Tamim Ansary captured wide notice in the United States
after 9/11, when his email to friends declaring his hate for the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden went viral.
The Afghanistan-born Ansary followed up that email by publishing a memoir in 2002, West of Kabul, East of New York,
exploring the cultural divide between his life growing up in Muslim
Afghanistan and moving to America at age 16. Ansary, whose books dealing
with Islam and the West include his 2009 Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes,
will be speaking this week at the World Affairs Council in Portland.
It’s a city he knows well from an eight-year stretch starting in 1968,
when he studied literature at Reed College and wrote for the underground
newspaper Portland Scribe.
Now living in San
Francisco, the 62-year-old author and lecturer is planning his first
trip in nine years to Afghanistan this fall. WW spoke with Ansary
before his March 11 lecture and before a U.S. House committee holds
hearings March 10 on “radicalization” of U.S. Muslims.
WW: What’s the best example of how an Islamic-centered world narrative differs from a Eurocentric one?
Tamim Ansary: The Western world is what came out of the
many societies that emerged from around the Mediterranean. This other
world is the world that emerged out of the many intertangled caravan and
trade and invasion routes that sewed together Persians, Turks, the
people of Northern India, Afghans and on into the Middle East,
encompassing finally the Arabs. I’m saying that’s a world, too. If you
look at the history of the world with the Mediterranean-centric point of
view, it seems as if the Muslims were important in the Dark Ages and
maybe a little bit in the time when the European colonialists first went
across the world. But I’m saying it’s perfectly viable for people that
live in that area as seeing theirs as being the heart of the world. And
if you do, then the influx of colonialism and the emergence of the West
instead of being the central event of history, is something that was
happening to you, from the peripheries. And that’s the story that I want
to tell.
What are Americans’ biggest misconceptions about Afghanistan?
There is a tendency for Americans to think of Afghanistan
as being a nation of sinister men with beards. And to think Afghan women
are timid, oppressed, cowering creatures. That misses that there are
different demographics within Afghanistan. There are millions of people
who live in the big Afghan cities and want to develop the country. They
want to be part of the world. And there’s also a failure [by Americans]
to realize that, in the old traditional Afghanistan of the rural
countryside, there is a whole social system in which everybody has a
certain part to play. In the old days that was a workable and fairly
peaceful kind of society. Now some of these terrible things that we see
in Afghanistan in these last 20 or 30 years, it isn’t an expression of
Afghan culture. It’s an expression of Afghan culture’s post-traumatic
syndrome after 2 million people were killed, 8 million were rendered
refugees and the entire countryside was bombed to slivers and the cities
were destroyed by the post-Soviet civil war infighting.
And what are Americans’ biggest misconceptions about Islam?
It’s a misconception to equate Islam with Islamism. There
is a movement in the world which is, I think, anti-colonialist in its
routes or anti-imperialist that goes back about 200 years. And that’s a
movement that has chosen to adopt Islamic discourse, mythological
references, ideas as a platform for pursuing a political program. That’s
a movement that can loosely be covered by the term “Islamism.” I think
most Muslims are not Islamists. Most Muslims, what Islam means to them
is, you try to perform your five daily prayers, you give some of your
money to charity, you try to go to Mecca if you can, at least once. And
you observe the fast in the month of Ramadan. And you testify that there
is only one God.… Islam is not as Christianity is: a plan for the
salvation of the individual person. In its very essence Islam is, in
part, a plan for the building of a just and harmonious community. Islam
directs itself a lot toward the question of how can Muslims be at peace
with one another. And it’s up to Muslims to enlarge that to inquire as
to how Muslims can be at peace with non-Muslims.
How religious are you?
I’m not religious. I’m a secular guy.
What’s your best guess as to how Afghanistan will be different, if at all, in 20 years?
It will be different, there’s no question of that. Time
doesn’t stop, and the difference will depend on how the configuration of
world power changes. Because Afghanistan has always been the nexus of
the competition of the great global powers: between the Soviets and the
U.S.-dominated bloc of the Cold War, between the British and the
Russians in the 19th century, between the U.S. and the punitive Jihadist
enterprise to destroy Western civilization, of al-Qaida, right now. I
don’t think as some do they’ll always be fighting. Whatever this thing
is, it’s going to be resolved in five or six years. There just might be
some terrible moments along the way. And I don’t know if there is a way
to really avoid those. I hope there is.
What do you think about the current American approach to Afghanistan?
If you were to ask Petraeus and Obama what they think
they’re doing, I think they’d say they are putting in enough troops to
rescue the population from the Taliban. And at the same time, they’re
trying to train the Afghan army and security apparatus to take over that
job so that we can leave and Afghans can take care of themselves. The
shortcoming there is that the presence of American troops in the most
troubled parts of Afghanistan creates the insurgency that we are in
Afghanistan to fight. We are not quelling the insurgency by being there.
We’re inflaming it. I think there’s also a component of the American
strategy which is to plug these so-called provincial reconstruction
teams into Afghanistan and help with rebuilding Afghanistan, in the
hopes that by building a civil order that will cut the insurgency. I
think the idea there is great. That would have been a great and workable
thing that would have done wonders if it had been pursued from the
start by the Bush administration. I think it’s a little late to come in
with that now, but I do hope it works.
What’s your take on American diplomatic efforts to engage the Taliban?
Well, it isn’t clear what the diplomatic efforts are right
now; you know there are a lot of things going on in Afghanistan. It
isn’t that specific as to who the Taliban is. The Taliban is just the
cover for all sorts of insurgencies that are active in Afghanistan.
Taliban—it does refer to an attitude, an orientation; it’s associated
with rural, religious, conservative fundamentalism in Afghanistan. And
you know, if there is a reconciliation process that puts the Taliban
back in charge of Afghanistan in some way, then I think you are going to
see some results for Afghans that certainly urban, progressive Afghans
like myself will be pretty uncomfortable with. There will be a
reactionary backlash to the advances made by women in the times since
the Taliban were overthrown. On the other hand, there is no military
solution to this. So in some form or fashion there is going to have to
be some diplomatic process that’s going to end the fighting there.
GO: Ansary’s lecture, “Destiny Disrupted: A History of the
World Through Islamic Eyes,” is at noon Friday, March 11, at the World
Affairs Council of Oregon, 1200 SW Park Ave., 3rd floor. $5 members, $10
nonmembers. Preregistration required; go to
worldoregon.org/events/registration/tamim_ansary.php.
