The Rumpus.net » tamim ansary

Tamim Ansary At Red Hill Books

Michael Berger — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:15:07 +0000

As both a Rumpus regular and as an employee of Red Hill Books, I’m pleased to announce that on Wednesday, October 7th at 7 p.m. at Red Hill fellow Rumpus contributor, Award-winning author, storyteller and Bernal resident Tamim Ansary will be reading from and discussing his newest book, Destiny Disrupted: A History Of The World Through Islamic Eyes.

I shall be working that evening and there will be wine, snacks, erudite conversation, good friends and copies of Destiny Disrupted for sale.

In the meantime, there is lots from and about Tamim Ansary right here at The Rumpus: Afghan Star: A Conversation With Tamim Ansary, Iran’s Regime: Marching Towards A Cliff, The Rumpus Long Interview with Tamim Ansary, as well as Dave Eggers’ The Last Book I Loved: Destiny Disrupted.

Please stop by on Wednesday! It will be a great night.

(Directions to Red Hill)

Afghan Star: A Conversation with Tamim Ansary

Jeremy Hatch — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:00:07 +0000

Pop Idol has been widely imitated throughout the world [American Idol here in the states] , but Afghanistan is possibly the only place where the mere existence of a televised, Western-style talent show amounts to a political statement. Although the Taliban is out of Kabul, the powerful conservative elements that remain have reservations about television, music, and dancing, and Afghan Star, as the program is called, is in many ways an act of defiance against those elements.

The program was the eponymous subject of a documentary film currently showing throughout the US, which follows four contestants — two men and two women — as they vie for the top prize, and the contest becomes a way to explore politics, ethnic rivalries, and the status of women in the country.

It reveals much about Afghanistan; or so I thought, until I mentioned the movie to Tamim Ansary. He seemed ambivalent, so I went to watch it; it impressed me, but then again, I knew very little about Afghanistan apart from what I’d learned from the film. So I thought it’d be interesting to sit down with Tamim and subject my naive reactions to his expertise. The result was a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation nominally about the film, but really about Afghanistan in general, touching upon music, the country’s ethnic diversity, the status of women, democracy, the pariah status of artistic truth-tellers like Khaled Hosseini, the successive waves of modernization and backlash that have convulsed the country since 1918, “old men with beards saying horrible things,” and — as a weird bonus — a popular but creepy overweight singer who, in his heyday, walked upon women’s hair on his way to the stage.

The Rumpus: So I just wanted to ask first: Was there anything in the film that actually surprised you?

Ansary: No, nothing that actually surprised me. I had kind of a funny reaction to the film, actually, after it steeped for a little bit. I’d been following Afghan Star before this movie came out, and in retrospect it struck me that the movie never really showed any complete performances by these people, that they didn’t respect the fact that these people are doing something they consider to be art. They did spend a whole lot of time on that suspenseful moment when the singers stood there and one of them was eliminated. Now I can perhaps say that, maybe to an American audience, it all sounds kind of the same.

The Rumpus: Well, you said that when we were talking about this last week, and I still don’t agree! To me, anyway, there was clear diversity to the songs, at least as much as we heard of them.

Ansary: Okay. But then I also realized that she mostly just hit all the themes you already hear about Afghanistan: there’s a lot of ethnic conflict and they can’t get together, they hate women, they’ve got old men with beards saying awful things, you know? There’s something about it that made me feel like the director kind of found what she was looking for. She found what she already thought was there.

The Rumpus: Wow. That reaction is really interesting. What I’m hearing from you is that the film reinforced preconceptions, but because I came to this without really knowing the first thing about Afghanistan, almost everything in it was a surprise to me. I actually found it educational.

Ansary: So in what sense did it educate you?

The Rumpus: Well, I’ll put it this way. Previously, when I thought of Afghanistan, I thought of a desolate place with no infrastructure, with children toting Kalashnikovs, with caves and terrorists mixed somewhere in there. But within ten minutes I got to know an Afghanistan, and a Kabul in particular, that seemed to be a very modern place despite all the war and earthquake damage — I loved that saying they quoted, “in Afghanistan, if there’s not war, there’s earthquake.”

Ansary: It’s true!

The Rumpus: Anyway, the film gave me a much more complex idea, compared to what I started with. Maybe it’s kind of pathetic, but I knew so little that what seem preconceptions to you, were revelations to me. Now I’d feel naive, but everybody that I talked to about this, and I like to think I have smart, well-informed friends, were just as surprised to hear this as I was to see it.

Ansary: Well, I have encountered this before. And you know, when I went back in 2002, I myself was surprised at how much there was of the old Afghanistan. The Afghanistan I remembered was pretty much all there. Like a third of the city was completely destroyed, true, but there were shops and stores, restaurants, kabob, cheese, good food, so many cars, and so many people could put together computers out of anything.

And when I went outside the city, into the countryside, into places like the Panchir Valley, which I thought would have been completely isolated, it turned out that the war itself had exposed these small villagers to sophisticated technology. I’d go to places where you’d see scenes from another time, people threshing wheat with pitchforks, and little boys would come running up and say “how are you sir? hello, hello!” And I would say, “how do you know any English?” Not only had the war not prevented the spread of technology, it had promoted it. It was so weird. So we don’t know much about them, but they know all about us.

The thing is, they’re alarmed by the young woman who dances in the sinuous manner onstage, but they have internet access there, and whatever you see on the internet, they can see it too.

The Rumpus: One of the producers alluded to that when he said “Afghanis see J.Lo on TV.”

Ansary: They see more than J.Lo, they see everything, including total porno. So I think that contributes to an even more dehumanized, weird idea about women. When you can see women on the screen like this, but in real life they’re like that, you have no idea what a woman is really like.

The Rumpus: Let me pick up on that. Two of the contestants they follow to the end were women. Inevitably, a lot of the film was about the status of women in Afghan society, and the restrictions they have to live under, and the risks they run by pursuing music. What did you think of the portrayal of that? Did you find it accurate or was it too heavy?

Ansary: I don’t think it was too heavy. But I’ll tell you something: I think Afghan women are really tough. It’s easy to assume that they’re pitifully crouched down and hiding, but that’s not the case. They’re tough, they have their world, and they’re in charge of that world, which outsiders never see. And in that environment, there’s a lot of activity of women pushing back against these structures. I would say 200 years ago, it was like that here. Women couldn’t go to school, they were disenfranchised, they couldn’t own property, in fact they were considered property for a time. And they fought for their rights, each little inch being the next they could conceive of getting.

