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Paper abstract:

My paper will provide a new argument related to state-building in Central Asia (including Afghanistan). Based on my archival and library research carried since June 2021, I found out that linguistic politics played the most important role in defining ethnicity and nationhood in Central Asia. Despite the decisive role the Soviet National Policy played in defining national boundaries in Central Asia, the role of internal factors are either treated secondary or undermined in the existing literature.

My findings suggests that the idea of being Uzbek, Afghan, and Tajik was primarily shaped by the Nineteenth Century Western notion of linguistic nationalism with the aim of reducing the domain of Persian readership "the Persianate nationhood" as Benedict Anderson might define, and was divided between Pashto (Afghani), Uzbek (a Turkic language), and Tajik (Central Asian Persian) domains. Although the Uzbek-Tajik, Pashtun-Tajik and Iranian-Non-Iranian tensions are dating back to the Chinghiz Khan or Timurid invasion of Iran and to the Shiite-Sunnite war between Uzbeks and Safavids and later between Pashtuns and Safavids, it became more linguistic towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, which ultimately reduced the political domain of Persian language. For Persian to survive as an official language in Afghanistan and Central Asia, it had to first define Tajikness and then rely entirely on Tajik people to partially maintain its status.

Reading travelogues and official histories as well as secondary sources (in Persian, Russian and English), I found out that the undisputed role of Persian language as the language of Islam, spirituality, education and politics - lingua franca, gets questioned at the time when Afghan and Uzbek rulers in the early Twentieth Century start searching for elements to help defining and creating nationhood. Shifting from the written Persian language to spoken languages, creating national histories, new grammatical rules, emphasizing on accents and registers over commonalities are parts of the main discourses in this time.

Regarding the wider implication of my research for the existing scholarship on state-building with a focus on Central Asia and Afghanistan, my paper unravels the complexity of state-building and criticizes state-building practices in these countries for not enjoying popular support at the time of their creation and largely relying on foreign support. Simply put, this paper problematizes the notion of state-nationhood in these countries by providing a historical account on how these states were created before the idea of nation "imagined nation or readership" existed at all.

I am a fourth-year PhD dissertator at Nazarbayev University. This paper is part of my PhD dissertation which I aim to finish by May 2023.