Talk:Muslim conquests of Afghanistan

Relevance?
Please explain to me the relevance of these sentences;
 * In the eighth and ninth centuries ancestors of many of today's Turkic-speaking Afghans settled in the Hindu Kush area (partly to obtain better grazing land) and began to assimilate much of the culture and language of the Pashtun tribes already present there..


 * The most explicit mentioning of the Afghans appears in Al- Baruni’s Tarikh al hind (eleventh century AD). Here it is said that various tribes of Afghans lived in the mountains in the west of India. Al Baruni adds that they were savage people and he describes them as Hindus.


 * Al Beruni mentions the Afghans once saying that in the western mountains of India live various tribes of Afghans who extend to the neighbourhood of the Sindh (i.e., Indus) valley. Thus in the eleventh century when the Afghans are first mentioned, they are found occupying the Sulaiman Mountains now occupied by their descendants, the very tribes which the advocates of the exclusive claims of the Durannis will not admit to be true Afghans. Al Beruni no doubt also alludes to them in the passage where he says that rebellious savage races, tribes of Hindus, or akin to them inhabit the mountains which form the frontier of India towards the west..

There is nothing in the 3 prior quotes that have anything to do with the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan.


 * The most renowned of the dynasty's rulers was Mahmud of Ghazni, who consolidated control over the areas south of the Amu Darya then carried out devastating raids into India. With his booty from India, Mahmud built a great capital at Ghazni, founded universities, and patronized scholars. By the time of his death, Mahmud ruled a vast empire that stretched from Kurdistan to the entire Hindu Kush region as far east as the Punjab as well as territories far north of the Amu Darya. However, as occurred so often in this region, the demise in 1030 of this military genius who had expanded the empire to its farthest reaches was the death knell of the dynasty itself. The rulers of the Ghurids  of Ghor in modern-day Afghanistan, captured and burned Ghazni in 1149, just as the Ghaznavids had once conquered Ghor. Not until 1186, however, was the last representative of the Ghaznavids uprooted by the Ghorids from his holdout in Lahore, in the Punjab.

Relevance?? --Kansas Bear (talk) 00:27, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Since the frame of this article is 642-714(as per dates given in the article), then the time period mentioned should only be within those years. --Kansas Bear (talk) 00:38, 26 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Kansas Bear

it would stand to reason that a correlation to a point in time is provided that provides contextual reference to  when the  Islamic conquest was made on a non Islamic Inhabitants of the geographical .location. The relevance of Al Beruni's recordings provide that attestation. Cheers Intothefire (talk) 02:00, 30 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The relevance of the second and third quote is that as this article is about the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan ,
 * Further there is a problem with the alluded time frame that you mention . The Islamic conquest of Afghanistan was not accomplished in the period 642-714, but till much long after . This was being worked on by me and discussed on another page [Template talk:History of Afghanistan] under the section 13 improve , till user Ariana310 comes along edits the page and the page completely disappears. You may like to refer to the work done there to generally improve the wiki content on the pre islamic period of Afghan History.


 * Actually, according to History of Afghanistan, by Abdul Sabahuddin(page 36), there were Kafirs that remained untouched by Islam until 1896. So this article should be written until that time?? --Kansas Bear (talk) 04:09, 2 June 2010 (UTC)


 * The entire article is an invention of Wikipedia. It has been suggested many times to merge this article with Islamic conquest of Persia and Islamic conquest of India, based on academic literature. The territories north of the Hindu Kush were conquered along with the rest of Persia (Sassanid Empire), while the southern regions were attached to the Islamic raids on Indian soil (the expansion of the Ghaznavid empire and their successors). This article stubbornly tries to establish a medieval history of a country that did not exist until the 19th century and did not have a separate history at that time. Tajik (talk) 20:02, 2 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Ok. That explains why the article is named, Islamic conquest of Afghanistan, yet the article itself reeks of ethnicities and conversion and avoids "conquest" like the plague. Thanks for the clarification, Tajik. --Kansas Bear (talk) 20:44, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Clearing confusion over the name

