Deborah Krant
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Ansary’s literary memoir tells the story of a life that straddles the fault line between Islam and the West: his father, hailing from an ancestral line rich in Sufi mystics, was one of the first ten Afghans sent abroad by his government for a Western-style education; and hIs mother was the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan as an Afghan. Ansary and his sister Rebecca were thus the first Afghan-Americans.

Ansary sketches “the Lost World”— Afghanistan before contact with the West, a world of tightly-knit clans living in large compounds surrounded by high walls in a large city that is really a densely interwoven fabric of private villages permeated by Islam. His story then moves to tiny Lashkargah, the headquarters of an American aid project in southwestern Afghanistan, eight square blocks of any California suburb transported to the banks of a river in Afghanistan, a mile upstream from the ruins of a thousand-year-old city, and surrounded by a desert wasteland as far as the eye can see. Here, Ansary begins a dual life—Afghan by day, American by night.

The author then explores the theme of the bifurcated cultural identity as his story moves to United States, to the sixties counterculture, to travels across North Africa and Turkey,  and finally to the psychological journey Afghan refugees and exiles have gone through in America since the Soviets invaded their country.

Go here to order your copy of West of Kabul, East of New York.
Richard Eder, writing for the New York Times, calls West of Kabul, East of New York “a book that steadies our skittering compass. Pointing east and west it signals not galactic opposites but two ends of a needle we can hold in our hand. … It speaks with modesty of tone and is all the more resonant for that reason; it searches by sifting… His book sees things we cannot make out, and need to.”

John Nichols, writing for the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, says, “West of Kabul, East of New York is … not a polemic of globalization or imperialism. In fact, it is essentially an autobiography. Yet, in his exploration of the Afghanistan he knew as a youth and of the practice of Islam to which he was exposed there, he opens vast horizons of understanding… about the price of progress in this perhaps too modern world.”

Roger Downey writes in the Seattle Weekly, “Ansary’s authorial voice is so unemphatic, so over-a-beer conversational that you’re surprised to find tears rising or rage beginning to choke you as you learn about the interminable geopolitical catastrophe that is the author’s birthplace. … West of Kabul, East of New York is one of those rare pieces of journalism–Rebecca West’s dispatches from Nuremberg come to mind, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima—that don’t just record history but make it.”

Jessie Thorpe, writing for United Press International, calls Ansary a “gifted storyteller,” and goes on to say: “Woven into his stories are lucid explanations of Islam, the history of Afghanistan, the heroes of his youth, what school was like in bare classrooms with no books, how women lived, the joys and cruelties of Islamic society — all of it highly educational and absolutely painless to absorb. In addition to ‘speaking’ beautifully, this author is capable of painting large colorful canvases with his words.”

West of Kabul, East of New York has been included ont he following lists:

It has also been chosen as:

A workshop-like discussion for writing students of the differences, similarities, and interrelationships between writing fiction and writing memoir, with a focus on strategies for discovering the story arc in real experiences and for tapping techniques of narrative fiction to bring memoir to life; but also on the issues and strategies involved in tapping real life experience to feed fiction.

A look at oil and resource issues—their role in recent, current, and likely future wars, followed by the prospects, problems, and implications of moving toward a sustainable society.

In Western schools, the standard world history traces a development from Mesopotamia and Egypt, through Greece and Rome, and then to the Dark Ages, which is followed by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern democratic nations. Ansary contrasts this to the alternate narrative he learned growing up: world history as seen from the perspective of the Islamic world, a perspective that places Islam at the center of history, regards the Dark Ages as one of the brighter ages, and sees the Crusades as one of history’s pivotal turning points. This lecture explores the relativity of historical narratives and proposes a world historical story from a global perspective.

Beginning with a look at the historical unfolding of Islam in its first millenium, Ansary moves on to explore the reformist currents of the last two centuries and the challenge Islamic thinkers face in trying to formulate a theology relevant to industrial modernism. A discussion of intellectual currents in the Islamic world is analyzed in the context of the Muslim experience with imperialism and its own growing political impotence.

Ansary discusses what it was like to grow up in Afghanistan, but with one foot already in America, contrasting life in a highly conservative Islamic society to that in post-modern United States and exploring, along the way, such thorny topics as the burqa and the position of women in Islamic society. Stories from a bi-cultural childhood illuminate how and why the worldview of Afghans typically differ from those of Americans.

Ansary moves from a long view of Afghanistan in the context of world history to his own experiences in Afghanistan after the events of September 11. He zooms in from the demise of the Silk Road through the Cold War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the rise of the Taliban. After exploring the origins of this group and its ties to Al Qaeda, he zeros in on Afghanistan today, discussing the direction of the social turmoil there, the factions and interests competing for power, and the implications of events in this country for Pakistan, Iran, the former Soviet Republics, the broader region, and, most importantly, people in the United States.

(Written in January 2002 for Salon.com)

Some of the language I hear in conversations about women’s roles in post-Taliban Afghanistan makes me nervous. I believe misconceptions may have crept into public perceptions on this issue.

Read more

Terrorism is more like crime than it is like war. Attacking terrorism by making war on other countries is like attacking crime by bombing New York, Detroit, and other high crime cities.

Gulmamadak the Great
An Afghan folktale retold: Gulmamad is a grown man, but everyone in the village–even his wife–insists on calling him Gulmamadak, which means “Little Gulmamad the Cute.” So Gulmamadak leave the village to do great deeds and gain some respect. Reading level: 4th to 5th grade.

