May 5, 2002

ON September 12, a day after the World Trade Centre was destroyed, Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American who has been making his living by writing books for American children, was upset by the reactionary comments he’d heard on a radio call-in show that morning. He wrote an impassioned note: “There was no point in bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, when the Soviets had already done so 20 years earlier.” He went on to compare “the Taliban to the Nazis, Osama bin Laden to Hitler, and the Afghan people to the Jews”.

The note was sent in an email to some twenty close friends, telling them how the threatened US reprisals against Afghanistan looked to him as an Afghan American. The note quickly landed in millions of ‘in-boxes’ worldwide. Overnight this shy, modest man was catapulted into the position of a sought-after media celebrity, an unofficial spokesperson for the Afghan people.

Salon reproduced the email as an opinion piece. The US electronic media came to him: Oprah, Charlie Rose, World News Tonight.

Before rising to fame, the 53-year-old Ansary had been chasing a career in journalism, then in fiction writing, but without success. Now, his agent took advantage of his sudden fame and got into a deal for a memoir that would begin where his celebrated email left off. The result was West of Kabul, east of New York: an Afghan American’s story, which was released in April. It is a passionate personal journey through two cultures in conflict by an Afghan-American with “an Afghan soul” still inside him.

The son of an Afghan father and an American mother, Tamim Ansary grew up in Afghanistan before the family migrated to the US. Ansary’s “own small story” provides the raw material for his analysis of the anxiety of a bicultural existence, the nature of Islam, and the Afghan value system.

Coming from a Western-educated family of poets and scholars, Ansary and his two siblings never quite adjusted to their Afghan peers.

Tamim Ansary attempted to swim the two cultures, a chameleon-like feat. “I am an Afghan among Afghans, and an American among Americans,” he explains.

As many Afghan Americans head back to Afghanistan, to help rebuild the country, Ansary plans to stay in the US. His contribution to the cause will be his writings — not just the memoir, but articles and essays, which he hopes will enlighten and inform Westerners, and, ideally, inspire them to send cash to the many small NGOs working to build wells, outfit schools, and clear land mines from farming areas.

He believes, for now, Americans are hungry for that personal story — the human face of the country in which the US government plays out its war on terrorism. Tamim Ansary has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on the conflict between Islam and the West. His book is a deeply personal account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.

I spoke to Tamim Ansary and here are some excerpts from that interview:

Question: When you sent the e-mail message, did you anticipate the impact it would have?

Tamim Ansary: Absolutely not. I was just shocked. It’s easy to believe that everybody’s on a war frenzy and in a blind rage. And of course everybody is angry — I’m angry too. But there’s more going on here. I think the way people forwarded this so quickly speaks to how many people want a better understanding of the situation.
 

Q: How do you feel about the Taliban?

TA: There’s a great book, Taliban: militant Islam, oil and fundamentalism in Central Asia, by the Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid. According to what Rashid writes, there was some pretty direct involvement between the US and the creation of the Taliban, and it had to do with the American impression that the Taliban had what it took to secure the country for an oil pipeline that was supposed to run through Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. I’m sure the Americans had no idea what was going to happen. They were careless.

It dawned on me, probably a year ago, that the Taliban potentially have a great deal of power, but not because of any weaponry which they possessed, but because they wield an ideological club. There are a lot of rootless people looking for a way to make sense of their lives in the world. There are devastated people in Islamic countries, living in absolute poverty, and they flock to the people who have an uncompromising ideal. The Taliban have that and their ideal gives hope to the impoverished people.

Pakistan brought the Taliban into being, but I don’t think it’s in control anymore, because Pakistan itself has a huge, dissatisfied, restless mass of poor people who turn to the Islamists. So if the US makes a deal with Pakistan about controlling terrorism, it may not amount to much.
 

Q: How do you feel about becoming a celebrity overnight?

TA: Ever since September 11, I have been so overwhelmed by the consequences of that event and of my widely-distributed email that I haven’t really had time to experience any emotion. Every day, every minute is just so filled with things I must do. Then I got the contract to write my book and I wrote that — a 200 page book — by January 1. Since then I’ve been asked to speak and read at various venues, and also I’ve been involved with various projects in the Afghan community — as well as trying to catch up on what had been my normal life. But to the extent that I know how it feels to be an overnight celebrity, it feels like it’s happening to someone else, and I’m just there watching, a silent observer.
 

Q: I believe you went back last month after 36 years, but you stayed in Peshawar. What are your impressions?

TA: I was in Peshawar for two weeks. I was staying with the local branch of an Islamic relief organization called Life for Relief and Development, and they were very cordial, very generous. My first impression of Pakistan — upon landing in Islamabad — was that, after 36 years away from that part of the world, I instantly felt relaxed and comfortable.

My second impression was that there is something deeply relaxed in Peshawar: despite a tremendous vitality on the surface. In a lot of ways I thought Peshawar was exciting and beautiful. But it was also phenomenally polluted. For that reason alone, I think I couldn’t live in that city.
 

Q: Why couldn’t you go to Afghanistan from Pakistan, specially when the Northern Alliance had offered you to represent the new Afghanistan in the US, after you became well known?

TA: I was not barred from entering Afghanistan, but I was there with four other Afghan Americans from the Bay Area as representatives of the American Friends Service Committee and the Afghan Coalition of Fremont to distribute blankets to Afghan refugees. We had sent three forty-foot containers on ahead. One container came, and we distributed those blankets in the refugee camps in the NWFP along the border. But the other two got hung up in Pakistani customs in Karachi, and try as we did, we could not supply enough paperwork to satisfy those customs officials and get them to release the shipment. My time ran out before we could get the container.
 

Q: How do you, realistically, see the future of Afghanistan under the existing set up?

TA: Afghanistan can recover if the international community safeguards the peace and independence of the country, lends aid to clear the landmines and engages in a weapons buy-back to remove the millions of guns from the hands of the population.
 

Q: Will Afghan society accept the changes, which the West wants it to adopt?

TA: I think Afghanistan will find peace only if the international community, and the West in particular, keeps its hands off Afghan culture and allows Afghanistan to find itself as an Islamic country. If the West tries to insist that Afghanistan transform itself into a Western-style secular democracy it won’t happen.
 

Q: Has 36 years of stay in the US made you more American and less Afghan?

TA: Even from the start mine was a divided soul, because my mother was American. And 36 years have made me, I think, more American. I am an American among Afghans and an Afghan among Americans or the other way around, you can say.
 

Q: Is your book, the West of Kabul, east of New York, your own life story?

TA: It’s a memoir, which means it’s my life story mixed with my observations and opinions about the world I live in and the events I have seen — so it’s like a conversation I might have with a friend.
 

Q: Will you use the unexpected overnight celebrity status that you have achieved for self or for the country where your roots belong?

TA: A loaded question (laughs). For self I am automatically being benefited. I feel I am in a better position to do something for Afghanistan. I want to tell my fellow Americans to give peace to Afghanistan. Warlords cannot bring peace, it has to be a new generation, better educated with an infrastructure — roads, schools, health facilities. Don’t force your standards and cultural values. Do take what benefits you want — pipeline, minerals — but give peace to the Afghans and don’t leave them in the lurch.

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