That’s how it happened here, but it can’t happen that way there, because the most extreme advancement of women’s rights already exists in the world. So for those women, every time they want an inch further than what the culture gives them, the battle is not for that inch but potentially for the whole distance.

What I see is that conservative old men believe that the world will end if women are allowed to come out and do the same things as men. Aside from anything else, the one thing that would help, is if they could have an experience of how it really is when women are liberated, and know that the world doesn’t end. But they can’t get to that because they’re busy making certain that it never happens, and making certain that every step towards its happening ends up creating violence and catastrophe, so they can point to that and say, “see what happens to society when women are liberated?”

It’s not because women are liberated, it’s because men don’t know how to handle it. And this is the other thing about the question of women in Afghan culture, which can be traced back to the legacy of colonialism. Many men have this attitude that “if my woman is independent, I’m less of a man, if my woman is strong, I’m a weaker man.”

The Rumpus: Well, that mentality was widespread here just a few decades ago.

Ansary: Yes, and it still exists in a lot of the country. So when that idea is present in someone’s mind, he will have this psychic reaction to women having strength and making decisions. He’ll feel emasculated by that.

So now, look at a context where an entire society has been imperially overtaken by another society, and their cultures are distinctly different, so it’s not just a power relationship, it’s a form of cultural imperialism too. The powerful other culture is there and it has social mores that are in argument with your social mores, and the most obvious, distinctive, and frightening one is that in the other culture, women are independent.

You see? There’s already a situation of cultural humiliation and impotence, and then the imperial culture comes in and says “you know, there’s just one little thing we want to change in your world: we want to emasculate you men, you have to let your women be free.”

This is catastrophic for the women, because it just exacerbates the idea that in the oppression of women, we can find our strength. And ordinary women then bear the brunt of men’s frustration.

The Rumpus: I want to talk a little about one of the key moments in this regard, which you alluded to earlier: when one of the women, Setara, is voted out, she impulsively dances and uncovers her hair during her performance. This causes an enormous scandal and there’s a lot of fallout: the TV show comes under pressure from the authorities, Setara has to go into hiding, there are threats on her life, she lies low for months in Kabul before attempting to return home, and there’s a clip of men in the street saying that she should be killed. All this in reaction to a dance that, to Western eyes, looks pretty innocuous.

Ansary: You know, I read several reviews of this, and I don’t think a single reviewer talked about that woman dancing without saying something like, “she barely even moved her hands! They call that dancing?”

The Rumpus: Well, I wouldn’t say that, exactly, but it was pretty tame.

Ansary: Sure, but here’s the thing: she didn’t just move her body, she did pelvic thrusts! When I saw it I thought, “gosh, she really didn’t have to do that.” It was so un-Afghan. There’s a kind of traditional dance, and it’s also provocative; they move their hands in this sinuous way and there’s a kind of flirtation with the eyes. But this was genital-centered dancing.

The Rumpus: No, you’re right, that’s an accurate description.

Ansary: And I thought, why did she do that? That was a deliberate move. She could not have really been surprised by the reaction. Now, did you see those six clips I sent you of Maryam Elaha in the fourth season?

The Rumpus: Yes.

Ansary: Well, in those you see that originally, that at the auditions, that girl is wearing a hijab and she’s standing stiffly, but by the end she’s got her fancy little Italian hat, and she is dancing and moving around. It’s not the kind of dancing that Setara did, but she’s loosened up a lot. If you only saw this movie, I think you’d come away with the impression that man, these guys are in danger, this show is going to fail, and people are going to get killed. It’d be interesting for people to know that now we’ve had another whole season, and I don’t know how many women were among the contestants, but to me Maryam Elaha is a superstar. She’s really good, even though she got voted out. These women in the movie, not so good! It’s like they made it to the finals only on some kind of rule.

The Rumpus: Unfortunately, I have to agree with that. Neither of them were that great. What’d you think of the two men?

Ansary: They were both good. I didn’t believe the one guy who said he was “classically trained.” I’m not sure what he means by that, and somehow I felt he was talking it up. Because in Afghanistan, “classical music” means Indian classical, like ragas. And he might mean “classical music”: what they used to do on Kabul radio ten years ago. Who knows what he meant.

The Rumpus: There was another aspect of Setara doing a Western-style dance that I wanted to talk about. It seemed like there was a double standard, in that Westerners can do whatever, but an Afghan woman on stage –

Ansary: That’s always been the case. If she’s ours, she has to represent our culture. They can do what they want.

The Rumpus: Are performers held to a harsher standard than ordinary women, or is it just that more attention is on them?

Ansary: More attention is on them, and I think that Afghans tend to have a very sensitive antenna out for what you’re telling the world, much more so than we are. There’s this hyper-consciousness of, whatever is done publicly represents us, and so we have to be careful about what we show the world. But then, pathetically enough, they kind of don’t understand what they’re actually showing the world.

You know, Kahled Hosseini was telling me he’s had a lot of trouble because of The Kite Runner. He’s persona non grata there, and that’s because he portrayed something that’s not at all uncommon: some bully kids raped a boy, and that happens. I lived in fear of that growing up myself, as a delicate little boy. And so, in some gathering or other, a bunch of Afghans told Kahled, You’ve dishonored our country. You’ve brought shame on us. And he said, What about ourselves killing each other by the truckload? I think that’s what has brought dishonor on our country, not this novel revealing some bit of truth about Afghan culture.

The Rumpus: Absolutely. I guess that any artist who writes about something kept tacit inside their culture exposes themselves to that kind of reaction.

Ansary: Yeah. His book is much more courageous in the Afghan context than anybody can see in the American context.

The Rumpus: Here it’s a summer read.

Ansary: Yeah, here people say, “Ah, I finally see Afghanistan. This is good.” But there, they say “Gah! Now they’re seeing Afghanistan! How could you do this to us?”

The Rumpus: One of the few things most people seem to have heard about Afghanistan is that music was banned there for a certain period of time. To me that’s almost like the idea of banning love: it just doesn’t make sense, and I can’t figure out how to get to where it makes sense. But I’ve read that there has been controversy in Islam over music from the beginning. Could you enlighten me a little bit about that debate? What’s the reasoning that gets one to banning music, if you know?

