Table Of ContentW E S T OF K A B U L ,
E A S T OF N E W Y O R K
An Afghan American Story
TAMIM ANSARY
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
NEW YORK
PROLOGUE
F
OR MANY LONG YEARS, my siblings and I thought we were the only Afghans in America.
When I introduced myself to people, they'd say, "Interesting name. Where are you from?" When
I said Afghanistan, I could feel myself changing, not unpleasantly, into a curiosity. Few knew
where Afghanistan was, and some were amazed to learn it existed at all. Once, in a college gym
class, a coach found my free-throw shooting form humorous. "Where have you been all your
life," he guffawed, "Afghanistan?" When I said yes, he was taken aback: he thought Afghanistan
was just an expression, like ultima Thule, meaning "off the map."
The Soviet invasion put Afghanistan on the map, but it didn't last. By the summer of 2001, a
new acquaintance could say to me, "Afghanistan, huh? I never would have guessed you're from
Africa."
3
That all changed on September 11, 2001. Suddenly, everywhere I went, strangers were talking
about Kandahar and Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif. On September 12, the abrupt notoriety of
Afghanistan triggered a volcanic moment in my own small life.
I was driving around San Francisco that day, listening to talk radio. My mind was chattering to
itself about errands and deadlines, generating mental static to screen me off from my underlying
emotions, the turmoil and dread. On the radio, a woman caller was making a tearful, ineffective
case against going to war over the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The talk-show
host derided her. A man called in to say that the enemy was not just Afghanistan but people like
that previous caller as well. The talk-show host said thoughtfully, "You're making a lot of sense,
sir."
The next caller elaborated on what should be done to Afghanistan: "Nuke that place. Those
people have to learn. Put a fence around it! Cut them off from medicine! From food! Make those
people starve!"
More than thirty-five years had passed since I had seen Afghanistan, but the ghosts were still
inside me, and as I listened to that apoplectically enraged talk on the radio, those ghosts stirred
to life. I saw my grandmother K'koh, elfin soul of the Ansary family. Oh, she died long ago, but in
my mind she died again that day, as I pictured the rain-fall of bombs that would be coming. And I
saw my father, the man who wouldn't, or couldn't, leave when the Soviets
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put the country in a clamp. He was long gone, too, but if he'd lived, he would be in Kabul now, an
eighty-three-year-old man, in rags on the streets, his ribs showing, one of the many who would
be starving when the fence was flung up around our land.
I didn't begrudge those callers their rage, but I felt a bewilderment deeper than shock. No one
seemed to know how pitifully harmless Afghans were, strong contenders for the Poorest People
on Earth award, overrun by the world's most hardened criminals, and now, it seemed, marked
out to suffer for the crimes of their torturers.
I wanted to call that talk show, but when I came home, I felt too shy. I'd never spoken to the
media at any level. So I went downstairs to my office and wrote an email to a few of my friends. I
poured out to them what I would have said to the public if I could have mustered the courage to
call that talk show. The moment I clicked on SEND, I felt infinitesimally better.
Later that day, some of the people on my list asked if they could pass my note on to their
friends, and I said, "Sure," thinking, Wow, with luck, I might reach fifty or sixty people.
That night, I logged on to my server and found a hundred emails in my in-box, mostly from
strangers responding to the message I'd hammered out earlier. It boggled my mind. The power
of the Internet! I had reached ... hundreds.
The next day, I realized something bigger was rising
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under me. At noon I got a call from my old friend Nick Allen, whom I hadn't seen in fifteen years.
Somehow, he'd received the email and had felt moved to track me down and say hi.
An hour later, I heard from Erik Nalder, the son of an American engineer, whom I had last seen
in Afghanistan thirty-eight years ago. He'd received my email—I couldn't imagine how—and had
felt moved to track me down and say hi.
Then the phone rang again. A caller from Chicago. A hesitant voice. "My name is Charles
Sherman..." Did I know this guy? "I got your email...." I couldn't place him. "You don't know me,"
he said.
"Then how did you get my number?"
"I looked you up on the Internet—anyone can get your number.... I just wanted to tell you that
... your email made a lot of sense to me."
I thanked him and hung up, but my heart was pounding. Strangers were reading my email,
and anyone could get my phone number. What if the next caller said, "Hi, I'm with the Taliban"?
What if Al Qaeda knocked on the door? How long before some hysterical racist sent a brick
through my window?
I wanted to cancel my email. "I've reached enough people, thank you; that will be all." But it
was too late. I couldn't withdraw the email. I couldn't issue corrections, amendments, or follow-
ups. My email spread like a virus throughout the United States and across the world. My
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email accounts overflowed with responses, and the servers had to start deleting messages I had
not read. Radio stations started calling—then newspapers—then TV. By the fourth day, I found
myself putting World News Tonight on hold to take a call from Oprah's people—inconceivable! I
have no idea how many people received the email ultimately. A radio station in South Africa
claimed it reached 250,000 people in that country alone. Worldwide, I have to guess, it reached
millions—within a week.*
What had I written? I wondered. Why the response? I barely had time to ponder these
bewildering questions. The media seized on me as a pundit. The questions came at me like
hornets pouring out of a nest, and all I could do was swing at them. From those first few insane
weeks, I only remember Charlie Rose's skeptical face looming toward me with the question,
"But Tamim ... can you really compare the Taliban to Nazis?"
I tried to tell him about that guy I'd met in Turkey, the one in the pin-striped suit who had
wanted to convert me to his brand of Islam, and the horror that had filled me as I read his
literature afterward, but my long-winded digression wasn't appropriate for that or any TV show. I
stumbled out of the studio, my mind reeling. What did I mean? The words I had used in that
email were so brutal. The Taliban, I had written, are a
*The text of the e-mail appears on pages 289-292.
