CHAPTER 8

RECLAIMING THE PAST

What’s past is prologue.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

FOR ALL THE CULTURAL TURMOIL caused by ancient tribal laws and religious dictates in the lives of the women of Afghanistan, the aesthetic, artistic, and architectural past that has also shaped their history is on the verge of a renaissance in the country today. Affecting men and women together, it may be the antidote to the destructiveness of recent years and could turn this whole weary place around.

Social anthropologists know that when the libraries are empty or burned to the ground, and the historic buildings have been razed, and the artisans have either been dismissed or have died and their work is in ruins, it has an abiding effect on the people.

But you have to dream big when it comes to rebirth in Afghanistan. The ongoing insurgency and the crushing poverty are nightmares in a place that is trying to find itself. Today, along with the soldiers, human rights activists, and policy wonks, whose mantra is “what’s past is prologue,” there are visionaries on the scene who dare to see in the relics buried in the rubble of the warring past, a rich architecture, literature, and art that have been “scarce heard amidst the guns below.”

Many years ago, while on assignment in the Canadian Arctic, I spent time with an Inuit woman who lived in a camp in the woods and provided shelter and back-to-the-land living for about twenty teenagers who were in trouble with the law. They had been convicted of crimes such as stealing, drug dealing, and vandalism. The way to get through to these young people seemed obvious to her, so she arranged with the court officials in Inuvik to have the teenagers sent to her version of boot camp to serve their time. When I asked her why she thought fishing, hunting, chanting, and drum-making could help, she said simply, “You have to know where you came from before you can figure out where you’re going.”

Preserving the past—the architecture as well as the artifacts— is a way of capturing the identity of those who went before, telling a story about how people lived, learned, worked, and fought. Although some scoff at the notion of investing fortunes to recreate a village or restock a library when people are starving and trying to stay alive in the midst of conflict, social anthropologists claim that failing to do so has a cost of its own.

As Anne of Green Gables’ small house in Prince Edward Island, the Vieux Ville in Quebec, Gastown in Vancouver, Black Creek Pioneer Village in Ontario, and the several forts across the prairies demonstrate, the history and culture of the past are part of the present and a map to the future. When we hoard Victorian furniture or pine hutches that had been forgotten in old barns, and linger over Group of Seven exhibits in art galleries, we bear witness to eras and artists that came before us. And that, say the experts, nourishes the soul.

War has a way of colouring a country various shades of grey: the guns, tanks, dust, mud, and rubble blur into a single hue. To most of the world, Afghanistan has been presented during the last decade as nearly colourless, a sepia image of treeless mountains and endless deserts, populated by beige-blanketed, bearded men. The only break in the monotony has been the periwinkle-blue burkas that are more a flashpoint to the Western media than a vibrant addition to the panaorama. Add to that the traditions that favour the ill-treatment of women, corruption, and brutality, and you come to the conclusion that Afghanistan has always been a dreary, oppressive, and dangerous place. We tend to measure the wins in terms of micro-credit programs and paved roads, or judicial reforms and human rights, and accept the losses in terms of looted museums, bombed Buddhas, and empty schools. While rebuilding and reforming Afghanistan is dependent on getting the people back to work and yanking the law into the twenty-first century, like the Inuit woman said, you need to know where you came from to figure out where you’re going.

THE TALIBAN WEREN’T THE FIRST to burn books and destroy art. The Nazis did it. So did Henry the Eighth’s Cardinal Wolsey. All of them presumed, preposterously, that you can eliminate ideas, turn thoughts into ashes, and wipe out the creative imagination of a people. But for every regime that tries to destroy art and culture, there are artists and philanthropists with an astonishing determination to fight back and to breathe life back into the ruins. In doing so, they fire the art of the possible as surely as potters fire their kilns.

The Canadian government has stepped up to the plate in a bold endeavour to help Afghanistan to reclaim its past with a donation of $1 million a year for three years to the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. And a Canadian citizen has executed an exceptional example of grassroots philanthropy by gathering an altruistic collection of medical students from across Canada to restock Afghanistan’s medical libraries.

The Turquoise Mountain Foundation owes its birth to a mix of royalty, politics, and diplomacy. Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, was hosting President Karzai at a private dinner at the prince’s residence in England when the conversation turned to the historic arts and crafts of Afghanistan. Karzai mentioned that the acclaimed woodwork, ceramics, and calligraphy were dying out, as were the craftsmen, the antiques of the cities had been smashed and looted by war, and the old towns were about to be paved over by developers and drug barons who saw the land as source of money and power. If he was asking for help, he was talking to the right person.

