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Khajistan Manifesto – KHAJISTAN™

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TLDR: Born in 9th-century Herat, Afghanistan, today Khajistan lives on as an archive founded by Saad Khan.   Khajistan preserves art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, from the Indus to the Maghreb, archiving banned, censored, and overlooked material excluded from the official record. Khajistan believes that mainstream history often turns a blind eye to the humor, myths, wisdom, and creativity of these communities, sidelining them in everything from books to the internet.    Khajistan believes that history need not be only about the rich, the intelligent, the bad, the good, the famous, or the infamous. Khajistan believes the absence of one's history and culture in the public eye is a loss that cuts deep. Khajistan believes everyone has a right to be seen and heard.   Khajistan believes globalism and imperial state cultures stunt the natural growth of local cultures.    Khajistan stands for nations, not nation states.   Khajistan believes censorship is a matter of social class.   Khajistan is a lens, a gaze, focused on a richer, more inclusive world.     KHAJISTAN MANIFESTO:   Erasure works in so many ways. Not only do the stories of people at the margins disappear, but the very knowledge that those stories existed somewhere in the first place is made to disappear too.   How can you save something if you don’t know whether there is something to be saved? And what if you are made to believe it isn’t worth saving at all?   It isn’t worth saving at all because it isn’t grand enough or that it falls outside the body of knowledge that is deemed to take us forward.   On their journey to their desired future, our peripheral visions were blocked. They said tunnel vision would do. They said this was no time to look back or look around or look in any other direction than the one ordained by us, the important officials.   What is really worth preserving in this world?   Who decides what should be preserved and what should be discarded?   And who are those that benefited from all the oppressive structures imposed upon the people by colonial masters? Those who still hold us, hostage, in their imagination and in our reality. Those who decide what we should wear, what we should think about, what should be seen, and what should be invisibilized. Those who are afraid of what we are capable of doing in the last hours of certain nights.   History cannot be manufactured inside a slaughterhouse.   When we find no room in the officially recorded histories, we turn to alternative ways. Our separate ways. Our lonely ways.   Who would have thought that the dead could come back and speak to us, speak through us, in a language you thought you had buried with them? It is time to grow eyes at the back of our heads, and destroy tunnel visions. It is time to add to the half-histories.   Your history has often gotten in the way of my history. So much so that only one remained. Your narrative didn’t survive because it’s powerful, it survived because it is power; backed by power, written and created for power, supported and forced down our throats by those in power.   We will never find a home in your books, your art, or your movies because we never found a home in your imagination, the way you conceive this world and its people. But it doesn’t mean you get to destroy what you can’t imagine. To kill that thing that doesn’t comply with what you think life should be.   How can we live and survive in a world where violent erasure has become a norm? Where violent erasure is cheered on and thought of as an essential tool to keep the ‘crooked’ subjects of the state far away from the national consciousness.   Thus far, most of what has been erased has existed only in the collective imagination of the censored people, accessible and yet intangible, a secret place at the edge of their subconsciousness - the most powerful archive of all. Such preservation is an act of glorious resistance. But now is the time to translate that memory into something we can see and touch and feel and pass on.   For the last 5 years, Khajistan has been documenting and preserving the lives, knowledge, art, and creative works of censored peoples in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, with an intention to expand our archiving efforts to censorious nation-states that now form over the expansive lands of Arabia and Bukhara.   Khajistan archives whatever is left of plundered history and art and the sources of entertainment they have deemed ‘too vulgar’ and ‘obscene’ and not intellectually stimulating enough - just because they didn’t cater to their elite class morality or some form of a fabricated national narrative.   Khajistan is recreating and rebuilding the dead. We save and cherish the unwanted, the unnecessary, the unusual, the unsavory, and all those things that do not align with the definitions created and imposed upon everyone in these lands.   We believe that there is a significant gap between globalized understanding of the people of The Middle World (a term coined by Afghan-American scholar, Tamin Ansari, to describe the gestalt of land that has existed under Islamic empires in the last 1400 years or so. It’s also known as the Islamicate world or a world influenced by Islam - not in a strictly religious sense) and the actual lives of the people. Misrepresented and misunderstood, still seen in binaries introduced by colonialism, the peoples of The Middle World and their stories are starkly different from what is usually ‘thought’ or ‘assumed’ of them.   We believe that this has a lot to do with class. Only a particular class—the upper and upper middle class—is in charge of the accumulation of knowledge; those that turn a blind eye towards whatever happens in the street. That accumulated knowledge is then packed and transported to the global market. It is a hegemonic process.   The elite class strongly believes (and has strongly believed for years and years now) that the life, art, and works of the ‘underclass’ are an embarrassment and an existential danger to the piety of national culture. Thus, it becomes their duty to ensure that only certain knowledge about people is accumulated - anything that doesn’t align with national culture and collective morality is carefully disposed of.   And yet, there are people who don’t subscribe to state-defined morality and the arbitrary concept of official culture. They continue to pose challenges to the morality police as well as the globalized understanding of The Middle World - with their art, memes, the way they dress up, who they sleep with, the movies they see, and the jokes they find amusing. Their ways of life either ‘shock’ the people sitting under chandeliers in their drawing rooms or at best they are ‘fascinated’ by them. Most of the time, however, they are just outraged and appalled.   For those in charge of everything we do, the national culture is a homogeneous entity, something carved out of a ‘morality’ supposedly shared by everyone. That is why those that fail to live up to the moral standards introduced by the class in charge are seen as deviants who ought to be disciplined or ignored.   Of course, the morality of the elite class in places like Pakistan sprouted out of the laws introduced by colonialism.   National culture is thought of as an all-encompassing entity but in reality, it only encompasses the moral standards of the elite class. Everything else is dismissed, laughed at, and eventually erased. Khajistan wishes to put an end to this downright oppression and censorship.   The documenting and archiving efforts of Khajistan are a direct continuation of the essential work undertaken by scholars in what is known as the Golden Age of Islam, roughly spanning from the 8th to the 14th century. Inspired by the philosophical traditions of the Romans and Greeks that preceded them, the Muslim scholars of The Middle World in this period took an objective approach to the preservation of knowledge. They archived knowledge at a time when it was lost in Christian Europe, and through their works, Europe became re-acquainted with its Greko-Roman roots.   Such an objective approach to knowledge accumulation, however, was marred by a number of political events that happened after. The lives and works of ordinary people were lost in the larger stories of kings and queens and their closest associates. Lofty ideas like land, capital, and high art, among a myriad of other ‘important’ things became the priority. And then the introduction of colonial morality and legal systems further alienated and distanced the common people from the grand scheme of things. They preserved what they thought was only essential - a selective approach to accumulating knowledge took over.   We at Khajistan believe that archiving and documentation should be done without any moral judgments. To see and record things as they exist - without tampering with them specifically for the sake of ‘national image’ or whether and how they fit in the cultural machinery. To see people as people and not as ‘shock’ elements and ‘deviants’ that pose a threat to the foundations of national culture. We do not believe that there is such a thing as a national culture, to begin with; it was manufactured for the convenient erasure of the lives and culture of the indigenous people of The Middle World.   The primary reason for demolishing the arts and works of the ‘underclass’ is utter disdain for the material conditions they inhabit. As long as their work is seen as something inseparable from the material conditions they live in, it is looked down upon, or looked at and described in derogatory terms - it’s either too crude or too obscene, a production of chemical imbalance, something that has no regard for moral codes that ought to be followed by everyone, not intellectually engaging, not making enough sense, never making any sense, not special or true to the times we live in.   They have no idea what times we live in.   They have no idea that some of us live outside time.   The upper classes love the stories of upward social mobility as long as that mobility is attained by using the very tools devised by those classes. There is hope for the less fortunate, after all, if they deploy ‘our’ (their) models and work hard and don’t do anything out of the textbook. As long as they conform to everything ‘we’ (they) have set out for them. The same goes for arts and entertainment and every bit of knowledge that comes out of the marginalized spaces. If it is something that assuages the guilt of the rich, it is good enough. As long as it doesn’t challenge the shallow morality of the elite, it is acceptable enough. As long as it is not a direct product of the material conditions they survive in, ‘we’ will nod our heads and acknowledge their efforts. As long as it doesn’t make them uncomfortable…..doesn’t make their stomach turn…..   