What Afghanistan Means to Me
um hello everybody
um i was asked to talk about something
something that is very familiar to all
of us
we all know that suddenly the world
changed and we entered the 21st century
me and like me millions of others we
entered the 21st century
with a hope with a smile we thought okay
time of war is over a time of
devastation is over a time of slashing
and beating and cutting hands is over
and so we can actually think right now
again within
as a human being of what to do
but there was also something else
happening that is still us
being naive as being
completely like living in afghanistan
had no idea
about it and don’t know how to deal with
it and it was for the first time in our
history
afghanistan and afghans in general
confronted with a new phenomenon and
that phenomenon was called
international community suddenly
thousands and thousands of
internationals from across the world
from europe america japan asia
everywhere
they poured into afghanistan and they
said we want to help you
and we want to help you build a new
country
built a most civilized society
and for us yes despite all devastations
i never thought that we are not
civilized
but we were still happy when i said all
right it’s a message of hope
and we embraced it with our heart the
only problem was that none of us
my generation and kabul
encouraged parliament where i grew up or
around in the larger kind of a
if you put in the larger context of all
afghanistan we do not know how to talk
with international we don’t know how to
even explain what we need
or what we want yes we were smiling we
were happy we were like going around
there was no sense of fear anymore
but we didn’t know how to communicate
with them we didn’t know
how to speak proper english or english
at all
we didn’t know how to even explain in
ourselves and
normal words and we didn’t know how to
connect with them more importantly
as human to human and explain ourselves
that was all right we didn’t know it in
the beginning
and decisions were made about
afghanistan
new constitution was established new
government was established
contrition was ratified
and we started to actually suddenly for
the first time in our history
on a massive scale on a massive scale
confront the whole world
and by confronting the whole well this
question of like who we are in this new
world
in the age of globalization in the age
of human rights
in the age of women rights and the age
that there is no borders actually and
you can
just go around and we were allowed to
travel even before that
it was almost impossible for the
africans to travel legally
unless they have to go and find some
safety in the refugee camps in iran or
pakistan
or some went to the west so
in that thing in that moment
i i that question started burning in me
and i was just graduated from the
medical
university as a young kind of a
practitioner of medicine
and i worked in the hospital for a while
but then in my mind that was burning we
were introduced for the for the first
time with a concept such as civil
society
are freedom of speech you have the right
to explain yourself without fear and it
was like wow that’s wonderful
and oh these women’s have right to be
they
they are not property they are human
beings they have the same
right as you so there was like exciting
moments we were like full of life
but also full of confusion in other
sense because we don’t know
how to even digest all that information
and all that
rights specifically because we didn’t
know
when we talked we sat down with the
friends we for the first time we started
to go for picnics we went to somalia to
saw land to pakeman to bombion
traveling around and just sitting with
people and talking and we were asking
these questions like
oh we have the freedom of speech
but what that mean i don’t know we have
rights to be
to kind of express our opinions you have
the right to to to
to to to the court without being
prosecuted without being
beaten to death for something and we
it was great things but we didn’t know
so what and then a lot of people came a
lot of afghans returned from
abroad those who were living as refugees
and those who
left and left for as immigrants in the
west
and meeting with them was another
challenge for us because they came up
with the new world views
with the new ideas with the new thoughts
about and their completely new
experience
about life and how life how life
what life meant for them yes and i saw
i i grew up in a kind of rather closed
now comparatively speaking like a kabul
despite being metropolitan and stuff
suffered during the war but it was a
close society
and now facing with all these new people
in my mind it was like
they were talking to me about the issues
of the concepts that
about like how they thought about
afghanistan what afghanistan is
about their grieves about their hopes
that i couldn’t connect
easily for instance they talked about
their like
i realized that afghanistan despite
my thought that it was always like a
country i realized that we
had so much divisions we have suffered
so much and we are divided by so many
problems
that needs time to be addressed now how
to understand these problems
so despite a lot of hope that was
surrounding me
and surrounding the whole like felt the
air
there was a fear also fear started to
grow up in me a concern maybe a better
word
that concerned that like
what’s going to happen to us again how
are we going to define ourselves
in this world in this time
in a which that i’m confronting with so
many new people
they’re my people but they’re also so
different
than me sometimes better sometimes worse
it doesn’t matter but
so different
but in the midst of all of it