Ansary: I do know. First of all, I just want to emphasize that nothing like this had ever happened in Afghanistan before. The idea that you would ban music, it just would never happen. The fact that it did happen for five years only reflected the fact that something had arisen in the world of Islamic fundamentalism that had reached this point, and the Taliban were an expression of that. And this radical Islamic fundamentalism has emerged in a colonial context, in reaction to Western culture, and the place where fundamentalism finally gravitates to most intensely has to do with sexuality and women. And that’s everywhere. I think the Taliban were the most extreme version of it, but it is throughout this whole world. And you see it in fundamentalism generally, but in Islamic fundamentalism in particular. From there, I think there’s a tendency for Muslim extremism to take the position that anything that is pleasurable must be wrong, including music.

The Rumpus: So it starts from a puritanical sensibility, and justifications are found afterward?

Ansary: Right. But there are two more things I want to say about this. One is that, it’s possible to look at this ban superficially and think “this is what Afghans are like, look what they did.” And in fact, we’re talking about a five-year period. On the other hand, I saw something in that movie that I’ve seen many other places, where they say: “here’s how Afghanistan used to be,” and then they show video of a rock and roll concert.

But that wasn’t what Afghanistan was either. That was a tiny part of the country. It is fundamentally a very conservative, socially conservative place. And these old men with beards saying these horrible things, that’s more like what most of Afghanistan has been all along.

But I would also say that, up until everything broke thirty years ago, the conservatism that you saw in rural Afghanistan, was nested in a stable social structure that had not broken. It was tribal, and it was a world divided between private and public. There was this fairly rich kind of private world where there were men and women, whereas the public world was family to family, and the men were the public face of that. So that was a complicated social structure that had a stability, and it worked then, and this war completely shattered all of it.

Just think for a minute about the fact that 8 million people ended up as refugees, and virtually all of them were women and children. This was like a third of the population, and the men were in the country fighting, so that these eight million refugees represented an even larger number of internally displaced persons.

Facing a catastrophe on this scale, when people want to restore something from the past, the first thing they look to is sexuality and women. And watching that movie really brought up for me again how difficult this question of women is. That’s where the rubber meets the road, and the music question emerges from that.

The Rumpus: A moment ago you referred to the archival photos and footage they showed of a more liberal Kabul — I’m assuming all that was from Kabul.

Ansary: Yeah.

The Rumpus: If you had shown me that without any context, I would have guessed they were taken in India, or Beirut, Turkey, some place like that. But you’re saying that was just a tiny slice of the country. They paint a picture of a very liberal place. Do you remember any of that?

Ansary: It was 1964 when I left, and it was around ’62 or so when that started. Afghanistan has always been a place that has both things going on. It has a deeply conservative countryside, but there’s always been a sophisticated urban elite, because in the course of history, it’s been the crossroads: people come from everywhere and go to everywhere.

So let me go back a little earlier. In the 1920s, some Afghans who had been involved in all the modernization that happened in Turkey moved back to Afghanistan during the 1910s, and brought the whole Young Turk movement with them. And one of the people that heartily joined into it was the prince, the heir apparent. His father died in 1918, he became the king, and he immediately launched this huge modernization campaign. They have ten years of it, and it was extreme for the context. Schools opened up to girls, the veil was abolished –

The Rumpus: Aren’t you talking about overturning more than a thousand years of tradition?

Ansary: Yes, you are. They did it once in the 1920s, tried to overturn a thousand years of tradition, and there was a backlash in the 30s. That guy was chased out, and the restoration was this heavy-duty authoritarian monarchy. They were also interested in progress, but they thought they had better go slow.

So they moved in that direction, and by the time I was young, in the 50s, it was very much the case that within the compound walls, it was very modern and lots of stuff went on. People had record players and we’d listen to Elvis Presley. But it was understood that you don’t show anything like that out in the streets.

So as I said, there were really two worlds, and you knew about that other whole world, because you’d go to people’s houses and once you were inside the walls, it was like that. And then, during the period when the communists took over, the push was to have it not within the walls. They wanted this world to go public. And so that’s the period in which women were dancing on TV, they had TV for the first time, so there was a lot of progress in that way.

But honestly, it was too much progress for the context. They had bars, they had nightclubs, all that stuff. And it was so extremely disjunctive, between what was in Kabul and what was ten miles out of Kabul — how could that work?

And then when I went back in ’02, it was within three months after the Taliban had been driven out, and I went to somebody’s party. There were a lot of cars coming from all these different places, and when you got inside the walls of that place, there was whiskey on the tables, there was dancing, there was rock and roll music, women and men were mingling freely — this is two months after the Taliban and it’s happening right there.

You see, there’s a fast, modern, young urban culture that has had continuity right on through that period. And now they’re struggling. Those guys, like the promoter of Afghan Star, they’re entering the struggle against those old guys, and they’re saying “we’re going to do this.” And there are also a lot of people who have come back from abroad, and they’re trying to reclaim the country for that more modern idea.

The Rumpus: Do you think they have a chance at avoiding another backlash?

Ansary: Well, the backlash is here, now. It is happening. The awful thing is, I don’t know if another terrible period can be avoided now. I wonder if there’s anything the US could do now; we’ve made bad mistakes and it might be too late.

The Rumpus: What about this idea the producer was pushing, that perhaps music could be a tool to help unify this incredibly diverse country, that they could trade guns for music?

Ansary: Wouldn’t that be nice? They’re always saying “maybe this thing” — fill in the blank — “will be a tool to unify the country.” The last one was a national army.

But I doubt that music per se could be a tool for that, because politically it signifies too much. Let me step over and discuss education for a moment. People say “well, you can just put a school in every place, and that will unify the country, people will stop being so ignorant. But a school is a statement about what culture is better and what culture is worse. So putting a school in there is already an assaultive act, saying “you guys are ignorant, and we’re going to teach you.” So that’s not a tool for unifying the country, it’s a tool for creating a line of scrimmage. And then that’s where the battle is joined. Not that schools are bad, but that’s what happens.

