Panjshir tourism

I took a little road trip to Panjshir yesterday with a tailor from down the street, his relative (can't remember know if cousin or brother-in-law), and a female Indian grad student who communicated with the tailor in funny half-English Hindi (("depend kerta hai" "kaafi cute hai"--Bengali's her first and English her second language) that he sometimes kinda understood.

Trying to pass for local in New Balance sneakers:

The valley is mostly Tajik, and famous for its resistance to the Soviets and then the Taliban under Ahmed Shah Massoud. The tailor I drove up with told me the previous night that he thought partition would be a good thing: leave the Pashtuns to fight among themselves, he was fed up with them.

The road through most of the valley has been paved over the past decade but there were a few scrabbly bits:



We left home early and arrived in my companions' village for a huge late breakfast of homemade dairy products (yogurt, doogh, bread stuffed with the curds left over from straining the liquid for doogh, butter, and the cream crust skimmed from the top of the yogurt) at the guesthouse of a local commander. I wasn't sure if we were being treated because we were foreigners or because the tailor's relative was a VIP or because the local commander was obliged to provide hospitality to constituents as a form of patronage (see Fredrik Barth, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans).

At any rate the tailor and his relative were friendly with him but seemed to take the commander's generosity for granted and didn't make a big show of thanking him or taarofing off his offers of mulberries and talkhan (a sweet made from pulverized dried mulberries with a rock-like consistency that had me a bit worried I would crack a tooth, though they apologized that it was all soft because it was warm; it was much better when cold and firmer. They told me that when the Panjsher was more or less under siege during the Soviet occupation and then at the peak of Taliban power and flour and salt were hard to come by, talkhan was a staple. Local myth is that the Soviets observed them eating the stuff and threw up their hands: These people eat stones; how can we fight them?)

I took this below picture later, during our lunch picnic of meat and bread and mangoes:

The fruit around here is amazingly tasty.

Cutting watermelon with an improbable California license plate:

At the commander's house in the morning we were given a mound of some of the best mulberries I've ever had, though they kept apologizing that it wasn't quite peak season:

Preparing hash. A friend of the guys driving me joined us with a lump of the stuff the size of an eyeball and made not the slightest effort to conceal it when we passed by police checkpoints.

I'm sure my camera and having an un-burqa'ed foreign women in the car earned us more attention, but still it seemed like a lot of Panjsheris spend their Fridays gawking at people driving down their one main road.

I got a second chance to photograph the chicken salesmen because after passing them we were held up for a few minutes at a checkpoint, not because of the hashish but because one of the guys was suspicious of us foreigners, and they got ahead of us again. When the plainclothes cop (?) asked what we were doing here and for our ID's the friend who had brought the hash started snapped at him that we were his guests and it was none of the cop's business. That got the cop angry and he made a point of slowly flipping through scrutinizing each of my Indian friend's visa stamps on her passport (which he held upside down).

At Ahmed Shah Massoud's tomb:

Other tourists climbed on the broken down Soviet APCs and tanks parked near his mausoleum:

games

My ex-neighbor invites himself over every few days to escape from his wife and children and use my internet (his ulterior motive in helping me get wired up thus revealed). At my house yesterday with his brother--who had just returned from India on business that went unspecified despite my probes--he told me that I should get myself a girlfriend here for the summer. I asked him how you meet women around here and he said usually over the phone. Sometimes you get their number from a friend or relative and other times you just dial random numbers and when you reach a girl with a pretty voice say oh sorry wrong number but strike up a conversation anyway. Then you talk and talk and maybe arrange to meet somewhere private like a restaurant if things really heat up. Indeed a few expats have told me that they sometimes get calls from completely random Afghan men who apologize for calling the wrong number but then start asking all about their lives instead of hanging up.

