News from Tartary
A round-up of miscellaneous Central Asiatic news and readings.
- Two pieces harshing on the Dalai Lama, one from a former director of the Free Tibet campaign in the New York Times, the other (an oldie) from Christopher Hitchens in Salon (bonus Hitchens: gratuitous Clinton-bashing in the closing paragraph). Plus an essay by Michael Parenti on the horrors of Tibetan feudalism and slavery, i.e., the way the country was run when the Dalai Lamas ruled it. Parenti is not reliable on the actions of Communist regimes, but when he's summarizing the work of actual historians on pre-Communist Tibet, mostly accurate. [Via the Null Device]
- The Financial Times examines the career of G. Karimova, daughter of I. Karimov and so heir-presumptive to Uzbekistan. Signs of how the world has moved on: the sultan's daughter is the one engaging in commerce of dubious legality, and she's wanted in the US for contempt of court, as part of a custody dispute with her Uzbek-Afghan-American ex-husband. [Via Jay Han in e-mail]
- A Norwegian journalist, Åsne Seierstad, has written a fictionalized account of her months of living with an Afghan family, The Bookseller of Kabul. The men of the family come off looking like beasts, of course. Here's a nice review of the book by Tim Judah, and here's a not so nice one in The Spectator. (Jay Han alerts me to the fact that the latter turns out to quote, without acknowledgment, from the reflections of King Herod in Auden's For the Time Being.) The eponymous bookseller, Mohammed Shah Rais, has come to Europe to sue the journalist: "It is defamation of me, my family and my nation". He's even quoted as saying he'd like to see the book destroyed. Various of the Usual Suspects are joining in saying that the book is an insult to Afghans generally and an offense against their honor. It's hard to tell from the news reports, even this well-written one by Judah, but I don't notice either Rais or his lawyer saying that anything reported is actually false, and it would not surprise me very much if it were all true. The position of Afghan women has never been particularly enviable, and the situation has certainly regressed over the last quarter-century. I think it is a mistake, however, to attribute this to something inherent in Afghan culture or religion, because (a) it didn't used to be this bad, and (b) the situation of women is deeply unenviable over most of the world today, and historically has been unenviable everywhere. What Seierstad reports would not have been out of line for classical Athens, except that more of the men would've been pederasts. For that matter, the British are only a handful of generations removed from having "A wife, a dog and a walnut tree/ The more you beat them, the better they be" as a proverb, or Hume explaining ("Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences") that men ought to listen politely to women in mixed company, because it's only courteous not to rub people's noses in their powerlessness and inferiority. (Let's not even get into the Byzantine origins of the burqa today.) So concluding, as even Judah does, that these very real and dishonorable horrors point to a hopeless and permanent situation is short-sighted. [Via Butterflies and Wheels and Jay Han]
- Mongolia has sent a detachment of troops to Baghdad as part of the Coalition of the Willing. The first time the Mongol army got to Baghdad, 10 February 1258, they sacked the city, executed the last Abbasid caliph, and slaughtered somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 people. This is still something of a sore spot with the locals. Can we at least hope that the commander of the detachment is not named Hulagu? --- Further to the topic of the Mongol sack of Baghdad and its world-historical import, or lack thereof, see the (erratic) essay "Sympathy for the Mongols" by Daniel A. Foss, or, more soundly, the close of volume 1 of Marshall G. S. Hodgson's The Venture of Islam. (I know I found the Xinhua news item through some blog or other, but can't reconstruct which; my apologies to Whomever.)
- Finally, we have Amy Waldman reporting on the bright prospects of Afghan warlords. Now, this kind of behavior --- feuding with rival gangs over who got to exploit peasants and traders --- is what gave my father's family its start in the world, back in the day, but even we'd gotten beyond that, and I'd like to think, as an American, that a country under the protection of the United States Army is not going to experience rule by competitive thuggery. Except, of course, that our army is tied down in Iraq... The natural solution is to recruit the warlords and their troops as auxiliaries for the occupation of Iraq. [Update: I have expanded on this suggestion.]
Afghanistan and Central Asia
; The Continuing Crisis