SAFAVID INFLUENCE ON THE CONVERSION OF THE HAZARAS TO SHI'ISM

This study will focus on the main factors in the conversion of the Hazaras to Shia, as a study that initially acknowledged that the Hazaras have a Mongol origin, that this Mongol origin was due to the Genghis Khan period and that the history of the Hazaras in Afghanistan could be dated to the earliest 13th century. This study considers the existence of Turkmen and Afghan tribes in the region where the Hazaras were settled as natural, rather than the understanding that seeks the origins of the Hazaras in the older periods, since the regions where the newly arrived Mongol tribes are settled are not completely unmanned places and are intertwined with Afghan tribes in some places and Turkmen tribes in some places. While the Afghan and Turkmen tribes (which were all Sunni) speaks Pashto and Turkmen languages, the Afghan and Turkmen tribes referred to together with the Hazaras became Shiite and spoke partly Persian. Just as the new the peoples of other regions (in the Golden Horde and Chagatai Khanates) in which the Mongols emigrated were Sunnized and Turkicized, the Hazaras became Persian speaker and Shia. This paper advocates a Safavid-influenced conversion thesis among some of the thesis that have been put forward so far with the question When and how the Hazaras have become Shia?. In this article, we will try to prove this Safavid effect in the light of the new questions and with the new findings obtained from the oral histories of the Hazara Seyyid families in Afghanistan which we collected from our field research in 2007.