I'm turning into the grumpy old man next door. My other neighbor's boys, the older of whom is maybe 10 and has Down syndrome, have come up with a new game of repeatedly throwing their soccer ball up onto their slanted corrugated metal roof with BANG and a CHCHCHCHCH as it rolls back down to them so they can (it sounds like) compete to catch it. About 2% of the time (so every few minutes) it rolls off the roof into my courtyard. At first the older boy just threw himself against my front gate repeatedly with all his might but after I told him off now at least knocks more politely.

My browser history after letting my ex-neighbor use my laptop:

cantonments and conferences

The UN and western embassies have cordoned off a big chunk of town, in fact the same area where the British set up their military cantonment during the 1st Anglo-Afghan War and which is now call Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood after the man who personally killed the British Envoy in 1841. Karzai has conferred the Ghazi Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan Medal on successive US military commanders and ambassadors; I wonder if they appreciate the irony.



You pass the Iranian and Turkish embassies on a road that Google says is called Jade-e Solh (Peace Street) but that the only street signs I've noticed in the whole city label as Ankara Caddesi (in Turkish), and then reach blast walls and a heavily defended gate. Past the guards and you have to go down a long corridor, essentially a kill zone covered by heavy machine guns, before you reach the UNAMA compound.


At UNAMA they were in fact the most friendly and helpful of government people I've consulted about my research. So far my research has consisted just of social networking, trying to meet the people who know the right people who were working on the dam development project I'm studying back 4 years ago during the period I'm studying. And so far I have little to show--the turnover of international staff of government agencies and NGO is even faster than I had expected. Surprisingly it seem like journalists are the only ones who have been working on the same long-term projects for years--the Afghan government people and employees of aid organizations I've talk to have also shuffled around from office to office every few years.

The previous couple days I stopped in at the Second Conference of Islamic Cooperation for a Peaceful Future of Afghanistan at one of the 5-star hotels here. Maybe a hundred people, mostly clerics, had been invited from provinces across the country with a few foreign guests and a number of defectors from the Taliban. The only panel I listened to in it's entirety was the one on women's issues. All the panelists followed the line that Islam, real Islam (and what constituted real Islam was unsurprisingly the biggest point of debate of the conference), is the fundamental basis for women's rights and violence against women and denial of their education is un-Islamic. The first and only male speaker said something to the effect of We all know and say the first names of the Prophet's wives, but how many of us know the first names of each others wives (apparently it's a dishonor to have other men say one's wife's name)? Do we think we're better than the Prophet?
Since it was a gather of a bunch of preachers, the question-and-answer sessions were mostly just answer sessions, and the answers to the panelists of the women's rights session were mostly hostile. One mullah said that he thought the panelists were too vague about what they meant by violence against women, because after all if a woman was disobedient her husband had the right to refuse to sleep with her, and if even that didn't work, to beat her. Another cleric said that whenever there was violence against a woman there was actually another woman behind it, most likely the husband's wife or mother. He started to give an example of how foolish women stirred up trouble: in his town a woman wasn't letting her daughter marry because she was holding out for a better bride price and it was creating tension between families. One of the female speakers cut him off rebutting that if it was the case that women were thusly ignorant and foolish it was the fault of men for denying them a good Islamic moral education. That silenced him. A cleric from Al Azhar seminary in Egypt had the final word on women with a long argument in Arabic that nobody understood because there weren't translators on hand to give Arabic-English or Arabic-Persian or Arabic-Pashto simultaneous translations over our headsets.



Women came up again when they debated what revisions to make in the official statement of the conference, which was done by rough consensus--they would ask for a show of hands over who objected to an article or it's wording and if a bunch of hands went up they would go back to revising without counting who was in the majority (which I think makes much more sense than majority rule). One of the female speakers proposed an article specifically on concern over women but the counter-argument that won out was that many of the articles talked generally about society and violence therein and it went without saying that women were a part of society. The angriest debate in the revision session was actually over the confusing grammar of a sentence that read something like "we are concerned that violence and....will contribute to an increase in violence and discord..."


