Kandahar, Afghanistan: Prelude
Stories of the Horizon of Being
There was a girl born in Khig, a village on the outskirts of the town of Maiwand, situated in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan. The daughter of a shepherd, at 18 she was engaged, her wedding planned in late July. Meanwhile, the British were conducting a brutal campaign in the region. Should a village be suspected of anything short of complete submission, their buildings would be burned, their livestock would be killed, and their grain destroyed. And come July, a British garrison marched on Maiwand.
Malalai, the daughter of the shepherd, joined her father and fiancé among the resistance that had gathered. As the two forces exchanged gunfire, the Afghan flag bearer was killed near where Malalai stood. When the flag fell, Malalai tore off her veil and raised it to rally the fighters, calling out:
If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame.
Stirred by her words, by the sight of this woman with her veil raised overhead in the gunfire, the resistance drove the British back in what became their greatest defeat of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
Why do I share this story, and what relevance does it have to the Westerner? What do you have in common with a shepherd’s daughter centuries ago, or an Afghan girl today, who studies in secret, whose education is criminalized? Your mind might float humanity to the surface as mine does, and yet the term is so lacking, so devoid of flavor, that it’s emptied of all essence, as if it has been reduced to no more than a political slogan.
I share this story with you as girls have shared it with me, as somehow I’ve awoken to being entangled in this. I share this story with you as for seven months I’ve witnessed and worked with women of this character. I share this story with you as I am breathless, wordy, and verbose, and know no straightforward way to describe the impression they’ve made on me. But the situation calls for some discipline in writing, some brevity, some restraint. And thus, I must broach the subject first tangentially.
For now, I ask you to consider only a few points. First, is that this century-old story inspires young women within the region today. Second, is that stories have power and are fundamental to how we interpret and interface with the world. There are stories thousands of years old that still move millions of men — sometimes expanding him toward courage, other times shrinking him toward complacency, often lowering him to violence, but on occasion raising him upward toward grace.
Lastly, all interpretive frameworks, all mental models you use knowingly and unknowingly to make sense of the world, are stories. It is the default way of being. Have you ever heard someone ask you, “Where is your accent from?” when you are local to a region? And the thought immediately arises: “What is this madman talking about? I have no accent.” When, of course, in actuality, no place exists where English is spoken without an accent. Thus, if you think you are not attached to a story, you are the most imprisoned by them, you are, regretfully, the most fanatical creature of them all, because you are unaware. When our stories don’t bump up against our world, we mistake them as truth.
You are not free from this fate should you depart from the common narrative around you, and instead latch on to a wing of counter-culture: narratives by podcasters, religious and new-age spiritual grifters, or whatever your particular, personal, curated and self-reinforcing milieu of internet information is. Surround yourself with people who are questioning, who are in pursuit of truth, and run from those who claim to have found it. If you are in possession of the truth, look again. Reality is complex, and claims on the contrary that argue existence is simple, cannot be made in good faith. The more you grapple with the world, the closer you examine the nature of things, the stranger it all becomes.
Interrogate the stories you tell yourself, become conscious of them, bear their weight, make them tangible. Take responsibility for your role in their continued authorship. Examine how they shape your behavior. Either you will pass them on or extinguish them within yourself, this is your choice. Be not afraid to hold opposite, apparently mutually exclusive stories at once. It generates creative tension. Faith and science are one ripe area for this.
until we speak again,
warmly,
austin
The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength.
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
Excerpts from an Interview with a Student
When the topic of universities and schools arises, I undergo a different state of being. This deprivation feels like a knot and a tumor in my brain and heart that torments me. Days pass, and instead of our pain being alleviated, it worsens, and the number of those drowning in this whirlpool increases every day. Enduring such a situation is agonizing.
I continually question the ban on girls’ education as if it were a nightmare. How can it be that, in this day and age, girls are deprived of schooling? Yet, I realize it’s a dream without awakening, leaving us pondering how much longer we’ll remain confined to household chores or solitary reading to acquire skills. We walk past school gates, barred from entry, even fearing to step outside.
Interview conducted by journalist Moqim Mehran.