From Balkh to Exile: Rumi’s 819th Birthday Frames Washington Debate on Religious Freedom and Displacement
Two Washington gatherings connected Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi’s journey from Afghanistan more than eight centuries ago with the displacement of Afghan Hindus and Sikhs, today’s wider Afghan displacement crisis, and emerging debates over religious freedom, human rights, artificial intelligence, and the future of international cooperation.
By Staff Writer
WASHINGTON, D.C. — An evening celebrating one of the world’s most enduring poets became, in Washington, a reflection on something painfully familiar to generations of Afghans: leaving home and carrying culture, faith, knowledge, and memory across borders.
On September 28, the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS), founded and directed by Dr. Davood Moradian, convened “Rumi Night in Washington” at the Museum of the Bible, marking the 819th anniversary of Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi, widely known as Rumi. The gathering formed part of AISS’s Third Annual Washington Darbar, a continuing forum for intellectual, cultural, political, and civic dialogue.
The evening brought together music, scholarship, and Afghanistan’s religious and cultural heritage: the LA Daf Ensemble; the Persian translation of Mustafa Akyol’s Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance; a screening on the Jewish Cemetery in Herat; a keynote address by Professor Michael Barry; and a celebration of Afghan Hindu and Sikh heritage featuring Mukesh Pran and Masood Omari.
Ambassador Ashraf Haidari, Founder and President of Displaced International, attended both the Rumi celebration and the following day’s conference. Reflecting afterward for Displaced Voices, Ambassador Haidari credited Moradian with sustaining an Afghan intellectual institution in displacement despite significant financial and institutional constraints.
“Dr. Davood Moradian deserves our appreciation for keeping AISS alive and active in displaced life,” Ambassador Haidari said. “Institutions themselves can be displaced, but their mission does not have to disappear. These gatherings continue to give Afghans a place to think, debate, preserve our intellectual life, and remain engaged with the world.”
There is also a quieter, deeply personal story of displacement behind AISS. Ambassador Haidari remembers Moradian’s German Shepherds, Rex and Runi, as an almost constant presence at the institute’s former Kabul home—watchful, curious, and welcoming as scholars, diplomats, students, journalists, and other guests arrived for discussions and events. Ambassador Haidari encountered them regularly during his own visits. The dogs later shared the family’s displacement from Kabul. One has since died; the other is now advanced in age and in declining health.
“For those of us who knew AISS in Kabul, Rex and Runi were part of the place,” Ambassador Haidari recalled. “They were always there, curious about every visitor. Their journey with Davood from that home in Kabul is, in its own quiet way, another story of displacement—of losing a familiar place, adapting elsewhere, and carrying memories of home with you.”
From Balkh, Afghanistan, to the World
Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi was born in 1207 in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan. His very name, “Balkhi,” preserves his connection to his birthplace. Still young, he traveled west with his family during the era of the Mongol invasions, eventually settling in Konya, in present-day Türkiye, where his poetry and spiritual thought achieved an extraordinary global legacy.
“Rumi belongs to humanity, but his journey began in Balkh, Afghanistan,” Ambassador Haidari said. “His story reminds us that people who leave home carry much more than possessions. They carry knowledge, faith, language, creativity, and human potential across borders.”
Rumi’s achievements should not romanticize displacement. They illuminate a different truth: losing one’s home does not mean losing one’s capacity to contribute.
A Historic Afghan Community Dispersed
On September 29, AISS convened “Religious Freedom in a Changing World: Faith, Pluralism, and Civic Life.” Its conference agenda brought together discussions on pluralism, minority rights, religion and political authority, artificial intelligence and spirituality, political pluralism, and freedom of religion or belief.
Among the participants was Subhash Kakar, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Global Federation of Societies of Afghan-Hindus & Sikhs. Afghan Hindu and Sikh participants spoke about the dramatic dispersal of their historic communities, referring to roughly a quarter of a million Afghan Hindus and Sikhs having been displaced from Afghanistan.
That number is best understood as a community estimate rather than a definitive census count. What is well documented is the magnitude of the exodus. Recent reporting on Afghan Hindus and Sikhs describes a large-scale departure spanning several decades and cites community representatives estimating that only around 100 Hindus and Sikhs remained in Afghanistan in 2025. Their displacement unfolded across successive periods of war, discrimination, property loss, insecurity, restrictions, and targeted extremist violence rather than under any single government or conflict.
