Long Years of Exile: Central Asian Refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan

This book is an ethnographic study of a group of Ferghana Valley, Uzbekistan emigrants who migrated to Afghanistan in the Stalinist period and are now refugees in Pakistan. The author describes their way of life in the 1970s and subsequently traces how they were impacted by the Marxist government, Soviet invasion, and prolonged civil war. Her work synthesizes fifteen years of research and fieldwork on family and gender relations, ethnicity, Islamic observance and its associated ideology for a Central Asian ethnic group that speaks Uzbek and Tajik. The ethnic community in Pakistan is now confronted with new choices: where to live, camp or urban slum, and whether to return to Afghanistan or go elsewhere to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or the United States.