[extropy-chat] The Storyteller's Daughter

[Amara Graps]

Hi Folks,

I discovered last weekend that my favorite Sufi writer, Idries Shah
(1924-1996) had a daughter, Saira Shah, who is following in her father's
footsteps as a writer, but with a journalistic bent. She wrote the film
"Beneath the Veil" about the Taliban, that was presented in the summer
of 2001 on CNN, and she has a book: The Storyteller's Daughter, that is
just recently published.

I'm pleased to learn about her because I liked very much her father's
writings and because she is giving first-hand knowledge of Afghanistan
and the Taliban that I didn't know and that I think is important for
others to understand.

Her father, Idries Shah, made a deep impression on me starting about
15 years ago. Shah was the most prolific publisher of Sufi literature
before he died. His tales taught me about sufis, and helped me learn
about myself in a psychological way, but his most memorable book was
his based-on-fact, but fiction work: Kara Kush. I could not put the
575(!) page book down because the story he wove is gripping. In that
book: you will get into the mind of an Afghan and people in an unusual
war situation (Afghanistan-Soviet Union).

 From what I read in interviews with Saira Shah, she is similarly as
courageous as her father, although she might not think of herself that
way.

In this interview:

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum133.html
Author of The Storyteller's Daughter talks with Robert Birnbaum
Posted: November 19, 2003
© 2003 Robert Birnbaum

Birnbaum introduces her:

"Reporter and broadcaster Saira Shah was born in Britain of an Afghan
father (though half Scottish), writer Idries Shah, and a British mother
(though Indian). She first visited Afghanistan in the '80s and there
became a freelance journalist covering the Afghan resistance to the
Soviet occupation. She has regularly traveled to hot spots like the
Balkans, Algiers, Palestine, Congo, Iraq, Columbia, Northern Ireland and
Sudan. She was part of the group that made Beneath the Veil, shown in
this country on CNN, which vividly exhibits the hell that was Taliban
Afghanistan. With her dear friend, director James Miller, Shah also made
a sequel called Unholy War that won numerous awards including a Peabody
Award. Last year Shah and Miller set up a production company and were
working on a documentary for HBO in Israel in May 2003 when Miller was
killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Shah has recently
published a memoir, The Storyteller's Daughter. For the time being she
lives in London."

and we learn some of her perspective of the situation in Afghanistan
leading to the rise of the Taliban. I had thought, before I read the
interview, that the Taliban was a very particular kind of person that
emerged from within the country's fighters, a mindset that was the
result of hard years of fighting the Soviets. According to her, it's
more complicated than that. In her view, the Taliban are a mindset from
several different cultural impulses: Pushtun tribal values,
conservative village mullahs with a very narrow view of Islam and the
West and an influx of mainly wahhabi Muslims (Arabs) who came to fight
alongside the mujahidin against the Soviet Union.

The gist of her interview is that the west is trying to solve the
wrong problem with the wrong methods. If one doesn't pay attention and
work on the sources of the problems, removing or changing the
figurehead (bin Laden or whoever else is in charge and in the
hierarchy) will make no difference.

a part of the interview:
SS = Saira Shah, RB = Robert Birnbaum

SS: [...] And the second reason is that there was symmetry after
the Taliban. History made more sense because you could see a progression
and it really became clear I had not seen and that really the West had
not seen, in the '80s, that there were two separate wars being fought in
Afghanistan. There was the Superpower conflict. But there was also the
mujahadin who were fighting a really different war. Pakistan was
fighting a really different war for Islam. We really didn't recognize it
at the time. It's exactly what I was saying about people not seeing
things that they are not set up to see. In the book I say that we'd be
in Peshawar and dead bodies with their throats cut would come floating
down the canal. These were the victims of intra-mujahadin fighting --
different factions were fighting among themselves, and there would be
explosions in the town, and we never really looked into them. We didn't
look and we didn't perceive. It seemed to me that history had come
around and we were again in a position where I got a second chance, if
you like. And again in the '80s Afghanistan was considered important
because it was the front line in the Superpower conflict and now it was
considered important as the front line in the war against terror. It
seemed like that there was a real danger of the same mistake being made
and the wrong things being looked at. So it just seemed to be symmetry
and also my storyŠ

RB: Has it not in fact already happened, these mistakes two years later?

SS: I think it is happening.

RB: Just today I came across this: "We have executed a private
assessment of Afghanistan, available to both civilian and military
elements of the USG, and these are our key judgements: 1) Taliban is
back in force, strong in the south, and opening a northern front.
2) Goodwill for US and NATO has collapsed. 3) Support for the Afghan
government is in flux-the US Government is largely to blame.
4) Refugees unable to return home are aggravating instability and poverty
and so onŠ So what's changed?"

SS: Says it all, doesn't it? I couldn't agree more. The West set out
to solve a series of problems in Afghanistan. The West is a very
problem-solving culture. And one of the problems of Afghanistan is
that it doesn't lend itself readily to being sorted out on the West's
terms. And I am afraid that the West really picked the wrong problems
to solve and the wrong methods to solve them. In being very fixated on
the Taliban and Osama bin Ladin, they neglected the cause of the
Taliban and the causes of bin Ladin. The Taliban particularly are not
a homogenous group.

