The Iranian Afghans

Iranian Studies
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The Iranian Afghans
Fariba Adelkhah & Zuzanna Olszewska
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Iranian Studies, volume 40, number 2, April 2007
Fariba Adelkhah and Zuzanna Olszewska
The Iranian Afghans1
Emigration from Afghanistan is the product of socio-political circumstances—drought,

regime changes, wars—and economic structures—pastoralism and agricultural seasonal
cycles—but it is also situated in a historical continuum of recurrent population movements
on a regional scale. As a phenomenon, it has been well-researched in Pakistan, but has
been less well understood from the Iranian side. However, many Afghans, notably but not
exclusively Hazaras, have settled there since the end of the nineteenth century.
Immigration from Afghanistan intensified from the 1970s onwards following the Iranian
oil boom and drought in Afghanistan and the political turbulence in that country after
1978. The policies of the Islamic Republic towards this population have been both
variable and inconsistent. Recently, their main priority has been the repatriation of
Afghans in an atmosphere of both official and popular xenophobia. The experience of
exile has resulted in important social changes, in particular with respect to education and
the position of women. Moreover, the Afghan presence on Iranian soil appears to be
irreversible: it satisfies economic needs, reflects the intensity of commercial exchanges
between the two countries, and in itself constitutes a complex trans-border reality.
Finally, it sustains a public and juridical debate on the definition of citizenship and
appears to be inherent in the idea of the Iranian nation itself.
Introduction
In 1988, Mohsen Makhmalbaf released The Cyclist, one of his best films, in which
he brought to the screen the fashion for games and wagers. He was inspired by a
childhood memory: to aid the victims of an earthquake in his country, a Pakistani
had stayed on his bicycle for ten days. But in The Cyclist, perhaps unwittingly,
Makhmalbaf evokes above all the condition of Afghan immigrants living in
Iran today. The film portrays the misery of one such family languishing in a
suburb of Tehran. In order to be able to afford a surgical procedure needed by
Fariba Adelkhah is a Research Director at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales

(CERI), Sciences-Po, Paris. Zuzanna Olszewska is a D.Phil. candidate at the Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University.
1
The first part of this paper was written by Olszewska based on nine months of fieldwork
conducted among Afghans in Iran between 2004 and 2006. The subsequent two sections, the intro-
duction and the conclusion, were written by Adelkhah based on two months of research in Iran
from August-September 2005 and ongoing research on border markets since 2000. This is an
abridged version of a working paper originally published by CERI in French under the title Les
Afghans Iraniens, Les Etudes du CERI, 125 (Paris, April 2006).
ISSN 0021-0862 print=ISSN 1475-4819 online/07=020137-29
#2007 The International Society for Iranian Studies
DOI 10.1080=00210860701269519
138 Adelkhah & Olszewska
his wife, a former cycling champion decides to pedal without stopping for seven
days and seven nights in a town square. The residents are invited to place their
bets. The man cycles without respite through the hubbub of the spectators’
loud conversation, fed and washed by his son, keeping his eyes open with
matches. Utterly exhausted, he does not hear the signal marking the end of the
game, despite his son’s tearful requests to stop and collect his due from those
who have already left the area. He continues as if in a dream as the spectators
disperse and the itinerant salesmen dismantle their stalls.
This very beautiful film can be seen as a parable of the vicious cycle in which
Afghan migrants have found themselves, confronted by an exploitative situation
but unable to back out of it. The figure of ‘The Afghan’ has become a recurrent
motif in Iranian cinema, as if to indicate that he has become a part of the social
landscape of the Islamic Republic. We find him, for example, in Kiarostami’s
A Taste of Cherry (1997), in the guise of a religious student, alongside a conscript
and a Turkish employee, suggesting the jigsaw puzzle that constitutes the mis-
shapen city of Tehran. In Hossein Panahi’s The White Balloon (1996), it is an
Afghan who helps the little girl who has dropped her money and risks being
punished. And in two masterpieces, Rain by Majid Majidi (2000) and Killing Mad
Dogs by Bahram Beyzai (2001), Afghan laborers are given the place of honor for
their role in the construction and reconstruction of the country. However, these
Afghans, having become omnipresent in the city and on film, are also undesirable
and, elsewhere, they are often represented as such—for example, in the television
series by Reza Attaran, where they always take on the role of villains.
From Immigration and Exile to Repatriation or Expulsion? (1978 – 2005)
On 17 April 1978, a coup toppled President Mohammad Daoud’s government

and installed the Marxist government of Nur Mohammad Taraki and the
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Amidst widespread rebellion
and a power struggle between the two factions of the PDPA, Khalq and Parcham,
the Soviet Union sent its armies to intervene in December 1979. Soon, four
million Afghans had fled to neighboring countries and an additional three
million were internally displaced.
These and subsequent political events—resistance, civil war, and repressive
theocratic government—in Afghanistan in the last three decades have led to
population movements on an unprecedented scale. Afghans have come to be
defined in international humanitarian jargon as one of the largest “refugee case-
loads,”2 or “one of the world’s largest and most prolonged refugee emergen-
cies.”3 A great deal of international attention has, therefore, been directed
towards them, with mixed results for the quality of academic scholarship. One
2
R. Colville, “The Biggest Caseload in the World,” Refugees 108 no. II, (1997): 3 – 9.
3
Human Rights Watch, Closed Door Policy: Afghan Refugees in Pakistan and Iran, 14 no. 2 (G)
(New York, February 2002): 4.
The Iranian Afghans 139
problem is that by far the greater part of the international funding and assistance,
and with it academic or media attention, has been devoted to camp-based refugees
in Pakistan, some 80 to 90 percent of whom were Pashtun,4 while comparatively
little is known about other ethnic groups in other contexts.5 Meanwhile, research
in Iran was made difficult by the political situation in the years of the Iran-Iraq
war in the 1980s, and though a large number of policy-oriented NGO and
IGO reports have been written since then, few sociological and even fewer ethno-
graphic studies have been carried out among the refugees in this country. This
section seeks to remedy this situation as far as possible, setting Afghan migration
within a historical continuum of frequent population movements in the region.
Migration as Economic Strategy and Political Necessity
Far from being made sedentary by the geographical constraints of their country’s
landlocked situation and rugged topography, the people of Afghanistan have
long embraced mobility as a cultural, political, and economic strategy. Such
migrations were induced by economic or political necessity—though the distinc-
tion between these causes is often blurred, as will be seen—and in addition were
often given a religious resonance. Forced resettlement was frequently employed
as a tool of political subjugation by rulers, but flight across borders was just as
frequently used as a gesture of political defiance and autonomy, often cast in
terms of the preservation of the true religion, Islam.
Both pastoral nomadism and migration for trade or employment throughout
the region have been necessary economic adaptations to supplement agriculture,
whose resources, such as land or water, are often fiercely contested and whose
fruits are unpredictable in Afghanistan’s mountainous and drought-prone
terrain. Both of these activities took on a seasonal pattern, and nomads and
labor migrants were not deterred by the need to cross international borders in
their movements. In the case of pastoral nomadism, these resulted from the
need to seek out pastures at different altitudes, enabling the survival and
grazing of flocks of sheep and goats in accordance with weather variations:
warmer lowland plains in winter and cooler highlands in the summer.6
Labor migration, similarly, was and continues to be connected to seasonal agri-
cultural cycles: thus, for example, farmers from the southern Hazarajat region find
work in the coal mines of Pakistani Baluchistan after the almond harvest in
September, returning home to work in their fields in the spring. During the
4
D. B. Edwards, “Marginality and Migration: Cultural Dimensions of the Afghan Refugee
Problem,” International Migration Review 20 no. 2 (1986): 313.
5
See, e.g., Edwards, “Marginality and Migration”; the contributors to E. W. Anderson and
Nancy Hatch Dupree, The Cultural Basis of Afghan Nationalism (London, 1990); and Pierre
Centlivres and Micheline Centlivres-Demont, Et si on parlait de l’Afghanistan? Terrains et textes,
1964 – 1980 (Paris, 1988).
6
G. Pedersen, “Afghan Nomads in Exile: Patterns of Organization and Reorganization in
Pakistan,” The Cultural Basis of Afghan Nationalism (London, 1990).
Soviet invasion, meanwhile, ethnic Hazara mojahedin (resistance fighters) would

work in the coal mines in winter, and spend the summer fighting with one of
the resistance groups. Thus, spring and autumn have typically been times of tran-
sition and intensified mobility.7
Furthermore, as Monsutti has argued, the case of the Hazaras is a perfect
illustration of both the difficulties in distinguishing between economic and
political motives for migration, and the way it has become embedded in cultural
values and practices. The situation in the Hazarajat (one of the poorest regions of
Afghanistan) has been compounded by the destruction of war and active discrimi-
nation in infrastructure provision and development by successive Kabul govern-
ments.8 Hazaras have been migrating to Iran and to the Gulf states to engage in
a variety of low-wage occupations on a regular basis since the 1960s. Several other
studies have recently argued that migration is both an economic and a cultural
strategy and may be seen as a ‘rite of passage’ for young Hazara men to full
adulthood, a means of securing independence and acquiring the assets necessary
to marry and support a family.9
It is this constant and often strategic movement which remains bidirectional
even in times of conflict that has led Monsutti to argue that migration is for
many citizens of Afghanistan a way of life: “Les mouvements d’aller et retour
(raft o amad) sont incessants. On est bien loin de la figure du réfugié, obligé de
quitter sa terre devant une menace qui le dépasse et espérant y retourner définiti-
vement un jour.”10 Edwards, too, has remarked that “geographical dislocation
does not necessarily cause cultural dislocation” for the Pashtuns, since “migration
and movement emerge as part of the Pakhtun [sic] mythology just as cross-border
movements in response to political pressures from neighboring governments
continue to be thought of as necessary actions taken to preserve cultural values
which might otherwise be jeopardized.”11 The image presented by NGOs and
the media of the helpless, vulnerable refugee stripped bare of politics and
history, is highly misleading.
A History of Afghans in Iran: Legal Status and Government Policy
Citizens of Afghanistan had been visiting Iran as migrant workers, pilgrims or