During one of the tea breaks I sat on the floor with a recently defected Taliban commander from Kandahar who was talking to a female Indian grad student through a translator. He claimed that he had left the Taliban because it was the Pakistanis directing them, though he had only defected last year after 17 years as a military commander so there must have been more to the story than a suddenly realization that Pakistan was using the Taliban as a proxy, but he was sticking to this safe talking point.
He joked that India and Afghanistan should partition Pakistan between them. Later the Indian grad student told me that the former Talib had confided in the translator that he felt hatred her when he first saw her because due to her dark skin he'd assumed she was Pakistani or Kashmiri. Apparently she's always reassuring people that she's from India and not Pakistan--just goes to show how nationalism very much trumps any kind of pan-Islamic sentiment among most people around here.

kickboxing

I just attended my first kickboxing class today. It was held in the sweat-smelling basement of a bodybuilding gym half-lit by a couple bare lightbulbs. Which is awesome--feels like a real fight club. The huge guy upstairs apparently ripped me off taking double the monthly rate of about $8, but my new coach, who's maybe 30 and very martial-looking and unbelievably flexible, is honest and seemed embarrassed until we decided the huge guy must have just taken 2 months up front. I kinda wanted to pay double though.

The students from boys of about 8 to men of about 30. There was brief sparring at the end, and they (including the eight-year-olds) fought hard, full-on head kicks and multiple stoppages for bleeding. Two of the young'uns were reduced to tears. Offense seems to be prioritized over defense at this club: hands low they just charged and destroyed each other without blocking anything. When someone landed a particularly resonant head kick or dropped their opponent everyone applauded, but there were none of the constant reminders from the audience to keep hands up and keep up evasive head movement that I'm used to from my gym in the US.
This might be a bad idea--black eyes will likely be frowned up in interviews I conduct and at the archives. But for the moment I'm very much enjoying the endorphins and kicking back with a non-alcoholic beer.

I managed to commit the big old faux pas of stepping on a prayer rug in my sambo shoes right in front of a guy who I hadn't noticed was praying, and another, who had been kicking the heavy bag (literally a giant sack bulging with I don't know what) in a shalwar kamiz, jumped forward to lead me off the rug shaking my hand saying No problem no problem as I stammered an apology.
Still I think I made a decent first impression as foreign novelty, though my Persian anatomical/athletic vocabulary needs--and will get--a lot of work.

Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children

Last night I attended a movie night/fundraiser for a Kabul-Istanbul rickshaw journey by Annika, German anthropology student, and Adnan, an Indian-Canadian journalist. They both work for the children's circus that was founded here in 2002 and trains local kids as performers. The idea is to stop in refugee camps and collaborate with children's aid organizations along the route to perform and plant the seeds for more circus franchises.

They had the rickshaw custom made in Jalalabad (with the steering wheel on the left, which will make driving harder in Pakistan but easier elsewhere, though rearview visibility is I think be the least of the rickshaw's problems driving on Iranian and Turkish highways).

What was different and welcome was that most of the people working for the circus have been doing so for 5 or 10 years--Annika at 8 months was I think the newest recruit and she's stayed the whole eight months without the frequent R&R or international conference hopping of most NGO and foreign government people. Without exaggeration, the majority of the NGO people I've talked to have been here for less than 6 months and are already thinking of moving on to other countries.

Annika swinging flames:

The woman next to me put a hundred dollar bill in Annika's cap after the performance, just to spite me. They're collecting donations for the trip here as well:

http://www.indiegogo.com/rickshawcircus

They seem to be really into weird artificial energy drinks around here. At least at the convenience stores I've been to so far, there's been more brand variety to energy drinks than to just about anything else.

Speaking of drinks, one sector where in my opinion the Iranian label has foreign competitors, including the Germans, beat for quality is non-alcoholic beer. If marketed well as a less sickly sweet more full-bodied alternative to soft drinks I think Delster could make it big in the US.

a few bazaar pics

 The best kebab I've had yet in Afghanistan:

          

Money market. The guys up on the balcony haggling with the guys below over ever-changing exchange rates.