So with music, there’s always been music in Afghan culture, and it has a certain place in traditional society, music is a certain thing, but now this Afghan Star kind of music is something completely different from that. So it’s an extreme version of, when rock and roll first hit here, all the old folks said it was just noise, and the kids thought it was the greatest thing. Music was not a tool for unifying the generations. It was a tool for marking the line between the generations. That’s what music is doing in this context now. Everybody’s got music, but whose music you’ve got is a way to mark out the lines.

In the long run, perhaps yes, but other kinds of relaxations have to take place before people can start to say “well, let me try this, what kind of music have you got?” The culture as a whole has to become more integrated, more easy with itself.

The Rumpus: I was thinking about your article the other day, Real Choice in Afghan Election, and I wanted to get your perspective on the claim that when participants voted using their cell phones, for many of them it was their first experience of democracy. What’s your reaction to that?

Ansary: Mixed. On the one hand, it’s an interesting thought, that because of cell phones, everyone can vote in something. So I think as far as that goes, that’s true. On the other hand, people really did vote in 2004. They didn’t really vote for anything in particular, they just kind of voted. But they did vote, and they were delighted –

The Rumpus: Yeah, it’s not like they were unfamiliar with the concept.

Ansary: Yeah, and I think that something like three-quarters of the coutry voted. I don’t think that’s fake, I think that’s a real number. But let me tell you a story. My cousin who was on the election commission, she helped organize those elections, and being a woman, she was the one who went into the compounds and registered the women to vote in these distant places. One woman said to her “I’m so excited about voting, when that day comes I’m going to have my husband bring me a hundred ballots, I’m just going to spend the whole day voting!”

The Rumpus: You know, voting used to be very like that here, especially in the late 18th to early 19th centuries. At that time the political parties were in charge of printing ballots, and already you can imagine what comes of that. The more ballots you could get printed up and marked, the more votes you could bring to the polling place. People would gather up huge bundles of ballots and send some unfortunate person to deliver them, and they’d be attacked and sometimes even killed along the way. So it’s not like elections have always been an easy thing even here.

Ansary: Some places that are coming to voting new — India is an example — they have very sophisticated electronic voting technology that works there. Much more so than ours. For some reason, ours never seem to work. The ATMs work, but the voting machines…

The Rumpus: To finish up, I want to return to one of the first points you made, which was that the film didn’t seem to respect the singers as artists. That made me wonder if you’d like to recommend some Afghan artists to us.

Ansary: Well, the artists that I like are mostly dead, unfortunately. There is one Afghan singer that every Afghan knows about and all Afghans love, and he was a popular singer from my day in Afghanistan and continued until ’79 when the communists knocked the country over. His name was Ahmad Zahir (AHK-med Zoy-eh). Everybody you hear singing popular music is basically singing in his style. We knew this guy when I was a teenager, he was also a teenager, and he came to our town, his uncle was my father’s friend, and even as a teenager, man, that guy walked into a room and nothing else was happening but him. He was just volcanically charismatic.

There was another guy who came to our town, Ustad Shaida (oos-TAHD shay-ah-DAH) to play music, and I couldn’t believe how good the guy was. I was twelve years old and standing by the stage, just lost in that music. And I recently discovered that there are two clips of this guy on YouTube. They’re audio clips with still shots. But the minute I saw the still shots, I said “there he is!” Then the music started and I was like, “man, I’m there, baby!”

The Rumpus: Can you recommend anybody from a younger generation?

Ansary: Today, there’s a young Afghan-American woman named Meghan Kabir (kah-BEE) and she plays this really kickass pop rock. But it turns out, she also plays Afghan traditional music. And when I see her playing rock and roll, I just wouldn’t even believe she’s an Afghan. Talk about moving!

One more old guy. There was a guy named Sarahang (sar-ah-RANG) who eventually became very famous after he left Afghanistan, but in my day he was a guy that, at the big weeklong independence festival in Kabul, he was usually hired to sing at one of these tea gardens they set up. Everybody loved him, but I remember that my mother really hated him and never really knew why. Then I saw clips of him on YouTube recently, and I realized why my mother disliked him. It’s because he was a big fat guy, and he was very flirtatious. He would sing and kind of eye the women.

The Rumpus: Well, that’s gross!

Ansary: It was pretty creepy! In fact, I was just talking about this guy the other day with an Afghan friend of mine, and he said “yes, he became so famous that when he went to India, they lined the street with women who came out to greet him, and the women bowed down and put their hair on the path so that he could walk to the stage without stepping on the ground.

The Rumpus: I don’t even know what to make of that. I can only hope he had a light step.

Ansary: Now I’m even revealing new things to you about Afghanistan!

Dave Eggers: The Last Book I Loved, Destiny Disrupted

Dave Eggers — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:30:48 +0000

I’m in the middle of Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes, and it’s incredibly illuminating. Ansary pretty much covers the entire history of Islam in an incredibly readable and lucid way. I’ve been recommending this book to everyone I know. Especially when people are looking for a comprehensive-but-approachable way to look at world history through the lens of Islam, there’s no better book.

(Check out The Rumpus Long Interview with Tamim Ansary)

Iran’s Regime: Marching Toward a Cliff

Tamim Ansary — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:38:40 +0000

A special comment by Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

The Khomeinist regime in Iran is in terminal trouble; but that doesn’t mean Iran is about to repudiate Islam and become a secular democracy. In order to see where Iran is going, it’s important to see where it’s been.

The so-called Islamic Revolution of Iran was never just about Islam. It was the product of three revolutionary currents coming together. One was constitutionalism, a century-old struggle for democracy, driven mostly by Iran’s secular modernists. One was Islamism, a push to put the shari’a in charge of political life—a movement fed by rural resentment of the Westernized urban elite and embraced by merchants of the country’s traditional economy.

And then there was nationalism: a rage fueled by Iran’s long-subjugation to European powers, a passion that permeated every level of Iranian society and made people of all backgrounds hungry to see Iranian sovereignty, strength, and pride restored.

In the tumult of 1978-79, master strategist Ayatollah Khomeini appropriated the nationalist impulse into his Shi’i Islamist movement. He was in a good position to do so because Shi’ism had been intertwined with “Iranianism” for over five centuries. Indeed, it was a defiant Shi’ism that set Iran apart from its powerful Ottoman and Moghul neighbors and let it emerge into history as a nation-state.

By making his brand of Islamism the face of Iranian nationalism, Khomeini combined two streams of revolutionary enthusiasm and used it to crush the third stream, the democracy movement of the secular modernists.