merchants long before the period of conflict that began in 1978. Those who
settled and integrated into Iranian society in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were naturalized as Iranian citizens and came to be classified as an
ethnic group known as Khavari or Barbari. Large numbers of Afghans sought
7
Alessandro Monsutti, Guerres et Migrations: Re´seaux Sociaux et Strate´gies Économiques des
Hazaras d’Afghanistan (Neuchatel/Paris, 2004), 135, 190.
8
Monsutti, Guerres et Migrations, 161 –2.
9
A. Monsutti, “La migration comme rite de passage: La construction de la masculinité parmi les
jeunes Afghan en Iran,” Genre, nouvelle division internationale du travail et migrations (Geneva, 2005).
10
Monsutti Guerres et Migrations, 186.
11
Edwards, “Marginality and Migration,” 317.
employment in Iran from the 1960s onwards, particularly during the terrible
famine of 1971 –1972 that struck the north-west of the country. Several
hundred thousand were already living in Iran as migrant workers at the time
of the 1978 coup, at which point they declared themselves to be mohajerin (refu-
gees) and remained in the country.12
The number of refugees in Iran and Pakistan climbed steadily throughout the 1980s
until it peaked in 1991 with three million refugees in Iran, according to Iranian gov-
ernment estimates.13 During this time, Afghans were granted refugee status on a prima
facie basis and issued with “blue cards” confirming their status as mohajerin.
A 1992 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) document
estimates the Afghan population in Iran at 2.8 million, of which 76 percent were
registered, 14 percent were unregistered, and 10 percent were in camps.14 The
UNHCR has run a small and underfunded operation in Iran from 1983; on the
part of the Iranian government, refugee affairs are administered by the Ministry
of the Interior’s Bureau for Aliens and Foreign Immigrants’ Affairs (BAFIA).
In theory, registered refugees have enjoyed widespread social benefits, includ-
ing access to free education, adult literacy training, health care, and employment.
Most were able to settle freely on the outskirts of cities rather than in refugee
camps, and in cities such as Mashhad, many were able to own real estate.15 The
Iranian economy benefited from their labor during the Iran-Iraq war (1980 –
1988) and the period of reconstruction that followed it. In practice, however, inter-
national agencies admitted that “the vast majority of Afghans lead rather
precarious lives.”16 The International Consortium for Refugees in Iran (ICRI)
reported that “widespread poverty, poor nutrition, and serious health/sanitation
problems can be observed in a number of Afghan settlements.”17
In the early 1990s, particularly after the fall of the communist government of
Najibullah in 1992 and shifting domestic economic and social concerns such as
unemployment, refugees began to be harassed by Iranian law enforcement auth-
orities.18 Even holders of blue cards who were legally entitled to residence and
social benefits began to have their ID cards confiscated in conjunction with the
repatriation program described below. ICRI reported: “In all the settlements
12
C. Pahlavan, “Afghan Immigrants in Persia,” Encyclopedia Iranica vol. 7: 385; P. Centlivres and
M. Centlivres-Demont, “Exil et diaspora afghane en Suisse et en Europe” CEMOTI 30 (June-
December 2000): 151.
13
UNHCR, “Afghan Refugee Statistics (6 May 2001),” http://www.un.org.pk/unhcr/Afstats-
stat.htm
14
UNHCR, Report from Refugees in Iran NGO Seminar (July 1992), 4.
15
Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, Diana Glazebrook, Gholamreza Jamshidiha, Hossein
Mahmoudian and Rasoul Sadeghi, Return to Afghanistan? A Study of Afghans Living in Mashhad,
Islamic Republic of Iran (Kabul, 2005), 19.
16
Hiram A. Ruiz, U.S. Committee for Refugees Returns to Iran, Finds: Iran Ready to Open Doors to
Western NGOs; Afghan Repatriation Off to a Slow Start (Washington, D.C., 1992), 3.
17
International Consortium for Refugees in Iran (ICRI), Afghan Women and Children in Iran:
A Study of Hard Work and Hope (Tehran, 1998), 1.
18
Abbasi-Shavasi et al., Return to Afghanistan?, 16.
visited [in Mashhad] the majority of refugees had had their ID cards confiscated
between 1992 and 1994. Some of them returned to Afghanistan and the rest
received a temporary permit, valid for a month, which was not supposed to
be renewed.”19 In some cases, the temporary permits could be renewed for a
substantial fee, but only for a month at a time.
During the civil war in Afghanistan (1992 – 1996) and the subsequent conquest
of most of the country by Taliban forces, meanwhile, new refugee flows were
generated, as they were again by the U.S.-led bombing campaign at the end of
2001. One human rights group reported “increasingly hostile treatment in Iran
and Pakistan and pressure to leave. Mistreatment at the hands of Pakistani or
Iranian law enforcement authorities and violence in refugee camps are just
some of the problems Afghan refugees face on a daily basis.”20
Afghans without legal residence also risk mass deportation and alleged beat-
ings and extortion.21 Some 100,000 undocumented Afghans were deported in
1999.22 Amnesty International raised concerns in 2000 that Iran may have been
returning refugees “against their will or where they [were] at risk of human
rights abuses.”23 “The international community is laboring under the illusion
that some areas in Afghanistan are safe for the return of Afghan refugees. This
ignores the reality that frontlines change quickly and ethnic tensions flare up at
short notice,” the statement added. Round-ups and deportations of Afghans
staying both legally and illegally continue to the present time.24
New registration exercises (Amayesh), largely intended to facilitate repatriation
and refugee management by standardizing refugee statuses, were carried out by
BAFIA in 2001 and June 2003, but the cards issued in the latter exercise were
only valid for three months for individuals and six months for families.25 As of
the beginning of 2004, some 1.4 million documented refugees remained in Iran,
a figure which fell to 743,856 by October 2005, thanks both to the voluntary repa-
triation program carried out jointly by the UNHCR and the Iranian government
and to “spontaneous” returns, which will be discussed in more detail below.
19
Forugh Foyouzat, Report on Visit to Mashhad, ICRI Report (Tehran, 18 August 1996), 1.
20
Human Rights Watch, Closed Door Policy, 4.
21
Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), “Afghanistan: Forcible Returns from Iran
Continue,” (20 February 2002), http://irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID¼21830&SelectRegion
¼Central_Asia&SelectCountry¼AFGHANISTAN. The UNHCR, however, has won the right
to screen deportees for particularly vulnerable cases or those with a well-founded fear of persecu-
tion: cf. UNHCR, “Briefing Note: UNHCR Sub-Office in Mashhad, Khorassan Province, The
Islamic Republic of Iran,” (Mashhad, 3 October 2004).
22
United States Committee for Refugees (USCR), World Refugee Survey 2000 (Washington, D.C.,
2000).
23
Amnesty International, “Iran: Are Returning Afghan Refugees Properly Protected?” Public
Statement, MDE 13/028/2000 News Service No. 183 (26 September 2000).
24
IRIN, “Afghanistan-Iran: UNHCR Concerned Over Wave of Refugee Arrests,” (12 January
2005), http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID¼45021&SelectRegion¼Central_Asia&
SelectCountry¼AFGHANISTAN-IRAN.
25
UNHCR, “Briefing Note.”
The Amayesh statistics yielded detailed demographic information on the

Afghan population in Iran for the first time. As of late 2005, Shia Hazaras at
47 percent constituted the single largest ethnic group among Afghans in
Iran, followed by Tajiks at 30 percent, Pashtuns at 13 percent, and the remaining
10 percent divided between small numbers of Baluch, Turkmen, Uzbeks,
and others.26 The proportion of Hazaras in the ethnic breakdown had risen by
6 percent since the beginning of 2004, suggesting that they are the ethnic
group that is most reluctant to repatriate. The majority of Afghans lived in the
big cities or surrounding rural areas in the provinces of Tehran (27 percent),
Khorasan (16 percent, including the city of Mashhad), Isfahan (12 percent),
Sistan and Baluchistan (11 percent, including the city of Zahedan), Kerman
(7 percent), and Qom and Fars (6 percent each, the latter including the city of
Shiraz). Figures for the year of arrival indicate two major departure waves,
with 40 percent arriving in the years 1978– 1985 (the early years of the Soviet occu-
pation), and 36 percent arriving between 1996 and September 2001 (the years of
Taliban rule). The gender balance was 44 percent female and 56 percent male.
Some 46 percent, or almost half, were children up to the age of seventeen. The
Amayesh statistics indicate that the vast majority of registered refugees were
living as families (89 percent), with a mean family size of 4.7 persons. In addition,
it is estimated that up to 500,000 undocumented refugees and economic migrants
are in Iran illegally, working in the construction and agricultural sectors.27
Repatriation
The first formal repatriation program for Afghans was created after the fall of
Afghanistan’s communist government in 1992 by a Tripartite Agreement
between Iran, Afghanistan and the UNHCR. During 1993, over 300,000
Afghans repatriated under this program, and close to 300,000 more returned
“spontaneously.”28 In the same year, over 500,000 temporary registration cards
were issued to unregistered Afghans or new arrivals, and these were extended
several times but eventually declared invalid in 1996. Meanwhile, in 1995, the
government announced that all Afghans must leave Iran, but repatriation was
suspended until 1998 when the joint program with the UNHCR resumed. In
2000 and 2001, Iran considerably tightened its legislation on the employment
of foreign nationals, imposing heavy penalties on those employing illegal
foreigners and restricting Afghans with residence cards to sixteen categories of
work, mostly manual labor.29
26
These and subsequent statistics from BAFIA/ UNHCR, Amayesh and Repatriation Database
(Tehran, 11 November 2005).
27
Abbasi-Shavazi, et al., Return to Afghanistan?, 1.
28
David Turton and Peter Marsden, Taking Refugees for a Ride? The Politics of Refugee Return to
Afghanistan (Kabul, December 2002), 12.
29
Turton and Marsden, Taking Refugees for a Ride?, 31; Abbasi-Shavazi, et al., Return to Afghani-
stan?, 15 – 18.
In 2002, Iran, Afghanistan, and the UNHCR signed a new agreement to