A long-time supporter of cultural conservation, the prince had launched the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London through his own foundation and proposed a similar project to Karzai to breathe new life into what he called “Afghanistan’s unique and incomparable art and architecture.” They both knew British diplomat Rory Stewart, and together approached him with the idea, requesting that he devise a plan that would restore the historic past in a way that would involve both artisans and citizens.

Stewart, a Scot from Perthshire, had distinguished himself on half a dozen fronts: as the diplomat who was the British representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo campaign; as the governor of two provinces in Iraq whose frustration with the allied mission there led to his resignation; and as the adventurer who decided to walk across Nepal, Pakistan, India, Iran, and then, when the Taliban fell from power, Afghanistan, and write about his adventures.

It was the Afghanistan portion of the walk that showed him the essence of the country and its people, and spurred him to want to restore the art and artistry of a culture that had been nearly obliterated by war. Starting in Herat in the winter of 2002, armed with a walking stick, and later accompanied by an abused, toothless Mastiff he called Babar in honour of Afghanistan’s first Mogul emperor whose footsteps he was following, he walked across the plains, mountains, and valleys to Kabul. His route took him through snow that was sometimes several metres deep and through villages whose inhabitants saw him variously as a spy, an infidel, a crackpot, and friend. Afterwards, he wrote a bestselling book, The Places in Between, which chronicled his extraordinary adventures. He dedicated the book to the people he met in all five countries, saying he owed both the journey and his life to them. In the foreword, he wrote:

They showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me and made this walk possible. They were not all saints although some of them were. A number were greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant and cruel. Some of them had robbed or killed others; many of them threatened me and begged from me. But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed, and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker and more vulnerable than me.

Stewart developed a deep and abiding respect for the rough-hewn country and its stubborn, loyal people. At the end of his four-month excursion, he visited the old city of Murad Khane in Kabul and thought at the time that this ancient place, once the centre of commerce, now almost buried in garbage and home to derelicts and drug dealers, would be lost if someone didn’t save it. “It’s unique,” he says. “It has narrow mud streets, courtyards, geometric designs.” It also had crumbling buildings that were falling down at the rate of one a week, no water or sewage, and more than its share of hooligans. Located on the north side of the Kabul River near the old bird market, it has been under attack from mujahedeen, Taliban, and local thugs throughout the upheaval in Afghanistan. It was a sorry sight when Stewart laid eyes on it. But after his time in Iraq, the disillusioned Stewart had developed a feeling for what needs fixing after bombs have destroyed countries. Murad Khane was slated for the wrecking ball. He wondered if the area could be preserved and the loss of traditional craftsmen reversed.

Then Prince Charles called. Launched under the joint patronage of the Prince of Wales and the President of Afghanistan at the end of January 2006, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation is housed in the Royal Fort, an eighteenth-century mud fortress on a mountainside above Kabul, and has plans so ambitious they make your head spin. Its mandate is to revive the traditional Islamic crafts of woodworking, ceramics, and calligraphy and to sustain the historic cities and landscapes in the rest of the country.

There’s something exquisitely serendipitous about the instructions Stewart gives me for meeting him at the fort: “Take the road behind the old British Embassy in Karte Parwan.” This crumbling building once played a powerful role, and then paid a hefty price, for its two separate invasions of Afghanistan. It stands with a view of the old fort and the country’s cultural past that is about to be reincarnated.

At the fort, sitting at a long, narrow table laden with platters of food for staff that hails from a dozen different countries, Stewart shares his plan as well as his frustrations. “If the old city was regenerated, we could create jobs and a sense of national pride,” he explains. While the Prince of Wales and President Karzai want to preserve the cultural past of Afghanistan, Stewart sees the Turquoise Mountain Foundation as all of that and something more. He takes a page out of the Inuit elder’s book when he says, “For regeneration to be effective, you have to work holistically.”

Named for the indigenous capital of Afghanistan during the Middle Ages, Turquoise Mountain was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1216, and despite decades of archaeological searches that were repeatedly interrupted by war, the precise site has not been rediscovered—except perhaps by Stewart. In the middle of nowhere, during his now-famous walk across the country, he came upon the extraordinarily beautiful Minaret of Jam, which was presumed to have been constructed at Turquoise Mountain. He described what he saw in his book:

A slim column of intricately carved terra-cotta set with a line of turquoise tiles rose two hundred feet.… Pale slender bricks formed in a dense chain of pentagons, hexagons and diamonds winding around the column. On the neck of the tower, Persian blue tiles the colour of an Afghan winter sky spelled: GHIYASSUDIN MUHAMMAD INB SAM, KING OF KINGS.…

No wonder he named the foundation for the treasure he had found in the snow.

In its first year of operation, the foundation established the Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture, gathered some of the great masters in Afghanistan, and opened a school to teach students the art of woodworking, calligraphy, and ceramics, arts that were almost lost, their masters dying before teaching the next generation the old techniques. The fort presently houses this school, but it will eventually move to Murad Khane, which is the most ambitious of all the Turquoise Mountain projects. The foundation plans to turn the oldest city within Kabul into its former self: a thriving bazaar, a centre of artisans, and a living space for locals.

“Initially, a lot of my plan was based on hope and bluff,” Stewart says. “I used the royalties from my book and hired two people.” He now has fifty buildings and a staff of three hundred. He also says he underestimated the size of the job. “I planned to set it up and move on. But it [has been] two and a half years now.” The delay was caused by the formula he devised for regeneration to work. “In a place that’s collapsed into a slum, you need to deal first with the basics, make it liveable, if you want it to be the commercial heart of the city.” In the first year, they removed the garbage, 560 truckloads, so much rubbish that the foundations of the buildings had been submerged in refuse for more than sixty years; opened schools, or what he calls “literacy centres,” for 165 kids; improved the water quality because there was no potable water or sewer system; and organized health care for the people who live there. “That tends to move the undesirables like drug dealers out,” says Stewart.

Every penny invested has gender strings tied to it. Stewart is well aware of the women’s needs, but he also is practical. For example, he says, “The women are making traditional bulani [an often greasy dough that looks like a pizza pocket but is filled with leeks or potatoes]. It’s not very good. They need better ingredients and to be taught how to make better bulani— then they’ll sell more, which is the point, isn’t it?” He also wants to see women involved in the famous ceramics trade, “but it’s a father-to-son operation so we’re having some difficulty.” The women are currently immersed in traditional crafts such as carpet-weaving, embroidery, jewellery-making, and textiles, but many of them are also learning the male-dominated crafts such as woodworking and calligraphy.

At the centre, the mingling scents of wood chips, which surround a carpenter’s bench, clay whirring into shape at a potter’s wheel, and the fresh ink from the pens of calligraphers fills the air. Here a woman is working on a Nuristani carving, a traditional technique using slender pieces of walnut and shallow relief. There a man is throwing a pot—the act of putting clay on the kickwheel—the way it has been done for centuries. Young people are making decorative and delicate jali screens. Men and women work together making rammed earth, which is mud pounded so hard it is as strong as concrete.

The master ceramicists come from Istalif, about an hour’s drive north of the Shomali Plains, the traditional home of the ceramics for which Afghanistan once was known all over the world. They work here with lead-free glazes, using high-temperature kilns, and new designs, hoping to eventually manufacture ceramic tiles for foreign markets. Master calligrapher Mohammed Mahfouz—he is master of all eight calligraphy scripts—is teaching a class how to do illumination, the delicate background behind the letters. This sacred art of the pen has been central to all Afghan crafts, including woodworking and ceramics, for a millennium.

In this centre where women and men work together, creating art, preserving the past, and celebrating beauty, it is hard to imagine the interminable war that has haunted their lives for thirty years or the terrorist attacks that have taken place within a few kilometres of the site as recently as two days ago. Turquoise Mountain is all about possibilities, artistic realities, and pride of place. The sense of possibility here is tangible, as heads bow over a project, a master teacher demonstrates intricate techniques, and the sounds of saws and hammers swirl with the swish of paintbrushes and the whir of the potter’s wheel. It is a sunny, airy space whose skylights let the daylight wash over the art that fills the rooms.

At the other site, in the old city of Murad Khane, with its Sufi shrines and blue-tiled minaret, the work proceeds apace with freshly cut two-by-fours slipping into place beside stripped old timbers that have been varnished and secured. It is in the middle of downtown Kabul. Developers wanted to turn it all into flashy malls and garish mansions when Stewart set his own sights it.

When the reconstruction is complete, there will be galleries and a bazaar, with handicrafts for sale, as well as the Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture, with its masters and students showing their art and technique to the public. Stewart wants the five-hectare site opened to the public as soon as possible, so people can see the artisans at work, stroll through the reclaimed buildings, and discover what he calls the last real traditional pottery in the world.

The mud streets are crowded when I visit Murad Khane. Crumbling buildings stand as reminders of the tasks yet to be done, but upstairs in the reception room of Peacock House where the work has been completed, you could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into another century. The delicate woven carpets and magnificent wooden carvings of peacocks and flowers, the intricate jali patterns and brilliant coloured threads in the cushions that surround the room, speak of a finer time, a time of self-admiration and self-confidence. This is the Afghanistan Rory Stewart wants to show to the world.

IN WINNIPEG, MANITOBA, AN OFFBEAT academic has plans for another side of Afghanistan he wants to show to the world. I met Dr. Richard Gordon in a bookstore soon after Veiled Threat was published. He was genuinely concerned about what he had heard and read about the women of Afghanistan and said, “I want to help. What should I do?” I appreciated his solicitude and, if I remember correctly, replied, “Almost anything you decide to do would be helpful.” He seemed mild-mannered, stroking the book he held in his hands while he posed his questions about Afghanistan, his wrinkled brow speaking of his humanitarian concern. I didn’t know at that time that he was a radiology professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Manitoba. Nor did I know how serious he was about taking action for Afghans, or how tenacious he is when he decides to fix something. He reminds me of the late June Callwood’s story about people who make a difference. “Moments when a useful contribution can be made by taking action almost never wear a name tag,” she said. “Instead they always look like ‘someone else’s responsibility—not my business.’” She was right, of course. Invariably, when we see that something is amiss, we think, “Someone ought to do something about this.” That someone turned out to be Richard Gordon.

He called me a few days later with a fine plan but one so immense I wondered how he would pull it off. “They burned the books,” he began. “The Taliban destroyed the libraries, including the medical school library at the University of Kabul.” Indeed, the library was in ruins. “They need doctors,” he went on. “How can they train doctors without books?” Then he announced, with the confidence of a neophyte, that this would be his contribution to Afghanistan. He would find a way to restock the medical library. This was in January 2002. I watched and listened in amazement over the next two years while the professor conquered the considerable barriers thrown in front of him—finding and storing the books, shipping and assembling a library, and ultimately fulfilling the promise he had made to himself that he would indeed help.

Medical textbooks cost a small fortune, as any struggling medical student can attest. Richard Gordon started with a fundraising plan—”a loonie a book”—thinking he could get donors to toss in a loonie with each book they contributed, and he would use the cash to supplement the collection. It seemed like he had a long way to go. Dean Brian Hennen suggested he approach the medical students. What happened next was a win-win solution.

Three medical students at the University of Manitoba volunteered to spearhead the project. When Kevin Warrian, Magda Kujath, and Jason Tapper set out to collect the 650 medical textbooks considered essential for a medical school library, at an estimated value of $110,000, Gordon made it clear to them that these could not be old, cast-off, out-of-date books that nobody wanted. So the trio stipulated to donors that the books needed to be less than ten years old. The language in the textbooks wasn’t a problem, as the medical school classes in Kabul are conducted in English. Twenty more students joined the team, calling it The Kabul Medical Library Project. But even with so many volunteers at work, they soon realized the call for books had to reach beyond Manitoba. They contacted medical students from across the country and were astonished when students from thirteen other medical schools vowed to take the request to university libraries, practising physicians, and everyone else they could tap for a book. The effort was then adopted by the Canadian Federation of Medical Students and eventually the project was dubbed Books with Wings. They began steamrolling towards their goal, creating subcommittees and a website, and soon realized that they needed a place to store the books coming in—now an estimated three thousand kilograms of them—and to somehow find a way to ship them to Kabul. Once there, they would need transport from the airport to the university and staff to stock the books on the shelves.

Maybe it was the shipping issue. It could have been the mention of the word shelves. Either way, Gordon soon was back on the phone to me. “What’s the postal system like from here to there?” he wanted to know. There isn’t one, I told him. “How will we get these books to Afghanistan?” he asked rhetorically. I was starting to think his phone calls and emails were his way of thinking through each stage of this project. The campaign he had set in motion was growing exponentially: Not only were the books coming in, but also awareness of the situation in Afghanistan was increasing among the student volunteers. He told the students they would have to raise more money to buy shelves in Afghanistan. Then he called the Canadian armed forces.

Only the military had the means to get the books to Kabul. At that time, the Canadians were assigned to ISAF headquarters and charged with securing Kabul and the surrounding areas from the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the warlords so that the transitional government could do its work. Later, their mission would be expanded to the rest of the country, and Canadians would lead the fight against the insurgency, but when Gordon was looking for a carrier to take his library to the university in Kabul, Canadians soldiers were mostly stationed in the city. I knew they did humanitarian shipments from time to time. I had been in a girls’ orphanage in Kabul once, and had noticed each child had a teddy bear on her bed. Teddy bears are not typical children’s toys in Afghanistan, but these ones had become the much-loved, prized possessions of thirty-two little girls. When I asked the woman in charge where the bears came from, she said, “Soldiers patrol this area. They stop and talk to the kids. One of them asked his family in Canada to send some toys, and a month or so later, all these bears arrived.” Thirty-two teddy bears is one thing. But three thousand kilograms of books? I thought it was a long shot. But I had underestimated Richard Gordon.

Gordon is the learned author of papers such as “Diatom Nanotechnology” and “The Fundamental Mechanism of Differentiation as Viewed from the Embryo to the Nucleus.” Somehow, between lecturing at the university and attending international conferences about “The Genome as a Discrete State,” he also was mastering the not-so-delicate art of shipping and library assembly. He is a scientist, after all, and thinks in formulas; in this case, books plus planes equal doctors trained. Every time I spoke to him on the phone or wrote to him by email, I would shake my head at his audacity and the size of the project he had started.

He is not a man who takes setbacks gently. When barriers were thrown in his way, he assumed the cause was either an inconvenient lack of awareness or irritating obstinacy, depending on the day he encountered them, and he simply went around or straight through them. When people hesitated, he demanded that they get over their indecision and just get on board. The students came up with their own ingenious methods to stock the library. They canvassed the residents in hospitals across Canada—these were doctors who had gone on to train in a medical specialty such as surgery, cardiology, or obstetrics—and suggested they no longer needed the books they had used as students of other disciplines, and to please donate them. They did. Kevin Warrian said at the time: “Medical school is tough at the best of times, most of all in a war-torn country with few resources. We can only struggle to imagine what it’s like to learn these subjects without even core textbooks.”

In May 2003, the library consisted of seventeen hundred textbooks that had been carried across Canada by post, or in trucks that had donated space, and were now housed in the warehouse of Login Brothers Canada, a medical textbook distributor with headquarters in Winnipeg, that had also donated 430 books to the project. Dozens of medical students at the University of Manitoba turned up to sort, label, and catalogue the books. Hundreds of volunteers had joined them in a cross-country effort: librarians, private citizens, and members of the Winnipeg Afghan community, including University of Manitoba student Mariam Omar and former Kabul Medical Institute professor and refugee Dr. Wassay Niazi.

The library left Winnipeg for Trenton, Ontario, the jumping-off point for the military flight, on May 21, 2004, in a truck donated by Login Brothers and under the supervision of Canadian Forces Reserve officer Gurinder Kler. It was received and delivered by the Canadian forces staff and Lt.-Col. Carl Walker, a Winnipegger who happened to be the commanding officer of health support services at Camp Julien, the military headquarters in Kabul. Every single book bears a nameplate that reads: “A gift from the medical students of Canada to the medical students of Afghanistan.”

I was thrilled to hear of the books’ arrival in Kabul and thought the project had come to a wonderfully successful end. Then my phone rang. “They don’t have a librarian,” a very agitated Richard Gordon explained. “The collection is worthless if they can’t get it properly onto the shelves and reshelved when the books come back.” Fortunately for about two hundred medical students in Afghanistan, half of them women, a philanthropist in Vancouver who prefers to remain nameless came to the rescue. He sent Gordon a cheque—the same day—that would cover the cost of sending a medical librarian to Kabul for three weeks to train a team of librarians. Janis Rapchuk, a volunteer with CW4WAfghan and a librarian in her working life, took a leave of absence and brought a happy conclusion to the odyssey of Books with Wings.

The dean of the medical school at the University of Kabul, Dr. Cheragh Ali, was overwhelmed by the success of the project. He sent his grateful thanks for the efforts of the students and volunteers and for the goodwill the project had created.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. When people get up close to a problem and discover that the seemingly impossible can be accomplished, they almost always find that there is more to do. Gordon and his team of medical students have gone on to stock medical, nursing, and dental libraries at eight other learning institutions in Afghanistan. He is now working on the engineering libraries at Kabul University, Kandahar University, and Kardan University, and has started a worldwide project to halt HIV/AIDS from spreading in Afghanistan. A peek at his website, www.bookswithwings.ca, as I write this chapter provides continuing evidence of the ongoing commitment of one man who said, “I want to help.”