M. Nazif Shahrani is a professor of anthropology, Central Asian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Nazif Shahrani was born in Badakhshan province of Afghanistan. He completed his elementary education in the village of Shahran-i-Khaash, in Jurm district of Badakhshan, attended Ibnisina (Avecina) Middle School and Kabul Darul Mu'alimin (Kabul Teachers Training High School) in Kabul before entering the Faculty of Education at Kabul University, Afghanistan.
During his junior year at Kabul University, in 1967, he was awarded an East–West Center scholarship by the University of Hawaii, Honolulu where he completed his BA in Anthropology (1970). He received an MA and Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle (1972–1976). Between 1972 and 1974, Shahrani conducted anthropological field research in the Wakhan region in northeastern Afghanistan among pastoral nomadic Kyrgyz in the Pamirs and their neighbors the Wakhi agropastoralist community. He later worked as an anthropological consultant for the ethnographic film, The Kirghiz of Afghanistan, which was aired on PBS’s Odyssey series (Fall 1981).
Shahrani has had research and teaching positions at several American Universities, including Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Nevada-Reno, Stanford University, and UCLA, before moving to Indiana University in 1990. He was also a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution (1997–98).
He teaches in the departments of Anthropology, Central Eurasian Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures departments at Indiana University. He has conducted extensive field research in Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. [1]
He is the father of three children.
His major contributions to Central Asian Studies include:
Tajiks are a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia, living primarily in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group.
Badakhshan is a historical region comprising parts of modern-day north-eastern Afghanistan, eastern Tajikistan, and Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Badakhshan Province is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. Much of historic Badakhshan lies within Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in the southeastern part of the country. The music of Badakhshan is an important part of the region's cultural heritage.
The Kyrgyz people are a Turkic ethnic group native to Central Asia. They are primarily found in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kyrgyz Diaspora is also found in Russia, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. They speak the Kyrgyz language, which is the official language of Kyrgyzstan.
Nematullah Shahrani is a prominent Afghan scholar. He was one of four Vice Presidents of the Afghan Transitional Administration from 2002 to 2004. Shahrani also headed of the Afghan Constitution Commission.
The Wakhan Corridor is a narrow strip of territory in Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan, extending to Xinjiang in China and separating the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan in the north from the northern areas of Pakistan in the south. From this high mountain valley the Panj and Pamir rivers emerge and form the bigger Amu River. A trade route through the valley has been used by travellers going to and from East, South and Central Asia since antiquity.
Wakhi is an Indo-European language in the Eastern Iranian branch of the language family spoken today in Wakhan District, Northern Afghanistan and also in Tajikistan, Northern Pakistan and China.
Wakhan, or "the Wakhan", is a rugged, mountainous part of the Pamir, Hindu Kush and Karakoram regions of Afghanistan. Wakhan District is a district in Badakshan Province.
The Wakhi people, also locally referred to as the Wokhik, are an Iranian ethnic group native to Central and South Asia. They are found in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and China—primarily situated in and around Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor, the northernmost part of Pakistan's Gilgit−Baltistan and Chitral, Tajikistan's Gorno−Badakhshan Autonomous Region and the southwestern areas of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The Wakhi people are native speakers of the Wakhi language, an Eastern Iranian language.
Christopher I. Beckwith is an American philologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Zorkul is a lake in the Pamir Mountains that runs along the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Yuri Enohovich Bregel was one of the world's leading historians of Islamic Central Asia. He published extensively on Persian- and Turkic-language history and historiography, and on political, economic and ethnic history in Central Asia and the Muslim world. He lived in the Soviet Union (1925–1974), Israel (1974–1981), and the United States (1981–2016).
The Pamiris are an Eastern Iranian ethnic group, native to the Badakhshan region of Central Asia, which includes the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan; the Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan; Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang, China; and the Upper Hunza Valley in Pakistan.
Ishkashim is a border town in Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan. With a population of around 12,120 people, the town serves as the capital of Ishkashim District. Another town by the same name is located on the other side of the Panj River in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan, although that town is normally transliterated Ishkoshim following Tajik practice. A bridge linking the two towns was reconstructed in 2006.
Marat Aldangaruly Sarsembaev is a Kazakh doctor of law and professor. He has won a range of international awards for his work.
The Department of Central Eurasian Studies, often abbreviated as CEUS, is a specialized academic department in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. Since its original formation in 1943 as a language-training program for the U.S. military, the department has become the sole independent degree-granting academic unit staffed with its own faculty dedicated to Central Eurasia in the country. Due to the department and the presence of several additional centers - the Inner Asian & Uralic National Resource Center, the Denis Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, and the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region - Indiana University currently hosts the premier program of Central Asian studies in the United States.
The Wakhjir Pass, also spelled Vakhjir Pass, is a mountain pass in the Hindu Kush or Pamirs at the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, the only potentially navigable pass between Afghanistan and China in the modern era. It links Wakhan in Afghanistan with the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in Xinjiang, China, at an altitude of 4,923 metres (16,152 ft), but the pass is not an official border crossing point. With a difference of 3.5 hours, the Afghanistan–China border has the sharpest official change of clocks of any international frontier. China refers to the pass as South Wakhjir Pass, as there is a northern pass on the Chinese side.
There are several hundred Kyrgyz in Pakistan, most of whom are immigrants based in the northern areas of the country. They have historically inhabited the Gojal valley of Gilgit-Baltistan. Pakistan's Broghil Pass, situated between Chitral and the Wakhan Corridor, also once had a large resident Kyrgyz community. Some hail from the town of Uzgen in the west of Kyrgyzstan; in addition, many were previously settled in the Little Pamir valley of the Wakhan corridor in Afghanistan. They fled to Pakistan in the aftermath of the Afghan Saur Revolution, leaving much of their wealth and animal herds behind.
Uzbek Americans are Americans of Uzbek descent. The community also includes those who have dual American and Uzbek citizenship.