The guys with the pimped out Pakistani taxi on the left were good enough to help us fix a flat. I looked and couldn't find a non-Toyota out of hundreds of cars parked along the river.

Back in 2008 a professor who'd spent years in Afghanistan commented to out class that it was a disgrace that nothing had been done to clean up the Kabul river hadn't after 6 years of foreign aid. Now it's been 10 and it still looks and smells like a cesspool. My friend who was guiding me around said that the people working at the bazaar have nowhere else to use for a latrine since there are no public toilets to be found and they're stuck there all day.

Of course as a former USAID employee (who was very critical of her past employer) pointed out, Kabulis don't seem to remember that there didn't used to be near constant electricity or perfect cell phone reception.

I'm amazed I haven't had any stomach problems yet in Kabul, especially after drinking a glass of the roadside ground sugar cane juice being made below from a communal roadside glass.

zelzele

Apparently there was an earthquake yesterday morning in Kabul that I managed to not even notice. Everyone else has stories of what they were doing when they felt it and how they initially thought they were crazy. Dozens died in Baghlan to the north. Electricity has been out since then, but apparently only on my block.

archives, male bonding, Turkish business

I've spent the last week trying to get access to primary source materials--which may or may not exist--from the First Anglo-Afghan War from the National Archives. Every time I go there's more waiting and new heads of such-and-such departments to meet and then I'm told that it's out of their hands and they have to get extra special permission for me and they'll try their hardest and I should come back in a day or four. I was warned that getting into the archives would be difficult and based mostly on how well-liked I made myself. The archives of the Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, are apparently simply impossible to get into. Even the Foreign Minister (and keep in mind that I don't bother fact-checking anything I write here, just repeat juicy tidbits I've been told) hasn't been inside. People at a research organization here told me that a while back an archivist from Cornell University had come to start cataloguing/organizing the Foreign Ministry archives and the Saudi government had even agreed to fund it all, but then when he showed up they told him he would have to do his cataloguing/organizing from outside the building.
I'm guessing the German government is the main backer of the national archives because all the display cases on one side of the main hall of different periods of Afghan history--which they've repeatedly suggested should be sufficient for doctoral research--are quadrilingual: Persian, Pashto, English, and German--and there are multiple display cases mentioning Afghan-German relations over the past two centuries (glossing over the period of courtship of Afghanistan by Nazi Germany). The other side of the main hall is all calligraphy, mostly in Persian with a smattering of Pashto. A group of schoolgirls were on there on a field trip yesterday, lining up to sign the guest book:

A couple evenings ago I joined live music night with a group of about ten men from the country's tip-top elite and two foreign women (the host said he was planning to invite five more beautiful women but his VIP guests had to be careful about word of them singing and dancing and imbibing getting out). The musicians were, my friend who kept making sure that I didn't think they were gay for dancing together told me, the direct descendants of Indian Muslim musicians who Ahmad Shah Abdali brought back to Kabul after sacking Delhi in one of his mid-18th century invasions of India. The three of them played, respectively, tabla, plucked rabab, and harmonium, and played what sounded to me--a complete laymen when it comes to ethnomusicology--like Indian rhythms with classical poetry for lyrics. The singer would recite one poem in Persian and then without stopping or as far as I noticed changing beat move on to a Pashto or Urdu poem that it took me a while to realize was a different language I didn't understand. Each line was repeated twice, and particularly deep Sufi mystical lines about selfhood or evaluating life would be greeted by cheers and repeated by the whole group the second time around. Sometimes just two men would get up and dance together and sometimes a group of five would do a semi-coordinating twirly circle dance together. Much giddiness. To express appreciation when the tabla player played an especially virtuosic solo or the singer belting out especially profound lyrics, men would dance over the the carpet on which the players sat cross-legged and elaborately toss a 500 or 1000 afghani note in front of them.

