A Persian in the Ranks: Rethinking Military Culture through the Life of a Forgotten Civil War Sharpshooter
In military history, the West often casts itself as having invented the clean, decisive, and morally superior way of war. From Victor Davis Hanson to popular portrayals of elite modern forces, the story is familiar: Western armies fight in fair, organized fashion, while others rely on chaos and cunning. Tarak Barkawi, a critical scholar of war and empire, dismantles this fiction. In his work, he shows that military culture is not national, not even truly Western—it is transnational, imperial, and embodied, forged in colonial entanglements and sustained by shared practices, not state ideologies.
Few stories illustrate this better than that of John Emmahi Khan (also known as Mohammed Khan), a Persian-born Muslim who fought as a sharpshooter for the Union Army during the American Civil War. Khan’s extraordinary life reveals that the motivations of soldiers are not grounded in patriotism or ethnicity but in a military culture of loyalty, discipline, and blood-debt, a point that lies at the heart of Barkawi’s critique of conventional war narratives.
It is a view echoed by anthropologist Anna Simons, who in her work on military anthropology argues that soldiers often do not join armies for ideological or nationalist reasons. Instead, enlistment is frequently rooted in personal relationships, social momentum, or situational pressures, and sustained by the internal culture of the military itself. Khan’s story, full of such contingencies and loyalties, offers a compelling case in point.
Military Culture as Embodied Practice: The Making of a Sharpshooter
Khan was born in Tehran in 1823, raised in Afghanistan, and emigrated to the United States shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. On August 2, 1861, while living in Boston, Khan enlisted in the 43rd New York Infantry Regiment—an all-white unit. By his own account, he did so after being encouraged by friends and under the influence of liquor. Whether he was shanghaied, persuaded, or swept into war by the swirl of male camaraderie and inebriated spontaneity, this reflects Simons’ core insight: that many soldiers are drawn into war for embodied, contingent reasons, not abstract ideological commitments.
This “social pressure plus situation” model aligns precisely with Barkawi’s rejection of methodological nationalism. Once in the army, Khan quickly adapted to the rituals and bodily disciplines that constitute what Barkawi calls the military habitus: drill, coordination, formation, and endurance. He even became a sharpshooter, a role requiring acute physical control and a stoic mental disposition under fire.
He moved through the ranks not by belonging, but by adapting—mastering the rituals of military life. This capacity to inhabit multiple identities without collapsing into any one of them gave Khan the aura of a man at the margins—unfixed, unreadable, and difficult to categorize. His role as a sharpshooter only deepened this enigma. Unlike foot soldiers who advanced amid chaos, a sharpshooter or sniper often acts alone, with deliberate patience and lethal focus. Khan struck from a distance, unseen yet deeply felt—a spectral presence on the battlefield. In him, cultural ambiguity, martial discipline, and existential resilience converged. He becomes not merely a historical footnote, but a figure who lingers in the margins of memory: unconventional, elusive, and profoundly compelling.
His loyalty remained with his unit—the 43rd New York Infantry, today memorialized at Gettysburg with a dedicated statue. That Khan, a Persian immigrant and outsider, identified with and remained loyal to his unit despite profiling and exclusion speaks volumes about the power of military culture to create identity and belonging where the civilian world offers little.
The Racialized Borders of Inclusion—and the Persistence of Brotherhood
During the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, Khan was separated from his unit and arrested—not by the enemy, but by his own side. Khan’s dark complexion and long black hair convinced a Union guard that he was Native American and thus could not really be serving in the 43rd Infantry which was a white unit. This guard decided that his appearance “did not fit” that of a typical white Union soldier, and so he was mistaken for a Native American. But of course, he did serve in the unit so he did pass as white to some. Still, at this time he was detained and sent to Philadelphia with a group of escaped slaves.
This is a moment of racialized misrecognition, an imperial phenomenon Barkawi highlights and which Simons would call a collision of identity, bureaucracy, and embodied presence. Khan was neither white nor Black nor Native—he was an ambiguous figure who didn’t fit cleanly into the racial taxonomy of 19th-century America, especially within its rigidly segregated military system.
And yet Khan refused erasure. He found another New York regiment (14th New York Infantry) bound for the front and rejoined his unit at Spotsylvania. When asked why he kept returning, he humorously quipped: “Because I am stupid.”
Both Barkawi and Simons help us decode this self-deprecating response. What Khan called stupidity was more likely a reflection of blood-debt and soldierly solidarity. According to Simons, once inside the military, the motivations that bind soldiers shift from external ideologies to internal relationships—who they train with, suffer with, and depend on. Khan’s loyalty to his regiment wasn’t about the Union or emancipation; it was about the men he fought beside.
