Afghan Exilic Writing Between Worlds (Part Two)

Guest post by Dr Mujib Abid. Dr Mujib Abid is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is an Afghan-Australian scholar of modern Afghan history, peace studies and political theory. Mujib’s work foregrounds critical traditions that self-locate in the Global South, including postcolonial and decolonial approaches, as well as other traditional and Islamic knowledge perspectives. One of his ongoing projects, “The Longest War: Australian Encounters with Afghanistan, 2001 to today,” studies the social and cultural dimensions of post-2001 Australian involvement in the “war on terror” and statebuilding regimes in Afghanistan. This is the second post of a two part submission. You can read Part One here.

Following from part I, I now shift focus from conceptual framing to lived experience, exploring how Sufist-inflected poetics emerges from exile. By profiling two Afghan-Australian writers—Omer Sabore in Brisbane and Hamid Parafshan in Melbourne—I trace how their literary and spiritual trajectories are shaped by displacement, tradition, and border thinking. 

Both poets give a glimpse of Afghan literary production in Australia, with their works resonating with recurring themes: commitment to esoteric Islam, Bedil’s poetic legacy, marginalisation from mainstream cultural institutions, and a simultaneous rootedness in tradition and lived, political realities. These are writers whose works dwell in the in-between: between homeland and exile, between ecstatic metaphysics and the everyday burdens of life in diaspora.

Irfan and Writing as Survival 

Both writers were initiated early into Irfan, the esoteric dimension of Islamic knowledge, often through family or mosque-based sabaq. Their relationship to writing, however, materialised in exile – an outcome of spiritual need, loss, and the disorientation of forced displacement. 

For Sabore, poetry was a return to meaning. After fleeing Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, he settled in Australia and lived a seemingly “successful” life: work in the public sector, active social involvement. But something was missing. Health issues left him homebound, and during this time, he turned to a collection of books sent by his father – himself a classically trained Bedilshinas. Their literary exchange resumed via phone, bridging not just continents, but ruptured spiritual transmission. 

“My father’s intuition was that Irfan was my path,” Sabore reflects on his childhood. His literary formation was eclectic and inclusive—he read Farid al-Din Attar, Sina’i Ghaznavi, and Junaid Baghdadi alongside Victor Hugo. This openness infuses his work with a worldly, non-totalising political sensibility grounded in Love, displacement, and dignity, rather than in overt ideological positions. Border thinking seeks to replace the false binary of culturalist and materialist theory. By the looks of it, Sabore has similarily never given heed to such compartmentalisation.  

This, then, allows for the sort of “double critique” that Khatibi spoke of. For Sabore, a formative moment occurred in 2005 at Dandenong Mosque, where he was chastised by an elder for reciting the Quran at the back rather than the front. Disturbed by the outburst of the exoteric divine, Sabore transformed the experience into poetry – his first attempt at composing verses. One might find it ironic that the first poem was a critique of Muslim orthodoxy, but this is precisely why traditional Islam, as border thinking, carries what Mignolo calls the potential to absorb and displace “hegemonic forms of knowledge into the perspective of the subaltern”. 

Here is the couplet that Sabore composed immediately after: 

There is no refuge at the monastery, for I’m a lonesome person 
I run away from myself, I am mad, I am disgraced 
To the mosque I went, though at the Beloved’s house too 
The ascetic quivered in anger, demanding my exit 

در دیر پناهم نیست من آدم تنهایم 
از خود گریزانم دیوانه او رسوایم 
در مسجد رفتم و چون منزلگه جانانه 
زاهد به خشم سر داد بیرون تو دیوانه 

Such moments exemplify a Sufist rejection of rigid orthodoxy in favour of experiential, intuitive spirituality. Sabore first book, Ishq o Ihsas (Love and Feelings), was self-published and distributed largely within Afghan diasporic circles. It interrogates similar themes. Today, he convenes daily virtual gatherings with Afghan literati and literature lovers – spaces of deeply local yet transnational literary communion that resist institutional neglect. 

From Political Dissent to Mystical Verse 

Parafshan’s journey also began in Afghanistan, but his early writing was shaped by the turbulence of war. A civil engineer and airline captain, he began composing poetry during the 1990s period of civil war, a time marked by chaos and dispossession. His first book, Armaghani Hashti Saur (The Gifts of the Eighth of Saur), chronicled the devastation of post-revolutionary Kabul in rhythmic prose. 