My friend I tagged along with to an expat dinner party last night told me to bring my passport, and that the host had been relieve that she wasn't bringing any Afghans with her as that would create [security?] problems. Many restaurants that cater to expats actually won't allow Afghans to enter, with the semi-official justification that they serve alcohol and even less official justification that it would make the expats and their security contractors worried about safety.

I had mango juice today with a financial consultant, from a firm whose selling point for the internationals is that it employs real Afghans who've lived in Afghanistan most of their lives (but have Western educations and values). I was about 40 minutes late. As I'm gradually learning, the walled garden cafes and restaurants where the elite hang out are mostly hidden away behind heavy gates with no outside signs so ordinary people in the neighborhood don't even know they exist (and so can't provide you with directions). The drivers of international organizations know where they are, but not regular taxi drivers.
Mostly we talked about my research project, which has been going nowhere so far, and his firm's frantic push to diversify as much as possible to the "real economy" (stuff like transportation and mining) before the aid market shrinks with the expected 2014 pullout of US/NATO troops. Right now their clients are mostly governments and aid organizations, and it seems to me the niche they've carved out as "authentic yet efficient" Afghans is one that can thrive most in an artificial "capacity building" economy.
The consultant also mentioned to me that in Kabul--though not Herat--the Turks have been far outcompeting the Iranians when it comes to exports and contracting, in part because Turkey isn't seen as having a meddling political interest. Many people have in fact started boycotting Iranian businesses, a bandwagon his firm has jumped on to show off their corporate ethics, with poor Iranian treatment of Afghan refugees as the proximate rallying cry. That leaves Turkish and Chinese imports of stuff like furniture and housewares and the former have a better reputation for quality. I feel I've been devoting too much of this blog to Iran-bashing, but it just keeps coming up.

roads

The assumption seems to be that it won't rain. There are a lot of improvised electrical connections (see below) exposed to the elements, and big mounds of cement powder beside the ubiquitous roadside construction sites. In some cases it seems that rain did hit unexpectedly, turning the mounds rock solid and adding to traffic woes. Though there's work being done all day all over town, it seems that they're mostly digging trenches for the wide, deep, open gutters or doing construction on private property. Outside of the main thoroughfares, there are not so much roads in the positive sense as unbuilt spaces between gutters. 10 years and who knows how many billions of dollars of development aid have come here, and the roads in front of the aid organizations' headquarters in the capital still haven't been paved.

I've never experienced traffic like in Kabul. I've been in traffic about as slow and frustrating, but never where we were constantly backing up for incoming traffic coming down a single lane (nothing is marked as one way that I have seen, and I'm not sure it would matter if it were) or pulling to the side right just about to tip over the edge of the open gutter so they could squeeze past us with a scrape. 

Unfortunately I didn't have my phone out when former presidential candidate Dr. Abdullah walked by with his entourage, picking his way through the idling Toyotas. I've noticed that Toyota is far and away the top brand here, whether for sedans, SUVs or pickups. I've noticed just a few Nissans, Mercedes, and one VW Beetle. I had kinda been expecting to see Fords and Chevys everywhere.

Most expats avoid the marked "local taxis" for fear of kidnapping, instead using call-for-pickup driving services that charge a flat rate of $5 or 250 afghani per neighborhood traversed. They accept US dollars just about everywhere expensive, and you actually get a better exchange rate (50:1) paying for your clothes and meals in dollars than you do from roadside or office money changers (48:1).

commenting fix

I didn't realize that the default setting was that only registered users could comment. I've fixed that now so you can comment all you like anonymously.

DIY

I spent much of the day helping my soon-to-be-ex-neighbor set up my internet connection, meaning pull a telephone wire out his window, untangle it from a tree and some other wires, tossing it onto my roof, an feeding it down my skylight into the living room. Actually I mostly took photos while he did the work. You can't really appreciate from that picture just how many wires were snaked and looped through that tree.

