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what constitutes “fair use”, that user may be liable for copyright infringement.i Tawim Kusavy | 2002 .
West of Waloul, East of New
Yom An Afghan American
Story. NM?! Ravvay , SNaus,
FGnourn
PROLOGUE
4
He Al, [:
Mfrqhous vous avy aloo
we were the only Afghans in America. When I in-
troduced 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 curi-
osity. Few knew where Afghanistan was, and some were
amazed to learn it existed at all. Once, in a college sym
class, a coach found my free-throw shooting form humor-
ous. “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”
F= MANY LONG Years, my siblings and I thought+ PROLOGUE +
That all changed on September 1, 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 mo-
ment in my own small life.
I was driving around San Francisco that day, listening
to talk radio. My mind was chattering to itself about er-
rands 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, ineffec-
tive 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
+ PROLOGUE:
Put the country in a clamp. He was Jong 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.
T didn’t begrudge those callers their rage, but I felt a be-
wilderment 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,
T wanted to call that talk show, but when I came home,
I felt too shy, P'd never spoken to the media at any level. So
I went downstairs to my office and wrote an e-mail 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 hun-
dred e-mails in my in-box, mostly from strangers respond-
ing to the message I’'d hammered out earlier, Tt boggled my
mind. The power of the Internet! I had reached ... hun-
dreds,
‘The next day, I realized something bigger was rising+ PROLOGUE +
under me. At noon I got a cal from my old friend Nick
Allen, whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Somehow, he’d
received the e-mail and had felt moved to track me down
and say hi.
An hour ater, 1 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 e-mail—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 e-mail...” I couldn't place him.
“You don’t know me,” he said.
“Then how did you get my number?”
“{ looked you up on the Internet—anyone can get your
number. . . . I just wanted to tell you that... your e-mail
made a lot of sense to me.”
I thanked him and hung up, but my heart was pound-
ing. Strangers were reading my e-mail, 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 e-mail. “I’ve reached enough
people; thank you; that will be all.” But it was too late. I
couldn’t withdraw the e-mail. | couldn't issue corrections,
amendments, or follow-ups. My e-mail spread like a virus
throughout the United States and across the world. My
+ PROLOGUE +
e-mail accounts overflowed with responses, and the servers
had to start deleting messages I had not read. Radio sta-
tions 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 e-mail ulti-
mately, 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 1 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 to-
ward 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
Lead his literature afterward, but my long-winded digres-
sion wasn’t appropriate for that or any TV show. I stum-
bled out of the studio, my mind reeling. What did I mean?
The words I had used in that e-mail were so brutal. The
Taliban, I had written, are a”
“The text of the e-mail appears on pages 289-292.+ PROLOGUE +
CULT
of IGNORANT
PSYCHOTICS.
When you think BIN LADEN, think
HITLER.
I never would have used such language if 'd thought
millions of people were listening. I'm sure 1 would have
measured my language more carefully. But in that case,
probably no one would have listened. And had I mis-
spoken? Would I now renounce my words? I decided the
answer was no.
‘Two weeks later, my cousin’s wife, Shafiga, called to tell me
there was going to be a memorial service for Anmed Shah
Massoud that night, complete with speeches, videotapes,
posters, and more speeches. 1 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. | admired Massoud, and his assassination disheart-
ened 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
+ PROLOGUE *
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. | 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 Amer-
can, but a secular one to the max, and a feminist back
when there hardly was such a thing—the daughter of an:
+ PROLOGUE *
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 min-
utes, 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 {
have edited or written. | am an American.
How could 1 be an adequate spokesman for Afghani-
stan or for Muslims?
“Look, I have nothing to tell people but my own smal]
story,’ 1 told the fellow. from the Northern Alliance.
“Maybe I can help Americans see that Afghans are just hu-
man 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 ques-
tions. 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 J am living in now and the world f 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 fu-
cling all this militancy. Perhaps it was nostalgia for a world
that existed much more recently, traces of which still lin-
10
+ PROLOGUE ®
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
o it, Tam one of those people.