Talk:Afghans

Work in progress

• 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.
  • The Afghans By Willem Vogelsang Edition: illustrated Published by Wiley-Blackwell, 2002 Page 118 ISBN 0-631-19841-5, ISBN 978-0-631-19841-3 -- identify original sources

• The first part of South Asia to be cleansed of Hinduism was Afghanistan. The 10 th century saw a life-and-death struggle there between Muslim invaders and the local Hindu population and dynasty. In this case, the replacement was not just religious, of Hindus by Muslims, but also ethnic, viz. of Indo-Aryans by Iranians. The fact of an at least partial physical replacement of the native population by invaders is attested by the linguistic shift. Until then, in much of the present-day Pashtu-speaking region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, an Indo-Aryan Prakrit was spoken (remember how the Sanskrit grammarian Panini was a native of Peshawar). It was replaced with Pashtu, an Iranian language.
  • Elst, K. The Problem with Secularism (2007)