Afghan books



The Dar-ul-Aman Palace, Kabul, October 2002

[Image source: http://www.rawa.org/k-nam17.htm. The Dar-ul-Aman avenue, once bordered by tall white-stemmed poplars, was described by Robert Byron as one of the most beautiful in the world.]




Åsne Seierstad: The Bookseller of Kabul (2002)

On September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, New York. Within weeks, Afghanistan was invaded, toppling the fundamentalist regime of the Taliban but failing to secure Osama bin Laden, the enemy of the United States.

Åsne Seierstad, a young Norwegian war correspondent, was in Afghanistan to report the conflict. She then stayed for four months in spring 2002 with an Afghan family and wrote this book. Soon translated into many languages, it was an immediate best-seller, feeding a suddenly intense desire by Westerners to understand parts of the world that for the first time seemed to have a serious significance for them.

The Khan family was not typical (is there a typical family?). It was rich by Afghan standards, and its patriarch, the bookseller, was multi-lingual and literate. Seierstad effaced herself from the book and tried to tell only family stories, as if she wasn’t there. She changed the names, but presumably in Kabul it was easy enough to penetrate the disguise. Its subject family were prominent citizens, and family matters were reported accurately, since that was the whole point of the book. After publication, Sultan Khan repudiated it as a travesty. Perhaps that’s when he could read it in English, not in Norwegian, a hermetic language to the rest of the world. He’s going to write his own book. But trade is booming. Meanwhile Seierstad has been in Baghdad during the war, and has been funding hospitals with her new wealth. Not everyone has fallen under her spell (a spell is a double-edged sword in this world). In Norway, people mutter that she bought her fame too easily. Others have detected a certain condescension in The Bookseller of Kabul.

Young Afghans (mostly ex-pat) on the Afghania portal were uncertain to blame Seierstad or Khan most – they saw the book as a dishonouring of their nation; their own lives did not sound much like the Khan family’s, they sounded very much like everyone else who posts to Internet forums. But Internet forums seem to select from a very narrow band within the human population.     

In a sense Sultan must be right. Intimate histories reported by and read by people of another culture must fail. It’s a kind of Chinese whispers. In the end-product of our reading, the combined product of Seierstad’s imagination, the translator’s imagination, and the western reader’s imagination, Leila, Mansur, Sharifa and the rest have inevitably been transformed into westerners who find themselves caught up in un-western situations. When we read that Leila never sees a drop of sunlight, we are bound to interpret that life-giving sun according to a Scandinavian (and British) scale of values. To be deprived of sunlight is to waste away! It can’t seem quite like that in Kabul, one of the sunniest cities on earth, where shade is fruitful and a blessing. Faute de mieux. It’s a beginning. Deeper inhabitation of an alien culture cannot be had on such readable terms.

And when I read:

While Sultan ruminated over how to ask for the hand of the chosen one without the help of family women, his first wife was blissfully ignorant that a mere chit of a girl, born the same year she and Sultan were married, was Sultan’s constant preoccupation...

my first awareness is that “blissfully ignorant” and “a  mere chit of a girl” contain English ideas. This kind of ignorance and this particular way of feeling dismissive of youth could not exactly convey Sharifa’s experience. On the other hand, verbal expressions cannot exactly convey one person’s feelings to another, anyway. We each have a private set of connotations for the same verbal formula. And besides, don’t some things supersede culture – for example, the experience of being no longer young, or having had three children? Perhaps we can try to form a global fellowship on the slender biological basis of what we share as members of one species.

And the book’s mode is after all western – a crossover between ethnography and fly-on-the-wall reality show.

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Back to Mikrorayon’s bullet-riddled apartment blocks, where water and electricity are so intermittent, from a visit to the hammam (steam baths) is a journey we can take, sharing the weight of those burkas – a smelly and stale shroud placed over momentarily clean skin. Can we weigh them more accurately than we weigh the meals soaked in mutton fat or the flabby, pale fat of the women?

Mansur, who has been our wide-eyed hero on the formidable journey to Ali’s tomb at Mazar, behaves with continual rudeness to his aunt and servant Leila. Seierstad admits that she could not feel temperately about the perennial male lording it over women. To admit the sufficient causes of Mansur’s ill-temper is one thing. But to see how all this looks, on the premise of woman’s rightful subjugation, is not possible for her. A country in a mess, what no-one denies... but what is a right way?

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Åsne Seierstad has gone on to write several other books, e.g. about Grozny (Chechnya), Baghdad, and Anders Breivik. The most recent one (2018) is about two Norwegian girls who went to Syria to fight for ISIS.


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Other books about Afghanistan – nothing in common with each other, particularly, except that I happen to have read them or been told about them.

