The Lines Inside the Line: Hazara Sub-Groups, Internal Division, and the Question of Unity
Spend any time in Hazara communities - in Quetta, in Bamyan, in Sydney, in Toronto, in Frankfurt - and one thing becomes hard to ignore. We are a people defined from the outside as a single group, and we have suffered as one. Yet inside that single line, we draw many smaller ones. We define ourselves by the valley our grandparents came from, the dialect our parents spoke, the sub-group we count ourselves part of. And those smaller lines are not always neutral. They become walls. They become reasons we sit at different tables, fund different organizations, and sometimes speak about each other in ways we would not tolerate from anyone else.
This article tries to look at that honestly. Not to scold, but to take the question seriously: who are the sub-groups within the Hazara, where did they come from, and why does shared persecution and shared displacement so rarely produce shared unity?
The Map Inside the Map
The Hazara are not a uniform population. Hazarajat, the central Afghan highlands, is a patchwork of valleys, plateaus, and isolated districts, each of which has historically supported a distinct community. The largest regional and tribal identifications include:
- Day Zangi and Day Kundi, the two largest historical tribal confederations, occupying much of the western and central Hazarajat. Day Kundi today lends its name to a province carved out of Uruzgan in 2004.
- Behsud, in the eastern Hazarajat, in what is now Wardak province, with strong ties to herding and seasonal migration patterns that have brought them into recurring conflict with Kuchi (Pashtun nomadic) groups.
- Jaghori, in southern Ghazni, known for high educational attainment and a particularly active civic and political life.
- Qara Bagh and Jaghatu, also in Ghazni, neighbouring Jaghori but with their own distinct identities and leadership lines.
- Uruzgan Hazaras, including the communities of Khas Uruzgan, who have lived under particularly heavy pressure from surrounding Pashtun populations and the central state.
- Sheikh Ali, in the northern fringe of Hazarajat, in Parwan and Baghlan, with a mixed Twelver Shia and Ismaili composition.
- Bamyan, the cultural and symbolic heart of Hazarajat, home to the destroyed Buddhas, with its own internal sub-divisions by valley and clan.
- Ghazni Hazaras more broadly, spanning Jaghori, Qara Bagh, Jaghatu, Malistan, and Nawur, each district carrying its own reputation and rivalries.
Cross-cutting all of this is a religious layer. The majority of Hazaras are Twelver Shia, but there are significant Ismaili Hazara communities, particularly in the north, and a smaller number of Sunni Hazaras in the peripheries of Hazarajat. There is also the question of Sayyid lineage - families who claim descent from the Prophet's household and who have historically sat in a distinct, often elevated, social category within Hazara communities. Whether Sayyids are "Hazara" in the full ethnic sense, or a parallel community living among the Hazara, is itself a question people answer differently depending on where they sit.
None of this is a curiosity for academics. These are the categories that shape who marries whom, who lives where, whose name appears at the top of a community announcement, and which Hazara organization in a given city abroad ends up speaking for "the community."
How the Lines Were Drawn and Reinforced
The internal divisions among Hazaras are not arbitrary, and they are not only the work of Hazaras themselves. Several forces compounded over more than a century to produce the map we have now.
Geography. Hazarajat is a region of high mountains, narrow valleys, and long winters. Until very recently, travel between districts could take days or weeks. Communities developed their own dialects, marriage networks, and leadership structures because the alternative - constant cross-valley exchange - was physically difficult. Identity became local because life was local.
The Afghan state's long policy of fragmentation. The campaigns of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in the 1890s did not only kill and displace Hazaras on a massive scale. They also dismantled the indigenous leadership structures, the mirs and khans of particular valleys, and replaced them with a pattern of administration designed to prevent any single Hazara figure from speaking for the whole. Subsequent governments continued versions of the same approach: recognizing local notables, playing districts off against each other, ensuring that political representation, when it existed at all, was sub-regional rather than collective.
