This talk draws on the approach of conceptual historians to explore how Asia emerged as a conceptual space with Afghanistan at its center in the minds and writings of Afghan and Muslim intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Reacting to European civilizational divides, transnationally-connected Muslim reformers of the early-twentieth century like the Afghan writer and statesman Mahmud Tarzi (1865-1933) conceived of a broader Asia in which Afghanistan figured prominently. Through Tarzi and the transregional press, Asia became a galvanizing political framework that shaped material solidarities on the ground in Afghanistan, not without tensions and contradictions. Beyond shedding light on important intellectual developments, this talk also puts forward conceptual history as a method for writing regional histories. It illustrates the potentials of situating and tracking the development of the geographic terms we use across time and languages, noting how they changed over time, through space and interrogating how they were understood by our historical interlocutors.

Marya Hannun is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, where she serves as the Managing Editor with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Her current research is a transregional history of the Afghan women’s movement and gendered reform in the early 20th Century.