one day in the midst of all of it i i
felt that yes there’s a lot of
differences between us
there’s a lot of injustices that in a
way shape our own history
there’s a lot of problems tragedies but
also great things
there was some level of connection that
i never found
despite my interaction with many people
around the world
a level of connection with this
the other afghans whether they came from
iran or or pakistan whatever
there was some level of connection that
cannot it was
it was i felt it that i could not
explain it so
and in my mind it kind of it was it that
question of
who we are become even more and more and
we’re relevant and more and more
stronger
one day i was invited and i think the
luck struck
one day i got a phone call i got a job
to work as a board assistant and the
organization called foundation for
culture and civil society a newly
established
organization in kabul in 2003
and its aim was to promote avon culture
and civil society so our society for me
was completely new concept i didn’t know
but i thought i liked the people sitting
together and having conversation and
thinking about like
we have to do this and we have to
promote this kind of rights we have to
talk to the
people of the villages they have to have
a voice in the government these things
were interesting for me
i didn’t know i was just sitting down on
the corner and just taking notes of the
people
and one day the head of the organization
he called me and says oh we’re having a
talk today
there is a guy called whitney azoy he’s
invited he wrote a book on
a long time ago and about um
the title of the book is buskashi game
and politics in afghanistan
and he says why don’t you come and
listen to his talk and i was invited in
a wedding party
at the same time i kind of like
make it was hard for me to make a
decision because the wedding party was
my friends
but the other day i decided like okay
let me go and listen to the talk so i
went and this guy
an anthropologist himself he was talking
about his experience his
life living in kunduz province in kunduz
and tahar province
and looking at the life of the people
during the period of
before the war before the soviet
invasion
and i kind of explained the social
structure the dynamics
the cultural traditions the
people-to-people contract
how authority was defined there how
buskashi a common game in afghanistan
in fact represents in fact kind of is a
mirror that explains how
different society especially the
communities in the northeast of
afghanistan
organize themselves i was captivated by
this talk
so i went to after the talk i went to
this person and says
how do you know about us that much i
grew up here i don’t know
like you explained in a way that i felt
it all the time but i was never even
able to put my thoughts into words
so how you did that he looked at me and
i just gave him my card and says well
why don’t you come back
a few next in a few days we will have a
conversation so i went to his
office a few days later and um
he was sitting with his wife and we had
a conversation about obama’s and he told
me the stories
of his life in 1970s as an american
diplomat
first and then an american scholar
researcher in afghanistan
travels in the north and the south
especially the northeast areas
and he asked me what do you want in life
now
i was in a hospital and
um i worked in the hospital and stuff i
working with a cell society
but then i thought well i want to study
abroad
i want to know the way you know i want
to know how you think
and have the ability to kind of trans
translate my thoughts into words
with that he just he gave me a paper and
says okay i want because his wife was a
spanish he
asked me if write the every name
of the city in spain the original name
in arabic because
spain was controlled part of the by the
kind of as we call it
part of like the islamic world for a
long time so i sit down and just those i
remembered from the school period i
wrote it down
and then in a way he encouraged me to
apply
and apply for a scholarship called
fulbright
i was graduated from medical school so i
went apply to the fulbright in that time
and it was a long process i really don’t
want to go through that but
when i got my acceptance like i was
accepted
when i got my acceptance letter from the
universe columbia university
it was says we congratulate you we are
that you are accepted
in the school of um arts and sciences
and i thought okay now they’re going to
put me in a
institute of nara isabel because for me
arts and sciences means like i
go and study like music and i didn’t
want to study music as with all these
due respect for musicians and stuff
so i but then i came home
and i was literally didn’t want to go to
to the states and i thought i don’t want
to be a musician i’m not actually good i
don’t even have a good voice
but then somebody told me that no no
don’t worry about it just go
and nobody knew enough in my
neighborhood what arts and sciences
means
so when i went there i realized that
actually arts and sciences imply
humanities too social sciences too it’s
just not about arts in a way that
we define it in african-america which is
a respectable
uh subject to study i went and i studied
abroad and after i finished i i came
back and i started to work
and i wrote and i tried to tell as a
master’s program in a master’s program
i tried to i studied i graduated but
even more questions came into my mind
about
the more i studied afghanistan
academically the more i looked at it
in different layers i realized that
avonuzon is in a way
like every other country and also like
no other country
it’s the only country that’s in the
whole region that’s never been directly