Holiday Histories: The Complete Set This 12-book series, written at the first-grade level, uses various political holidays as windows for presenting relevant topics in history. For example, Labor Day provides a frame for telling the story of the Industrial REvolution and the labor movement–all in 26 pages with no more than 25 words per page.

Native Americans (Set) This ten-book set, written at the second grade level, covers the various Native American cultures of North America, with a description of the environment of each region, the cultures that flourished there before the advent of the Europeans, the consequences of their encounters with Europeans, and what is happening with the Native Americans of that region today. Each book draws strong connection between the environment and native culture of each region, but emphasizes that Native Americans are modern people existing today. For example: Arctic Peoples looks at the people of the far north, the Inuit and the Aleuts.

Cool Collections: Insects is part of a series for first graders that uses various types of collections–stamps, dolls, natural objects, and so on–as a tool for introducing children to critical thinking skills such as cassifying and categorizing.

Alien Alert is part of a series of educational comic books called Adventures Plus. Each page tells a story but also has an embedded activity. To move from one page to the next, readers need to complete the activity. The stories are written at the 5th grade level, and the skills are coded to those in the Texas and national curriculum standards for that grade level. Alien Alert, for example, focuses on vocabulary skills such as prefixes and antonyms. The Case of the Missing Millie, by contrast, emphasizes real-life and study skills such as reading maps and bus schedules and tracking expenses.

Grammar Handbook Is there such a thing as a grammer handbook that makes you laugh? There’s one. This one. Goes with Adventures Plus.

Science All Around Us: Matter presents basic concepts about matter with simple experiements first-graders can perform to comprehend such concepts in physics as weight, denisty, volume, and precipitation.

The Lost Boy and Spiders from Outer Space are high-interest low-readability novels for students of high school age reading at a third-grade level or below.

About a year ago, Afghanistan went through a turning point, and not a good one.  The country had been teetering between chaos and order ever since the day the Taliban fled Kabul. (Parenthetically, it wasn’t American bombardment that drove them out in 2002. but American diplomatic and financial pressure on Pakistan, which forced that country to stop supporting the Taliban.  Without money and guns from Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Taliban could not stand up to native Afghan forces because they were, in fact, merely a stalking horse for Pakistan–the cadre were young Afghans recruited out of the refugee camps, but the officials in Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence was pulling all the strings. A further parenthesis: if America had forced Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban earlier, as a number of Afghan leaders had pleaded, the Taliban would have toppled long before 9/11.)

In any case, the moment the Taliban fled, Afghanistan stood poised at the gates of hope and America had a golden opportunity to reverse anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world by resurrecting a devastated Muslim country without any strings attached. 

Instead, the United States launched its war in Iraq. Reconstruction aid to Afghanistan faltered.  The central government, which lacked the military power to impose its will on the countryside, now also lost the leverage that control of substantial aid money might have given it.  In the years that followed, the Karzai government did its best through diplomacy and horsetrading to give the country’s many conflicting factions and forces some stake in a new civil order and thus draw them into nation-building.  But at the same time, Pakistani agents, radical Jihadists from the Arab world, and other troublemaking outsiders, as well as jealous tribal chieftains, warlords left over from the previous twenty-three years of bloodshed, traditional rural clerics, and other “insiders,”  collaborated to undermine the emerging civil order.  This was not, mind you, a conspiracy hatched in some secret lair, but a spontaneous convergence of interests among many forces: each had something to lose from peace and each had something to gain from chaos. There is a hidden hand in politics much like the “hidden hand” Adam Smith famously discovered in the market.  Because of this hidden hand, people pursuing their own political self-interest can collaborate without speaking a word to one another

Some big-ticket money did come in. The road from Kabul to Kandahar was rebuilt, for example (but so hastily and shoddily that parts of it are already crumbling).  Fancy new houses rose from the rubble of Kabul’s bombed-out neighborhoods. And the city now has bars and brothels and a shopping mall. The infusion of foreign aid, however, has caused ruinous inflation without raising local incomes, and it has failed to promote any grassroots business development, because the countless small-time native entrepreneurs–Afghanistan was crawling with them in the early days after the Taliban fell–got no funding to pursue their little business schemes.  

Out in the countryside, where the soil is still heavily laced with land mines, peasants have found that they can at least hold body and soul together with the income they can squeeze from growing opium poppies.  Former warlords have quickly seen in this the opportunity to prosper as druglords. Former guerilla warriors, whose skills would be useless in a peaceful society, now can find work as enforcers for the drug lords. 

In short, Afghanistan has seen a race between chaos and order that broke out the day the Taliban fled Kabul.  In the last year or so, chaos has begun to gain the upper hand on order, I think, by pursuing several effective tactics. First came the assassination of aid workers in the south, which undermined foreign efforts to deliver reconstruction aid to this fiercely independent region. Then came the attacks on schools, which forced over 200 of them to shut down. Next,  anti-government forces began assassinating pro-government clerics, cutting off this means of co-opting the conservative masses.  And last but not least, Afghanistan began to see suicide bombings, a tactic never used by native Afghans even during the anti-Soviet war–these represent a backwash into Afghanistan from the catastrophe in Iraq. Over the last year, there have been more than a hundred such bombings in Afghanistan. 

American combat in Afghanistan officially ended on January 10, 2002, yet the United States has more troops stationed in the country now than it ever did–ever: about 20,000 give or take.   The media usually ascribes the mounting violence here to “the Taliban” but this is just a phrase and a dangerously deceptive one because it invites the idea that this whole problem could be solved by capturing or killing someone or a whole list of someones, or destroying their headquarters or disrupting their “command and control” capabilities, etc.  In fact, here as in Iraq–and as in the world as a whole–what we’re fighting is not an entity but a condition. 

 

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