His estimates of when he would come to my house/get stuff done have been 2-24 hours too optimistic, but nonetheless as far as I understand he's done me a huge favor asking nothing in return. Of course I really have no way of knowing if I'm somehow getting screwed over,  if he invented or exaggerated the 1500 afghani start-up fee or 3000 afghani monthly cost, but he seems a good guy and those are the same figures cited by the absentee Iranian whose house I'm staying in. That's my share of a total 6000 afghani (about $120) split 50/50 with the new neighbor who's replacing him for 512 kbps service. You see we're reaching an, um informal arrangement, whereby we pay the company for only one high-speed connection and have an ethernet cable reaching from my living room across over the street to them. In theory this makes sense because the new neighbor moving in is a "logistics company" which will be using the internet during then day when I'm out, and I'll have it all to myself in the evening. So instead of each individually paying half as much for a 256 kbps connection we get a connection that will be the same speed when we're both using it (assuming they actually only have one computer as they told me but which I seriously doubt is the case in an office) and twice as fast the majority of the time when only one of us is using it. We'll see how it works once they've moved in, but for the moment my connection is surprisingly fast so far, better than any of the others I've used so far in the country.

And I seem to be getting the better end of the bargain because now the router is in my house, so (as far as I understand) it will work faster on my end and they run the risk that I'll [accidentally] unplug their ethernet cable rather than the other way around. Before it was in the ex-neighbor's house, but I guess it was because he likes us more that we transferred the cables and router to our house. Actually his motives are still very unclear to me.

It goes without saying that $120/month for internet service about 1/30 the speed of a high-speed connection in New York is really expensive. And that's just for the best service using standard 2-copper-wires telephone line rather than the coaxial or fiberoptic high-speed connections--my soon-to-be-ex-neighbor said those cost $500-600 monthly.

And after yet another interlude water is flowing again, and hot. The neighbor and I decided that the pump must be broken because plugging it in made the electrical meter read that it was consuming lots of energy but it did nothing, but the owner showed up this afternoon and discovered that something or other had just burned out and rigged this up:

It works. He says he'll even install a device so the tank automatically refills itself (another neighbor had a minor flood from their roof today, making me feel less stupid for the one I effected from my own tank yesterday). It turns out that the lack of hot water was entirely my own fault--I'd closed off that tap fiddling with the water heater the other day.

At a research institute I visited yesterday they mentioned in passing that a coworker had recently gotten electrocuted attempting such improvisation while standing in a puddle.

More on Mina's backstory:
Previously she'd told me that she was Panjsheeri. It had come up when I noticed that we have a mulberry tree and asked when they'd be ripe. Mina said not to bother with these mulberries; they were no good; I had to try the mulberries in the Panjsheer valley, where she was from.
But as it turned out that though that's where her folks are from originally she's never lived there, and just went there to visit three times with my absentee roommate. She grew up in Kabul but then her family went to Iran when Najubullah was president (so late 80s-early 90s, before the civil war period as usually delineated) and lived in Karaj and Tehran and another town in the area I'd never heard of for 19 years. She got married and had four kids but then her husband died and the cost of living in Iran was too expensive so she had to come back here. She liked Karaj a lot more.

misunderstandings

I'd like to think that I grasp the custom of taarof by now, but I really don't. I moved into a new house two days ago, which a friend of a friend who's out of the country is renting (I thought he owned it until the realtor showed up yesterday saying we owed him a lot of money). His servant/cook Mina is taking care of the house in his absence, and when I called her Sunday afternoon to say I would move in that evening after dinner she said Come for dinner. I thanked her and demurred (figuring it was taarof) but she insisted so I arrive there at about 6pm. As it turned out, there actually wasn't any food at all in the house and she was about to leave to go back to her place, so I had to go back to the guesthouse where I'd been staying and then head out to a restaurant with a couple grad students also in town to do research. We went to Afghan Fried Chicken, which luckily served other food as well, and sitting (because they were female) upstairs in the family salon we were serenaded by a man performing very loud Bollywood love songs on a keyboard. Midway through the meal, a guy in a giant mouse costume did a lap around the family salon (we were the only ones there) and then walked entered the VIP where a group of serious-looking men had sat down a few minutes early. After just seconds the man in the mouse costume beat a hasty retreat from the VIP room and headed back downstairs. Under the costume he had dress shoes and what looked like fancy suit trousers on.

