St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

80 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике Секция 5. Паттерны политической жизни Афганистана и трансграничных регионов... clerics into the revolutionary maelstrom of Iranian politics. Yet the events of that year also forced many Afghan Shia to seek refuge in Pakistan and beyond. Still others saw the leftist revolutionary government that had seized power in Kabul the year before as the salvation of a minority community that has long faced persecution at the hands of the Afghan state. Civil war and the rise of the Taliban movement would dash many of the utopian visions of the Afghan Shia in the 1990’s, but the US-led intervention in 2001 renewed hopes for an entirely new dispensation for a now “emancipated” minority community within an ostensibly “democratic” polity. This paper investigates the intersection of these revolutionary legacies and the search for new strategies of religious and national legitimation within highly mobileAfghan Shia diaspora communities scattered across the globe. Analysing the encounters of these actors with Muslims in Europe, the USA, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere, I focus particular attention on the tension between the nationalist discourses of migrants and the Shia universalism of diasporic religious scholars, on the one hand, and the simultaneous efforts of these same religious leaders to represent “national” concerns, on the other. Sana Haroon (University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA) Sufi Fraternities and Political Integration in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands This paper compares the strategies of social engagement received and transferred by the mobile mullahs of the Akhund Ghaffur-Hadda Mulla line in the Indo-Afghan borderlands with those used by the pirs of the khanqah (Sufi lodge) — centered line of Khawaja Usman Damani in the same region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Sufi networks were comparable for their common roots in “reformed” Mujaddidi practice that straddled the political border of colonial India and modernAfghanistan. They may be differentiated for the loci of their participation in and mediation of the day-to-day affairs of practicing communities — the Hadda Mulla’s antecedents were dispersed among the Pashtun borderland communities to support day-to-day enforcement of religious priorities while Damani advocated a khanqah -centered practice. I argue that it is the dissimilarities and not the similarities of the two fraternal networks that are of significance here. Assessing the spatiality of religious participation rather than evidence of conflict with state, I argue that while the pirs in Damani’s line restricted their activities within the khanqah , the mullahs of the Hadda line acted intentionally as agents of political integration. The latter’s conceptualization of the arena of religious service fashioned both a geo-political and an ethical contiguity across difficult terrain, linking small settlements and sparse