Today, Afghanistan—if it ever reaches global headlines—is portrayed as an unstable land, known more for the wars great powers fight (and often lose) on its territory. Yet for most of human history, Afghanistan wasn’t on the margins of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right.
In few countries is the contrast between buried riches and visible squalor as great as in Afghanistan. Ancient towns like Balkh and Ghazna present scenes of desolation which belie the wonderful objects and architectural elements that archaeologists have recovered from them. Other rich sites, like Ai Khanum, lie below the surface of a featureless plain….
The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai’s newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan,…
The prominent Afghan-American writer Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar, is also well-known for his stories published in magazines and journals like The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope. Now some of these have been compiled in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, bringing them and others together in one collection….
On 9 September 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites counter-factuals:…
My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird came about through the efforts of Untold Narratives, a UK-based organization which works to develop and amplify the work of writers marginalized by social, geopolitical or economic isolation, particularly those in areas with recent or ongoing conflict. In 2019 and early 2021, Untold put out open calls…
We have been here before. In 1220 the Mongols sacked Afghanistan, scattering its artists and musicians in all directions. The Sufi poet Rumi wound up in Konya, in today’s Turkey, but the majority of these refugees fled into neighboring India, where they were warmly welcomed by culture hungry audiences. They contributed to the development of…
When the Taliban took over Kabul in the summer of 2021, I—like many people around the world—kept asking such questions as: How did it all come about? What do we know about Afghanistan other than from a geopolitically inflected perspective mostly dominated by the US interests?
America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power occurred after Sandy Gall wrote this fascinating book about the military exploits of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a mujahideen commander who fought against the Soviets in the 1980s and against the Taliban and its allies until his assassination…
Chekhov advised that if you talk about a gun in a play’s first act, you’d better shoot someone in the third act. Mike Barry, the Franco-American historian and humanitarian aid activist, saw the gun in the early 1970s, when he first observed the fault-lines in Afghan state and society. In Le Cri afghan, he shows…
This book provides a local journalist’s perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. Fixers are local journalists hired to help global media outlets in developing news stories on wars. The book shows how the fixers’ risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on…
The story of Alexander the Great has inspired conquerors and would-be conquerors throughout history. Alexander’s sweep through the Middle East and Central Asia left behind evidence of his mark on history—namely, in the several cities that he founded, and that sprung up to govern the kingdoms he left behind.
Beh’s family was already in Canada when she was born. Her parents and two older siblings emigrated there from Afghanistan to escape war; Beh’s uncle, Kaka Farhad, had previously settled in British Columbia. Monster Child, Rahela Nayebzadah’s impressive new novel of immigration and family dysfunction, is told from the perspective of thirteen year-old Beh and…
In the 11th-century Persian classic Book of Alexander, the great world conqueror goes to the farthest reaches of the world, only to have a wiseman show him what he was looking for, in a mirror—self-awareness. But as Edmund Richardson shows here in his powerful retelling of the life of Charles Masson, we do not live…
As difficult as it may be now to imagine it, there was an Afghanistan at peace before the “forever wars” which now consume it. Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper’s research among Piruzai Durrani Pashtun of Northern Afghanistan in the 1970s is a record of that other not-in-the-news Afghanistan.