Then, in the mid-1800s a distant cousin of Barakzai clan took power under Amir Dost Mohammad, born to a Qizilbash wife of Sardar Payanda, was not sympathetic to the Shias and exploited Sunni-Shia differences. However, practically all-immediate descendants of Ahmad Shah Durrani left the Hazaras in relative peace with the exception of Shah Kamran’s 1847 attack on Hazarajat. Not the same could be said of the Hazaras. Overall, the Qizilbash continued to serve in high administrative and army positions in successive administrations. When Ahmad Shah Durrani’s son, Timur Shah, moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, he brought with him more Qizilbash families to Chindawal (Adamec, 2003 Ghobar, 1967 Gregorian, 1969 Noelle, 1997). Ahmad Shah Durrani’s rearguard army commander known as Wali Mohammad Khan Jawansher was given one of the settlements in Kabul, the Chindawal District. Ahmad Shah Durrani continued to hold the Qizilbash as advisors and ghulam khana (royal personal bodyguards). When the Afshari king, Nadir Shah Afshar, was assassinated, his general Ahmad Shah Durrani, a Sadozai nobleman, became Afghanistan’s first formal king in 1747. The Kabul garrison consisted of about 12,000 families (Adamec, 2003 Gregorian, 1969 Noelle, 1997). The Qizilbash became noticeable in Afghanistan when Nadir Shah Afshar, alleged by some to have Safavid lineage, created the Kandahar and Kabul garrisons during his Indian campaign in 1738-39. The Qizilbash, literally translating into “redhead”, were Azerbaijani-Turks of Shia faith who spoke Farsi. They were believed to have furnished the Safavid kings with a cavalier of 70,000 horsemen. The Hazaras are speculated to have descended from the contingents (‘hazar’ meaning thousand or regiment) left behind by the Mongolian quests into Afghanistan (Adamec, 2003 Gregorian, 1969 Noelle, 1997).Īnother Shia group in Afghanistan is the Qizilbash, remnants of the Safavid dynasty. While The Kite Runner is not a history of Afghanistan, the relevant background needs to be discussed from a historical perspective to better understand the context of the novel in Afghan society.īefore the 16th century, the Safavids ruled in western Afghanistan, the Hazara ethnic group was Sunni, but as a matter of pressure and time, they converted to the Shia faith. Interestingly enough, in 1994 the emerging Taliban regime banned kite flying and an assortment of other activities offering at best a graveyard peace to a conflict-ridden society. This is symbolic to the 1992 event in Afghanistan when ethnoreligious warlords looted and pillaged Kabul and other cities in a race to see who can amass the most booty. When the opponent’s kite has been downed, then the real battle turns into a race, the kite run, to see who retrieves the fallen kite. His role is not much different than the foreign powers that instigated all Afghan sides into battle to fight their proxy war by providing arms, training, and intelligence. In most case, the kite flyer is encouraged to kite duel aggressively at high altitudes by the ‘string giver’ who usually holds the string reel. Kite flyers attempt to down their adversary’s kites analogous to the fighting between the Afghan government and mujahidin guerrilla factions whose hands are cut and bloodied, as is the hand of the kite flyer when the ground glass coating of the kite string sears through the hands. Similar to Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, Afghan kite flying involves mid-air duels between rivals. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner derives its name from an ancient Afghan hobby of dueling with kites. In Kabul, fighting kites was a little like going to war” (Hosseini, The Kite Runner, P.43) I felt like a soldier trying to sleep in the trenches the night before a major battle. I’d roll from side to side, make shadow animals on the wall, even sit on the balcony in the dark, a blanket wrapped around me. I never slept the night before the tournament. If you were a boy living in Kabul, the day of the tournament was undeniably the highlight of the cold season. “Every winter, districts in Kabul held a kite-fighting tournament. Mir Hekmatullah Sadat gives an in-depth analysis of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. From the June 2004 of Afghan Magazine | Lemar - Aftaab
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