provide assistance to refugees wishing to repatriate voluntarily, beginning in
April 2002 to last for a year, later extended until March 2005 and recently
again until March 2006.30 By September 2004, one million Afghans had returned
under the series of repatriation programs,31 in addition to almost 568,000 “spon-
taneous returnees” who did not receive assistance.32 Most reports on the subject
of refugees’ attitudes to repatriation noted that, fearing continued fighting, ethnic
tensions (in the case of Shia Hazaras, who had been singled out for attack by the
Taliban), or a shattered economy, lack of security, work, and education and
medical facilities, most were extremely ambivalent about returning,33 particularly
those who had been in the country for a long time and had become well-inte-
grated into their neighborhoods. It appears, however, that the carrot-and-stick
tactics of the UNHCR and the Iranian government, along with the steps taken
towards security and reconstruction in Afghanistan, are compelling many
Afghans to return.
Monsutti has described the situation of alternating toleration and harassment
or expulsions as a game of cat-and-mouse, intended to allow the Iranian
economy to benefit as much as possible from Afghans’ labor in low-wage,
poorly-regarded occupations, without letting them feel too comfortable in the
country and thus settling there permanently.34
Cultural Transformations
It seems that a reversal of Afghan immigration to Iran is on its way. On the one
hand, the Islamic Republic is intensifying its pressure to encourage the Afghans
to return to their country, in a context of growing nationalism, persistent unem-
ployment, and limited opportunities for wealth acquisition or social mobility. On
the other hand, the fall of the Taliban regime and the coming of peace to parts of
the country, at least justify or facilitate their departure. Whatever the reason, the
experience of expatriation or exile will have profoundly marked the migrants,
which will not be without consequences for Afghan society itself, as has been
seen in other cases of return migration around the world, including, of course,
Iran.
This hypothesis of return migration, then, needs to be formulated more pre-
cisely. Besides the fact that the end to hostilities in Afghanistan is not certain,
30
IRIN, “Iran: Special on Afghan refugees” (29 June 2004), http://www.irinnews.org/S_
report.asp?ReportID¼41904&SelectRegion¼Central_Asia.
31
IRIN, “Iran: Interview with UNHCR Head to Mark the Return of One Million Afghan
Refugees,” (2 September 2004), http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID¼42985&Select
Region¼Central _Asia
32
UNHCR, “Afghanistan: Challenges to Return,” (Geneva, March 2004).
33
See Ruiz, U.S. Committee for Refugees Returns to Iran; Turton and Marsden, Taking Refugees for a
Ride?, and Abbasi-Shavazi, et al., Return to Afghanistan?
34
Monsutti, Guerres et Migrations, 168 – 9.
the return of Afghans seems a complex phenomenon simply on account of the

social changes that migration has brought with it: the Afghans who return will
not be the same as those who fled ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. The best illus-
tration of this is the education that they have benefited from during their exile or
expatriation.
While literacy and learning in pre-war Afghan society were undoubtedly
associated with power, access to them was restricted to those in urban areas
and much smaller numbers of males in rural areas. By the late 1970s, there
were fewer than 900,000 school pupils for a population of fourteen million.35
Literacy rates in the late 1970s were estimated at between 5 and 10 percent of
males and about 1 percent of females.36 Although some sectors of society
valued it immensely, for others, especially for farmers who needed manpower,
it was not a priority. The sending of girls to public schools, meanwhile, was
seen as an affront to their dignity and to the honor of the men who were respon-
sible for their protection. With their arrival in Iran and their gradual integration
into Iranian neighborhoods and exposure to Iranian media, however, many refu-
gees have absorbed the value of education as a means to social mobility, as a reli-
gious injunction, and as a good in itself. Hoodfar points out the ironic situation
that refugees who once fled in protest against compulsory education for girls are
now trying to remain in Iran at all costs so that their daughters may be educated.37
Many Afghans now speak of it as a “blessing” that Afghan girls and women have
been able to “breathe in a cultural environment such as that of Iran,” in the words
of one prominent woman, who has a Bachelor of Arts in public health and is also
an accomplished poet and cultural activist.
According to a United Nations report, some 137,334 Afghan children were
enrolled in Iranian public schools in 1998, of whom at least 47 percent were
girls—unfortunately, these represented less than a third of the estimated
number of Afghan children in Iran. In addition, over 18,000 Afghan children
and over 300,000 adults were taught basic literacy skills between 1985 and
1999.38 Another study found that literacy rates and education levels rose after
arrival in Iran. For example, 90 percent of household heads in Mashhad were
literate, and there was no illiteracy among children born in Iran.39 However,
children without refugee cards could not attend state schools, which led to the
creation of dozens of informal schools operated by Afghans for Afghans,
without certification from the Ministry of Education, known as madrasehha-ye
khodgardan (self-run schools). These have periodically been shut down by the
35
M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979 – 82 (Berkeley,
1995), 79.
36
Margaret A. Mills, Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (Philadelphia, 1991), 3.
37
H. Hoodfar, “Families on the Move: The Changing Role of Afghan Refugee Women in Iran,”
Hawwa, ii (2004): 141 – 171.
38
Catherine Squire, Education of Afghan Refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Tehran, December
2000).
39
Abbasi-Shavazi, et al., Return to Afghanistan?, 21.
authorities, despite offers of financial support by NGOs, while their teachers risk
arrest and eviction for their activities.40
At other times, their activities appear to be tolerated. Many of these schools,
particularly in Mashhad, are run by and for former residents of one particular
hometown in Afghanistan—for example, Herat or Mazar-e Sharif—illustrating
the importance of hamshahri (fellow townsman) ties in exile. Some receive
donations to cover their operating costs from Afghans living in Western
countries, allowing them to offer free tuition to children from poor families
and to improve their facilities. The facilities, however, vary immensely in
quality from schools located in tiny rooms or bare concrete basements with no
more than curtains to separate the classrooms, to schools which have attractive
premises, several computers, libraries, and other teaching aids. They follow the
provisions of the Iranian state curriculum and use Iranian textbooks, while at
least one school has added textbooks from Afghanistan for the teaching of
Afghan history, geography, and the Pashto language. The UN report estimated
that in 1998– 1999, approximately 14,000 students were attending informal
Afghan schools in Tehran and Mashhad.41
This figure is likely to have grown in the past years, however. As of the
academic year beginning in autumn 2004, Afghan children can no longer
attend public primary, middle, or high schools without paying a substantial fee
(the equivalent of U.S. $150 per child per year), or sit for university entrance
examinations in the Islamic Republic. One informant estimated that at least
100,000 Afghan children were prevented from continuing their schooling
because they could not afford the fees, which caused considerable emotional dis-
tress among school-age children. Their parents reacted with anger, meanwhile,
and a number of Afghan mothers were arrested for publicly demonstrating for
their children’s right to education. Many of the informal schools have therefore
expanded their intake and private educational centers, which once offered only
extracurricular classes, have now become fully-fledged schools, employing
Afghan university students or graduates as teachers. Their fees are substantially
lower, ranging from 1,000 tomans to 6,000 tomans per month, depending on
the level (approx. $1.1 – $6.6). The diplomas issued by these schools are certified
by the Afghan embassy so that they may be recognized in Afghanistan should the
children repatriate.
The enormous demand for skills training has led to the creation of dozens of
educational centers on various scales in areas of Iranian cities, particularly
Mashhad and Tehran, with a high concentration of Afghan families. Due to
reports from returnees to Afghanistan that the English language and computer
literacy are essential to compete for well-paying jobs there, these two areas are
particularly popular, but classes are also offered in first aid, basic pharmacology,
40
See ICRI, Report on Developments; Squire, Education of Afghan Refugees; S. Sarhaddi-Nelson,
“Afghan Refugees in Iran Learn to Keep School a Secret,” Los Angeles Times (25 December 2001).
41
Squire, Education of Afghan Refugees.
midwifery, the Pashto language, journalism, filmmaking, design, and handicrafts,

