Author: Anis Rezaei
In a recent hope-inducing article titled “Shirin’s Petition: An Enslaved Hazara Woman’s Quest for Justice in the Late 19th Century,”[1] (hereafter Shirin’s Petition), co-authored by Dr. Ali Karimi and Masuma Nazari, the Hazara War (1891–1893) is examined through the personal story of a woman named Shirin, in its aftermath. According to the article, Shirin was the daughter of Mir Muhammad Azim Beg—a local king-like figure from Shahristan in Daikundi Province, located in the central highlands of Afghanistan, also known as Hazaristan (the Hazara people’s native homeland). Following the defeat of the Hazaras and the ensuing conquest and devastation of Hazaristan, Shirin and her family attempted to flee Afghanistan—but were captured. All the male members of her family, except for her youngest brother, a toddler at the time, were killed. Shirin and the other women and girls in her family were enslaved. This article examines the Hazara War through Shirin’s quest for justice within the political apparatus of the very state that inflicted unspeakable suffering and injustices on her family and her people.
In the late 19th century, Afghanistan’s king at the time, Amir Abd al-Rahman Khan (1880–1901), driven by tyrannical ambition and an insatiable greed for power and domination, waged a series of bloody conquests to forcibly annex independent and semi-independent regions—such as Hazaristan—into what would become modern-day Afghanistan. Among these conquests, the Hazara War stands out for its unmatched scale of destruction and the immense suffering it inflicted on the Hazara people. The campaign led to mass killings, forced displacement, widespread enslavement, and the systematic destruction of Hazaristan. In fact, the magnitude of this violence and its long-term impact have led many historians to describe it as a “genocide.” For example, in his 2017 book The Hazaras and the Afghan State,[2] Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi draws a parallel between the Hazara War and the Armenian Genocide (1915–1916). Similarly, in his 2024 articleThe Afghan State and the Hazara Genocide,[3] Dr. Mehdi Hakimi argues that the scale and nature of the atrocities committed during the Hazara War satisfy the legal criteria for genocide.
The Hazara War and the catastrophe it unleashed—including the mass enslavement of the Hazaras, which disproportionately affected women and girls—not only relegated the community to the lowest social strata in Afghan society, but, more importantly, rendered them vulnerable to systemic, targeted violence and structural discrimination that persists to this day. In a recent article, Dr. Melissa Chiovenda characterises this ongoing targeted violence as “slow-burn genocide”.[4] This genocide has profoundly shaped Hazara history and identity. Yet, despite its continuous and pervasive nature, it has received limited in-depth and rigorous academic attention.
In particular, our understanding of the massacres of Hazara civilians in the 1990s—such as the Afshar Massacre (1993),[5] the Mazar-e-Sharif Massacre (1998),[6] and the Yakaolang Massacre (2001)[7]—as well as the ongoing targeted attacks on the group over the past two decades, remains largely confined to reports by Human Rights Watch and a handful of other independent human rights organizations. Nevertheless, despite this limited coverage, the gendered dimension of this violence, where Hazara men and women experienced distinct forms of brutality, is evident both in historical accounts of the Hazara War and in documentation of the 1990s massacres.
During the Afshar Massacre, for instance, Human Rights Watch documented the killing of 70 to 80 Hazara civilians in the streets of Afshar—a western neighbourhood of Kabul—the execution of an additional 700 to 750 individuals in captivity, and the looting of approximately 5,000 Hazara homes. The reports also highlight the gendered dimension of the violence, including widespread sexual abuse, rape, and the abduction of women during and after the bloodshed. Similarly, the institutionalised enslavement and sexual objectification of Hazara women during and after the Hazara War is acknowledged in the works of Hassan Poladi (1989)[8] and Hasan Kakar (1968)[9]. However, in these studies, this aspect of the violence is largely marginalised. Hazara women are represented as passive victims and mute spectators of the genocidal violence. This oversight may be due to the authors’ limited access to data on this aspect of the war—or perhaps a lack of scholarly curiosity, to put it bluntly. Nevertheless, such marginalised and homogenised representations of Hazara women in historical accounts have rendered these studies inherently exclusionary, reductive, and gender-insensitive. Consequently, our collective understanding and interpretation of the past have been profoundly shaped in a similar manner.
