[between two worlds]
A CHILDREN’S BOOK WRITER FROM AFGHANISTAN TRANSFORMED BY 9/11 TA M I M
A N S A RY
Tamim Ansary was born in 1948, in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father worked as a professor at Kabul University and his mother—the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan—taught English at the country’s first girls’ schools. In the mid-fifties, his family moved to the tiny government-built town of Lashkargah, in the country’s southwestern desert. Today, that area is the heart of the Talibinist insurgency. Back then, it was the nerve center for the country’s biggest American-funded development project, a vast complex of dams, canals, and experimental farms, which his father helped to run. When he left Afghanistan in 1964, the country was still a tranquil backwater. He finished high school and college in the United States, then worked for a collectively-owned newspaper. Later, just as Khomeini was seizing power in Iran, he traveled in North Africa and Turkey, looking for Islam, and found Islamism instead. Unnerved and exhausted, he returned to San Francisco, married the love of his life, and settled into a quiet life of editing and writing children’s books. Then came September 11, 2001. The day after those airplanes brought down the twin towers, an email he wrote to a few friends went viral on the Internet, and he found himself derailed from his previous career into speaking for Afghanistan and trying to interpret the Islamic world for the West—because at the time there was no one else to do it. In his memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, he depicts how it was to grow up straddling these two vastly disparate cultures— Afghanistan and America. In 2010 he published Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes to critical acclaim, and more recently The Widow’s Husband, a historical novel set in Afghanistan in 1841. In 2012 he released Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan.
20