In the next several decades, while the world mourned the death of Iranian democracy, Khomeini and his successors made good their promise to nationalist pride and thus secured their grip on the country. They humiliated the United States; beat back Iraq; eradicated all traces foreign cultural influence in Iran; and forged a menacing state able to project its power through Lebanon into the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But recently the Khomeinists have faltered. The ascension of Ahmadinejad has hurt them. The trouble with Ahmadinejad is not that most of the world sees him as a villanous thug (that by itself could have helped him domestically.) The problem is that most of the world sees him as a laughable buffoon, a donkey: he brings shame upon the nation. And he compounded his flaws by mismanaging the economy. Iranians worried about tomorrow’s livelihood feel their country’s power and prestige waning. As a result, the regime’s ownership of the nationalist agenda erodes. If it loses that chip, it must rely purely on its Islamic credentials for legitimacy and even in Iran, that’s not enough.

Many in clerical establishment have seen this coming. This is what the reform movement has been about. Men like Khatami, Mousavi, and Rafsanjani don’t propose to dismantle the Islamic Republic and replace it with a secular democracy. They’re out to save the Islamic Republic by changing its approach to the world and thus preserve its stature in world affairs. They see what Obama sees: that belligerent bullying ultimately weakens a nation. This doesn’t mean their commitment to Islam (or even Islamism) has weakened, any more than Obama’s willingness to talk with states like Iran means he no longer believes in democracy.

In Iran, however, the pressure of internal contradictions has built up such intensity that there is no controlling the reformist challenge and no predicting its consequences. The only thing we can say for sure is that the regime led by Khamenei is in a bind from which it cannot escape.

The regime is in a bind because the question on the table now is whether it is hurting the nation, and the question doesn’t come from disaffected outsiders but from core members of the ruling elite.

Every instrument the regime possesses for dealing with the crisis tends to put its own legitimacy at risk. Khamenei’s decision-making has further boxed him and his cabal into a corner. Take the election results: had those been counted properly, they might well have produced numbers pretty close to what the regime announced—believe it or not, that’s what a Manchester Guardian poll and several others showed in the weeks before the election. In the voting itself, there may not have been much fraud.

But that no longer matters, because the votes were not counted properly. That’s indisputable. By issuing the results of the voting sooner than the votes could possibly have been counted, Khamenei drew the spotlight away from scattered polling booths and trucks rolling through the streets with ballot boxes, and situated the central act of fraud squarely in the headquarters of the regime.

As Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei may have many powers, but he doesn’t have the power to do as he pleases for personal gain. As a fundamental principle, in the Islamic Republic, no one is free to do as he pleases, not even the “Supreme Leader.” Everyone is subject to the law—that law being the shari’a. By appearing to commit a blatant dishonesty in order to put his own man in the drivers seat, Khamenei has cost himself an aura of impregnable authority, and this will hurt him because, for all the military and police resources at his command, the Supreme Leader’s authority ultimately derives from rectitude and religious learning, not bodyguards and guns. As soon as people stop believing in his rectitude, guns won’t save him.

No doubt Khamenei calculated that his decree would stop all the protests dead and that life would then do what life does: go back to normal. But the protests didn’t stop and so Khamenei found himself caught out in cold.

Therefore, he went to the next step and called on his military resources, because what else could he do? The revolution of 1979 suppressed whole currents of revolutionary passion unrelated to Islam, and those sentiments have been festering and heating up under the skin of the Islamic Republic for decades. The Khomeinist regime cannot let that magma keep welling to the surface. The trouble is, the division in Iran runs vertically. This is not a confrontation between a homogenous oppressed underclass and a monolithically united tyranny. Leading members on both sides of the divide are highly placed insiders. In calling out the troops, the regime turns its guns on itself. To justify this action, it has no recourse but to redefine some founding members of the Islamic revolution as disloyal outsiders. Even if it succeeds in thus rebranding men like Rafsanjani, it damages the legitimacy of the state structure as a whole: success is failure.

Furthermore, to keep the opposition scattered and disorganized, the regime has no choice but to stopper up their channels of communication. That means it has to disrupt the Internet, shut down Facebook, stop the Twittering, and keep cell phone text messages from getting through. These, however, are the power technologies of our time. These are what make societies effective, powerful, and modern. In shutting down these systems, the regime is dragging Iran back into a primitivism that can only reduce the country to third-tier status—and Iranians can feel this. So all such actions offend the yearnings still alive in the Iranian soul for strength, self respect, and a high standing in the world.

In short, every step the regime can take to shore up its strength must cost it some credibility and squander some of its ability to keep presenting itself as the champion of Iranian pride. If a plurality of the nation comes to feel that these Khomeinist clerics are good Muslims but bad for Iran, they are finished. Their only possible hope then will rest with some outside force inserting itself into the fray and giving them a convenient scapegoat, someone like John McCain, who incredibly enough said today that the United States “should lead” the Iranian revolution. But then, if the Khomeinists of Iran depend on John McCain to save their hides, they’re probably dead men walking already.

The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

Beverly Parayno — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:45:38 +0000

Tamim Ansary is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York and the forthcoming book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. He is also the facilitator of the the oldest continuous free writers’ workshop in the country.

Rumpus: I need to record you so you’re not able to retract anything later.

Ansary: That’s okay, I’m not running for office anytime soon.

Rumpus: What was it like being of mixed race in Afghanistan? I know in the Philippines, children of mixed race are often looked down upon, but it’s complicated because they’re also admired for their beauty – lighter skin, eyes and hair.

Ansary: Well, I don’t think we were more attractive (laughs). It’s true that being of mixed race over there was a very distinct experience. I was not an Afghan, I was not an American either. There was never a time when I didn’t know it. When I say not ever a time, I mean not one second.

I remember one time the religion teacher said to the class, “Afghans are very tough and foreigners not so much. Here, I’ll give you a demonstration.” He asked me to come up to the front, and then said to the class, “I’ll beat this guy and you’ll see he’s going to cry.” So he beat me and I cried. Then he sent for my cousin, the son of an Afghan general, and beat him, but he didn’t cry.

Rumpus: Was there any advantage to being of mixed race?