The absence of a unifying institution. Other persecuted peoples have built bodies that hold their internal differences together: a church hierarchy, a national academy, a recognised political leadership in exile. The Hazara have produced extraordinary individuals and important organisations, but no single institution has yet emerged with enough legitimacy across all sub-groups to be accepted as the convening body for the whole community. The Hizb-e-Wahdat parties of the 1990s came closest, and their fragmentation into Khalili, Akbari, and other factions is itself a textbook case of the pattern under discussion.
Sectarian and lineage layering. Twelver Shia, Ismaili, Sunni, and Sayyid distinctions are not only theological. They map onto status hierarchies, marriage rules, and patterns of religious authority. In some communities, a Sayyid family will not give a daughter in marriage to a non-Sayyid Hazara family of equal or greater means, on grounds of lineage alone. These are quiet rules, rarely written down, but they shape life.
Uneven development. Some Hazara districts, Jaghori in particular, sent their children to school in Quetta and Kabul in large numbers from the mid-twentieth century onward. Others did not have that option, or did not take it at the same rate. The result is a community whose internal class and educational gradient runs partly along sub-group lines, which then feed stereotypes that get repeated until they harden.
The Question of Universality
It is fair to ask whether what we are describing is a Hazara problem at all, or simply human behaviour wearing Hazara clothes.
Social psychology has a clear answer to part of this. Henri Tajfel's work in the 1970s on Social Identity Theory established, through a long series of experiments, that human beings will form in-groups and out-groups on the thinnest available basis - the colour of a shirt, the result of a coin toss - and will then favour the in-group and discriminate against the out-group, even when nothing material is at stake. In-group cohesion, in this account, requires an out-group boundary. If that is true at the level of randomly assigned shirt colour, it is true many times over for groups defined by valley, dialect, lineage, and centuries of separate history.
Gossip and intra-community judgement, similarly, are not a Hazara invention. Anthropologists from Robin Dunbar onward have argued that gossip is a fundamental social technology, one of the main ways small communities enforce norms and distribute reputation without formal institutions. Communities under pressure tend to gossip more, not less, because the stakes of who is reliable and who is a risk are higher.
So the universal layer is real. We should not flatter ourselves that our divisions are uniquely terrible. But that is only half of the answer.
What Is Specifically Ours
The other half is what is specific to our situation, and there are at least three things worth naming.
There is, first, the absence of a unifying institution described above. Many other communities have one - a church, a council, a recognised leadership in exile, a respected academic body. We do not, yet, have an institution whose authority crosses sub-groups in a way that makes it the natural convening body. The Hazara organisations that exist often, by virtue of their founding circumstances, carry an implicit regional or sub-group identity, and that gets read by other sub-groups even when it is not intended.
There is, second, the way persecution itself fragments rather than unites. This is counter-intuitive but well-documented in the literature on collective trauma. Communities under sustained existential threat often turn inward, not outward. Trust contracts to the smallest verifiable circle: family, then clan, then village, then sub-group. Wider trust, the kind required to fund a national institution or accept leadership from a different valley, requires safety and continuity - the very things persecution removes. The Afghan state's century of pressure on Hazaras did not produce a unified Hazara response. It produced a thousand small, careful, defensive units, each one rationally minimising risk by trusting only its own.
There is, third, intergenerational trauma's effect on trust. People who grow up in households shaped by displacement and loss often inherit a finely tuned suspicion of others, including others within the broader community. Suspicion was, for our parents and grandparents, a useful signal. It does not switch off when the immediate danger recedes, and it gets transmitted along with the language and the food.
What Distance Doesn't Heal
You might expect that when people are uprooted from their homeland by war and resettled together in a new country, they would set aside the old internal lines. Shared loss would be enough. The walls between Day Zangi and Behsud, between Jaghori and Sheikh Ali, between Sayyid and non-Sayyid, would feel small next to the walls between all of them and the new society around them.
This is not, on the whole, what happens.
In Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Mississauga, San Diego, Denver, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and London, Hazaras have organised in many places along sub-group and regional lines. There are mosques and cultural associations that, even when their public name is "Hazara" something, are in practice anchored in one regional community. There are weddings whose guest lists track lineage. There are board memberships and donations that follow the same channels they would have followed in Quetta or Kabul.