including rug-weaving and artificial flower-making. In addition, a number of
foreign and Iranian NGOs offer vocational training classes free of charge, parti-
cularly in the English language, graphic design and the use of other specialist soft-
ware, and short medical training courses to address the fears of poor hygiene and
lack of health facilities held by those considering repatriation to Afghanistan.
The preliminary findings of a recent study of Afghan refugee children and
adolescents in Iran found that, besides delivering an education, the informal
schools were helping to transform young Afghans’ sense of marginalization in
Iranian society into a positive collective identity.42
Another aspect of education with enormous significance for Shia Afghans has
been the ability of young Afghan men to study free of charge—indeed, with
grants for living costs, accommodation and study aids—at the howzeha-ye
‘elmiyeh or religious seminaries in Mashhad and Qom, which train Shia clerics
in theology, Islamic law, history, and philosophy. Not all of them have attended
with the intention of becoming clerics, however; for many, it is the means to
obtain an education in a universally respected field and a degree of social mobility
without worrying about subsistence, in a situation where the alternative is to
work in ill-paid, backbreaking jobs as laborers. This has had two important
consequences. First, it has given a number of Afghans the financial security
and leisure time to be involved in cultural activities which have helped to
sustain a positive Afghan identity. For example, many of the most important
poets of the resistance generation were talabehs (religious scholars). Second, con-
trary to what might be expected, it has exposed them to an environment of phi-
losophical debate and questioning and to the wide range of Islamic viewpoints,
from the conservative to the very liberal, which are debated in post-revolutionary
Iranian religious circles, many of them sympathetic to women’s education and
public presence.43 This is an environment in which learning is a value in itself
and, indeed, the responsibility of every Muslim.
According to the head of one Afghan arts center in Mashhad, attended
mostly by girls, the majority of his pupils were daughters of clerics. The
renowned poet and talabeh who headed another cultural center was particularly
encouraging to young women, including those with feminist tendencies sharply
critical of traditional patriarchal society. One young female poet told me that
her cleric brother regularly gave her the free book vouchers he received from
the seminary to buy books of poetry and literary criticism for herself, in contrast
to other families which opposed their daughters’ literary activities. People with
42
Dawn Chatty and Gina Crivello, Lessons Learned Report, Children and Adolescents in Sahrawi and
Afghan Refugee Households: Living with the Effects of Prolonged Armed Conflict and Forced Migration
(Oxford, 2005), 20.
43
Indeed, Ali Mohaqqeq Nasab, a Hazara cleric and women’s rights magazine editor who was
recently convicted of blasphemy in Afghanistan, was a recent returnee from Iran and former semi-
nary student. His crime was the questioning of strict Shari‘a punishments, or the principle that a
woman’s testimony is equal to half of a man’s.
formal religious training often expressed their readiness to interact with “all
kinds of people,” no matter what their religious or political beliefs are, for
the purpose of broadening their own horizons. Women are also increasingly
taking theological classes: both Iranian universities and a number of Afghan
religious centers offer degrees in Islamic Studies or shorter courses in the
reading and interpretation of the Qur’an—including a seven-year university-
equivalent degree course specifically aimed at women, offered by one Afghan
religious foundation in Mashhad.
An unknown but significant number of Afghan youth have been educated in
Iranian universities in a wide variety of subjects. Until 2004, university education
including living costs were free of charge for those who passed the highly com-
petitive konkour, the standard national university entrance examination, and they
were allowed to study at a number of universities in major cities around the
country. No statistics are available on the total number of Afghan university stu-
dents, but between 1996 and 1999, a German scholarship fund disbursed over 700
scholarships to Afghan refugee students, the majority of whom were studying
medicine and engineering.44 In 2004, however, new regulations barred Afghans
from taking the examination; there was a good deal of confusion following this
and universities responded differently to the problem of allowing those who
had already been accepted before the rules entered into force to register that
autumn—some were refused. Since then, Afghan students have only been per-
mitted to apply as fee-paying “foreign students” to a limited number of univer-
sities. Policies change frequently and youth grapevines are always abuzz with
the latest news on which universities are accepting Afghans, and their costs.
These are comparatively high, up to U.S. $1,000 per semester for tuition fees
alone.
The itineraries of return are thus much more diverse than those of exodus. We
must now take account of what a large-scale departure of Afghans would mean
for Iranian society itself, either as a result of systematic expulsions, or at the
initiative of the migrants themselves, for lack of any other strategy of social
mobility.
The Irreversibility of the Afghan Presence
By turning its back on its traditionally welcoming policy towards Afghans, Iran is
undoubtedly closing itself into a trap of impossible choices. In fact, the Afghan
presence in the country appears to be irreversible. First of all, as we have seen,
it does not date from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, nor from the civil
war of 1992– 1996, from the repression of the Taliban, or from the American
intervention in 2001. It is situated in a long history, predating the formation of
the state system in the region and, indeed, constitutive of it. Like the Mongol
Empire, the Safavid dynasty extended its sovereignty over a large part of
44
Squire, Education of Afghan Refugees.
today’s western Afghanistan: Herat, the lower Helmand Valley and, in the mid-
seventeenth century, Kandahar. The conquest of the Hindu Kush by Shah Abbas
(1588 –1629), notably, prompted the conversion of the Hazaras to Shiism.45 For
this reason, the plateau of Khorasan was a single entity and the formation of a
proper border dates back only to the nineteenth century, a consequence of the
emergence of Afghanistan as a buffer state with allegiance to the Victorian Raj
(1880).
In 1801, a British cartographer still placed Herat unequivocally within the
“protected domain” of Persia.46 The Afghan state-formation process has its furth-
est roots in the creation of the Durrani Empire (1747).47 This began its decline
from the beginning of the nineteenth century as a result of internal divisions
and British pressure. Despite this, the Qajars did not manage to fulfill their irre-
dentist dreams in the part of Khorasan which had escaped them and notably failed
to retake Herat in 1837, then again in 1852 and in 1856, following a military inter-
vention by the British who feared that potential Persian territorial gains would
end up serving the designs of Russian imperialism, then at the height of its expan-
sion.48 The Treaty of Paris (1857) confirmed the end of the Qajar project to re-
conquer all of historical Khorasan. This was followed by the lengthy task of
demarcating the eastern border in Khorasan, Sistan, and Baluchistan, by succes-
sive mixed commissions—Anglo-Afghan-Persian but also Russo-Persian, from
1870 to 1905.49
In brief, Afghanistan in the nineteenth century underwent three major evol-
utions that concerned Iran more or less directly: its emergence as a commercial,
financial, and eventually political satellite of the British Raj; its gradual unifica-
tion and its emergence as a monarchic state under the leadership of the Kabul
government; the rise of the Sunni Pashtuns to the detriment of other ethno-
religious groups, and the pauperization of the peasantry. The Hazarajat was
particularly affected by these transformations, especially under the reign of
Abdur Rahman (1881 – 1901), who opened the pastures of the Hindu Kush for
the Pashtuns.50 The Three-Year War waged by Abdur Rahman in the Hazarajat
45
Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner, eds., The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics. Afghanistan Iran,
and Pakistan, (Syracuse, 1986), 27 ff.
46
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions. Shaping the Iranian Nation 1804 –1946 (Princeton,
1999), 30.
47
Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: La difficile reconstruction d’un Etat, Cahier de Chaillot, Institut
d’Etudes de Sécurité 73 (December 2004).
48
On the irredentist policy of the Qajars and more generally of the nationalist Iranian elite, see
Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions,in particular p. 19 ff; on the Iranian-British dispute over Herat, see
p. 30 ff.; on the resurgence of Persian irredentist feeling at the time of the Versailles Conference in
1919, see p. 150 ff.
49
Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions, 33 ff.
50
See Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton, 1980); P. Centlivres and M. Centlivres-Demont,
“Pratiques quotidiennes et usages politiques des termes ethniques dans l’Afghanistan du Nord-
Est,” Le fait ethnique en Iran et en Afghanistan (Paris, 1988); as well as Gilles Dorronsoro, La Re´volution
afghane (Paris, 2000).
provoked the exodus of numerous Shia Hazaras to Iran and the British Raj. This
policy of favoritism towards Pashtuns and hostility towards Hazaras was
pursued until the 1970s and still continues to sustain the emigration of this
population.51
Consequently, the mass settlement of Barbari (called Khavari by Reza Shah)
people in Khorasan dates back at least to the end of the nineteenth century.52
Many Iranians thus bear the names of Afghan tribes or towns, such as Tekkallou,
Pouladi, Abdalabadi, or Herati. Some of their ancestors moved back and forth
between the two countries or had sought asylum in Afghanistan between the
two world wars to evade compulsory conscription in 1922 or the ban on
veiling in 1936. In his concern for national unity, Abdur Rahman himself affirmed
that his Hazara subjects were in fact Shias who had come from Iran.53 A character
such as Jamaluddin Asadabadi, called “Afghani,” born in 1838 or 1839 in
Hamedan in north-west Persia—who sojourned in the Afghan cities of Kandahar,
Ghazni and Kabul from 1866– 68, but who passed himself off as Afghan to avoid
being extradited by the Ottoman Empire after the assassination of Naser ed-Din
Shah in 1896—is emblematic of these mixed histories.54 “Afghan” merchants,
meanwhile, much the same way as their “Persian” or “Indian” counterparts,55
have traversed the trade routes from Ghazni to Quetta and Isfahan or from the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina to Central Asia, for centuries. During these
voyages, which in the past would have lasted many months, some took wives
or acquired property in Iranian cities. Even today, some Afghans cite such
ancient attachments to substantiate their claims to Iranian citizenship.
Moreover, the mountainous and desert character of the border renders it
porous and difficult to control. In other words, it seems doubtful that the
Iranian authorities could succeed at reversing a historical tendency as ancient as
this and a geographical inclination at a moment when globalization is intensifying
migratory flows and the ECO (Economic Cooperation Organization) and other
organizations or international treaties seek to promote regional integration or
the alliance of Persian-language countries.
51
Banuazizi and Weiner, The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics,92 – 95; R. Tapper, “Introduction,”
The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London, 1983): 35; Olivier Roy, L’Afghanistan.
Islam et modernite´ politique (Paris, 1985).
52
Seyed Askar Mousavi, The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political
Study (Richmond, 1998), 148 – 150; Monsutti, Guerres et Migrations, 136.
53
Hasan Pouladi, The Hazara, History, Culture, Politics & Economy [Persian edition] (Tehran,
1381/2002), 357.
54
Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jama-l ad-Dı-n al-Afgha-nı-: A Political Biography (Berkeley, 1972), 5 ff; Homa
Nategh, Djamal-ed-Din Assad Abadi, dit Afghani (Paris, 1969). Afghani is also said to have been born
in Konar, Afghanistan, rather than Iran, as is written in three languages on his mausoleum. He died
in 1897 in Istanbul and his coffin was returned to Afghanistan ten years later, in 1906, and buried in
Kabul inside what is now the university campus.
55
Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750 – 1947. Trade of Sind from Bukhara
to Panama (Cambridge, 2000).
Afghans themselves have a clear awareness of this past of free circulation. They
readily invoke Imam Khomeini’s declaration that “Islam has no borders.” They
recall that they arrived in Iran as refugees (mohajerin), hoping to be welcomed as
the Prophet Mohammad was by the ansar, the inhabitants of Medina: Hazaras by
Shias, and Pashtuns by Sunnis; this did occur to the extent that today, it is almost
impossible to untangle these respective populations on the basis of their nation-
ality. Thus, Afghans have married local girls, tilled the soil, gone to war, and
volunteered for martyrdom in the cause of Iran—as a documentary by one
Afghan journalist and filmmaker has emphasized.56
But many Afghans neglected to clear their legal status and did not update their
residency cards due to political pressure, especially after the end of the war when
ration coupons that they had benefited from were withdrawn. Nonetheless, they
do not consider themselves to have violated the law or policies of their host
country at any point. Not only have they eaten only the bread which they them-
selves have earned through their own hard work, often in openly exploitative
conditions, but they also protest to the Iranian authorities that “we have our
dead in common” (mordeh sharik hastim). Indeed, many Afghans are buried in
Iran—not including the martyrs fallen in battle on the Iraqi front—and conver-
sely, one finds “Iranian” tombs in Herat, such as the famous one of Goharshad,
the great fifteenth century female maecenas of the Timurid court, wife of
Shahrokh, son of Timur. She was responsible for the building of one of the
principal mosques of Mashhad, a major site of Islamic resistance in 1936. More-
over, the tomb of Zoroaster is said to be located in Balkh, and the University of
Kabul houses the mausoleum of Afghani. Afghans, therefore, consider them-
selves well-rooted in Iran, and it is Iranian Persian, not Afghan Persian that
their children speak.
Another factor invoked by Afghans relates to the presence of Imam Reza in
Mashhad. For who else but he, the “Protector of the Gazelle” (Zamen-e Ahou),
could have offered them his shelter and permitted them to preserve their honor
and their religion after the communist coup d’etat in April 1978 and the Soviet
intervention in December 1979? Historically, pilgrimage to the Mashhad
shrine, or passage through Khorasan en route to Karbala or Najaf, whether to
bury someone or to go on a pilgrimage to other holy sites such as the mausoleum
of Jami at Torbat-e Jam on the border, have significantly contributed to the emi-
gration of Afghans to Iran—including of Sunnis, since the latter shrine honors a
holy figure of this sect—and to their mixing with the local population.
These days, religious legitimization of residence in Iran is stronger than ever
and is tending towards diversification. Khorasan is an access route to the holy
places of Syria—and holding a passport does not appear to be a prerequisite
for travel to Damascus or Karbala, judging by statements we have heard from
one interviewee who had sent his father to Karbala to help him recover from a
nervous breakdown! To the south of Mashhad, the cities of Torbat-e Heydarieh
56
Reza Heydari, Born an Exile (Madar mara avareh zaid) (Mashhad, 2004).
and Kashmar, which contain the tombs of Sufi pirs such as Sheikh Abolqasem
Gurkani, Qotbuddin Heydar and Ahmadorreza (brother of Imam Reza), and
the emamzadehs Hamzeh and Morteza receive the faithful coming from South
Asia, Central Asia, and the east, including Pashtuns and Sunni Baluches.57
The devotional sites of Kurdistan are also increasingly visited via the east of
Iran. These religious interactions are all the more intense because, on the
ground, religious sociability quite easily blurs sectarian cleavages and
because it is obviously accompanied by a flourishing of business—for example,
the sale of prunes, pride of the town of Kadkan near Torbat-e Heydarieh—and
the worldly practice of recreation or of pleasure. The proximity to Imam Reza
is a powerful argument justifying non-return: “If it were not for the love of his
threshold (astan or baregah), I would no longer endure such humiliation,” declared
an old man who had applied for naturalization. “My husband works, my children
go to university or work, and I have no other joy but to go and pray at his tomb—
what would I do in Afghanistan?!” asked one woman—rhetorically, since like
most of the inhabitants of this city, she did not seem to be the kind that visits
the shrine every afternoon.
And, in his poem “Return” (Bazgasht), Mohammad Kazem Kazemi writes,
equally rhetorically, given that he is still in Iran years after it was published:
I shall leave behind all that I possess, then I shall leave