“This was not abstract writing. They stole my home. I tried to make a case to the government, but no one cared.” After fleeing to India and eventually Australia, he attempted to resume work in aviation. Despite holding U.S. and German pilot licenses, he was required to retrain – and after 9/11, the onset of widespread Islamophobia meant Muslim pilots were effectively excluded. “Not even control towers would hire us,” he recalls. “I had over 16,000 hours of flight time. But that didn’t matter.” 

Disillusioned and depressed, Parafshan turned to classical texts that had once captivated him, but now spoke with new urgency. The injustices and violence of post-9/11 hysteria, enacted as retributory military deployments to Afghanistan but also experienced intimately through rejection and loss, needed to be explained away. He discovered deeper layers in the writings of Bedil, Hafiz, and Attar, and began composing mukhammas—poems that extend classical verses with new lines, creating bridges across time. One such example: 

Regardless of religion, do not colour friendship with reluctance 
Love and decency are life’s refuge 
The Lovers’ universe excludes those with only worldly concerns 
May you, dear God, not allow hate into the realm of the fortunate 
Do not wish for the call of slander on these things 

به هر مذهب نباشد دوستی را رنگ اکراهی 
بود مهر و صداقت زندگانی را پناه گاهی 
ندارد اهل دون در عالم الفت هوا خواهی 
به طبع مقبلان یا رب کدورت را مده راهی 
بر این اینه ها مپسند زنگ تهمت آهی 

Parafshan has since self-published three more books—Murwarid-ha-i Parafshan (Radiant Pearls), Guldasta-i Adab (The Garden of Letters), and Gulbarg-i Ghazal (A Petal of Ghazal). His writing moves between mysticism, exile, and political lament. Though his literary formation is deeply traditional, it is not apolitical. As he puts it, “the very message of ma’rifah is to celebrate marginality, not as disadvantage, but as insight.” 

As such, Parafshan’s Sufist-inflected, exilic writing, as epistemic disobedience, can be read as decolonisation taking a non-linear and subaltern form – one that invites different imaginaries of justice, democratisation/equalisation of sources of philosophy, and criticity. It does this by talking back, resistance, and renewal – all from marginality, at peace with marginality. Through cracks and fissures in coloniality, as Catherine E. Walsh’s intervention reminds us, the exile literati’s life and activism ‘evidence actionality, agency, resistance, resurgence, and insurgent forms of subjectivity and struggle; they are the spaces of creation against and despite the system, of hope against despair, of life living up against coloniality’s present-day project of violence-dispossession-war-death all intertwined; of re-existence in times of de-existence’.  

Writing Outside the Frame 

Both poets inhabit a cultural space outside the English-speaking mainstream. Their audiences are primarily diasporic and self-organised. Publishing often happens through informal channels—small print runs, Kabul and Tehran-based presses, digital PDFs, and literary salons via WhatsApp and Zoom. Though the institutions of literature and education in Australia have largely ignored them, their work persists in networks of meaning-making, of their own making. 

Having experienced borders as sites of violence, they write back, their utterance holding to account coloniality of power not just here but also there. Fundamentalism in all its guises, Islamic or Euro-American, needs to be dismantled. And they do this from marginality, through the fissures and cracks of coloniality. As Parafshan notes, “They [the universities] care about medicine or engineering, not so much about Bedil.” Yet in spite of this marginality, or perhaps because of it, they produce knowledge that resists commodification, thrives on community, and refuses to be translated into dominant languages or genres without losing its essence. 

They speak back against injustice and the demand for assimilation. Sabore describes writing as a psychological need: “when I see injustice, I’m compelled to write. Our encounters, good or bad, are all inspiration.” And to crack open another world of possibility, he draws from universally marginal and fragmented Afghan subaltern knowledge perspectives.  

Refusing to give up on spiritualist knowledge perspectives, while also deeply attuned to their political condition, their works recall a key Sufist dictum. Wajd (ecstatic experience) must be followed by sahw (sobriety) – a return to self, community, and service. Writing, then, becomes not just an act of catharsis, but of offering, of khidmat in the real world. 

Sabore and Parafshan’s literary worlds are grounded in the ruins and riches of exile. Their writing navigates what cannot be neatly mapped: the coexistence of heartbreak and hope, of political loss and spiritual awakening. In doing so, they reimagine Afghan identity and exilic subjectivity not as a static label, but as an unfolding border gnosis – resistant, radiant, and irreducibly plural. 

Their poems are not merely expressions of nostalgia or trauma. They are acts of world-making that speak from the peripheries, drawing light into places rarely seen or heard. 

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