colonized
and it’s a multi-ethnic multi-linguistic
multi-sectarian
country but unlike
any other country in the region it does
not have
a separatist movement nobody wants to
separate from it
while every every ethnic group in
afghanistan was to
kind of have their co-ethnics across
the bound borders of afghanistan so when
i just realized that okay there must be
something different
it might sounds in a way taken for
granted might take him for granted for
most of us we just see it as what it is
but if you look at it from like a more
theoretical perspective if you compare
it with all the theories of
like political science about ethnic
politics about
governance about state formation this is
an anomaly
it doesn’t exist especially a muslim
world and i thought i
found a way to move on with my phd
so this is like a golden question for me
if that is an anomaly that cannot be
explained
despite all the explanations that people
give but cannot academically
explained it requires to
to go deeper into it and that’s why
after a few years of working in
afghanistan
in new afghanistan i went for the phd i
graduated i came back
and i studied anthropology
took me six years people think that it’s
easy but actually it was a
most difficult period of my life because
i had to live with
cans of being lubia as we call it
for weeks because student life is a poor
life whether you want it or not whether
you where wherever you study it
and i came not from like a wealthy
family but from a middle class
avon family so now i’m back in
afghanistan i’m just like
equipped with more some answers i found
i wrote my dissertations about these
questions
and i’m if i can say there is one answer
for that there is none
but i realized that there’s something in
afghanistan there’s something
that cannot be politically explained
sometimes cannot be mathematically
defined
but if we look at the culture as the way
we think as human beings
as individuals and also as societies as
communities
as youth or not as men or women
there’s something more and that’s i can
call it culture
something that in a way binds people and
that is based
not on something artificial it’s not
based on their state policies
it comes from a long history it comes
from a deep cultural
traditions it is based on something that
exists in our minds and hearts and it’s
and there is no way to kind of put it
into one word or one sentence but all i
can say
that this the shared experience of
happiness and pain
and misery and smile
and pain and relief and the fact that
the afghan societies itself hold each
other together
the fact that no state ever
put us together but we came together
based on certain
understandings and thoughts and feelings
no matter the historical
circumstances especially in the modern
history especially in the 1990s
when the state collapsed in the country
when there was no police
there was no army and yet communities
managed to hold
itself together following nothing
very fancy their traditions their heart
their faith and their beliefs and i
think that
to me excuse me has been
one of the main factors that kind of
may be able to answer us that who we are
as
africans right published my book and i
realized
during my whole experience as a student
as a scholar and as an ordinary person
as a doctor as a civil society activist
as just a normal human being as a coach
a geek
part one with all of that i i realize
that
the experience of what we’ve faced what
we’ve experienced
in the last 40 years especially post
2001
we are going through a process of
cultural rebirth in which
us and again us not as individuals
only but as individuals and as a
communities but as a community that’s
not very only inward but the community
that are connected with the larger world
are trying to redefine ourselves as who
we are
as much as traditions hold us together
and help us to kind of define ourselves
in certain periods of time
that traditions are not something frozen
in time
that traditions that history that
understanding that psychology that we
have
are helping us in this period
to move ahead and redefine afghanistan
again
not on the realities of the past but on
the facts and hopes of the future
and the present and the future i’m
saying that because i know that today we
are facing again
with a very major challenge a challenge
that
threatens some of the best achievements
that we have
an achievement that’s maybe not tangible
because it doesn’t bring money
but it brings hope and it brings meaning
like our
rights as human beings our rights as
women and men of this country
our right to have ability to explain
ourselves and it’s a right to live with
dignity
these are the the factors these are the
concepts these are the
elements that actually can define
afghanistan in the 21st century and
again
help us to move ahead despite all the
problems and if that is that or lost
then we are truly we probably gonna have
to ask this question from us again
what we are doing and what we are and
who we are
i’m personally very hopeful because i
know that despite all the challenges
there is some vital force there’s an
energy inside
us an energy that cannot be quantified
by
data cannot be explained only by surveys
cannot be seen through just
only academic or scientific or
cultural or even religious eyes
or views it’s something that’s a
combination of all of it and some that’s
kind of a vital force that will keep us
together
and will help us to move beyond the
challenge
of today that threatens the very basic
rights
that well that defined us in the
beginning of the 20th century
21st century and hopefully continue to
shape mold and structures us our being
for the remaining of this century