This exclusionary and gender-insensitive body of historical knowledge has, in turn, contributed to the subjugation of Hazara women to a distinct form of oppression that Miranda Fricker (1999)[10] terms “epistemic oppression.” Fricker explains that epistemic oppression occurs when “the social experiences of the powerless are not adequately included in the collective understanding of the social world” (p. 23). To date, Shirin’s Petition notwithstanding, not only are Hazara women’s gender-determined experiences of the enduring violence inflicted on the group largely excluded from our collective understanding, but—more importantly—our perception of these women remains confined to viewing them as silent bystanders and passive victims. As a result, our interpretation of the past is narrow, hardly allowing for an alternative perspective on Hazara women—one that acknowledges their agency and recognises their roles as political actors and resistors in the face of violence.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that Hazara women, as members of a persecuted ethno-religious group in a deeply patriarchal society, experience marginalisation along multiple, intersecting axes. On one hand, they face gender-based oppression; on the other, they are systematically targeted because of their Hazara ethnicity and Shia faith. This renders their experience of oppression both intersectional and multifaceted. Yet, this intersectional reality is largely absent, not only from dominant historical narratives about the Hazara people but also from the existing body of gender and women’s studies on Afghanistan. As a result, both bodies of scholarship remain largely one-dimensional and exclusionary, failing to adequately reflect the complex structures of oppression that shape the lived experiences of women from marginalised ethnic and religious backgrounds, such as Hazara women.
To elaborate further, gender and women’s studies in the context of Afghanistan have extensively focused on the historical and ongoing violence against women primarily through the lens of gender alone, often treating gender as a singular category. In other words, these studies have largely portrayed women in Afghanistan as a homogeneous and monolithic group, whose experiences are determined exclusively by their gender. This approach has failed to account for the diversity among women, particularly in terms of religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other intersecting identity markers that shape distinct and unequal experiences of violence and marginalisation. Consequently, women from oppressed ethnic and religious communities—such as Hazara, Sikh, and Uzbek women—are disproportionately affected by political violence targeting their bodies and personhoods. These women experience violence on multiple, intersecting fronts—based on their gender, religion, ethnicity, and other identity markers. Yet, this compounded vulnerability remains largely invisible in mainstream gender scholarship. The realities of Hazara women, therefore, are more precisely understood as being shaped by the intersection of multilayered systems of oppression—gendered, ethnic, religious, and epistemic.
While Shirin’s Petition contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the genocidal intent behind the Hazara War and its multifaceted, lasting consequences for the Hazara people, it also sheds light on the role of Hazara women both before and after the genocide. Although the article centres on Shirin—an enslaved Hazara woman whose story offers a rare window into the gendered experience of the war—it inadvertently subscribes to the male gaze. This is more precisely manifested in the article’s engagement with the existing scholarship on the history of the war and the Hazara people. The article does not delve beyond a descriptive, noncritical overview of existing historical knowledge, without examining how Hazara women have been represented in those accounts or whether such representations are themselves problematic. Shirin’s Petition, as a first-of-its-kind academic endeavour centred on a Hazara woman’s agency and story, ought to have addressed this unjust oversight in the existing scholarship. Instead, it marginalises its own potential contribution to developing a new understanding of the Hazara War—one that departs from prevailing misrepresentations of Hazara women as passive victims, and foregrounds their agency, political activism, and resistance in the face of multilayered injustices.
Notwithstanding this limitation, the article grounds Hazara women’s experiences both before and after the genocide. It not only centres Shirin’s political agency and resistance, but also highlights the significant roles Hazara women played in governance, decision-making, and active leadership, sometimes even as commanders in conflict, before the genocide. More importantly, Shirin’s bold pursuit of justice for the atrocities committed against her family and people, undertaken within the very political apparatus that perpetrated those crimes, constitutes a profound act of resistance. It is a resistance not only against the immediate injustices she and her community endured, but also against the looming threat of institutionalised subversion, distortion, and erasure of their stories from the historical record. As the article rightly observes, Shirin’s petition letters serve not only as powerful historical documents that shed light on various dimensions of the war, but also as acts of defiance and resistance against forgetting, against historical erasure.
Shirin—an enslaved Hazara woman who witnessed the massacre of her people, including her father, brothers, and other male relatives; the mass displacement and enslavement of her kin, including her mother and sisters; and the destruction of her homeland—refused to submit to the erasure of her voice, her story, and her experience from history. There is immense power in that refusal.
