When Abbas Jamshidifar, a well-known Iranian actor, was asked during a live online program to say one “good thing” about Afghanistan, he uttered only a single word: “opium.” That one word sparked a wave of outrage on Afghanistan’s social media and forced the speaker to apologize. But if we reduce the entire story to a verbal slip or an inappropriate joke followed by an apology, we will certainly have strayed from the core issue: the unflattering and inadequate image of Afghanistan and its residents that prevails in the minds of most Iranians. The core issue, then, is not Abbas Jamshidifar and his remark, but rather the image that the majority of Iranians hold in their minds of the people of Afghanistan.
We must accept that in Iran we face a bitter reality: being from Afghanistan or being an Afghanistan national is, before it is an “identity,” regarded as a “low social status.” According to this perception, you may be a university professor, a skilled physician, an accomplished writer, a minister, or even a president in Afghanistan, but the moment you cross the border into Iranian territory, all of that background fades away, and only one status remains for you: an “Afghan laborer.” And not just any laborer, but one without proper wages, without job security, without any means of defending his rights, and without even the dignity befitting any free human being. The problem, then, is not merely discrimination against a migrant from Afghanistan, but the fundamental issue of reducing the entire population of an independent land to a lowly and worthless social status. When the people of a country are seen only in the form of “laborers,” their scientists, professors, poets, artists, and writers are also recognized not by their names and abilities but by that same negative label. What Jamshidifar said arises precisely from this prevailing mindset.
The truth is that despite shared borders, a common language, and thousands of years of historical ties, Afghanistan remains one of the least understood countries in the region for the majority of Iranians. This unfamiliarity is not confined to ordinary people; it is also quite pronounced among academics, elites, and even political actors. Some professors are well acquainted with the geography of the Middle East, North America, Central America, Western and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and so on, yet when it comes to Afghanistan, Iran’s closest neighbor, they have not gone beyond a handful of media headlines. It would be more accurate to say that they have read about seven generations of Middle Eastern and European statesmen in detail and know them well, yet they lack even a superficial understanding of contemporary Afghan political figures. It is therefore no surprise that even professors at reputable Iranian universities write and pronounce “Karzai” as “Karzaay.” I also once read in a book by an Iranian author that Hamid Karzai was introduced as the “prime minister” of Afghanistan. This shows that a large portion of Iranians have not read Afghanistan’s history and have no clear picture of the country’s cultural and social structure. All they have heard is the endlessly repeated stereotype: Afghanistan is opium.
This unfamiliarity sometimes extends to even the most basic cultural facts. I know it is hard to believe, but there are still a small number of Iranians who do not know that Persian is an “official” language in Afghanistan with millions of speakers. Many do not even know that the people of Tajikistan also speak Persian, and that the language is not confined to the borders of present-day Iran. As a result, there are Iranians who are astonished to hear fluent Persian from an Afghanistani or a Tajikistani, as if Persian were a language others had learned from Iran, rather than a language that has flourished for centuries across a vast geography, from Balkh and Bukhara to Herat, Ghazni, Shiraz, and Isfahan. This astonishment is itself a sign of unfamiliarity with Afghanistan and a disregard for the country and its people as a whole.
It must be admitted that for most Iranians, Afghanistan is essentially not a country worth knowing. It would be more accurate to say that for Iranians, Afghanistan is less a “subject of knowledge” than a “subject of news,” and usually only when a wave of migration, a security incident, or a political crisis occurs. But the issue is not merely a lack of awareness; a kind of “identity distancing” is also evident. For example, many Iranians are reluctant to highlight their country’s historical and cultural ties with Afghanistan, as if association with this country were a source of shame for them. As a result, talking about the shared Persian language and common history is not appealing to them but rather unpleasant. On the contrary, they prefer to highlight what their country has in common with Japan, Switzerland, and other developed nations.
A more striking example of this unfamiliarity can be found in the small number of works by those who have written books about Afghanistan or traveled to the country and claim familiarity with this land. For instance, Amir Hashemi Moghaddam, a professor at Mazandaran University, who is devoted to the idea of “Cultural Iran,” has written a book titled Why Afghanistan Matters for Iran? By his own account, completing the book took more than three years, and it was commissioned by an institution affiliated with the Iranian presidency. Hashemi Moghaddam, who has also traveled to Afghanistan and written a travelogue titled Journey to the Land of the Aryans, clearly challenges Iranians’ unfamiliarity with Afghanistan. Yet, interestingly, he himself falls into a lack of knowledge about Afghanistan within his own book. For example, he refers to Faramarz Tamana as the “president of Kabul University,” whereas Tamana actually headed “Afghanistan University,” a private institution. This is, of course, not a major error; it neither changes Afghanistan’s fate nor diminishes the value of the author’s efforts to introduce the country. But from another angle, this small slip carries significant meaning: Afghanistan has been so little studied in Iran that even those interested in it sometimes make mistakes while criticizing others’ lack of knowledge about it. Ironically, when the same author writes about the reasons for Afghanistan’s perceived insignificance in Iranian eyes, he cites drug trafficking originating from Afghanistan into Iran as a prime example and ties it directly to the country’s identity, writing that because opium cultivation and drug production are associated with Afghanistan’s identity, the subject needs to be discussed separately. Although the author goes on to argue that this perception is fundamentally mistaken, meaning that not all people of Afghanistan are involved in drug trafficking and that narcotics are not part of Afghanistan’s identity, the sentence he used at the outset raises a question: who established the link between “Afghanistan’s identity” and “narcotics”? Is the drug trade truly part of Afghanistan’s identity, or is it part of a narrative that has been constructed and repeated about the country over the years? There is a difference between the two. What Jamshidifar said, then, is not the statement of one individual but the repetition of a constructed narrative.
But if we look closely, the roots of these narratives, stereotypes, and demeaning views all trace back to a single source: Afghanistan’s own weakness. The reality is that respect in relations among nations is not solely the product of history and culture; in the contemporary world, it is increasingly the product of power. A country with an effective government, a strong economy, a valid passport, and an attractive market earns respect for its citizens abroad, even if it lacks much of a cultural legacy. Conversely, a country known for years of war, migration, poverty, and dependency inevitably causes its citizens to carry the weight of that same image. If a Japanese, Chinese, Emirati, or Qatari citizen enters Iran today, an image of their country accompanies them before they even speak: an image of wealth, power, and modern technology. A citizen of Afghanistan, however, often arrives carrying the image of a country that has been mired in various crises for decades. This is, of course, not meant to justify Iranians’ contempt for the people of Afghanistan, but rather an attempt to understand the roots of the matter.
You can read the Persian version of this analysis article here:
