Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Strikingly, in its early days the Taliban supported art and was involved in programs of cultural preservation. Only later in the regime, when the terrorist group al-Qaeda and foreign agents had begun to wield most of the power, were the anti-art policies established and many of the most beautiful objects in the country, some two thousand national treasures, wantonly destroyed. The Taliban’s purpose was to wipe out Afghan identity so that nationalist resistance to the new regime would be weak. Unlike Soviets or Maoist Chinese, who interfered with the arts in an effort to eliminate whatever history could not be used to construct patriotic propaganda, the Taliban worked toward annihilation. The whole idea of being an Afghan was to be eradicated. This program required interference not only with intellectuals and artists but also with ordinary people and their ordinary pleasures. “They succeeded in destroying about eighty percent of our cultural identity,” Rahim says. “The Soviets had already done their damage; they wanted to turn a thousand years of history into nineteenth-century Marxism. But the Taliban wanted to destroy everything.”

Gathering Round TVs

Television, illegal under the Taliban but reborn in early 2002, is the most popular means of disseminating new ideas and values, though the country’s only station’s equipment is dilapidated and many shows have to be shot several times because of poor-quality video and cameras that fail. Mansour has brought in professors for programs about the history of Afghanistan stretching back to 1000 BC. There are also music and art programs, showings of old Afghan films, and recitations of new Afghan poetry. Afghans are hungry for this material; after five years without television, large groups of viewers in Kabul gather around sets that are often hooked up to car batteries when power fails, as it does most nights.

Guardians of Art

Many of Afghanistan’s best artists use traditional media, such as painted miniatures, which originated in Afghanistan and are central in the country’s artistic history. The leading miniaturist, Hafiz Meherzad, encloses figurative scenes within exquisite borders of gold leaf and ground-rock pigments. Meherzad said he had been “too tired to emigrate” after the mujahideen took over in the post-Soviet power vacuum and thought that he could continue his work quietly during the Taliban’s reign so long as he didn’t show it publicly. But when his neighbors cried out that the Taliban were searching everyone’s house, he panicked and buried all his work. It was largely destroyed by the earth’s moisture. His sense of cultural responsibility is acute. “I do not believe in innovation in this field,” Meherzad said. “If you make changes in this work, you will destroy even the past. You in America can innovate because your past is safe. Here in Afghanistan, we need to secure our past before we begin to create a future.”

The Taliban found it hard to attack calligraphers, whose work was holy; but it held them in considerable suspicion, and men such as Ismail Sediqi kept a low profile. He stopped making beautiful images of his own poems, with lines such as “I am a treasure within a ruin.” Instead, he became “a simple scribe” who wrote verses from the Koran. Even here, however, he found room for sedition: he often copied out the opening verse of the holy book, which announces—contrary to the restrictive practices of the Taliban—that God is the God of all men. “Innovation?” he said. “Well, I sometimes put modern makeup on the beautiful face of the classic forms.”

Asefi, who has become a potent symbol of cultural rebirth in Kabul, was unable to leave Afghanistan during the Taliban period, which started in 1996, because of family obligations, and he made only landscapes, bare of human or animal figures, and “unrepresentative in any way of life in Afghanistan.” The pressure and the fear gave him psychiatric problems that continue to haunt him. Now he is returning to those works and adding the figures he always envisioned. “If the Taliban had lasted five more years, they might have destroyed our culture,” he said. He is grateful for the American military intervention: “By liberating us, you saved our history as well as our present lives.”

Underground Poets

Afghanistan is a country of poets. Shir Mohammed Khara ran an underground poetry movement under the Taliban. He met with other poets who had memorized their poems so that they could discuss them without running the risk of being found carrying them. Whenever they gathered, they carried copies of the Koran so they could tell Taliban agents that they were having a prayer meeting. A number of poets have allied themselves with the newspaper Arman (Hope).