Make their stomach turn.   Khajistan believes in the freedom of creating more “unacceptable” art and then preserving it at all costs. One country, one nation, and one kind of knowledge/art is dogshit that needs to be challenged every fucking day of the week. We don’t follow archival standards. We publish in fragments because that’s how our history reaches us; smudged. We gather whatever survives and push it into the world’s information networks. Ones that are lopsided and biased.   Khajistan believes in metadata as ijtihad. Each tag and each file name asks: What were we not allowed to remember? Leaflets that fell from the sky. Mujra posters. Madrassa books. Digests sold in silence. Photos. Tapes. Background scores. State propaganda. Zines no one kept. Footage no one wanted. Pictures pulled from your uncle’s porn stash. What slipped through, what rotted, what refuses to die. Khajistan saves it all. Not as heritage but as evidence of what was denied the right to shape our now.   Apart from taking inspiration from the scholars and archivists of the Golden Age of Islam, we are also massively inspired by the unwavering spirit of the Khawajasira (the Third Gender People of South Asia) community who, despite not being allowed by our colonial masters to hold even a pen, preserved their complex culture and traditions by documenting and archiving knowledge through oral history and a code language. They protected their works in the face of a constant onslaught from those in power. Their subconscious was more powerful than the devious erasure designs of those either ‘ashamed’ of them or ‘afraid’ of their very existence. Learning from their informal archiving culture, Khajistan aims to make a fiercely independent hub of information to ensure that the knowledge and aesthetics of the underclass, the ‘marginalized’, are transported up in every technological upgrade.   Khajistan is that third space where life exists in its different iterations, unmarred by the binaries and stereotypes imposed upon them.   As the Islamicate world lost its penchant for research, documentation, and translation to find answers to the most pertinent questions of existence, to go along with its delay in embracing the printing press, our histories became wrought with one-dimensional, stale stories about those who could afford with power or money to have their says recorded. They only preserved and continue to preserve what they deemed important and worthy. The inability of further technological upgrades to assimilate the creative products of these cultures into its blueprint did not help. A lag occurred because the gatekeepers of culture didn’t want it, didn’t care, or were very strict with what they allowed to come through.   There’s something so laughable about the concept of globalized knowledge. It refuses entry. And it refuses to believe in ghosts, distant stars, UFOs, poets teetering at the edge of sanity, anthropomorphized cats, haunted trees, mujra dance, healers, and seers with range. If they could, they’d surgically alter the outermost extensions of our memory and consciousness. But, this all changed when the internet came along, especially when it became accessible and cheap, something not just for the few. The internet enabled people left out of the expensive history-making process to archive their stories in their own way and save it as digital memory. Even though the key to that vault sits with the powerful, there are still people like Bigo Live’s CEO, who fully understands the universality of a bite-sized video. He understands that history and knowledge of the world now needs to be more accessible universally. Not everyone can read books. And reading what? And by whom?   The early years of mobile internet in The Middle World saw the heavy presence of these ‘marginalized’ communities, going live and interacting with each other on micro metaverses across the globe. They even served as the perfect sample for Chinese tech companies like Byte-dance and YY to gather data for the same AI running on apps like TikTok and Bigo respectively. Such trends became popular in the West very recently, but they were a way of living in The Middle World way before the covid pandemic. Capital has brought in shine and glow and another class on these micro meta verses, the empress class. People who initially populated and whose data made these online spaces grow had to move, and they did.   Instead of Baghdad being its center, as in the case of the Golden Age of Islam, Khajistan is a borderless metaphysical existence of online identities, lives, and peoples of the Middle World. It took me years to trace my own people in history, and I do not want that to be the case for young kids and kids who are not born yet. That is why Khajistan needs to be supported to create an accessible parallel history of the masses of these lands, who are

Khajistan Manifesto by Saad Khan · December 25, 2025 TLDR: Born in 9th-century Herat, Afghanistan, today Khajistan lives on as an archive founded by Saad Khan. Khajistan preserves art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, from the Indus to the Maghreb, archiving banned, censored, and overlooked material excluded from the official record. Khajistan believes that mainstream history often turns a blind eye to the humor, myths, wisdom, and creativity of these communities, sidelining them in everything from books to the internet. Khajistan believes that history need not be

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