This morning, I read a thoughtful piece by Armin Langerudi, an Iranian writer, on the relationship between the Iranian diaspora and enlightenment. In it, he spoke of the strikingly weak role that the Iranian diaspora has played in the intellectual enlightenment and transformation of its home society.
Kabul 24: That essay was a wake-up call for me to once again turn my attention to the Afghan diaspora – a vast population that has left the country in recent years yet still maintains a loud and visible presence in our political and cultural life. The central question is this: Are we also heading toward the same fate that Langerudi describes for the Iranian diaspora, or is our situation so complex and distinct that it must be treated as a completely separate phenomenon?
From the reflections I’ve had on the writings and discussions emerging from the diaspora, it has become clear that many Afghan migrants arrived in the West carrying exactly the same ideas and worldview they had inside the country.
They had the opportunity to encounter new epistemological and cultural spaces, yet in most cases they neither took advantage of educational opportunities nor underwent any fundamental shift in their intellectual outlook.
A large portion of these migrants have been content merely with learning the language and finding manual jobs; they have not fully integrated into the host societies either.
This condition has plunged them into a kind of existential disorientation – a state one might call “uprootedness and worldlessness,” meaning a rupture from the authentic experience of “being-in-the-world” and an inability to build a stable place for themselves in the new land.
At the same time, many of them suffer from what could be called an “issue disconnect.” They are highly active in virtual spaces, but their minds are preoccupied with debates that have little real connection to the actual problems of people inside Afghanistan and play no role in enlightening or intellectually transforming Afghan society.
On the other hand, some migrants have fallen into the illusion that simply because they have reached the “free world,” they are automatically more enlightened and aware than those of us who remained in Afghanistan – without any foundational change having occurred in their mental structures or their understanding of the world.
This whole complex set of phenomena shows that we urgently need a serious, scholarly study (a qualitative research project) to understand the Afghan diaspora – a study grounded in lived experience, in their thoughts, beliefs, and lifestyles, one that analyses their narratives within the context of their actual existential reality.
I myself do not have direct, unmediated lived experience of migrant life – the kind of vivid, embodied knowledge that comes from living among them – and I hope one day to spend some time in their midst to gain that firsthand understanding. Yet even from this distance, I can see that this is a fundamental issue.
If this growing chasm between “inside” and “outside” is not understood and rigorously examined, the day may come when the distance between us and the diaspora becomes so deep that meaningful dialogue between us is no longer possible.
Jamshid Mehrpour – Kabul