I came on foot, on foot I shall depart
I swear an oath by this Imam that I will take nothing
But a handful of dust from the holy Shrine.58
In fact, the Heratis of Mashhad gather in their own hosseiniyeh,59 and Kandaharis
and Kabulis have their respective mosques. On Ashura, the procession of Shia
Afghans has been much admired, with its particular rhythms and chants—
although at one point the authorities banned it, according to the Afghans, due
to its popularity which overshadowed that of the Seventy-Seventh Regiment of
the Revolutionary Guards.
From the side of the Iranians themselves—at least those who are most directly
concerned with living near the border—the irreversibility or naturalness of the
Afghan presence is evident, which does not prevent them from holding opinions
not particularly favorable towards Afghans under certain circumstances. Much
depends on the particular locality or population. A town such as Fariman, for
example, which is some eighty kilometers south-east of Mashhad, even though
57
Personal observation, summer 2001.
58
Translated by Olszewska with the help of Belgheis Alavi, whom we would like to thank for her
invaluable assistance throughout our research.
59
This is one of the largest hosseiniyehs in Mashhad, built in 1990 –93 by wealthy Herati business-
men living in Mashhad, led by Haj Gholamhossein Taheri. The space is often rented by Iranians
from the neighborhood.
it has almost no Afghan inhabitants and despite the ring of Khavari villages which
surrounds it,60 appears to be rather afghanophobic. This is due to problems of
insecurity linked to the drug trade in the region, and also because security
forces step up their monitoring of the road to Mashhad, in workshops, and in
the fields in pursuit of illegal immigrants or drug traffickers, all the while inter-
fering in the everyday life of “honest people.” Afghans, meanwhile, say that
they avoid the town since some networks of traffickers have extorted large
sums from them, making the fortune of the village of Sefid Sang.
But eighty-five kilometers further on, in Torbat-e Jam, the atmosphere is com-
pletely different and Afghans have blended into the landscape. One insufficient
and clearly false explanation for this would be the religious factor: some of the
inhabitants of Torbat-e Jam are Sunni while Fariman is exclusively Shia.
However, many Afghans living in Iran, as we have seen, are Shia Hazaras and
yet this has not helped them receive a warm welcome in Fariman. Some
Khavari—people of Hazara origin who settled in Khorasan decades ago—are
not the last to have reservations about new arrivals from Afghanistan, according
to the classic logic of the door one closes behind oneself.
Conversely, the integration of Afghans in Torbat-e Jam may, no doubt, be
explained by the intensity of cross-border ties and by the mixed nature of the
majority of its families, although the religious sociability of Sunnis has, indeed,
contributed to easing their local assimilation. Kinship relations transcend the
border, some fifteen kilometers away, and marriages and funerals are celebrated
on either side of it. And the residents of the region do not lack ingenuity in
circumventing national regulations, in particular as regards the education and
the future of their offspring. If an Iranian woman married to an undocumented
Afghan cannot register her children at school, she will entrust them to a sister
who will register them under the name of her own husband. If an Afghan
family needs to prove the long duration of its residence in Iran, they will not
lack written testimonies in the form of neighbors’ petitions (esteshhad-e mahalli)
to establish it, and for want of a rigorous or systematic public administration
in the countryside, nothing can really contest them. If an Afghan wishes to
invest in Iran but runs up against the official prohibition on his becoming the
owner, he chooses a figurehead or an Iranian associate to register his property
in his name or he will give them his startup money in exchange for the profits.
In fact, it appears that some of the dramatic armed abductions that have afflicted
the region originate in disagreements between partners of this kind. They are thus
played down by local inhabitants, being relegated to the status of simple business
conflicts.
Similarly, investments in Iran are susceptible to being passed back and forth
across the border, as in the case of the carpet weaving enterprise Cheshmeh Goli,
60
Some of these are well known for being the birthplaces of famous personalities like the foot-
baller Khodadad Azizi, the current Member of Parliament of Fariman, Hosseini, or the reformist
parliamentarian Zafarzadeh, born in Chartekab, Garmeh, and Narg, respectively.
long located in Torbat-e Jam and recently relocated to Herat where demand is
higher and wages lower. Another manifestation of this osmosis between Iran
and Afghanistan is the circulation of seasonal labor to assist in the harvest of
crops, such as watermelon, wheat, rapeseed and cotton, that the region is increas-
ingly specializing in.
It follows that an interface between Iran and Afghanistan has developed over
the decades and that a true grey zone has been created which cannot be reduced to
a zero-sum game between two national affiliations. A significant portion of the
population of border regions is of “uncertain identity” (mashkuk ol-hoviyeh)—
those who are unable to prove descent from a father with unimpeachable
marital status. This category comprises children of mixed Iranian-Afghan
couples whose marriage was not administratively registered and cannot be
bureaucratically regularized for lack of the necessary documents. To this, we
must add another substantial group, that of cast-off children of failed marriages,
raised by single mothers, or simply abandoned, barred from school and taken in
by distant relatives or neighbors. They are caught in a paradoxical situation by a
state once too weak or ill-equipped to regulate marital status in rural areas, now
suddenly turned punctilious, demanding documents from people which it was not
in a position to issue before the end of the 1980s.
Of course, things are more complicated, and not only because the regime
changed in 1979. The very nature of this state and the benefits it accords its citi-
zens, whether in terms of sanitation, elementary or higher education, or of the
subsidies it provides on basic products such as wheat, oil, milk, medicines and
petrol, has been transformed. From this perspective, the key moment was the
war with Iraq, which saw the institution of a rationing system from which, as
we have said, the Afghans benefited, but which quickly became an important
economic issue in which the delimitation of Iranian citizenship was at stake. In
addition, land speculation and the growing tendency to travel rendered more
or less indispensable, at least in theory, the holding of certain identity documents
such as title deeds, birth certificates, or passports. In reality, among the paradoxes
of the Islamic Republic was the fact that it established, after the death of Imam
Khomeini, an “Islam with borders”; or the fact that it is on the verge of institut-
ing a regime of national preference with regard to social and economic rights and
not merely one of national exclusivity in the exercise of the vote. Afghan immi-
grants, as well as those whose identity is deemed “uncertain,” are among the fore-
most victims of this political reversal. They thus perceive it with bitterness,
resentment, and lack of comprehension—and all the more so because Iranian
public opinion largely favors the new policy towards Afghans. For all that,
they do not envision leaving the country which they consider to be their own.
The Afghan presence in the Iranian interior is not radically different from the
situation prevailing at the border, apart from the fact that the immigrants enjoy
the anonymity offered by large cities, at least in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz,
and Qom. Afghans have taken over or built whole quarters of these cities—for
example, Pakdasht (some seventy kilometers from Tehran), Kashmar (near
Isfahan) or Golshahr and Sakhteman (on the outskirts of Mashhad)—which