The reasons are worth naming. Trust networks people bring with them are the ones they had. When a family arrives with limited language, resources, and official support, the first call they make is to the people they already know - and those people are almost always from the same village, district, or sub-group. The community that forms around them is the community that helped them land. That is reasonable and human. It is also self-reinforcing.
Communities abroad often preserve the social structure of the moment they left, frozen in place. The internal hierarchies and leadership claims that existed in 1990s Quetta or 2000s Kabul travel intact to a Sydney suburb in 2010 and continue operating there long after the originating context has changed. Life abroad is, in this sense, a museum of the homeland's internal politics, well-preserved because it is no longer being tested against homeland reality.
The new country, in most cases, does not force the issue. Australia, Canada, the United States, Germany, and the UK do not know or care about the difference between a Behsudi and a Jaghori. To them, we are all "Hazara" or, more often, "Afghan." That external flattening does not produce internal merging. It just means our internal lines become invisible to outsiders while remaining vivid to us.
The hardest piece to admit is that internal competition can intensify abroad rather than relax. With less external threat to organise against, and with finite resources - board seats, government grants, media attention, religious authority - the energy that might have gone outward turns inward. Who speaks for the community? Whose mosque gets the visiting cleric? These are real prizes, contested along the lines we already had.
What Unity Would Actually Require
It is easy to call for unity. It is harder to describe, honestly, what unity would require, and harder still to do the work. A few things seem necessary, based on how other communities have moved through similar passages.
Institutions whose legitimacy crosses sub-groups. This is the hardest piece. It requires sustained effort to build bodies - educational, cultural, advocacy, religious - whose governance visibly includes all the major sub-groups, and whose decisions are accepted because the process is fair, not because the outcome favours one camp. The test is whether a Behsudi family will accept a Jaghori chair, and a Jaghori family will accept a Sheikh Ali chair, on the basis of competence rather than origin.
A shared story, told by many voices. The Hazara story needs to be told in a way that includes all the regions and sub-groups, without flattening their particulars. Sub-group identity is not the enemy of Hazara identity. The enemy is when sub-group identity is used to deny others' belonging in the larger story.
Norms around gossip and judgement. Communities cannot legislate themselves out of gossip, but they can shift the norm. When a respected figure refuses to participate in casual disparagement of another sub-group, others notice. The change is cultural, gradual, and requires the people with the most standing to use it.
Friendship and marriage across the lines. People who know each other intimately do not easily accept narratives that demonise the other side. Cross-sub-group friendship and marriage, where they happen, do more to dissolve internal walls than any number of speeches.
Patience with the fact that this takes generations. No community has unified on a deadline. The peoples who have held together over time have done so through long, repeated, often boring institutional work across decades. We are early in that work. That is not a reason for despair; it is a reason for realism.
A Note on What This Is and Is Not
None of this is to say that sub-group identity is bad, or that people should erase the particulars of where they come from. The valleys, the dialects, the local histories are precious and should be preserved. Nor is it to say that the Hazara are uniquely fractured. Almost every people of comparable history has internal lines that look much like ours.
It is to say, plainly, that the lines inside the line are real, that they cost us, and that pretending otherwise has not served the community. We can love where we come from and still recognise that the person from the next valley over is one of our own. Holding both at once is not a contradiction. It is, in the end, what unity actually looks like.
Sources consulted: Sayed Askar Mousavi, "The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study" (1998); Alessandro Monsutti, "War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan" (2005); Niamatullah Ibrahimi, "The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion and the Struggle for Recognition" (2017); Kristian Berg Harpviken, "Social Networks and Migration in Wartime Afghanistan" (2009); Robert L. Canfield, "Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society: Religious Alignments in the Hindu Kush" (1973); Henri Tajfel and John Turner, "An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict" (1979); Henri Tajfel, "Human Groups and Social Categories" (1981); Robin Dunbar, "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language" (1996); Vamik Volkan, "Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism" (1997); Minority Rights Group International country profiles on the Hazara of Afghanistan and Pakistan; UNAMA reports on Hazara communities; Afghanistan Analysts Network reporting on Hazarajat districts and Hizb-e-Wahdat factions.