p. 44 With the air of one opening an important conversational topic, Halima’s husband asks: ‘Tell us, what are orfinary people in the West saying about our lives?”
At this time, in spring 2001, people are saying nothing whatsoever about Afghanistan. They’ve barely even heard of Kabul… Now sitting here in the gloom, feeling rather than seeing this family’s expectant faces – I cannot bear to tell them any of this. So I take a coward’s way out. I quote them lines of the poet Sa’adi of Shiraz:
The people of the world are limbs from one body, sharing one essence,
When a single limb is oppressed, all the others suffer agony.”
To the family, this concept is so familiar it is self-evident. They wait for me to make my point, because they already assume people in the West believe oppression in the world concerns us all. But they are wrong; they have been abandoned.”
p. 135 “A hawk beloning to a king flew away and landed at the house of an old woman. She had never seen a hawk before, and she decided to look after it. She trimmed the hawk’s curved beak into a straight line, cut off its crest and clipped its claws. “There,” she said, when she had finished. “Now you look much more like a pigeon” Masnavi, Jalaluddin Rumi
p. 153 Rumi’s father and his young son fled their hometown of Balkh in northern Afghanistan and joined the tide of starving civilian refugees being pushed before the invaders. [Mongols]. They took refuge in Nishapur, in present-day Iran. But the Mongols were hot on their heels. Behind them the entire population of the city of Herat was massacred…. Six months earlier people had joked that you could not stretch out your leg in Herat without kicking a poet or a philosopher. … Rumi, who had lost his family, his home, his country, his future – and all hope of peace or stability during his lifetime – refused to be limited by the parameters of his collapsing world. “From the point of view of a man,” he says in his Discourses, “a thing may appear to be good or evil. But from the point of view of God, everything is good. Show me the good wherein no evil is contained, or the evil in which there is no good. Good and evil are indivisible.”… The world of the West was telling me there was a battle going on between good and evil. The Society bloc saw things the same way – it just reversed who was good and who was evil. But here, on the back of a buzkashi horse, was a view gleabed from the sowing and reaping of countless invasions: there are no absolutes in our fragmentary world; the divisions we create and believe in are artificial. Time itself is no straight line of ordered progress, but an endlessly repeayting cycle – throughout our lives and throughout history – from which we are at liberty to learn if we wish. The rest is a swirling mass, a primal force, a dustcloud of thindering feet and shouting voices, the thrill of the chase, the cutting down and the building up.”
p. 154 “Even our beloved national dish, pilau, is said to have originated on those wild rampages, when the troops of Genghis Khan laid out their round shields to catch the dripping from the carcasses they had pillaged, and threw in a little rice – a grain they had never seen until they came to Afghanistan – to mop it up.”
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