A second misunderstanding with Mina has been water, which keeps getting cut off but which returns every time she's here, meaning that she clearly understands what the issue is and how to turn the water back on. She seems to be under the impression that because I'm foreign and have difficulty with her accent sometimes I'm incapable of understanding anything. Or maybe she wants to avoid burdening me with unnecessary details. At any rate every morning I call her (she shows up just for a few hours in the afternoon) to ask why the water isn't working now and every morning she wants me to fetch the boy across the street (I'm not sure what the usage of pesar means in this context as he looks to be in his late 30s: I suppose it means that he's a servant? Or that he's unmarried? Or it's just an informal way of saying guy?) so she can give him instructions; I was close to yelling at her this morning telling her, No just tell me what to do and I'll do it. As it turned out, the solution I finally coaxed out of her of reseting the circuit breaker to the pump delivering water up to the tank on the roof did nothing. Then a few hours ago the landlord walked up while I was ringing the bell of the house next door--having already sufficiently annoyed the pesar across the street--to ask if they knew what the problem was. He said he'd take care of it and walked away and two minutes later the faucets were gushing. 10 minutes after that water was gushing down out of the tank off my roof because apparently the pump is actually quite efficient. I took my first shower in three days--about 30 seconds boiling hot and then ice cold.

I'm tempted to go running back to organization's guest house for $50/day. 

Culture Wars

I was at the Kabul University library today, and its stacks have been partitioned into something like spheres of foreign influence, with the librarians forced to juggle multiple classification systems to find anything. The library was practically empty after a decade of civil war and then Taliban rule, so the US government donated a few thousand books barcoded according to the Library of Congress system. The German government donated a few thousand books classified by International Standard Book Numbers (is that a completely different system?). The Asia Foundation donated a few thousand books and I didn't think to ask which classification system they used. The Iranian government donated a few thousand books classified with its own system (whose name I can't remember... starts with an s...) that was designed to be based in Farsi because with other systems in find Persian books one has to transliterate them into the Latin alphabet and not everyone transliterates the same consistent way.

To one side, the displays of Iranian and American government funded reading rooms face off against one another. The American side has a row of posters on the theme "The Road to Equality: How American Women Won the Vote." The Iranian reading room entrance is flanked by a larger-than-life bust of the Islamic ideologue (and also alleged British intelligence agent and Freemason, though I doubt the Iranian government wanted to highlight that aspect of his life) Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who one librarian told me with annoyance the Iranians claimed was one of their own and not really Afghan (though in this case I think most scholars agree that he was an Iranian Shiite trying to pass himself off as Afghan to appeal to the broader Sunni audience). 180 degree view:



UPDATES: I'm told that in Iran they refer to him as Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (which is in fact the name of the main street and square in my old neighborhood of Youssef Abad in Tehran, but I never bothered looking it up) after his hometown of Asadabad. But in fact now that I actually read the inscription under the bust, I see that it says

بسی رنج بردم در این سال سی

عجم زنده کردم بدین پارسی

I took many pains over these thirty years

I brought life to Achaemenid [civilization] with this Parsi (as Farsi was referred to back in the day and still is when Iranians want to remind you that they're heirs to thousands of years of civilization)

Those lines are the (rather pompous) wrap-up of the Shahnameh, meaning that bust is of the poet Ferdowsi (a much less surprising choice for the Iranian government to place outside its reading room). Very interesting that a senior librarian told me it was Afghani/Asadabadi...