Ansary: Personally, there was a huge advantage. Intellectually it’s a really good thing to have access to the knowledge that all truth is relative. That’s an inheritance when you’re growing up across two cultures. I think this idea makes people uncomfortable; it’s certainly a lot more comforting and easy to live in a culture that is homogenous and amongst a society of people who are sure about things, so that you can feel like there’s a rock you’re standing on. The trouble is, there is no rock that any of us is actually standing on.

Rumpus: Did you want to go to boarding school in America or did your parents ship you off at sixteen?

Ansary: No, I wanted to go, I arranged that myself. I applied for a scholarship and then told my parents what I’d done. I was always very conscious of the fact that if you’re an Afghan in world terms you’re so poor that you can’t do anything. My father had a big, responsible position in the government, and I was told that his salary was something like forty dollars a month at that time. And my mother taught in the American school, so she was paid two hundred dollars a month. She earned five times what my father made simply because she was working at the lowest possible American wage scale. So I just felt like, if you’re an Afghan, you just can’t get out. There’s no way.

Rumpus: What was the biggest shock for you arriving in America?

Ansary: The biggest shock was dealing with sexuality. There is just no such thing as dating in Afghanistan. When I was a senior in high school, and I’d been here for two years, I thought I had a girlfriend. We were both in this modern dance class and we did a performance together. We spent a lot of time together, and I was in love. I ran into her thirty years later, and she said that after several marriages had broken up, she had met a guy that was in our class and they had fallen in love and were going to get married. She said he was her boyfriend when we graduated from Rocky Mountain. And I was like, he was? At the time I thought you were my girlfriend, you had a boyfriend?

After high school, I transferred from Carlton College to Reed College because it had a reputation for being this wild place. I got wild and I got crazy. After that I ended up in the hippy world of Portland, but I still didn’t have any experience with normal American dating customs. I’d never asked a girl out. We just ended up in the same place and had sex. I never picked a girl up or said, “I’ll meet you at 8 pm and we’ll go to dinner.” We were hippies. We didn’t have money, we didn’t go to dinner. We went to the hot springs with peyote and got naked.

Rumpus: Are you carrying any drugs on you right now, such as LSD in your wallet?

Ansary: Well, I used to when I was a college student. You never know when you might need to be enlightened.

Rumpus: You talk about the difficulty of returning to Afghan culture, what you’d have to give up in order to do so, namely individualism, the sense that each person has charge of their life. In Afghan culture, there’s a sense of being a part of a larger group, a tribal connection that’s difficult to break. People spend more time building and strengthening social networks than focusing on their own personal productivity and growth. Do you think Americans give up too much for freedom?

Ansary: I don’t know if we have a choice. When I think about those aspects of Afghan culture that you just called out there, I’m really talking about a culture that still had possession of its norms, but that was destroyed in the last quarter of a century. I think it’s very up in the air as to what the culture of Afghanistan is like now. When you take a country that consists of interrelated stable networks of tribes and clans and families and you randomly drop bombs everywhere, so that every possible connection is broken by bloodshed, people run and hide, some run across the border, some go back in and fight, then you’ve got this world in which all the old mechanisms for how someone becomes a leader and becomes respected are gone.

In a culture that’s been destroyed like that, pure military strength and savagery count for a lot — the ability to get at least ten or twelve guys to obey and follow you, or the ability to suck up to some foreign person that will give you money and guns. New kinds of strengths and skills are favored by the circumstances, so then when the smoke cleared of that, there was a whole new kind of level of leaders and authority figures that didn’t have that much to do with the old days.

A society like ours consists of individuals making their way within certain frameworks of rules. It’s a very flexible, creative society that is absolutely adaptable and really strong. You know, all these older societies with conditions, customs and traditions, where everyone has to follow their rules — our society will just come in and smash it. So I think our only hope is to start from here and say, “How do we get beyond this to more values, to find a new way to have a connection with that which is permanent?”

Rumpus: You talk about going back to authentic memory when writing, and not imposing on the journey of the memory, but allowing associations to happen so one memory triggers another.

Ansary: This idea of just capturing memory came from a guy named Don Anderson who came to our workshop. He was writing his memoir about his life before he was six years old, and had amazing details of an otherwise completely average childhood. The clarity of his details reminded most of us, including me, who grew up in Afghanistan, of our childhood. So one time I said to him, “These are really great; at some point, you’re going to want to organize it and figure out your theme.” And he said, “No, I’m not really interested in doing that. I’m just interested in remembering.”

So when I started working on what would eventually become West of Kabul, it was just remembering. That’s all I was trying to do. One thing led to another, and there were things I didn’t include in the book, like memories of various Afghan friends of my father and moments of childhood memory like walking in from the snow and seeing my grandmother, who was four feet tall when she stood up (but rarely stood up), sitting in a corner, puffing away at her hookah.

But what I was reminded of when you asked that question was, after I had written about some of these memories that didn’t appear in the book, I tried to remember a trip to North Africa, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally I realized I wasn’t actually trying to remember. I was actually trying to write the narrative that fixed itself in my mind. I was stuck on the narrative, and I wasn’t bursting through to the raw material of events. So I managed to figure out a way to just let go, and when I did that, I’d remembered something I hadn’t ever thought of since then: when I was in Paris on my way to all this excitement going on in the Muslim world, I walked into a shop and the guy was an Afghan. I was completely astounded. In those days you hardly ever saw Afghans anywhere. So I introduced myself and we fell into a conversation, and he said, “Oh, you’re so and so, why I knew your father, I knew your uncle.” He asked questions about my family in such a way that I felt pretty plumped up. I come from a pretty eminent family and this stranger in Paris knew all about them. It made me feel pretty good about myself. And it was only when I re-remembered that moment in that authentic way, that I realized he was doing something that I was supposed do, the complimentary thing to, but instead, I just sat there soaking up his words. It’s a seriously rude thing. Many years later retrospectively, I felt embarrassed. That’s the mark of an authentic memory — when you feel emotions appropriate to the event that you didn’t even feel at the time.

Rumpus: In an article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Rick Moody compares the creative writing workshop to a focus group or a test screening of a film because of the “checklist” of broad questions often used to rate aspects of a film. He also discusses the ways in which teachers and students alike agree upon a predictable formula for critique that promotes mediocre writing. What are the alternatives to the writing workshop?