“The near disappearance of Afghan Hindus and Sikhs should matter to every Afghan,” Ambassador Haidari said. “They are not somebody else’s minority. They are part of Afghanistan’s history and identity. When a country loses an entire community to persecution, insecurity, and displacement, the whole country becomes poorer.”
Millions of Afghans Still on the Move
The Hindu and Sikh experience forms part of Afghanistan’s much larger displacement story.
Afghanistan remains one of the world’s largest and most protracted forced-displacement situations. Movement has also increasingly reversed direction as Afghans return—or are returned—from neighboring countries. By September 22, 2026, 506,410 deportations to Afghanistan had been recorded during the year, including 439,000 from Iran and 66,100 from Pakistan.
Across the longer period from mid-September 2023 through August 2026, approximately 6.5 million Afghan nationals returned from Iran and Pakistan. Many had spent decades—or their entire lives—outside Afghanistan and arrived with limited social networks and constrained access to housing, livelihoods, documentation, services, and protection.
“Return should not automatically be confused with a solution to displacement,” Ambassador Haidari said. “If people are sent back without livelihoods, housing, protection, or basic rights, they can simply move from one form of vulnerability into another.”
The pressures reach far beyond religious minorities. By August 2026, more than 2.6 million Afghan girls had been denied secondary education since 2021, while Afghanistan remained the only country where secondary and higher education were effectively closed to girls and women.
“Forced migration does not begin at the border,” Ambassador Haidari said. “It begins where wars remain unresolved, states fail their people, poverty deepens, and rights are denied.”
AI, Human Rights and the Future of International Cooperation
During the conference panel “Metaphysics Meets Artificial Intelligence,” Ambassador Haidari asked whether AI might offer the United Nations an opportunity to strengthen its increasingly challenged role by encouraging member states to agree on core principles for public education about AI, responsible regulation, safety, and constructive application.
He also raised the need for structural reform—including a more inclusive and representative UN Security Council—if future international rules are to command broader legitimacy.
The intervention came as international AI governance itself was evolving. The first Global Dialogue on AI Governance convened in Geneva on July 6–7, 2026, bringing governments and other stakeholders together to discuss international cooperation and common approaches to AI governance.
“AI is forcing humanity to think globally at precisely the moment when international cooperation is weakening,” Ambassador Haidari said. “If states can agree on common principles for educating people about AI, regulating it responsibly, and applying it safely, technology could help renew multilateral cooperation—but the institutions making those rules must themselves become more inclusive and representative.”
Ambassador Haidari later questioned Richard Bennett, whose UN mandate as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan was renewed in 2025. He asked whether human-rights advocates were engaging reluctant member states behind closed doors as well as publicly—and whether they were demonstrating how protecting rights could also advance states’ national interests.
His argument was not to replace the moral or legal case for human rights, but to reinforce it by demonstrating its practical relevance in an international environment increasingly shaped by strategic, economic, and security calculations.
“When human rights collapse, the consequences rarely remain inside national borders,” Ambassador Haidari said. “Human insecurity can produce forced migration, radicalization, trafficking, illicit networks, and regional instability. The moral and legal case for human rights must continue, but governments should also understand that protecting human dignity can serve their own security and national interests.”
Preventing the Next Exile
Born in Balkh, Afghanistan, Rumi produced poetry and ideas that crossed languages, cultures, religions, and continents. Afghan Hindus and Sikhs, like millions of other displaced Afghans, have likewise carried businesses, professions, faith traditions, skills, and memories into new societies.
But celebrating what displaced people achieve after exile should never make displacement itself desirable.
“The real measure of success is not only how well refugees rebuild after they are displaced,” Ambassador Haidari said. “It is whether governments and international institutions can address the wars, persecution, repression, and human insecurity that force people to flee in the first place.”
More than eight centuries after Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi left his birthplace amid the upheavals of his age, Afghans are again scattered across neighboring countries and around the world. AISS itself—and even the journey of Rex and Ronie from their familiar Kabul home—offers a reminder that displacement reaches far beyond statistics. It uproots people, communities, institutions, relationships, and the everyday markers of home.
“Rumi’s journey reminds us that displacement begins long before someone crosses a border,” Ambassador Haidari said. “Our challenge is not simply to celebrate what displaced people accomplish after exile, but to create the conditions that allow people to live safely, freely, and with dignity in their own homes.”
The enduring question raised in Washington, then, is not simply how the world remembers Rumi. It is whether societies and international institutions can protect pluralism, human rights, and human security early enough to prevent persecution and repression from becoming another generation’s exile.