RB: But mostly they are PushtunsŠ

SS: Mostly Pushtuns, yeah. Even in something like this [the
above-mentioned assessment]. "The Taliban could take powerŠ" as if
there is this kind of creature called Taliban. In fact, the Taliban
are a very ad hoc sort of thing. For wont of a better word you could
almost call them a mind set. 'Taliban' just means students. It's not
that the Taliban are coming back, they have never gone away. They are
still there. There is a massive culture of war lordism in Afghanistan,
as is quite well known. Where do they get those weapons? Well, they
got them from the Soviet occupation-both from the Soviet Union, in
captured weapons and the United States. So I fear for Afghanistan. I
fear now is a little window and things will get very grim again unless
there is a very different sort of commitment and that's not only for
money but a commitment to attention.

RB: The Afghan worldview seems to me to be almost untranslatable into
English.There are some values that don't seem to cross over the
linguistic barrier. And for all the talk about the fanaticism of the
Taliban towards the end of your book you quote someone, Abdul Haq,
claiming that the Taliban could have been bought off. Why didn't the
US do that?

SS: Oh yeah, he said that to me, tragically, a few days before he was
killed. He said it a couple of days before the US bombing [of
Afghanistan] started. He was pulling his hair out and he was saying,
"It would cost a fraction of the price." At that point it was a
political thing for the States. I am sure they were very well aware
that they could have bought off the Taliban.

RB: Are you sure about that?

SS: Yes, because Pakistan knew that. Pakistan, had already, with Saudi
money, bought them off. And Pakistan was desperate to avoid a war in
Afghanistan and would certainly have been saying that to the US. But
that wasn't the point. The point at that time was that it was just
post-9/11 and they needed to be seen to go in and be doing something.
Just giving a whole lot of money to a lot of warlords would not have
gone [over] too well, even if it had been covert. But it would have
worked. It's like that old fable I grew up with-I think it's an Aesop's
fable and it's in Rumi as well. The Sun and the Wind were having an
argument about the horseman, about who could take the cloak off the
horseman. And the wind blew and blew and the horseman just drew his
cloak tighter. And then the sun came out and the horseman thought, "Oh
what a lovely day, I'll just take my cloak off and sit down." That is
more the approach you need in Afghanistan. If you go in with an army,
Afghanistan is the graveyard of armies. It's not going to work. If you
are perceived to be an occupying force, it's not going to work. I
remember going in to Chitral as the US bombing started and there was a
sign up saying, "To America, we yearn for death as you yearn for life."
You are not going to beat a people like that. It's not worth. It's just
not worth it. There are different ways. There are different ways to tryŠ

[...]

RB: Isn't there a great deal of hopelessness attached to Afghanistan?
The pictures and the fact that Kabul had been decimated, a good part of
the agriculture has been destroyed. Millions of people have been
uprooted. What grandeur of human spirit will lift Afghanistan from those
terrible and declining conditions?

SS: At this point it needs a little bit of help- that human spirit.
[laughs] We are equating two different layers that don't go together.
But yes, you can't expect a country that has been systematically
destroyed over twenty years to suddenly become a flourishing economy and
democracy. It's just not going to happen. It needs help from outside.
Partly at the end of the book I am trying to explain the difficulty in
helping. It needs a specific sort of help. It needs a help without
assumptions, a help without expectations. It needs more than even decent
charity. It needs love, for wont of a better word. And that's hard. I am
saying as well as money there must be a quality of attention. I don't
see that happening.

---------------
I suggest to read the whole interview. In another interview I found
about her:
http://www.bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=shah
she says more about this topic.


Q: Talk about what it was like to grow up as an Afgan-in-exile in Britain.

SS: We weren't exactly exiles-a return trip seemed to be always around
the corner-until the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, when I was 15. I grew
up with two self-contained worlds that rarely met: my sedate middle
class existence in Kent, and a sort of virtual homeland, woven from
stories.

Q:Why did you become a journalist?

SS: I wanted to travel to Afghanistan, and the country was at war. I
also felt (but didn't really realize it at the time) a need to reconcile
my Eastern myth-making side with my Western love of factual truth. I
told myself I wanted to uncover the truth behind the myth, but probably,
more likely, I wanted to discover that the myth was literal truth.

Q:Please talk about your search for personal and cultural identity. How
have the facts informed you? How about the ancestral myth that has been
your inheritance? Which gets you closer to truth, fact or mythology?

SS: A lot of the book deals with the question of how to approach truth.
There is a Persian saying: "the question about the sky, the answer about
a rope." Facts try to build a ladder, rung by rung, to approach the sky,
while stories and myths try to provide an overarching rainbow of
metaphor, which can give you a taste of what the sky is like, though not
necessarily physically reach it! In my quest for Afghanistan, I used
both. Both were helpful-and I suppose you could argue that neither could
be really useful without the other.

[...]


Q: Do you think things have changed in Afghanistan since the most
recent war?

SS: Of course they've changed-nothing stays still. But there are still
overwhelming problems. The main one, I think, being that the West
picked the wrong problem to solve-getting rid of the Taliban and
chasing Osama. There needs to be much more emphasis from the West on
rebuilding Afghanistan, rather than destroying perceived enemies. That
will take at least a generation and require cash and care.

Q:Do you think Osama bin Laden is alive or dead?

SS: I have no clue-and I think Osama bin Laden is a huge red herring.
The West needs to concentrate on the factors that created Osama and
helped him to flourish, not on the man himself. There can be any
number of Osamas.

Q:How often do you get to Afghanistan these days? When were you last
there?

SS: I was last there in October 2001-at the ending of the book. I was
supposed to go this spring, but the tragic death of my friend and
business partner James Miller made it impossible. I hope to go and
spend proper time there when I have finished the film I was working on
with James. In the meantime, I am campaigning for Israel to hold a proper,
independent, and open investigation into how he was killed.


------------

Amara




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Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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      "Trust in the Universe, but tie up your camels first."
                (adaptation of a Sufi proverb)