naturally have a more or less bad reputation, but which now constitute an integral
part of the urban landscape. Their “Abbasqoli bazaars” (named after the original,
a market created in the early 1990s near the shrine, in the Tollab area of Mashhad
largely populated by Khavari people of Hazara origin; this has now become the
generic term for all Afghan markets specializing in inexpensive products) have
multiplied in the holy city, where new buildings are devoted to them and are fre-
quented by pilgrims of many different origins. The name, which one might say
has become a kind of brand name, is beginning to be used in Tehran to describe
shopping centers of the same type. Similarly, clusters of Afghan men waiting for
potential employers may be seen at most of the large intersections in the big cities,
particularly traffic circles near highway junctions in the suburbs. The expression
used to describe this, sar-e falakeh or sar-e chowk, “at the circle/junction,” i.e.,
without a permanent job, rings of Afghan Persian; Tehranis would more likely
refer to a meidan or meidoon. The essential part in unskilled labor in the cities is
played by immigrant labor, and it is now rather unimaginable that Iranians
might one day take over these tasks. This is equally true of agriculture and
animal husbandry. Livestock herding, pistachio shelling, and removing the
stamens of saffron are entrusted to Afghan families, as is the production of
prayer beads, which is attaining industrial proportions at pilgrimage sites. All
this suggests that this underpaid labor force, deprived of all safety nets, has
become indispensable to many sectors of the Iranian economy.61 It is also
telling that the municipality of Bam had to turn to Afghan well-diggers
(moqanni) after the earthquake in 2003, as this profession seemed to have disap-
peared among the working Iranian population.62 But beyond this particular
case, presumably all municipalities, despite the regulations, employ Afghans for
rubbish collection, gardening, and the maintenance of public roads through
subcontracting to private companies, relatively less subject to controls despite
their recent increase and the tightening of regulations.
However, Iran does more than employ unskilled Afghan labor. It has also had
recourse to numerous experts fleeing their country or trained in Iran after 1980
and who have been recruited, for example, into the “Reconstruction Crusade”
( jihad-e sazandegi). As for informal business between Dubai, Central Asia, and
Afghanistan, of which Iran is the hub, it is hardly possible to see how Iranian
society could manage commercial networks which transcend borders and
which depend on agents living in the Islamic Republic or having their families
live there rather than in decadent Dubai. The liberalization of the Iranian
economy depends on the interconnection of business circles and on the
osmosis of ethnic/national communities which form them. After all, Afghanistan
itself is an important market for Iran, being, for example, its second largest buyer
61
Omid Farhang, “Kargaran-e afghani, sazandegan-e bi nam va neshan [Afghan workers, anony-
mous builders (of the Iranian economy)],” in Goft-o-gu 11 (1375/1996), 43 – 51.
62
Interview with Nahid Ashrafi, director of the NGO Hami, Tehran, September 2005.
of textiles after Azerbaijan,63 and its seventh largest importer of all products since
2003 (in 2000, it was in twenty-fifth place). Iran Khodro is considering opening an
assembly plant for Peugeot model 405 for supply to Afghanistan.64 And the
chambers of commerce of the cities of Mashhad and Zahedan compete to
ensure the transit of goods imported from Dubai and heading for Afghanistan
or onwards to Tajikistan or Kazakhstan. Hence, the development of road infra-
structure for trucking convoys, which is inexorably integrating the region on
either side of international borders.
A metropolitan area like Mashhad exists in symbiosis with Herat, and vice
versa, particularly thanks to the new highway inaugurated with great pomp by
the two heads of state in January 2005. But this is equally true of a city like
Zabol. Thanks to its customs treaty with Pakistan, the Afghan Transit Trade
Agreement (ATTA)—and, it must be said, thanks to the war and the presence
of many humanitarian organizations—Afghanistan has long been a very attrac-
tive platform for trade. Iranians can, in border towns such as Shahr-e No near
Zaranj in Nimroz Province, buy numerous products of diverse origins. Some
are imported from Pakistan and benefit from the customs exemption, or some
are simply more expensive in Iran due to monopolistic licensing of certain
goods there, sometimes siphoned off from humanitarian aid or having transited
through Iran by international trucking and been released on the market of the
Islamic Republic by means of fraud and smuggling. For their part, Iranians
export to Afghanistan—also largely in an illicit manner—cheap products subsi-
dized by the Islamic Republic, such as petrol, flour, medicines; or simply products
whose prices are economically competitive, such as asphalt, cement, detergent,
parapharmaceuticals, and a variety of plastic consumer items produced by the
petrochemical industry.
To this, one must add criminal trafficking such as the massive trade in drugs or
human beings, among them possibly minors, destined for the Gulf States. In all of
these flows, Afghans—and particularly Hazaras because of the long duration of
their stay in Iran, and the Baluch considering their transnational location on
both sides of the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf and their “flexible citizen-
ship”65 —hold the role of kingpins, notably by being agents of the so-called
hawala system (havaleh in Persian) which both conveys immigrants’ remittances
to their home villages and countries, and finances trade.66 On both sides of the
border, Islamic trade law, for example contracts of the mozarebeh type, supersede
both national laws and national affiliations. It is illusory to prohibit Afghans from
63
Sharq (23 azar 1384/2005).
64
Donya-ye Eqtesad (10 khordad 1384/2005), ‘Asr-e Eqtesad (3 khordad 1384/2005).
65
Aiwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, 1999).
66
A. Monsutti, “Cooperation, Remittance, and Kinship among the Hazaras,” Iranian Studies 37
no. 2 (June 2004): 22 – 228; see also his impressive book, Guerres et Migrations. On the role of
Afghan traders in the gold market, see F. Khosrokhavar, “Rapports inter-ethniques et marché
de l’or. De l’interaction entre les communautés turque, afghane, juive et persane au sein du
marché Manoutchehri-Ferdowsi,” Le Fait ethnique en Iran et en Afghanistan (Paris, 1988), 175 – 182.
holding a bank account in Iran, as the Iranian government has just decreed, since
they, like anyone in the country, have access to the network of interest-free loan
funds.67 Islam is certainly supranational in the economic domain, if not in politics,
and at the hour of its accession to the World Trade Organization, the Islamic
Republic, which has never completely renounced its command economy inher-
ited from the empire, will have to cope with the consequences of this choice.
Iran is, therefore, situating itself in the same kind of schizophrenia as western
European societies. Its economy depends on travelers and immigrant labor,
whether or not they are legal. But it stigmatizes them while exaggerating their
numbers, insofar as it voluntarily implements restrictive legislation dating
back to the period between the World Wars and long obsolete, and it discourages
immigrants from extending their refugee cards by confiscating them and serving
them with repatriation orders. Along with Iraqis—known as mo‘avedin—expelled
by Saddam Hussein, refugees from the current conflict, or simply economic
migrants, Afghans are the first to be affected by this contradiction.68 These
two populations also sometimes merge: some of the mo‘avedin who came from
Iraq are of Afghan origin although they prefer to hide this fact, as in the case
of a significant number of families living in Neishabur.69 One can see that the
problem is much deeper and more generalized than that of simple Afghan-
Iranian relations. It relates to the magnitude and the intensity of exchanges,
both religious and commercial, in the long term and on a wide scale that
extends from India to the Levant. The transnational figures of the Pilgrim, the
Merchant, the Havaledar, and the Migrant, which frequently overlap and traverse
the same routes, come into conflict with or have to bow to the growing bureau-
cratization of the state, Islamic though it may be, and to the rise of a willingly
populist and discriminatory nationalism.70
Iranian society is sinking into a paradox. The presence of Afghans within it is
massive and, we believe, irreversible. About 600,000 applications for naturaliz-
ation have been made, no doubt in vain.71 But this presence is becoming increas-
ingly invisible as a consequence of repression or integration. There are no visibly
“Afghan” restaurants in Mashhad or Tehran, while the contribution of Iraqis to
the transformation of the culinary landscape of the Islamic Republic is evident.
Even among themselves, Afghans do not declare themselves as such and seek
rather to blend into Iranian society. This sometimes leads to absurd situations:
two Afghan students kept their origin to themselves until one day one guessed
67
Iran (11 khordad 1383/2004).
68
The number of Iraqis in Iran was 96,921 as of 2005 (sic!); given the continuously uncertain
situation in their country, they have not yet received an ultimatum to leave Iranian territory, and
they can even be employed in the public sector (Sharq, 4 ordibehesht 1384/2005).
69
Monsutti cited in Abbasi-Shavazi et al., Return to Afghanistan?, 10.
70
On the case of Oman, see Marc Valeri, L’Etat—Qabous. Identite´ nationale et le´gitimite´ politique au
sultanat d’Oman (1970 – 2005) (Paris, 2005), 331 ff.
71
Massoumeh Shahriyari, “Panahandegan dar estekhdam-e dowlat [Refugees Employed by the
State],” Sharq, 4 ordibehesht 1384/2005.
her friend’s background from her handwriting. Dissimulation or dishonesty has

become the rule in many circumstances, even the most intimate. Some do not hes-
itate to subject themselves to cosmetic surgery of the nose or cheekbones to elim-
inate the “crime of their features.” But unfortunately, Iranians can detect Afghans
by their pronunciation of the number six, and in the border areas, security forces
observe funerals to identify the deceased of uncertain origin (mashkuk). People
identified in this way have included high-ranking civil servants.
Afghan Immigration and the Reconstitution of the Islamic Republic
Invisible, silent, or suppressed though it may be, Afghan immigration does not
fail to contribute to a kind of unspoken questioning in Iranian society of itself
and its conception of citizenship.72 Thus, the approximately 80,000 children of
“uncertain identity,” numerous around Torbat-e Jam, in the village of Salehabad,
and in Baluchistan, have caused a real juridical imbroglio by revealing the mul-
tiple contradictions between the various legal codes and principles claimed by
the Islamic Republic, and between their diverse, often incoherent, applications. 73
Consider the case of a child with an Iranian mother and an Afghan father who
has abandoned his family or who is simply not able to participate in an adminis-
trative procedure to regularize his situation. In the real or supposed absence of the
father, the state finds itself in an embarrassing situation, lacking the legal status of
“single mother.” It might assign the title of “illegitimate” (haramzadeh) to the
child, but the term does not exist except as an insult because it implies adultery
and does not correspond to any civil status, and thus cannot be uttered by the
public administration. It might also recognize him, as it does now, under a
“dubious” or “uncertain” identity (mashkuk ol-hoviyeh), but this bars him from a
normal life in everything from schooling to marriage or employment. In such
a situation, the mother has no alternative but to remain in Iran with children
deprived of all civil rights, or to go to Afghanistan to find—really or
fictively—their father and attempt to return to Iran with him, armed with an offi-
cial Afghan marriage certificate in order to be able to register and make official
their marriage in Iran.
It goes without saying that the second solution of going to Afghanistan is very
risky for a wide range of reasons, from the possible ill-will of the husband to the
cost of administrative procedures and to the reluctance of Iranian consular ser-
vices. According to official figures, the latter granted 240,000 visas to Afghans
in 2004, but spokespersons of the Afghan community claim that this figure is
72
On the juridical evolution of the latter from 1900 onwards, see Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions,
53 ff.
73
We would like to thank Maryam-Sadat Golduzian for entrusting us with her Masters thesis,
still in manuscript form, for use in this study: Barresi-ye haq-e tabe’iyat beh onvan-e yek haq-e bashari
va ’emal-e an dar hoquq-e dakheli-ye Iran [A Study of the Right to Nationality as a Human Right
and its Application in the Domestic Law of Iran], Tehran, Allameh Tabatabai University, Depart-
ment of Law, 1384/2005.
negligible compared to the number of applications. Only those of important