Ferdowsi (c. 940-c. 1020) is the author of the massive Iranian poem The Shahnameh. Many of the legendary locations look further east, i.e.to Balkh (near Mazar-e Sharif in N Afghanistan) and the Oxus, e.g. Seyavash’s campaign against the Turan Afrasyab. 

Rumi – the thirteenth-century Sufi and (in dubious translation) topselling poet of 2004 in the USA,, was born in Balkh which is now in Afghanistan. (I’ve lost my notes, but I think the tenth-century philosopher Avicenna was also born in Afghanistan.)

“The sancitity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.” (Gladstone to the voters of Midlothian, 1879). Gladstone really used Afghanistan as a rhetorical hyperbole. Though he had strongly opposed the Disraeli-sponsored invasion of Afghanistan, his developing views on national self-determination were focussed on Christian nations and specifically in the present instance on an independent Bulgaria. As post-colonial critics have emphasised, Gladstone’s philosophy of self-determination was only practically applied in an imperial context to white “settlement colonies” e.g. to Canada not to India. Its main focus was on Europe, where  Gladstone’s ideal had great influence on Woodrow Wilson and the new frontiers of Europe drawn up at Versailles in 1919 – the new or revived nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Roumania. The chief victim of these changes was the extinction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the last large exemplar of the essentially medieval idea of lands yoked together not by nationality but by (Catholic) faith and aristocratic inheritance. This new philosophy remains in principle a cornerstone of international policy but it cannot be wholly disentangled from the contemporary racialism that underscored its force, e.g. the hatred between Slav and Magyar. Its limit is reached where two unfriendly groups inhabit the same territory (Northern Ireland, Palestine..). Then the widely-promulgated belief that national self-determination ought to be one’s right might make genocide more likely. Thus Fisher notes sourly that when the Turks methodically massacred every Greek in Smyrna in 1922 (and created a million Greek refugees from mainland Turkey to Greece), “the chief occasion of Greco-Turkish hostility was paradoxically removed.”  By a similar logic Hitler’s destruction of East European Jewry was a “final solution” to a problem conceived in terms of national self-determination. Thus a principle actuated by admirably disinterested liberalism bears some responsibility for the most evil acts of the years that followed. Yet the racialist conception of nationality should already have been an obsolescent concept – it is essentially a rural idea based on often illusory extrapolation from memories of stable cultural groups in an era when isolation was a common experience, and is utterly inadequate to prescribe ideals for the mixed populations of great urban centres.  And in fact all conceptions of nationality must one day be known as only imaginative projections; the human species is instantiated not by peoples but by persons. This is of course much easier to entertain if you don’t perceive your own cultural group as threatened. 

Kipling’s story Dray wara yow dee  (1888) has an Afghan narrator who recounts his vengeful pursuit of Daoud Shah, his young wife’s lover. Kipling’s story has many subtleties; on one level it was clearly a large influence on the next item (by ‘Afghan’). Kipling’s long story The Man Who Would be King (also 1888) describes the fatal attempt by Peachey and Carnehan to become “Kings of Kafiristan” – this is the area shown on modern maps as Nuristan. It is a mountainous and inaccessible region NE of Kabul and south of the Hindu Kush (the two adventurers turn right at Jagdallak, which they recall from serving under Roberts – in the 2nd Afghan War of 1878-80).

‘Afghan’, Exploits of Asaf Khan, Herbert Jenkins, 1923?  This book, written by an Englishman some time after the World War, concerns a border-country hero who is also a ruthlessly bloody killer; his effortless salvation in our eyes depending in large part on his devotion to the English – as e.g. the narrator of Kipling’s “A Sahib’s War”. The English are thoroughly idealized, and the moral ins and outs of it all are staggering at times. But as I carried on reading, I found the book increasingly impressive – a novel folk-epic combining popular adventure fiction (“coolly”, “the work of an instant”) with a well-handled quasi-oriental manner and skilful narration.  It proceeds by episodic chapters told out of sequence in order to produce, eventually, a fully realized Imperialist image. It would be unsubtle to dismiss this as purely a matter of “history is written by the victors”. British admiration for the mountain fighters, treacherous and bloody as they might be, is notably present in the following book too, and no doubt persists to this day as an unacknowledged colouring; it’s as an antidote to this kind of racialist romancing that Seierstad should be appreciated.  [I am appropriating the old word “racialist” to refer to a way of interpreting national, racial, regional and even professional types, much cherished for its romantic possibilities in writers of this time – Buchan perhaps showing it most clearly, but few British writers (even the most prestigious) avoid it completely. For Buchan to place, say, a red-haired Breton fisherman, a turbaned Sikh and a pawky Glasgow lawyer in the same railway carriage is to create a romantic situation already rich with legendary significance – and the complexity to which e.g. Buchan may develop this picture-thinking can be surprising. I distinguish the term from “racism” which is best used with explicit and primary reference to injustice (e.g unjust thinking, behaviour, laws, policing, etc). Racialism, both as a contemporaneous pseudo-scientific theory and in the wider imaginative sense I am giving it,  is racist, of course, but it is a specific manifestation of racism, perhaps in literature an intermediate stage in addressing the existence of other cultures at all – as opposed to e.g. Jane Austen, for whom other cultures are not on the agenda at all.]   

Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1936?) is a travel-book (supposedly in search of the origins of Islamic architecture). Extravagantly admired by Bruce Chatwin, who re-traced the journey in his youth and wrote an introduction to the reprint in 1980 – collected as “A Lament for Afghanistan” in What am I doing here (1989). The most notable features of Chatwin’s piece are his perpetuation of the idea of the moral superiority of the mountain race over the lowlanders of Iran, and his angry reference to appeasement,  referring to the West’s lack of protest about the Russian occupation.

Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) ... great entertainment, from what I remember.

Patrick Macrory, Kabul Catastrophe: The Retreat of 1842, 1986 (originally published as Signal Catastrophe in 1966). Fascinating account of British political and military mismanagement in the First Afghan War – total destruction of an army, reminiscent of (and not quite unworthy of comparison with) Thucidides’ account of the Sicilian expedition.

The Horsemen, novel by the French journalist Joseph Kessel, translated by Patrick O’Brian in 1968. Odd book – I thought I had read it as a child but now I think I must have mixed it up with another book, possibly called Bush-Khazi!. For the first fifty pages it feels so over-written that you wonder if you’ll get through it. Then you begin to realize that it’s turning into a powerfully unusual book. It concerns the buzkashi horsemen of the northern steppes and a deranged journey across the Hindu Kush, full of visionary scenes, self-destructive pride, subjugation and cruelty, and it has the best broken leg in literature. My idea of how the book was written is this: start with a few general facts about “the Afghan world” (e.g. indomitable pride, abject subjugation, horses), then build up a conception of a world in which such things can flourish in their fiercest forms, then write the book about your imaginary world, adding more Afghan colour as you go along. I am trying to explain why I feel that both author and reader seem so inward with this world. 

Nick Danziger, Danziger’s Travels: Beyond Forbidden Frontiers, 1987. In part of which, Danziger manages to get across into Afghanistan (Herat area) from Iran, and eventually gets out to Pakistan via the ungovernable border area south of Kandahar. This was at the time of the war with Russia – a tense narrative.

Khyber Knights (2001), by CuChullaine O’Reilly. A "long riders" epic, describing travels on horseback in -- mostly --Peshawar (Pakistan) and -- partly -- Afghanistan, at the time of the Russian invasion. The Irish-American author converted to Islam as a result of his experiences. More details: http://www.thelongridersguild.com/Books/khyber-knights.htm .

The Kite Runner, 2003. Novel by Khaled Hosseini (Californian doctor born in Afghanistan, whose family received political asylum in 1980) – largely set in Afghanistan.   Followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns , And the Mountains Echoed.  Hosseini seemed to create a new genre of popular fiction, with readers across both East and West. See e.g. Nadia Hashimi, below.

Jason Elliott, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan (2007).

Debbie Rodriguez, The Kabul Beauty School (2007). Heart-warming account of a women's initiative in Kabul, soon after the fall of the Taliban. Debbie has also written the fictional books The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul (2011) and Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul (2016)

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea (2008), and Greg Mortenson, Stones into Schools (2010). Non-fiction, about Greg's humanitarian work setting up schools in remote mountain areas. Set mostly in Pakistan, partly in NE Afghanistan. Veracity assailed by Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit (2011).

Maggie Hamilton Little. Dancing with Darkness (2011)

The Pearl that Broke its Shell, 2014. Novel by Nadia Hashimi (another expat with Afghan roots), followed by several others. Set in Afghanistan in two different periods, early 20th century and early 21st century.

Rory Stewart, The Places In Between (2014). Travel book describing a walk across Afghanistan from Herat eastwards. Rory is currently a minister of state in the Ministry of Justice.

A book I have not read – Nadia Anjuman’s Gul-e-dodi (Dark Red Flower). She lived near Herat and came to the attention of western media when she died, aged 25, following a domestic beating on 4/11/2005. At the time of her death none of her poems had been translated into English.

(I wrote most of this in 2004, but I've updated the book list and a few other things).