Empire, Race, and the Complexity of Identity
John Emmahi Khan was not alone. While his Persian origins and Civil War service are highlighted here, his experience as a liminal soldier—needed for battle, discarded in peace—echoes a broader pattern across imperial formations.
Take the Sepoys of the British East India Company, many of whom revolted in 1857, not from ideological opposition but due to perceived violations of ritual honor and betrayal of trust. Or consider the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, West African soldiers recruited into French colonial armies, who were celebrated in wartime propaganda and later marginalized, denied equal pensions and buried in separate cemeteries. The U.S. Congressional Record (2007) notes that by 1970, there were more Filipinos in the U.S. Navy than in the Philippine Navy. Indeed, Filipino Scouts and Puerto Rican Borinqueneers served the U.S. military in the 20th century under conditions of racialized ambiguity and legal precarity—expected to fight with honor while often denied full civic belonging. They were good enough to fight, but not for citizenship.
These men were bound together not by flags, but by the shared weight of empire’s contradictions: conscripted into wars not of their making, sustained by military brotherhood, then excluded from the spoils of citizenship and memory. Like Khan, they slipped between categories—neither fully colonizer nor colonized.
Tarak Barkawi’s argument resonates powerfully here: imperial armies are forged through transnational entanglements, not nationalist narratives. Khan’s story, reframed through this comparative lens, becomes less an anomaly and more a case study of the soldier as a trans-imperial subject—loyal, disciplined, haunted.
The Military, Society, and the Spaces in Between
Khan’s story, like so many others in imperial armies, illustrates the interplay between military service and racial identity. He married a woman described as a “yellow woman,” likely a “quadroon”—someone one-quarter African by the racial codes of the day. She was referred to in pension records as a “brightly looking colored woman.” Together, they had a family in Boston, placing them at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities—Muslim, Black, immigrant, poor.
Anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of liminality—the state of being “betwixt and between” social categories—offers a useful lens here. And Simons adds that military service often becomes a “liminal zone” where normal social rules are suspended or rewritten. Khan occupied a liminal space, neither fully accepted nor entirely rejected, navigating the complexities of race, religion, and nationality in a society structured by rigid classifications. His interracial family, while likely marginalized in civilian life, may have been partially shielded by the respect he earned as a veteran. Yet, as Barkawi would argue, imperial inclusion is always provisional. Soldiers like Khan are indispensable on the battlefield but rarely fully recognized afterward.
Indeed, his pension was not approved until 1881, twenty years after enlistment, and only following a Congressional case in 1884. Despite multiple combat wounds and hospitalizations in Washington and Philadelphia, he had to fight again—this time for the state’s recognition of his service. He was one of the few known Muslims to serve in the Civil War.
The Afterlife of a Forgotten Soldier
John Emmahi Khan fought two wars—one with a rifle, one with paper. His second war lasted longer.
Despite being wounded in combat, hospitalized multiple times, and ultimately returning to his regiment after being misidentified and detained, Khan’s military pension was not approved until 1881. The wheels of recognition turned only after a Congressional intervention in 1884, more than two decades after his enlistment.
He died in 1891 in Manhattan and is buried at Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn, a Civil War graveyard. He lies among the ranks of the remembered and forgotten—a veteran marked by stone, but largely erased from collective memory.
Yet his life story is anything but forgettable. It is Barkawi’s and Simons’ theories made flesh: the story of a man pulled into war by social gravity, shaped by martial ritual, bound by blood-debt, and discarded by the very nation he served. His motivations were embodied and interpersonal, not ideological. His loyalty came from within the military system, not from the state that barely recognized him.
Conclusion: Soldiers, Not States
John Emmahi Khan’s story helps us move beyond the stale frameworks of nationalism and into the real, human terrain of soldiering. His enlistment, likely propelled by intoxication and peer dynamics, reflects what Anna Simons sees as the social anthropology of war—that people join militaries as much for company, pressure, or momentum as for any belief. His persistence in rejoining his regiment, despite racial profiling, affirms Barkawi’s concept of blood-debt and Simons’ notion that soldiers fight for each other far more than for abstract ideals.
Khan was not “stupid.” He was loyal. And loyalty, in war, is not rational—it is relational.
In an age of renewed interest in global military histories and postcolonial memory, Khan’s life asks us to stop thinking like states—and start thinking like soldiers.
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