7
CULT
of IGNORANT
PSYCHOTICS.
When you think BIN LADEN, think
HITLER.
I never would have used such language if I'd thought millions of people were listening. I'm
sure I would have measured my language more carefully. But in that case, probably no one
would have listened. And had I misspoken? Would I now renounce my words? I decided the
answer was no.
Two weeks later, my cousin's wife, Shafiqa, called to tell me there was going to be a memorial
service for Ahmed Shah Massoud that night, complete with speeches, videotapes, posters, and
more speeches. I should come.
Massoud was the last credible anti-Taliban leader in Afghanistan, the man who put together
the Northern Alliance, a towering figure, assassinated by Arab suicide bombers two days before
the attacks on the World Trade Center. I admired Massoud, and his assassination disheartened
me, but I was just too spent to go to his memorial service. "I need to rest," I pleaded.
Shafiqa was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Listen, Tamim, we are all proud of what you
have done. You have written a letter. That's good. But Massoud slept with only a
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stone for a pillow for twenty-three years. He scarcely knew the names of his children, because
he would not set down the burden of liberating our country. I think he was tired at times, too. I
think you should be at his memorial service."
I hung my head in shame and said I would be there.
The following week, a representative of the Northern Alliance phoned me. "You have the ear
of the American media. You know how to say things. We know what things must be said. Let us
work together. From now on, you must be the spokesman."
"The spokesman? For what? For whom?"
"For our cause. For our country."
I could feel my ears shutting down and my eyes looking for the back door. Was Afghanistan
really my country?
Dear reader, let me pause to introduce myself properly. Yes, I was born and raised in
Afghanistan, and I know Islam intimately, from the inside, in my very soul. Yes, I learned to say
my prayers from my Afghan grandmother; yes, I know the flavor of sundown on the first day of
Ramadan, when you're on the porch with the people you love, waiting for the cannon that will
mark the moment when a white thread can no longer be distinguished from a black one and you
can put the day's first sweet date in your mouth.
But my mother was American, and not just any American, but a secular one to the max, and a
feminist back when there hardly was such a thing—the daughter of an
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immigrant labor agitator in Chicago who would have been a Communist if only he could have
accepted orders from anyone but his own conscience. And I moved to America at age sixteen,
and graduated from Reed College, and grew my hair down to my waist, and missed Woodstock
by minutes, and revered Bob Dylan back when his voice still worked. I made a career in
educational publishing, and if you have children, they have probably used some product I have
edited or written. I am an American.
How could I be an adequate spokesman for Afghanistan or for Muslims?
"Look, I have nothing to tell people but my own small story," I told the fellow from the
Northern Alliance. "Maybe I can help Americans see that Afghans are just human beings like
anyone else. That's about all I can do."
"That is important, too," he said, his voice softened by anxiety and despair.
In the weeks that followed, however, the media kept punching through to me, and I kept
answering their questions. It turned out that I did have plenty to say about Afghanistan, Islam,
and fundamentalism, because I have been pondering these issues all my life—the dissonance
between the world I am living in now and the world I left behind, a world that is lost to me. And
as I kept talking, it struck me that I was not the only one who had lost a world. There was a lot of
loss going around. Perhaps it wasn't really nostalgia for the seventh century that was fueling all
this militancy. Perhaps it was nostalgia for a world that existed much more recently, traces of
which still lin-
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ger in the social memory of the Islamic world. Lots of people have parents, or grandparents, or
at least great-grandparents who grew up in that world. Some people even know that world
personally, because they were born in it. I am one of those people.
PART ONE
The Lost World
VILLAGES AND COMPOUNDS
I
N 1948, WHEN I WAS BORN, most of Afghanistan might as well have been living in
Neolithic times. It was a world of walled villages, each one inhabited by a few large families,
themselves linked in countless ways through intermarriages stretching into the dim historical
memories of the eldest elders. These villages had no cars, no carts even, no wheeled vehicles at
all; no stores, no shops, no electricity, no postal service, and no media except rumors,
storytelling, and the word of travelers passing through. Virtually all the men were farmers.
Virtually all the women ran the households and raised the children. Virtually all boys grew up to
be like their fathers and all girls like their mothers. The broad patterns of life never changed,
never had as far as any living generation could remember, and presumably never would. People
lived pretty much as they had eight thousand years ago.
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That was the countryside. The big cities, such as Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, were living in
the fifteenth century or so. And the biggest city, Kabul, where my family lived, had made it to the
twentieth century, but just barely. Cars were few, roads were unpaved, and public transportation
consisted mostly of gadis—horse-drawn two-wheeled carriages. Electricity was scarce, too. Most
of us used kerosene lanterns at night. There was no running water. We all had wells. There was
no garbage service. We didn't produce any garbage. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in
the city, but the houses had no numbers and the streets had no names. If you didn't know where
you were going, you probably had no business going there. A postal service existed, but it didn't
deliver to private homes unless the mailman felt like it, and he felt like it only if he knew you or
had heard of you. Yet even with hundreds of thousands of people in the city, the postman very
possibly had heard of you. Oh, not you in particular; you were just a leaf, a bud. He'd know the
branch, the trunk, the tree itself: your people.
Everybody in the city lived in a compound, a yard surrounded by walls that divided the world
into a public and a private realm. That's the main fact I want to get across about the lost world I
grew up in: It was not divided into a men's world and a women's world; the division was
