Where Islams Clash

Crossing the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan is like walking into a live-action pastiche of some nineteenth-century explorer's travelogue. It is a silent country. The ubiquitous background hum of an industrial society--its computer fans, its stereos, its jetplanes-is noticeably absent. Other noises bubble up to your ears: the wind, rivers, and the muezzin's call to prayer. Other people's conversations are incredibly hard to tune out. Afghanistan is also a paradise for photographers. Everything is photogenic. If the country feels like a pastiche, it is more Arabian Nights than The Great Game. In the Herat silk market peasants spin brilliant white silk cocoons into coils before selling them to the carpet- and turban-makers. It is a magical world of Sufi shrines, goat herders, nomadic tribes, and ancient ruins.

The exoticism can be blinding. If you are not careful, you easily forget the decades of suffering, frustration, and misery that have defined the everyday life of twenty million Afghans. The sight of refugees and the burning ashes of war save us from fantasizing, but devastation can be a crude awakening. During the Cold War, Afghanistan was a theater of a different kind: a place where the superpowers could act out their own plans for world domination. They have moved on to other battles, but Afghanistan remains a ravaged country. It is a country, like too many in the world, where a child carrying a Kalashnikov as big as he is does not draw special attention. It is a country of displacement: the primitive agriculture and absence of advanced technology makes the human environment extremely fragile. Two or three years without rain is a catastrophe that will piston a steady flow of people out of the countryside and into refugee camps around the cities and beyond the country's borders. Despite the drought, Iran (with the help of the UN High Commission for Refugees) continues to repatriate, often by force, Afghan refugees who settled in the country during the war with the Soviet Union. Children that were born in Iran to Afghan parents are being sent to a country that they have never known. Yet people will continue to stream into Iran as long as the drought parches the land. People end up going back and forth across the border, being moved rather than moving themselves.

This humanitarian crisis is compounded by politics. Many of the repatriated are Hazâra, a Mongol, Shiite ethnic group that has always been despised by the rest of this Indo-European, Sunni country. The strict rule of the ultra-orthodox Taliban has made the plight of minorities even more acute.

True, the Taliban are trying to lead the country down a new path. Yet their guidance looks more like bullying. Their attempt to return to "true" Islamic values only hides another type of authoritarian regime, and another dead-end for the country. The Taliban have willfully forgotten the defining essence of Afghanistan. The country has always been a crossroad of history where the legacies of innumerable cultures--Persian, Hellenistic, Chinese, and of course Islamic--have met to exchange their wares. The Taliban are allowing the resources of the country to waste away, be they its cultural heritage or the full potential of its people, its women and its ethnic minorities. Their attempt to construct an Afghanistan, and an Islam, that speaks with only one voice disdains the range of identities and beliefs that have always co-existed in the country. Doing so carries on the sad tradition of recent Afghan history: the continued suffering of its people.

Above: In Herât, in eastern Afghanistan, as throughout the Muslim world, the Quran provides guidance to worshippers. Islam arrived to Afghanistan in the eighth century. The irony of the Taliban's rule is that there never was any substantial Western influence in Afghanistan in modern times. More than 90 percent of Afghans were and continue to be observant Muslims.

Above: Before Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism co-existed...