Ansary: I think what he’s saying applies to workshops that have a stable membership and a recurring group that feeds back to each other, which is all MFA workshops. One thing that makes our workshop different is that there are different people all the time; it changes every single session, and it’s instant critique. Nobody gets to ponder anyone’s stuff for two weeks and give them their considered opinions. So it’s kind of like an open mic in a way.

I really think of a writer’s workshop as being mostly a social thing. Writing is the loneliest profession. It’s really great to get out and knock about with some other writers. But I think the big danger of the workshop is when you think people are telling you how good your stuff is, whether it’s working or not. That’s not true at all. Whoever is there has an opinion, but their opinion is nothing exalted. If you think that you’re getting advice on what to do, that’s ridiculous. Nobody knows that. If you don’t know, then you shouldn’t be writing. The critiquer’s job is to say “ouch” when you hit them, but they can’t tell you how to load your gun, fire, or aim it.

Rumpus: When someone in workshop is reading from their piece, I notice you look around at other people, stare up at the ceiling, squirm in your seat a bit, adjust your glasses. It appears that you’re not paying attention at all, but then you emerge with such precise observations and insights. Are you just fidgety?

Ansary: Those seats are hard. Who can help but fidget in those seats? It’s true that I find it very interesting to listen to and to think about writing that’s not good as well as writing that is good. For me, it’s very interesting to think about what a piece would be doing if it were working, and why didn’t it have that affect. And yet when something is not working, I can’t help but fidget when I’m listening to it, it’s true. There’s no screening to attend this workshop; nobody has to pass a test to be part of the group. The only criterion is that they have to think they’re a writer, and, the truth is, not everyone that thinks this is correct in their assessment. But somehow I think it works.

What’s interesting is that some people who come in aren’t writing anything I can really find myself able to listen to, and then later something happens and they write really good stuff. They come because they’re pregnant. And then eventually they have their baby, and some have false pregnancies (laughs). And there are also people who seem pretty good, their stuff is interesting, but then it gets less interesting as time goes on.

Rumpus: Kind of like dating.

Ansary: Yes, I guess it is. Now I’m trying to think back – did that happen or did I always get dumped before I ever found that out?

Rumpus: What do you think the common pitfalls are of beginning writers?

Ansary: Writing can fail for a lot of different reasons. My personal little bug-a-boo is writing that has great language, but it’s disguising the fact that’s it’s not doing anything else. But I feel that about much published and much praised writing.

Vikram Seth is my favorite modern writer. And he said something about how he wants to draw people down into this world and not have them notice the language. Obviously language is the medium of writing, so it has to be good, but my thought is, what is good language? Good language is only good if it serves something. So what is that something?

Rumpus: At the pub after every workshop, you have a slice of cherry pie. Why do you like cherry pie so much?

Ansary: I like cherry pie cause it’s delicious! The fact is, my mother made cherry pie when I was a kid. It was one of her standard things, maybe that’s why. She made lemon meringue pie, too. I make it once a year. I really perfected that one.

Rumpus: Tell me about your new book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Who’s your audience and what do you want them to take away from it?

Ansary: My audience is largely American, non-Muslim readers who don’t have a clue or have only a vague idea of what the context of today’s political events are for most Muslims. But I also think about my friends in the Afghan community. They know many things about Islam, but there are many things they don’t know. I think they’ll find it interesting because it’s all there. I wrote this book because I think that most of us in the West have an unconscious narrative of world history. I think it’s interesting and important to explore that other story line. The events are the same, we’re all in them, but I’m telling the story that leads to today’s events through a whole different landscape. And I’m trying to do it in the way that if you and I were sitting in a bar and you said, “Hey, you’re from that part of the world, is there a whole other idea of history there?” I’d say, “Yeah – bartender, bring me a couple more.”

Rumpus: After you finish each book, you head straight to the movie theater to watch whatever is playing at that moment. What did you watch after you finished Destiny Disrupted?

Ansary: There was some movie about Robert De Niro being a movie producer, and I don’t remember much of that because I fell asleep. And then the next day, I realized I had been editing two different versions of the book, and when I sent it to my editor, it had some correct changes but many were incorrect, so I wasn’t done at all. Later, I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was the punctuation mark that ended the project.

Rumpus: I think I speak on behalf of workshop attendees when I say thank you very much for having given up every Tuesday for the past ten years to facilitate the workshop, and for your service for many Tuesdays to come.

Ansary: As long as my strengths hold out.

***

The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

Beverly Parayno — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:51:01 +0000

Tamim Ansary is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York and the forthcoming book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. He is also the facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, the oldest continuous free writers’ workshop in the country.

Parayno: I need to record you so you’re not able to retract anything later.

Ansaray: That’s okay, I’m not running for office anytime soon.

Parayno: What was it like being of mixed race in Afghanistan? I know in the Philippines, children of mixed race are often looked down upon, but it’s complicated because they’re also admired for their beauty – lighter skin, eyes and hair.

Ansaray: Well, I don’t think we were more attractive (laughs). It’s true that being of mixed race over there was a very distinct experience. I was not an Afghan, I was not an American either. There was never a time when I didn’t know it. When I say not ever a time, I mean not one second.

Parayno: Was there any advantage to being of mixed race?

Ansaray: Personally, there was a huge advantage. Intellectually it’s a really good thing to have access to the knowledge that all truth is relative. That’s an inheritance when you’re growing up across two cultures. I think this idea makes people uncomfortable; it’s certainly a lot more comforting and easy to live in a culture that is homogenous and amongst a society of people who are sure about things, so that you can feel like there’s a rock you’re standing on. The trouble is, there is no rock that any of us is actually standing on.

Parayno: Did you want to go to boarding school in America or did your parents ship you off at sixteen?

Ansaray: No, I wanted to go, I arranged that myself. I applied for a scholarship and then told my parents what I’d done. I was always very conscious of the fact that if you’re an Afghan in world terms you’re so poor that you can’t do anything. My father had a big, responsible position in the government, and I was told that his salary was something like forty dollars a month at that time. And my mother taught in the American school, so she was paid two hundred dollars a month. She earned five times what my father made simply because she was working at the lowest possible American wage scale. So I just felt like, if you’re an Afghan, you just can’t get out. There’s no way.

Parayno: What was the biggest shock for you arriving in America?