businessmen and representatives of political groupings supported by Tehran
are treated favorably, and visas go to those who can pay for them.
According to the website Baztab, reputed to be close to the Revolutionary
Guards, the consulate of the Islamic Republic in Kabul has become a “visa super-
market.”74 According to the press, certain non-governmental organizations and
various weblogs, many Iranian women in Afghanistan, finding themselves
trapped in a patriarchal society, subjected to multiple abuses, desperate and
unable to regularize their marital status and return to Iran, have taken their
own lives by self-immolation.75 Thus, the most reasonable solution in these
kinds of cases—assuming of course that it presents itself as a clear and rational
alternative in such dramatic circumstances—is to remain in Iran in a situation
if not quite of illegality, then one without rights.
Moreover, the Islamic Republic, rather curiously, does not recognize religious
marriages which are not administratively registered, at least at first glance. Some
32,000 Afghan-Iranian unions are in this category, placing the spouses in a very
precarious position from the civil and bureaucratic perspective, of which women
and children are naturally the first victims. We are aware of many unfortunate
family situations. The departure, absence of regular status, or death of a
husband leaves his family in a position of great administrative vulnerability,
even if the solidarity of relatives and neighbors permits them to meet their every-
day needs. One also encounters the absurd, as so often in a bureaucratic order. In
one set of siblings, some children may have Iranian nationality and an identity
card while others do not, the laws having changed between births. By granting
one member of a family a residence permit as a compromise, the authorities
can also enforce the repatriation to Afghanistan of the rest of the family. And offi-
cials are not always immune to the corruption which still muddies the consistency
of the state’s public policies.76 More dramatically, some Afghan husbands forced
to leave the country have preferred to murder their Iranian wives rather than
leave them behind and risk seeing them remarry.77
Press articles, the mobilization of charitable associations, and the taking of pos-
itions by the authorities on this subject have sustained an increasingly lively
debate and have put the spotlight on the irresolvable legal contradictions in the
74
“Sefarat-e iran dar afghanestan: Souper-e dallali be ja-ye fa‘aliat-e diplomatik [The Iranian
Embassy in Afghanistan: Business or Diplomacy?]”, http://www.baztab.com, 24 and 28 dey
1384/2006.
75
On the difficult situation of Iranian women in Afghanistan, see Farnaz Ghazizadeh, “Afghaniha
beravand, zanan-e iranieshan ra ham bebarand! [Afghans Should Leave Iran and Take Their Iranian
Wives with Them!],” in http://roozonline.com/01newsstory/008358.shtml; on the legal problems
posed by those without documents, see Ali Ghadimis, “Teflak shoghalha [Poor Jackals],” in
http://www.ali-gh.com/archives/000175.php; Elaheh Boghrat, “Inja adam khar darad [Cannibals
are amongst Us],” in www.alefbe.com/articleAdamkhar.htm.
76
The new arrangement of BAFIA’s offices in Mashhad, in the same district as the police head-
quarters, involves an open layout which will no doubt make it more difficult to bribe officials.
77
http://www.womeniniran.com/news/81-news/10-81-n/21-10-81/1-21-10htm.
Islamic Republic, which has preserved the fundamental aspects of the legislation
of the ancien regime, some of whose clauses date to the beginning of the twentieth
century.78
Thus, an often passionate debate has been re-launched on the “women of the
street” (zanan-e khiabani), that is to say, on prostitution; and also, in effect, on
the status of “unregistered marriage” (sigheh) which prostitutes can claim, but
which equally covers the practice of potentially “temporary” liberal relationships
or cohabitation. In the last decade, serial murderers attacked women of suppo-
sedly loose morals in Tehran (1995 – 96), Mashhad (1999– 2001) and Kerman
(2002 – 2003). The killers were arrested, sentenced and hanged, but not before
public opinion and the media seized upon the events. First of all, it was self-
evident to many that the murderers could only have been Afghans, especially
in Mashhad and Tehran (in Kerman, it was quickly learned that the killer was
an Iranian who had infiltrated libertine circles of the city and who intended to
eliminate women guilty of “corruption,” without harming, incidentally, their
male “victims”). But when it became clear that all the perpetrators were
Iranian and self-declared Islamic avengers loudly justifying their actions, as in
the case of Said Hanai in Mashhad, another polemic came into force. Some
approved of the murderers or, in any case, found extenuating circumstances
since they were “purifying” the city—thus argued, for example, the dailies
Keyhan and Resalat.79 Others blamed both the deplorable behavior of the
women and the irresponsibility of the murderers for taking justice into their
own hands. Still others posed the question of why there was so much prostitution
in Iran. But implicitly, it was the problem of women’s freedom of movement
in public spaces and the free usage of their bodies that was being scrutinized;
and by extension, the status of free unions or at least unregistered (qachaqi,
literally, “contraband”) ones—the same ones which place some Iranian wives
of Afghans in irresolvable legal and administrative situations. At the same
time, these crimes (but also the disappearance of twenty-two—mostly
Afghan—children, of which a pedophile at Sardasht near Tehran was found
guilty)80 allowed for open discussion of the practice of homosexual rape, a
hitherto taboo subject reserved for the prison chronicle.
Honor crimes, the responsibilities of the police and the judiciary in these
matters, women’s rights, the controversies of legislation and jurisprudence con-
cerning them, border control, and the status of those without documents and the
rights of their children, so-called “street children” (bacheha-ye khiabani), all came
under discussion.81 When the newspapers expressed surprise at the passivity of
78
See Maryam-Sadat Golduzian, A Study of the Right to Nationality, ch. 3 on the obsolescence of
legislation relating to the status of foreigners inherited from the ancien regime; and Kaveh Bayat,
“Mohajerin-e shoravi, nakhostin tajrobeh-ye panahandegi dar Iran [Soviet Refugees: Iran’s First
Experience of Asylum Cases],” Goft-o-gu 11 (1375/1996): 7 – 23.
79
Keyhan (7 mordad 1380/2001); Resalat (9 mordad 1380/2001).
80
“Jenayat-e bozorg dar hashieh-ye Tehran [An Outrageous Crime on the Outskirts of Tehran],”
Iran (21 shahrivar 1383/2004).
the police when faced with the disappearances of children at Sardasht, the head of
the latter explained sententiously that a disappearance was not a crime and could not
by itself trigger an investigation.82 The Afghan parents of some of these children did
not dare to notify the police for a long time for fear of being deported. At issue was
whether the responsibility for protecting minors, championed by the Nobel Prize-
winning Shirin Ebadi, lay with the state or with the family.
The legitimacy or illegitimacy of the oldest profession was enthusiastically
debated. Why not open “houses of chastity” (khaneha-ye ‘efaf, i.e., brothels in
Islamic politically correct language) providing clerics who would perform tem-
porary marriages and medical personnel who would guarantee the appropriate
hygienic standards to combat sexually transmitted diseases? And perhaps the
motivation was also to some extent to administratively and financially control
this economic activity, to hide it from the public view by taking it off the
streets, and to extend the sexual offer to men hitherto not much inclined to
frequenting prostitutes? Nonetheless, more recently, one Ms. Eshrat Shayegh,
a parliamentary deputy of the abadgaran close to President Ahmadinejad, surmised
that if it were up to her, the problem would be quickly resolved with the public
hanging of ten zan-e khiabani. She quickly denied these remarks in the face of the
public outcry they provoked even in the ranks of her own political movement.83
Journalists, parliamentarians, magistrates, and functionaries of the security forces
regularly express their opinions on these social issues, weekly tabloids have made
this their specialty, and weblogs in which women write at length about these
dramas proliferate and quickly invite the wrath of the censors.84 Whether they
appear as killers, thieves, or rapists—or even victims—Afghans are at the heart
of these contradictory narratives which Iranian society tells about itself. Their
presence underlies numerous claims or protests related to civil rights.
In addition, it has another catalyzing effect in the religious and cultural
domains. Here, too, the two countries undergo osmosis. Despite its lettres de
noblesse in the matter of religious knowledge, Afghanistan does not currently
have a renowned Shia religious authority with the exception of Ayatollah
81
To cite just a few articles: F. Khalilpour, “The Crisis of Marriage with a Foreigner,” Hamshahri
(25 ordibehesht 1384/2005); F. Qalehdar, “The Honor of Iranians is Threatened: A Crime Named
Rape,” ‘Etemad (8 shahrivar 1384/2005); E. Mo‘ini Mehr, “The Uninvited Guests,” Farhang-e Ashti
(10 shahrivar 1384/2005); S. Zarabadi, “Neither Authorised nor Illegal,” ‘Etemad (4 ordibehesht
1384/2005); M. Shahryari, “Refugees Employed by the State,” Sharq (4 ordibehest 1384/2005);
E. Mo‘ini Mehr, “Children Between Here and There,” (23 tir 1384/2005). It must be emphasized
that the authors are almost always women.
82
Elaheh Boghrat, “Inja adam khar darad [Cannibals are amongst Us],” http://www.alefba.
com/articleAdamkhar.htm.
83
Banafsheh Samgis, “Biganeh ba qorbanian-e jam‘eh” [Ignorant of Society’s Victims], Sharq 24
azar 1383/2004.
84
Alfred Hermida, “Web Gives a Voice to Iranian Women,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/
tech/2044802.stm; Netlex Blogs, “Weblogs iraniens: le sexe cache l’essentiel,” http://www.nellex-
france.com/weblogs/?p¼1003; Michael Theodoulou, “Proliferating Iranian Weblogs Give Voice
to Taboo Topics,” in http://www.csmonitor.com /2003/0623/p07s02-wome.html.
Mohaqqeq Kaboli. This is in plain contrast with Iraq or Lebanon. The many
Afghan Shias, thus, largely refer to Iranian theologians or thinkers, such as
Shariati, Soroush, Ayatollahs Taleqani and Khoi, and, of course, Imam
Khomeini. Meanwhile Ali Khamenei, the Guide of the Revolution, has accepted
the marja‘iat—i.e., being the “source of emulation”—of Shias outside Iran.
Many Afghans are also theological students in Mashhad and Qom. There are
currently approximately 1,500 Afghan clerics in Iran, and a substantial number
among them have married Iranian women, contributing to the interweaving of
the two countries. In Khorasan, it is not unusual for the leader of prayers to be
Afghan without advertising it and without the community of believers attaching
the least importance to it. But in this domain, too, irritations are multiplying, sub-
jecting clerics or theological students of foreign origin to unheard of formalities
as conditions for pursuing their studies, extending their stay, or payment of the
fees for their Masters degrees by the howzeh in Qom or the Astan-e Qods
foundation in Mashhad.
Part of the Iranian clergy looks rather askance at the tightening of immigration
policies which makes it risk losing some of its students. Moreover, members of
the Afghan diaspora around the world frequently invite Iranian religious auth-
orities, if only for linguistic reasons, and participate in the activities of religious
centers which some of them have created—for example, in California.85 Even if
Afghanistan is less important in this respect than Lebanon or Iraq, Iranian Shiism
exists also through the audience which it finds there. But above all, the current
weakness of its religious power partly explains the severity which the Islamic
Republic demonstrates towards its citizens. It would probably think twice if it
had to fear the wrath of one Ayatollah Sistani. It is revealing that, as we have
seen, some Afghans prefer to put forward their identity as Iraqi mo‘avedin
rather than professing their more distant origins.
Moreover, Afghanistan bears religiously upon Iran as a Sunni-majority
country. Whether in a republic or an empire, Shiism is a state religion which
tends to become conflated with national identity, at the risk of placing Sunnis
in an uncomfortable situation. They are not recognized as such, except in the
statistics which are put forward in a vague ecumenical discourse, but are, in
fact, subjected to discrimination in public employment or political life—they
do not have a single minister and participation in elections is difficult.
Beginning in the 1990s, people became worried about the increase in influence
of this denomination that Afghan immigration was bringing to the east of the
country, and saw in this the nefarious hand of Saudi Arabia, drug traffickers,
or the United States. The followers of Bin Laden among Afghan migrants all
over the Gulf region only sharpened these alarms.86 Nonetheless, in reality,
85
On Ayatollah Qazvini’s school, City of Knowledge, in Pomona, see Fariba Adelkhah, Les
Iraniens de Californie: si la Re´publique islamique n’existait pas, Les Etudes du CERI 75 (Paris, 2001):
19; on the visit to Australia of Hojjat ol-Eslam Seyyed Hassan Navab, president of the Center of
Religious Research and Studies, see Jomhuri-ye Eslami (22 shahrivar 1984/2005).
things are different. The absence of any political or religious representation worth
mentioning obliges Iranian as well as Afghan Sunnis to frequent Saudi or Pakistani
religious centers in Tehran, which has no Sunni mosque. Molavi Abdolhamid of
Zahedan, the greatest Sunni religious authority in Iran, complains about this
bitterly and ceaselessly pleads for the opening of such a shrine, which would
help Iranian Sunnis avoid reciting their Friday prayers behind a foreign leader.
Moreover, the Islamic Republic could take advantage of Sunni minorities in its
regional politics, notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, to attempt to
put an end to politico-religious or “tribal” conflicts.87 But Molavi Abdolhamid
does not deny that on the ground, Afghan immigrants, because of their familial
or other connections to Iranian Sunnis and their integration or circulation through-
out the region, are part of a silent reconfiguration of the social landscape.
These transformations are expressed less in explicit political or electoral terms
than in terms of more general social change. Thus, Afghan businessmen, intellec-
tuals, and experts come together to bring about the undeniable growth in power
of a Sunni elite, one of whose bastions is the network of independent universities
(daneshgah-e azad-e eslami, i.e., private paid universities, in contrast to the public
university), and one of whose driving forces is the more or less informal circula-
tion of money across the Gulf, South and Central Asia, or indeed the world,
through the hawala system.
Social relations are inflected in a region such as Khorasan, and in a much more
subtle manner than a simple antagonistic axis between Sunnis and Shias. For
example, the Astan-e Qods, which cannot be suspected of pro-Sunnism, favors
the development of regional exchanges and investments and did not experience
any particular qualms about trading prolifically with Afghanistan under the
Taliban at the end of the 1990s, a fruitful cooperation which was continued
with the government of Hamid Karzai or, more locally, with the governorate
of Ismail Khan and later his successors Seyyed Mohammad Kheirkhah and
Hossein Anvari in Herat. This process of regional integration brings about an
increased presence of Emirati, Saudi, Iraqi, Pakistani, and also Afghan networks,
in apparent contradiction with the public policies of the central state.
Conclusion
These interactions are interesting because they remind us that the immigration of
Afghan populations into Iran cannot be dissociated from the emigration of many
Iranians away from their country, especially to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and
to the Arab states of the Gulf and the Sea of Oman. In his indignation towards the
Qajars, Afghani estimated in 1892 that more than one-fifth of the inhabitants of
Persia had settled abroad,88 and these departures, moreover, led to the institution
86
F. Adelkhah, “Qui a peur du mollah Omar ? L’économie morale du talebanisme dans le Golfe,”
Critique Internationale (12 July 2001): 22 – 29.
87
Sharq, (9 khordad 1384/2005).
of the passport and the identity card (tazkireh) in 1900.89 Iranian emigration
intensified even more after the institution of the customs service, obligatory
conscription, the banning of the veil, and later with the 1979 Revolution, the
war with Iraq, and the economic crisis from which the country has never truly
recovered since the second half of the 1970s. One of the unique aspects of
Iran, therefore, is that it is simultaneously a country of emigration and of immi-
gration, a continual coming and going which inevitably influences the idea that
the nation creates about itself.
Furthermore, the history of Iranian territory and citizenship suggests that
the control and the exploitation of the frontier regions have played a major role
in the politics of reforming the country since the danger of its dismemberment
became evident with the disastrous war against Russia in 1804 and the successive
concessions that the country had to consent to under pressure from different
empires which lusted after the spoils.90 As late as 1921, a province such as Khorasan
could sink into rebellion at the instigation of Colonel Mohammad Taqi Khan
Pesyan,91 and one of the first tasks of Reza Shah, the new strongman of Iran,
was precisely to re-establish the authority of central power over tribal leaders
and rebels before attempting to modernize Iran. The “pacification” of Sistan and
Baluchistan came even later, if it was ever achieved at all, given the importance
and the violence of the drug trade, partly conducted by the armed tribe of the
Shahbakhsh. The great nationalist rebellion of the Baluch in Pakistan between
1973 and 1977, in particular, had repercussions on the Iranian side of the border.
These days, the problem appears different, even if Afghanistan remains a confused
source of danger in the Iranian national imagination.92 Immigration and the relation-
ship with the border are among the elements indirectly affecting the political recom-
position of the Islamic Republic. They have undoubtedly played a role in the rise in
nationalist sentiments over the past few years, and the ambivalence of President Kha-
tami’s campaign slogan in 1997, “Iran for all Iranians,” has perhaps not been suffi-
ciently emphasized, in that it represented a great overture towards the diaspora,
but neglected the millions of foreign migrants settled in Iran.
Apprehensions provoked by the advances of Sunnism or Wahhabism in the
eastern provinces, attributed to the actions of Saudi Arabia, represented
another variant of this anti-Afghan fever often close to the collective psychosis
of a besieged population. Nonetheless, it would be simplistic to keep to this
reading. Political and, in particular, electoral repercussions of immigration and
of the border question are more complex. One might take as evidence the fact
that the frontier provinces, particularly Sistan and Baluchistan, have had
voting tendencies in recent years which were clearly different to those of
88
Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions, 83.
89
90
91
92
Roy, L’Afghanistan, 283.
central provinces or the national average: it was here that Mohammad Khatami
won his best results and, in 2005, Sistan and Baluchistan chose Hashemi Rafsan-
jani in the second round of the presidential election.
To speak of Afghan immigration in Iran is to highlight the regional background
from which it emerged and the integral relationship which the latter has with the
coming into being of Iranian society and state themselves. Along with the
Kurds, the Arabic speakers, the coastal populations which inhabit both sides of
the Gulf, and the Baluch who live between several states (Pakistan, India, Afghani-
stan, Oman and the United Arab Emirates), Afghan migrants or populations of
Afghan origin, all contribute to the insertion of the Islamic Republic into a trans-
national space without clearly defined borders. The epicenter of this is naturally
the Gulf. Thus, the Malek Siah mountain range lying between Pakistan, Iran
and Afghanistan, constitutes an immense free zone in the orbit of Dubai and articu-
lated with other economic spaces as distant as China, Central Asia, Turkey, and the
Middle East. The authorities are resigned to its existence, in part because informal
trade is the only activity which allows destitute populations to survive and guaran-
tees a minimum degree of civil peace, and in part because it is not without benefits
for certain ruling groups. At most, they seek to limit it and enclose it by creating
border markets, such as that of Milak in Zabol, controlled by the Supreme National
Security Council, and enacting regulations for them, such as the lifting of the ration
coupons for petrol which had allowed for lucrative cases of fraud.
Beyond the emblematic cases of Afghani and Bin Laden, the itinerary of one
Bohlul is revealing of the depth of this “transnational historical field.”93 Moham-
mad Taghi Bohlul, a cleric and native of Sabzevar, reluctantly took the lead in
the 1936 protests in the mosque of Goharshad in Mashhad against the ban on
veiling. Troops intervened with cannon and caused many deaths. Bohlul
managed to flee to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned for four years and
where he remained after his release. Thrown into prison once again for a dark
case of murder, he was expelled to Egypt, from where he went to Iraq. Rightly con-
sidered to be Iranian, he was chased from there by Saddam Hussein at the end of the
1960s and settled once again in his original homeland as a mo‘aved, not without
being harassed and spending several weeks in prison. He died there at the age of
105 in 2005 and was buried with the most solemn rites.94
In reality, these two national spaces, Iran and Afghanistan, and the populations
which claim them, are unthinkable one without the other. It is this evidence that
the authorities of the Islamic Republic choose to forget, unless the relaxation of
coercive measures of immigrant control since October 2005, at least in the aca-
demic domain, does signal the implementation of a more realistic policy, even
if this is in the name of respect for the “disinherited.”
93
Jean François Bayart, Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalization (Paris,
2004), 134 ff.
94
Sharq, (28 tir 1384/2005); Keyhan News (9 mehr 1384/2005).

