been to their ceremonies, and they are very beautiful.” In the first years after the Taliban were driven from Mazar, the Zoroastrian families had thought about coming out into the light. “But not anymore, not now, anyway,” the young journalist said. “I can’t write this for the newspapers here. I can’t write about religious things.”
The subject had come up as we were talking about Mazar’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Both the government and the people were committed to social and economic progress. The city’s Shia and Sunni Muslims coexisted and prayed together in traditions inflected by Sufism, Islam’s mystical cosmopolitanism. Women were not expected to closet themselves away in kitchens or hide themselves underneath burqas. But by standing out as a rebuke to the religious fanaticism that had for so long stultified civilized life from Persepolis to Peshawar, Mazar was being targeted for jihadist subversion. Among the radical mullahs who were quickly growing in influence in the city was the Sunni reactionary Mawlawi Abdul Qahir Zadran. He’d spent time in Pakistan, he was a powerful orator and he seemed to have a lot of money. You could buy his CDs and tapes in the markets. In Zadran’s sermons, Muslims who failed to cleave to Deobandist discipline were apostates. Americans were invaders and crusaders. Schoolgirls were prostitutes.
The young journalist and I talked about Iran, about the colleges the Tehran regime was opening on the outskirts of Mazar and the propaganda the Khomeinists were finding ways to get into the Afghan news media. As the “war-weary” Western world was losing interest in the cause of Afghan democracy, Iran’s shadow was looming over everything. Khomeinist Iran was the empire to contend with now.
At the entrance to Mazar’s grand Blue Mosque, the shrine guard took me accurately to be a kafir. He gently refused me entry, with obvious embarrassment to himself and to my hosts. The new rules say kafirs can’t come in, he said. I wandered around outside and mingled with the pilgrims happily enough, but the guard noticed me later and called me over to have tea with him, as a gesture of cordiality. He told me he was sorry. But the insult had been given. He knew it. I’d seen that it had offended him more than me, and he seemed to know that, too.
As it happens, I’d discreetly slipped into the mosque anyway, or at least into a chamber accessed by a back entrance, where the Sufis still had a secure place for themselves. I joined them for a few moments as they engaged in their euphoric and hypnotic ritual chantings. In the song they were singing, the refrain was from a poem by Rumi: “My life is going to end, but I hope to join with God.”
Afterwards, my hosts told me that the way things were going, even the Sufis’ days of liberty at the mosque were rumoured to be numbered. The Iranian-influenced Shia imams considered the Sufis dangerously unorthodox. The Deobandi-influenced Sunni imams had started calling them heretics.
Only the day before, on the plaza where we were walking, Mazar’s Khomeinists had gathered in an angry demonstration. “Death to America,” they chanted. “Death to Israel. Death to the Jews.”
AMONG THE MANY things that came as a surprise when I first visited Kabul in the autumn of 2008 was the Dari version of Marilyn Manson’s “Personal Jesus” playing on the radio. There was also the astonishing courtesy, solicitousness and exuberant friendliness of the people. The view from the mausoleum of King Zahir Shah at the top of landmine-pocked Maranjan Hill, where the kids come to fly their kites on weekends, revealed a city of perhaps four million people, ten times the population of thirty years before. Kabul’s motor registry department was adding eight thousand new vehicles to its rolls every month, and the roads were choked with traffic. Down in the gritty backstreets, uproars of laughter erupted from men sitting around TV sets watching Afghan talk shows. The bazaars were bursting with life and commerce. Even in the dingiest parts of the bomb-blasted metropolis, down among the rickety vendors’ stalls that sell cow heads and sheep guts, there was always a newly opened computer school or a long line of unveiled women waiting for their literacy or accountancy classes to open for the day. Every morning, the streets were filled with schoolchildren.
It was as though there were two completely different cities in the world called Kabul.
The city that routinely showed up in English-language television reports and daily newspapers was a Central Asian version of Stalingrad during the siege, or Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge rolled in. Shortly after I arrived, Britain’s Sunday Telegraph judged Kabul to be “as dangerous as Baghdad at its worst”—the Taliban were at the gates. But the Taliban were not at the gates, and the city I came to know—making my appointments, buying naan and bananas at the bazaars, popping into bookstores, drinking tea in mud houses and half-collapsed buildings, sitting at tables in pleasant offices and coffee shops—was not the city the world was being told about. The Kabul that trundled along before my eyes was a thriving, heartbreakingly poor but hopeful and splendid place.
Over the years, I’d made Afghanistan a bit of a personal study, and I could count Kabuli émigrés among my friends. Still, nothing had quite prepared me for certain things. The prompt pizza delivery service, for one. For another, the fact that you could take a handgun to the bank with you, leave it with the guard and pick it up on the way out. Perhaps most surprising was the spectacular contrast between the cosseted little universe inhabited by Kabul’s “international community” overclass and the raucous reality of everyday life among Kabul’s rambunctious masses.
Kabul, the capital of Absurdistan, is the city you see at sunrise over the shoulder of the television reporter, the city that crackles at twilight from the verandas of jittery foreign diplomats, aid-agency bureaucrats and journalists. It’s the city with helicopters always flying overhead and rapid-fire text messages on everyone’s cell phones relaying intelligence bulletins about the latest assassination attempts and kidnappings.
The real Kabul can be a perilous place, true enough. As in almost every big city between Amman and Calcutta, something horrible happens almost every day. The day before I arrived, Gayle Williams, a British aid worker, had been shot dead by two Taliban thugs on a motorcycle outside the gates to Kabul University. Humayun Shah Asefi, a prince from the old royal family, had just been kidnapped along with his son. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Melissa Fung hadn’t been heard from for weeks—she’d been kidnapped by bandits. A French aid worker was snatched just a few blocks from the guest house where I’d settled in. Notably, an Afghan who lived on the street where the incident occurred died in his attempt to prevent the Frenchman’s abduction. He grabbed a kidnapper’s machine gun by the barrel and was shot in the chest.
A few days after I got to Kabul, while I was interviewing Fatani Gilani, head of the Afghan Women’s Council, one of her staff ran in with a cell phone. Gilani took the call and gasped. The young man she’d just sent to pick up some office supplies had been caught in the blast from a suicide bombing at the Ministry of Information building over on Feroshgah Street. Five people were killed. The council’s young employee was okay, though. Just a bit shaken up.
But the real Kabul was not a dreary, white-knuckle-dangerous place where the crazy locals are just itching to slit foreigners’ throats. It was a city that got knocked around, picked itself up, dusted itself off and carried on with its business. This was the city I came to know, a city of polio victims, almond sellers, seamstresses, football players and anti-poverty activists. A city of cab drivers, teachers, money changers and beggars. It wasn’t especially difficult to get to know the place. The trick, I learned, was to run with savvy Kabulis. Don’t keep routines. Don’t make ransom bait of yourself. I found I could pass as an Afghan easily enough, shambling down the street or wandering the markets on some errand. But up close, even with my Afghan shawl and Panjshiri hat, I wasn’t fooling anyone. All the better, too. Get noticed as someone from away, and people