 * Arabs were not on a conquest to conquer lands, they were just conquering people in the name of Islam. This is why they never created Arab kingdoms or held territories.
 * Afghanistan in this article is simply refering to the area that was occupied by the Afghan tribes (Pashtun tribes). This is what the Library of Congress, Dupree, and everyone else are mentioning, and in the 7th century the territories north of the Hindu Kush were not occupied by Afghans. It was around 1750 that the Hindu Kush territories became part of Afghanistan. Just because the modern nation state didn't exist in the 7th century it doesn't mean the Afghan people didn't exist. There are many sources which speak about Afghan tribes and those tribes are today's Afghans. In fact, these tribes are mentioned even during 500 B.C.
 * The name "Afghanistan" simply translates to "land of the Afghans" in the local Afghani language. So basically this article is titled Islamic conquest of the land of the Afghans and is specifically about when and how the Afghan tribes became Muslims. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cooliodog (talk • contribs) 06:09, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Encyclopedia articles have to have "Contemporary Relevance". In the time of the Sassanids, the article could have been called "Islamic Conquest of the Sassanids". Now that Afghanistan exists - & the Sassanids don't - as a current geo-political reality - it is totally logical to call this article "Islamic Conquest of Afghanistan". As a non-scholarly, Indian, Hindu, lay-person, motivated by a stray reference in a NY Times article I was reading & interested in finding out how & why CURRENT Afghanistan embraced Islam - this is the way I searched for it - & found it on Wikipedia. The Wall Street Journal also had an article today by Jawaid Rashid, author of "Taliban" stating his opposition to Robert Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India- 's proposal to split Afghanistan into 4 countries as a way to end the conflict which is beneficial to US Interests. In the Colonial days of the West's Hegemony, the media would rapidly have called it "the Blackwill Doctrine" & discourse would have lined up for, or against, it with all comments by a "Native" deemed superfluous; I think we need to respect Nasrkand's ethnic & National Pride far more than we need to respect Tajik's scholarly quibbles; this is the very route by which scholars end up at that square where a slightly less learned & less tolerant populace "burns their books" ! MajMaverik (talk) 09:11, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

I wonder whether whoever created this article properly researched as much as he could. The Arabs came into the region while fighting the Sassanid-Persian towns which they captured. They tried to conquer Kabul and Zunbils as well but the only long-term achievement was levying tributes which stopped later as well. The article earlier gave little clear background about how the Arabs entered the area of Afghanistan and their wars there.

Afghans don't even seem to be living in most of the area except in the very east around modern Afghan-Pak per Muslim scholars of that time. The Muslim sources instead mostly seem to only mention, Turks, Iranians, Hepthalites, some even Indians in the land the Arabs and later Muslims fought. The conquests were hardly mentioned, even Islamization wasn't much focused upon. I have added properly researched content to the best of my ability to improve this article. MonsterHunter32 (talk) 23:48, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Good job on the expansion MonsterHunter32. I just made some edits that clarified certain terms and also restored some of the quotes by historians such as Al-Biruni and Farishta, which help the reader in understanding the pre-Islamic background of Afghanistan. Capitals00 (talk) 05:31, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Its Tajik and Persian propaganda to make it seem as if Pashtuns only lived in the south and didn't live in other parts of Afghanistan prior to Islam or during the introduction of Islam. Someone even stated the Hepthalites lived in the north before Pashtuns but fails to realize the Abdali/Durrani Pashtun tribe is a literal descendant of these people who's empire's capital was in the north in Balkh. I noticed the years i have been here that Wikipedia in regards to the Pashtun people are totally against them and mainly anti-pashtun in general. Oh and its mainly Iranians editing Afghan related articles or trying to Push a Persian narrative in many of the articles yet this goes unnoticed on here. How can Wikipedia articles such as these be neutral if only a few select people are editing them? Akmal94 (talk) 02:54, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Shahi Section Deletion
The immediate precursor to the Islamic period of the Ghaznavids in Aghanistan was the Hindu Shahi, and various other Buddhist and Hindu realms of Zunbils and  Suris dynasties in Afghanistan. Starting with user 119.73.5.169 various content has been deleted. I have restored much of that content which was already in the article. Intothefire (talk) 15:56, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

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External links modified (February 2018)
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Anti-Pashtun POV?
This line sure sounds like it; '' The Pashtuns later began migrating westward and displaced or subjugated the indigenous populations such as Tajiks, Hazaras, the Farsiwanis, Kakars and Baloch people before or during 16th and 17th centuries. They also displaced the Kafir people from Kunar Valley and Laghman valley to the less fertile mountains.[28]''

This is a huge fallacy which can be easily cleared;

1. Kakars are a Pashtun tribe yet it says that Pashtuns conquered them, this makes no sense.

2. There were no Farsiwans, Baloch and definently no Hazaras in Afghanistan in the 8th century.

3. Kaffirstan is in modern day day Nuristan and its boundary did not stretch into Kunar

Therefore i am going to change the way this reads a bit since i might get a warning for removing it alltogether. Akmal94 (talk) 02:02, 30 July 2019 (UTC)