The Iranian Afghans

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Iranian Studies

ISSN: 0021-0862 (Print) 1475-4819 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cist20

The Iranian Afghans

Fariba Adelkhah & Zuzanna Olszewska

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Published online: 16 Apr 2007.

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Fariba Adelkhah and Zuzanna Olszewska

The Iranian Afghans1

Emigration from Afghanistan is the product of socio-political circumstances—drought,

Fariba Adelkhah is a Research Director at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales

From Immigration and Exile to Repatriation or Expulsion? (1978 – 2005)

On 17 April 1978, a coup toppled President Mohammad Daoud’s government

Migration as Economic Strategy and Political Necessity

Soviet invasion, meanwhile, ethnic Hazara mojahedin (resistance ﬁghters) would

A History of Afghans in Iran: Legal Status and Government Policy

Citizens of Afghanistan had been visiting Iran as migrant workers, pilgrims or

The Amayesh statistics yielded detailed demographic information on the

In 2002, Iran, Afghanistan, and the UNHCR signed a new agreement to

the return of Afghans seems a complex phenomenon simply on account of the

midwifery, the Pashto language, journalism, ﬁlmmaking, design, and handicrafts,

The Irreversibility of the Afghan Presence

I shall leave behind all that I possess, then I shall leave

Isfahan) or Golshahr and Sakhteman (on the outskirts of Mashhad)—which

her friend’s background from her handwriting. Dissimulation or dishonesty has

Afghan Immigration and the Reconstitution of the Islamic Republic

negligible compared to the number of applications. Only those of important

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