Rumour and Conspiracy

Rumour and conspiracy. The dark side of the human imagination digs its claws into Pakistan’s collective consciousness like a feral cat, extracting every last lustful drop of pleasure it can squeeze out of a people living in a dreamscape. The persistent unreality hovering over the Tribal Areas and NWFP, in Darra Adam Khel and Swat, in South Waziristan, Bajaur and Orakzai, in these elemental geographies Deception’s shadow mingles with the blinding light of another fiction - Truth.

In the penumbra is where reality lies.

In that grey-zone, teenagers blow themselves up on the command of cult leaders, men of God who’ve convinced them that this is their duty. There will be no suffering in the act, they tell them: it will, rather, be the end of suffering. Press the button, they command, and with a smile worthy of any politician, promise them the Kingdom of God. Press the button, they profess with the absolute certainty of false prophets, and like a light switch flipping on, the darkness of this world will be instantly illuminated by the light of heaven. As if they've done the journey themselves. The charlatans.

This in the penumbra.

And this also: militancy is the effect. The causes are many. Poverty, illiteracy, culture and a misreading of culture; corruption – political, economic, moral. All fan the flames of a violent imagination. Pashtuns are under attack. ‘They fear us,’ say the Pashtuns. ‘The U.S. wants to destroy us.’ Follow this line of thought and you come to the inevitable conclusion that the Taliban are a tool of the U.S. They set the beast loose on Pashtun lands to sow the seeds of chaos, to disorder a tribal order to which they will now impose an order of their own.

This in the imagination.

And this also: democracy is the saviour. The light of democracy will bring clarity to these clouded people. It will bring Freedom and Equality. It will usher in an era of Enlightenment. This fiction fills the op-ed pages of western newspapers, pours out of the mouths of political pundits like rancid effluence. The voices of the people must be heard!

Truth in the imagination. Falsehood in the penumbra. So deeply intertwined have light and darkness become.

Enamoured with our own words, we close our ears to the voices that really matter. ‘We have a way,’ say the Pashtuns. ‘We have our own truth and it has served us well for centuries.’ But no one actually cares what the Pashtuns want: their land is too important in today’s geopolitical order. Too important for their own good. Better to make them docile toadies of our own vision.

The Pashtuns, however, will not be ruled. That is one lesson the penumbra teaches us: they will not have their destiny scripted for them. These are the fillips for the conspiracy theories that infect the Tribal Areas, these forays into domestication, these misdirected military interventions. To the Pashtuns, it only looks as if the Other is out to get them, again.

Reclaiming Identities

Not all's lost in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, a shipment from the Afghan Museum in Exile in Switzerland landed on the doorstep of the National Museum in Kabul. It's still sitting there, a potent symbol of the painfully slow pace of progress. But at least I feel comfortable using the word "progress" in the Afghan context. There is progress.

Afghanistan's treasures rival Egypt, if not in scale, then in quality and variety. The largest artefacts, the Bamiyan Buddhas, were destroyed by what I referred to in my last post as the Taliban's religious reductionism. Countless others were obliterated by the civil war, looters, more Taliban zealots and the wrath of nature, but these 1 400 pieces survived, along with an unknown number of others locked away somewhere in the dungeons of the Presidential Palace.

Afghanistan's history is coming out of hiding - in bits and pieces of course, as stolen artefacts are located, shattered ceramics delicately reassembled, statues re-excavated from rubble, stories patched together from a jumbled mess of ideology, hatred and greed. The disintegration of the museum is a sad but salient reminder of what some people will do for a sip from the goblet of power - steal a peoples' history, demolish it, crush identities and reduce multiple selves to a manageable singularity. Over 70% of Afghanistan's cultural history is still missing, circulating among profiteers who place their own selfish desire for wealth above the shared history of humankind.

But history is not so easily defeated. In Kabul, it's showing just how resilient it can be. The museum is on the mend, rising out of the rubble like a New Iram. Its first show will open on April 25th - an exhibition of photographs of the Tashqurghan Bazaar before and after it was leveled by fighting between the Soviet Red Army and Afghan mujahideen in the mid-1980s by writer, photographer and ethnographer Dr. Roelof J. Munneke. From what I've seen, it's a moving tribute to what has been lost and a determined statement for what can be saved (full story to be published in the travel section of the Hindustan Times shortly).

The Museum should be fully operational by sometime in mid-Summer. Some pics:

War and Peace - Afghanistan's

National Museum on the mend

Rebuilding

Dr. Munneke - Reclaiming Identities,

photos from Tashqurghan Bazaar

Dr. Munneke - promotional cards

Seated Boddhisatva Statue from Kunduz

4th-6th Century C.E.

Pre-Islamic wood figure

Nuristan