Ansaray: The biggest shock was dealing with sexuality. There is just no such thing as dating in Afghanistan. When I was a senior in high school, and I’d been here for two years, I thought I had a girlfriend. We were both in this modern dance class and we did a performance together. We spent a lot of time together, and I was in love. I ran into her thirty years later, and she said that after several marriages had broken up, she had met a guy that was in our class and they had fallen in love and were going to get married. She said he was her boyfriend when we graduated from Rocky Mountain. And I was like, he was? At the time I thought you were my girlfriend, you had a boyfriend?

Parayno: Are you carrying any drugs on you right now, such as LSD in your wallet?

Ansaray: Well, I used to when I was a college student. You never know when you might need to be enlightened.

Parayno: You talk about the difficulty of returning to Afghan culture, what you’d have to give up in order to do so, namely individualism, the sense that each person has charge of their life. In Afghan culture, there’s a sense of being a part of a larger group, a tribal connection that’s difficult to break. People spend more time building and strengthening social networks than focusing on their own personal productivity and growth. Do you think Americans give up too much for freedom?

Ansaray: I don’t know if we have a choice. When I think about those aspects of Afghan culture that you just called out there, I’m really talking about a culture that still had possession of its norms, but that was destroyed in the last quarter of a century. I think it’s very up in the air as to what the culture of Afghanistan is like now. When you take a country that consists of interrelated stable networks of tribes and clans and families and you randomly drop bombs everywhere, so that every possible connection is broken by bloodshed, people run and hide, some run across the border, some go back in and fight, then you’ve got this world in which all the old mechanisms for how someone becomes a leader and becomes respected are gone.

Parayno: You talk about going back to authentic memory when writing, and not imposing on the journey of the memory, but allowing associations to happen so one memory triggers another.

Ansaray: This idea of just capturing memory came from a guy named Don Anderson who came to our workshop. He was writing his memoir about his life before he was six years old, and had amazing details of an otherwise completely average childhood. The clarity of his details reminded most of us, including me, who grew up in Afghanistan, of our childhood. So one time I said to him, “These are really great; at some point, you’re going to want to organize it and figure out your theme.” And he said, “No, I’m not really interested in doing that. I’m just interested in remembering.”

Parayno: In an article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Rick Moody compares the creative writing workshop to a focus group or a test screening of a film because of the “checklist” of broad questions often used to rate aspects of a film. He also discusses the ways in which teachers and students alike agree upon a predictable formula for critique that promotes mediocre writing. What are the alternatives to the writing workshop?

Ansaray: I think what he’s saying applies to workshops that have a stable membership and a recurring group that feeds back to each other, which is all MFA workshops. One thing that makes our workshop different is that there are different people all the time; it changes every single session, and it’s instant critique. Nobody gets to ponder anyone’s stuff for two weeks and give them their considered opinions. So it’s kind of like an open mic in a way.

Parayno: When someone in workshop is reading from their piece, I notice you look around at other people, stare up at the ceiling, squirm in your seat a bit, adjust your glasses. It appears that you’re not paying attention at all, but then you emerge with such precise observations and insights. Are you just fidgety?

Ansaray: Those seats are hard. Who can help but fidget in those seats? It’s true that I find it very interesting to listen to and to think about writing that’s not good as well as writing that is good. For me, it’s very interesting to think about what a piece would be doing if it were working, and why didn’t it have that affect. And yet when something is not working, I can’t help but fidget when I’m listening to it, it’s true. There’s no screening to attend this workshop; nobody has to pass a test to be part of the group. The only criterion is that they have to think they’re a writer, and, the truth is, not everyone that thinks this is correct in their assessment. But somehow I think it works.

Parayno: Kind of like dating.

Ansaray: Yes, I guess it is. Now I’m trying to think back – did that happen or did I always get dumped before I ever found that out?

Parayno: What do you think the common pitfalls are of beginning writers?

Ansaray: Writing can fail for a lot of different reasons. My personal little bug-a-boo is writing that has great language, but it’s disguising the fact that’s it’s not doing anything else. But I feel that about much published and much praised writing.

Parayno: At the pub after every workshop, you have a slice of cherry pie. Why do you like cherry pie so much?

Ansaray: I like cherry pie cause it’s delicious! The fact is, my mother made cherry pie when I was a kid. It was one of her standard things, maybe that’s why. She made lemon meringue pie, too. I make it once a year. I really perfected that one.

Parayno: Tell me about your new book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Who’s your audience and what do you want them to take away from it?

Ansaray: My audience is largely American, non-Muslim readers who don’t have a clue or have only a vague idea of what the context of today’s political events are for most Muslims. But I also think about my friends in the Afghan community. They know many things about Islam, but there are many things they don’t know. I think they’ll find it interesting because it’s all there. I wrote this book because I think that most of us in the West have an unconscious narrative of world history. I think it’s interesting and important to explore that other story line. The events are the same, we’re all in them, but I’m telling the story that leads to today’s events through a whole different landscape. And I’m trying to do it in the way that if you and I were sitting in a bar and you said, “Hey, you’re from that part of the world, is there a whole other idea of history there?” I’d say, “Yeah – bartender, bring me a couple more.”

Parayno: After you finish each book, you head straight to the movie theater to watch whatever is playing at that moment. What did you watch after you finished Destiny Disrupted?

Ansaray: There was some movie about Robert De Niro being a movie producer, and I don’t remember much of that because I fell asleep. And then the next day, I realized I had been editing two different versions of the book, and when I sent it to my editor, it had some correct changes but many were incorrect, so I wasn’t done at all. Later, I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was the punctuation mark that ended the project.

Parayno: I think I speak on behalf of workshop attendees when I say thank you very much for having given up every Tuesday for the past ten years to facilitate the workshop, and for your service for many Tuesdays to come.

Ansaray: As long as my strengths hold out.

***

The Rumpus.net » tamim ansary

Tamim Ansary At Red Hill Books

Related Posts:

Afghan Star: A Conversation with Tamim Ansary

Related Posts:

Dave Eggers: The Last Book I Loved, Destiny Disrupted

Related Posts:

Iran’s Regime: Marching Toward a Cliff

Related Posts:

The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

Related Posts:

The Rumpus Long Interview With Tamim Ansary

See Also: East Of New York West Of Kabul Named San Francisco One Book 2008

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell

See Also: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam

Related Posts: