The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

Almost every activity that Babur describes—gambling, dancing, colorful clothing, debauchery, singing, and alcohol—was illegal under the Taliban and remained illegal or discouraged under Ismail Khan’s new government.

I watched a fruit wrapper from Isfahan flying in Alexander’s footsteps.

Our shadows lengthened on the gravel: Abdul Haq’s the largest, Qasim’s the smallest, mine with a hunchback formed by my pack. The desert grew around us and the three of us diminished in size.

“Don’t worry. Go ahead. It’s the government’s ammunition, not mine.”

In both Iran and Afghanistan, the order in which men enter, sit, greet, drink, wash, and eat defines their status, their manners, and their view of their companions.

But when the servants brought the food, I was the only one to look up. Servants, like women and children, were socially invisible.

The old man answered placidly and rode on and when I turned, he was again a miniature vanishing into an expanse of sand.

my sense that I was on an adventure seemed self-indulgent in the context of the war. I found it difficult to write about the risk of death. I wrote “one” instead of “I,” as though I were shying away from myself. “Strangely, walking makes one feel one has had a fuller life . . .”

The abrupt episodes and half-understood conversations already suggested a society that was an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humor, and extreme brutality.

He saw Afghanistan as a poor, superstitious country with corrupt leaders and nothing to gain from looking backward. His sympathies were with baseball caps, not caravanserai. When he denied the building was a caravanserai, I do not think he was being ignorant. He was saying that whatever the building had once been, it was nothing anymore.

Ghiyassudin was the Sultan of the Ghorid Empire who built the mosque in Herat, the dervish domes in Chist-e-Sharif, and the lost city of the Turquoise Mountain.

Exhaustion and repetition created within the pain a space of exhilaration and control.

Babur’s breed of dogs formed part of the Ghorids’ tribute to the Seljuk and became such proverbial parts of Islamic culture that a medieval scholar is recorded as saying “Avicenna could not fight with a dog from Ghor.”

I felt that for me to be in . . . comfort, while my men were in the midst of snow and drift . . . would be inconsistent with what I owed them . . . it was right that whatever their sufferings were . . . I should share them. There is a Persian proverb that Death in the company of friends is a feast.

Every good and evil that exists If you mark it well is for a blessing.

Since the Koran, unlike the Bible, is the verbatim word of God, spoken through Muhammad in Arabic, a translation is not considered to be the Koran. At times, it has been considered blasphemous to translate it at all.

Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.

Khalife Amir measured silence, dividing each minute into a succession of clear notes from the string and then weaving time together again with his tenor voice.

“Do you know how many civilians the Americans and British have killed in this country? Thousands,” said a man with a rifle, “tens of thousands.” “Have they killed them in your village?” “No, not in this village. We have not seen an American or a British. They would not dare to come to our village because they are afraid to die and we would kill them at once. They are afraid to die because they have no God. They are pathetic and decadent and corrupt. Why are they afraid of their deaths? They have nothing to live for. But I am ready to die now. We are all ready to die now because we know that we will go to God. That is why they can never defeat us. That is why their civilization will be destroyed. This is jihad.” Everyone nodded earnestly.

Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.

Where I had been in Asia the tarmac roads petered out into bare patches of littered earth. Here the concrete ran clean from the roads over the curbs and up the walls of the houses, so that the whole city seemed rendered as a single room. Middle-aged men in suits stood in the streets at midday, looking lost and soft.