Shirin’s Petition challenges the dominant portrayals of Hazara women in existing literature, where they have often been relegated to the role of passive victims and silent spectators of violence. By centring Hazara women’s agency and political activism, the article expands the boundaries of our limited historical understanding. It opens new avenues for scholarly inquiry and invites deeper, more critical engagement with this long-overlooked dimension of Hazara history. Above all, the article makes a significant contribution to an inclusive, egalitarian, and gender-sensitive understanding of the war—one that recognises Hazara women’s political agency and acts of resistance in the face of genocidal violence and persecution. It is a step towards redressing the systemic epistemic oppression that has long excluded Hazara women’s voices and experiences from the historical record.
Anis Rezaei is a Hazara woman and an aspiring academic based in the UK. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford.
_______________________________________________________
Reference:
[1] Karimi, A., & Nazari, M. (2025). Shirin’s Petition: an Enslaved Hazara Woman’s Quest for Justice in the Late 19th Century. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 68(3-4), 339-397.
[2] Ibrahimi, N. (2017). The Hazaras and the Afghan state: Rebellion, exclusion and the struggle for recognition. Oxford University Press.
[3] Hakimi, M. J. (2024). The Afghan state and the Hazara genocide. Harv. Hum. Rts. J., 37, 81.
[4] Kerr Chiovenda, M. (2025, May 26). A response to genocide against Palestinians, Hazaras and all at risk. In L. Allen & H. Mogstad (Eds.), Confronting the genocide of Palestinians and refusing repression [Forum]. Public Anthropologist, 7(2), 147–201. Brill. https://doi.org/xx.xxxx/xxxxx
[5] Human Rights Watch. (2005, July). The battle for Kabul: April 1992–March 1993. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/afghanistan0605/4.htm
[6] Human Rights Watch. (1998, November). The massacre in Mazar-i Sharif. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/afghan/Afrepor0.htm
[7] Human Rights Watch. (2001, January 19). Afghanistan: Massacres of Hazaras – Summary. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghanistan/afghan101.htm
[8] Poladi, H. (1989). The Hazaras. Mughal Publication Co., Stockton, California.
[9] Kakar, M. H. (1968). The consolidation of the Central Authority in Afghanistan under Amir’Abd al-Rahman, 1880-1896. University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (United Kingdom).
[10] Fricker, M. (1999). Epistemic oppression and epistemic privilege. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, 25, 191-210.
Shirin’s Petition: Demarginalising Hazara Women’s Political Agency and Resistance
Author: Anis Rezaei
In a recent hope-inducing article titled “Shirin’s Petition: An Enslaved Hazara Woman’s Quest for Justice in the Late 19th Century,”[1] (hereafter Shirin’s Petition), co-authored by Dr. Ali Karimi and Masuma Nazari, the Hazara War (1891–1893) is examined through the personal story of a woman named Shirin, in its aftermath. According to the article, Shirin was the daughter of Mir Muhammad Azim Beg—a local king-like figure from Shahristan in Daikundi Province, located in the central highlands of Afghanistan, also known as Hazaristan (the Hazara people’s native homeland). Following the defeat of the Hazaras and the ensuing conquest and devastation of Hazaristan, Shirin and her family attempted to flee Afghanistan—but were captured. All the male members of her family, except for her youngest brother, a toddler at the time, were killed. Shirin and the other women and girls in her family were enslaved. This article examines the Hazara War through Shirin’s quest for justice within the political apparatus of the very state that inflicted unspeakable suffering and injustices on her family and her people.
In the late 19th century, Afghanistan’s king at the time, Amir Abd al-Rahman Khan (1880–1901), driven by tyrannical ambition and an insatiable greed for power and domination, waged a series of bloody conquests to forcibly annex independent and semi-independent regions—such as Hazaristan—into what would become modern-day Afghanistan. Among these conquests, the Hazara War stands out for its unmatched scale of destruction and the immense suffering it inflicted on the Hazara people. The campaign led to mass killings, forced displacement, widespread enslavement, and the systematic destruction of Hazaristan. In fact, the magnitude of this violence and its long-term impact have led many historians to describe it as a “genocide.” For example, in his 2017 book The Hazaras and the Afghan State,[2] Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi draws a parallel between the Hazara War and the Armenian Genocide (1915–1916). Similarly, in his 2024 articleThe Afghan State and the Hazara Genocide,[3] Dr. Mehdi Hakimi argues that the scale and nature of the atrocities committed during the Hazara War satisfy the legal criteria for genocide.
The Hazara War and the catastrophe it unleashed—including the mass enslavement of the Hazaras, which disproportionately affected women and girls—not only relegated the community to the lowest social strata in Afghan society, but, more importantly, rendered them vulnerable to systemic, targeted violence and structural discrimination that persists to this day. In a recent article, Dr. Melissa Chiovenda characterises this ongoing targeted violence as “slow-burn genocide”.[4] This genocide has profoundly shaped Hazara history and identity. Yet, despite its continuous and pervasive nature, it has received limited in-depth and rigorous academic attention.
In particular, our understanding of the massacres of Hazara civilians in the 1990s—such as the Afshar Massacre (1993),[5] the Mazar-e-Sharif Massacre (1998),[6] and the Yakaolang Massacre (2001)[7]—as well as the ongoing targeted attacks on the group over the past two decades, remains largely confined to reports by Human Rights Watch and a handful of other independent human rights organizations. Nevertheless, despite this limited coverage, the gendered dimension of this violence, where Hazara men and women experienced distinct forms of brutality, is evident both in historical accounts of the Hazara War and in documentation of the 1990s massacres.
During the Afshar Massacre, for instance, Human Rights Watch documented the killing of 70 to 80 Hazara civilians in the streets of Afshar—a western neighbourhood of Kabul—the execution of an additional 700 to 750 individuals in captivity, and the looting of approximately 5,000 Hazara homes. The reports also highlight the gendered dimension of the violence, including widespread sexual abuse, rape, and the abduction of women during and after the bloodshed. Similarly, the institutionalised enslavement and sexual objectification of Hazara women during and after the Hazara War is acknowledged in the works of Hassan Poladi (1989)[8] and Hasan Kakar (1968)[9]. However, in these studies, this aspect of the violence is largely marginalised. Hazara women are represented as passive victims and mute spectators of the genocidal violence. This oversight may be due to the authors’ limited access to data on this aspect of the war—or perhaps a lack of scholarly curiosity, to put it bluntly. Nevertheless, such marginalised and homogenised representations of Hazara women in historical accounts have rendered these studies inherently exclusionary, reductive, and gender-insensitive. Consequently, our collective understanding and interpretation of the past have been profoundly shaped in a similar manner.
This exclusionary and gender-insensitive body of historical knowledge has, in turn, contributed to the subjugation of Hazara women to a distinct form of oppression that Miranda Fricker (1999)[10] terms “epistemic oppression.” Fricker explains that epistemic oppression occurs when “the social experiences of the powerless are not adequately included in the collective understanding of the social world” (p. 23). To date, Shirin’s Petition notwithstanding, not only are Hazara women’s gender-determined experiences of the enduring violence inflicted on the group largely excluded from our collective understanding, but—more importantly—our perception of these women remains confined to viewing them as silent bystanders and passive victims. As a result, our interpretation of the past is narrow, hardly allowing for an alternative perspective on Hazara women—one that acknowledges their agency and recognises their roles as political actors and resistors in the face of violence.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that Hazara women, as members of a persecuted ethno-religious group in a deeply patriarchal society, experience marginalisation along multiple, intersecting axes. On one hand, they face gender-based oppression; on the other, they are systematically targeted because of their Hazara ethnicity and Shia faith. This renders their experience of oppression both intersectional and multifaceted. Yet, this intersectional reality is largely absent, not only from dominant historical narratives about the Hazara people but also from the existing body of gender and women’s studies on Afghanistan. As a result, both bodies of scholarship remain largely one-dimensional and exclusionary, failing to adequately reflect the complex structures of oppression that shape the lived experiences of women from marginalised ethnic and religious backgrounds, such as Hazara women.
To elaborate further, gender and women’s studies in the context of Afghanistan have extensively focused on the historical and ongoing violence against women primarily through the lens of gender alone, often treating gender as a singular category. In other words, these studies have largely portrayed women in Afghanistan as a homogeneous and monolithic group, whose experiences are determined exclusively by their gender. This approach has failed to account for the diversity among women, particularly in terms of religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other intersecting identity markers that shape distinct and unequal experiences of violence and marginalisation. Consequently, women from oppressed ethnic and religious communities—such as Hazara, Sikh, and Uzbek women—are disproportionately affected by political violence targeting their bodies and personhoods. These women experience violence on multiple, intersecting fronts—based on their gender, religion, ethnicity, and other identity markers. Yet, this compounded vulnerability remains largely invisible in mainstream gender scholarship. The realities of Hazara women, therefore, are more precisely understood as being shaped by the intersection of multilayered systems of oppression—gendered, ethnic, religious, and epistemic.