The same librarian was keen to differentiate between Iranian Farsi and Afghan Dari, a point that came up when I commented glancing at a newspaper after lunch that in Iran America was spelled differently. This is something like calling American and British English two different languages: they stem from exactly the same origin and the written language is almost completely identical, but branched off with the separation of the populations by political boundaries and now the accent and slang of speakers of the two dialects are quite different (though this gap tends to narrow with education).

50 years ago, he claimed, Dari and Pashto were both their own pure languages, but then much country's population to had fled to Pakistan or Iran during the war and then brought back the vocabularies and expressions of those places with them. Now a Pashto sentence was often two words of Pashto, three of Urdu, and one of Farsi. There has also been deliberate foreign influence, he said, and depending on newspapers' political affiliations and their foreign backers, along with (relatedly) the migration history of their writers, they write in more Farsi vs. Dari styles. Farsi was creeping into Dari in other ways too, he said. Sometimes publishers took Farsi books and just changed the covers and titles and called them Dari, which then contributed to the shift in accepted "standard Dari" to incorporate more Farsi.

Questionable historiography aside, I can sympathize with resistance to the patronizing attitude of the Iranian government and Iranians more generally towards the rest of the Persianate world.

In telling me about how the university library was classifying all the incoming books, the librarian said that they didn't want to just adopt the system that the Iranians had come up with, despite it being better suited to their script that LoC or ISBN, because that would mean changing the Dari language itself to conform to Farsi logic of titles and authors and subjects (I should have asked him for an example--very interesting and Foucauldian in theory but I don't know what that would mean in practice). The librarians here would try to adopt elements of the Iranian system for a Dari-based classification, but that would take years.

By contrast, everybody at the organization where I'm saying calls their language Farsi, though now I'm thinking perhaps for my benefit. The yard keeper, who lived in Iran for 6 years, said he would speak Irani with me so I could better understand him (something like offering to speak Australian).

This was an interesting find (though an inappropriate use of hipstamatic camera mode): a book written by an Afghan named Mohammad Ali in the imperial language about a period of British domination and Afghan resistance that another Afghan had then struggled to read, writing Persian translations in the margins and underlined difficult phrases. The author's narrative is itself an odd mix of nationalism and admiration for the British. Incidentally the afghani-US dollar exchange rate is not too different now than it was when this book came out in (if I remember correctly) 1959. It's 48:1 now and the book's price is 100 afghani or 2 1/2 dollars.

As he drove me back home, I mentioned this to my colleague and he told me that a few months ago there had been a big dustup a few months ago over the very label of the university: instead of the Farsi--sorry, Dari--word daneshgah, a group was pushing for it to be called a po'intun (at least that's what I remember it sounding like), the Pashto word for university, along with changes in the names of departments, etc. In the end no changes had been made. My colleague said that in fact it was only changed to Daneshgah-e Kabul 15 or 20 years ago, I'm guessing when the Panjsheri Tajiks took the city. I should do a little more research to see exactly when and how this happened, and why the Taliban didn't change it back when the university was reopened under their control.

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first impressions

I walked around town for a couple hours todays. I really like the way Afghans dress. And their accents for that matter, much more dignified than the singsongy Iranian way of speaking, and especially the baby talk you hear from rich fake-blonde daafs in Tehran. All the biggest buildings seemed to be either selling construction materials or wedding salons.

Thus far almost everyone I've met and even all the Afghans I've been told I should talk to--admittedly not a representative slice of the population--have lived abroad, whether in the US, Germany, or Iran, or at least have siblings overseas. More than one has told me they plan on leaving Afghanistan soon. One colleague at the organization where I'm staying, for example, has two brothers working at a casino in Las Vegas, who he wants to join, and his mother is if I remember correctly in Boston. He applied for an immigrant visa to the US back in 2002 with his father as a sponsor, but then after six years of waiting on the application process his father died and so he has had to start all over with his mom as sponsor.
I'm certainly not the first one two notice that much of the (especially the technocratic) elite is composed of returnees, but it's nonetheless surprised me just how many people I've met so far seem to be keeping one foot in the door of another country.