ABSTRACT
Before the war, some observers of Afghanistan had already pointed to the weakness of the national bond outside the capital and stressed two more salient levels of identity: the supranational umma (the Islamic community of believers) and the subnational qawm (Centlivres, Centlivres-Demont 1988a: 34-35). The multiformity of the latter term well expresses the complexity of Afghan social reality, in which the ethnic group is only one register of identity. Besides, in the course of the history of Afghanistan, political coalitions have rarely been of an ethnic order. Religious distinctions have been highly significant and sometimes encompassed ethnic appellations (Canfield 1973a: 4-5, 12; 1986: 99). The correlation of these two levels is particularly strong among the Hazaras, whose history has been marked by religious heterodoxy and political, economic and social marginalization.
