Afghans

Afghans (Dari: افغان‌ها; Pashto: افغانان) are the citizens and nationals of Afghanistan, as well as their descendants in the Afghan diaspora. The ethnonym Afghan historically referred specifically to the Pashtuns, a nomadic, pastoral people primarily resident in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Quotes

• For what care I, though all speak Sohrab’s fame?
  For would that I myself had such a son,
  And not that one slight helpless girl I have,
  A son so fam’d, so brave, to send to war,
  And I to tarry with the snow-hair’d Zal,
  My father, whom the robber Afghans vex,
  And clip his borders short, and drive his herds,
  And he has none to guard his weak old age.
  • Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum (1853)

• Four Afghans sit in evening light,
  With features dusked by turbans white,
  But eyes like sun-glow I’ve seen smoulder
  On a lonely desert boulder.
  In circle, cross-legged, they converse,
  With accents guttural and terse.
  Unknowable are nomad faces
  Till you haunt all desert places:
  The same pent dreams glint there unknown
  As on the eve-lit boulder-stone.
  Earth brother, I must stranger be
  To such fierce taciturnity.
  • Rex Ingamells, "The Afghans", in The Jindyworobaks (1979), p. 4

External links

• Henry George Raverty, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans (London: William and Norgate, 1862)