Before Taliban

Introduction / 13
the political controversies that seethed below the surface in Kabul, much less
the maelstrom toward which Afghanistan was headed. Nor had I read
Thomas’s account of his trip to Afghanistan, and so I couldn’t have recognized
the possibility that the scene in Naim and Jabar completed an arc
begun in Kabul fifty-some years earlier—from a king remaking his summer
palace in the image of a Hollywood film to a poor boy pocketing his
turban in order to fit into his own humble version of the modern imaginary.
For Amir Amanullah, clothing was a symbolic manifestation of a nation’s
progress. For the young boy in Naim and Jabar, it would seem to have the
related significance of “fitting in” and “looking the part” for which he too
was auditioning. Looking back, I imagine that the Afghan students who sat
in my classroom in their second-hand Western clothes must have felt a similar
concern, but at the time I didn’t make the connection between the boys
in the film and the students I encountered every day at the school.
Only much later, when I rented the film to show a classroom of American
college students what Afghanistan was like before the revolution, did I focus
on the scene with the turban and come to reflect on the fact that many of
those Afghan students I taught a long time ago must have experienced
moments like the one in the film when they too had to make a decision
between one world and another. Nor did I fully grasp until seeing the film a
decade later that it was boys like Naim and Jabar, as well as my own Englishlanguage
students, who provided the bulk of the membership of both the
Marxist and radical Islamic parties that plunged Afghanistan into its quarter
century of crisis. During my first stay in Afghanistan, in the 1970s, there
were political rumblings to be sure, but I and most of the Westerners of my
acquaintance were blissfully unaware of how deep the discontent was.
Everywhere one went in Kabul in the mid-seventies, one saw photographs
of the bald and seemingly benign countenance of the Afghan ruler,
President Muhammad Daud, who appeared very much in charge. Few of the
people I spoke with doubted the country’s basic stability, and only much
later did we discover that beneath the apparent calm, leftist and Islamic
political parties were both feverishly making plans to overthrow the government.
As a newcomer to Afghanistan, I had no way to know the extent
of the discord in the country, although two events might have provided
clues if only I had been able to see them clearly. The first occurred shortly
after my arrival in Kabul; Islamic militants belonging to the Muslim Youth
Organization (Sazman-i Jawanan-i Musulman) staged armed uprisings in a
number of provinces. The government had little trouble suppressing these
attacks, and press reports indicated only that there had been local disturbances.
They did not advertise the organized and political nature of these