While Shirin’s Petition contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the genocidal intent behind the Hazara War and its multifaceted, lasting consequences for the Hazara people, it also sheds light on the role of Hazara women both before and after the genocide. Although the article centres on Shirin—an enslaved Hazara woman whose story offers a rare window into the gendered experience of the war—it inadvertently subscribes to the male gaze. This is more precisely manifested in the article’s engagement with the existing scholarship on the history of the war and the Hazara people. The article does not delve beyond a descriptive, noncritical overview of existing historical knowledge, without examining how Hazara women have been represented in those accounts or whether such representations are themselves problematic. Shirin’s Petition, as a first-of-its-kind academic endeavour centred on a Hazara woman’s agency and story, ought to have addressed this unjust oversight in the existing scholarship. Instead, it marginalises its own potential contribution to developing a new understanding of the Hazara War—one that departs from prevailing misrepresentations of Hazara women as passive victims, and foregrounds their agency, political activism, and resistance in the face of multilayered injustices.
Notwithstanding this limitation, the article grounds Hazara women’s experiences both before and after the genocide. It not only centres Shirin’s political agency and resistance, but also highlights the significant roles Hazara women played in governance, decision-making, and active leadership, sometimes even as commanders in conflict, before the genocide. More importantly, Shirin’s bold pursuit of justice for the atrocities committed against her family and people, undertaken within the very political apparatus that perpetrated those crimes, constitutes a profound act of resistance. It is a resistance not only against the immediate injustices she and her community endured, but also against the looming threat of institutionalised subversion, distortion, and erasure of their stories from the historical record. As the article rightly observes, Shirin’s petition letters serve not only as powerful historical documents that shed light on various dimensions of the war, but also as acts of defiance and resistance against forgetting, against historical erasure.
Shirin—an enslaved Hazara woman who witnessed the massacre of her people, including her father, brothers, and other male relatives; the mass displacement and enslavement of her kin, including her mother and sisters; and the destruction of her homeland—refused to submit to the erasure of her voice, her story, and her experience from history. There is immense power in that refusal.
Shirin’s Petition challenges the dominant portrayals of Hazara women in existing literature, where they have often been relegated to the role of passive victims and silent spectators of violence. By centring Hazara women’s agency and political activism, the article expands the boundaries of our limited historical understanding. It opens new avenues for scholarly inquiry and invites deeper, more critical engagement with this long-overlooked dimension of Hazara history. Above all, the article makes a significant contribution to an inclusive, egalitarian, and gender-sensitive understanding of the war—one that recognises Hazara women’s political agency and acts of resistance in the face of genocidal violence and persecution. It is a step towards redressing the systemic epistemic oppression that has long excluded Hazara women’s voices and experiences from the historical record.
Anis Rezaei is a Hazara woman and an aspiring academic based in the UK. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford.
_______________________________________________________
Reference:
[1] Karimi, A., & Nazari, M. (2025). Shirin’s Petition: an Enslaved Hazara Woman’s Quest for Justice in the Late 19th Century. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 68(3-4), 339-397.
[2] Ibrahimi, N. (2017). The Hazaras and the Afghan state: Rebellion, exclusion and the struggle for recognition. Oxford University Press.
[3] Hakimi, M. J. (2024). The Afghan state and the Hazara genocide. Harv. Hum. Rts. J., 37, 81.
[4] Kerr Chiovenda, M. (2025, May 26). A response to genocide against Palestinians, Hazaras and all at risk. In L. Allen & H. Mogstad (Eds.), Confronting the genocide of Palestinians and refusing repression [Forum]. Public Anthropologist, 7(2), 147–201. Brill. https://doi.org/xx.xxxx/xxxxx
[5] Human Rights Watch. (2005, July). The battle for Kabul: April 1992–March 1993. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/afghanistan0605/4.htm
[6] Human Rights Watch. (1998, November). The massacre in Mazar-i Sharif. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/afghan/Afrepor0.htm
[7] Human Rights Watch. (2001, January 19). Afghanistan: Massacres of Hazaras – Summary. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghanistan/afghan101.htm
[8] Poladi, H. (1989). The Hazaras. Mughal Publication Co., Stockton, California.
[9] Kakar, M. H. (1968). The consolidation of the Central Authority in Afghanistan under Amir’Abd al-Rahman, 1880-1896. University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (United Kingdom).
[10] Fricker, M. (1999). Epistemic oppression and epistemic privilege. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, 25, 191-210.