West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

Front Cover

Tamim Ansary's passionate personal journey through two cultures in conflict, West of Kabul, East of New York.

Shortly after militant Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an e-mail to twenty friends, telling how the threatened U.S. reprisals against Afghanistan looked to him as an Afghan American. The message spread, and in a few days it had reached, and affected, millions of people-Afghans and Americans, soldiers and pacifists, conservative Christians and talk-show hosts; for the message, written in twenty minutes, was one Ansary had been writing all his life.

West of Kabul, East of New York is an urgent communiqué by an American with "an Afghan soul still inside me," who has lived in the very different worlds of Islam and the secular West. The son of an Afghan man and the first American woman to live as an Afghan, Ansary grew up in the intimate world of Afghan family life, one never seen by outsiders. No sooner had he emigrated to San Francisco than he was drawn into the community of Afghan expatriates sustained by the dream of returning to their country -and then drawn back to the Islamic world himself to discover the nascent phenomenon of militant religious fundamentalism.

Tamim Ansary has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on the conflict between Islam and the West. His book is a deeply personal account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.

 

Selected pages

Contents

II
11
III
28
IV
38
V
51
VI
59
VII
79
VIII
82
IX
97
XV
179
XVI
184
XVII
190
XVIII
197
XIX
205
XX
217
XXII
219
XXIII
235

X
109
XI
121
XII
139
XIII
149
XIV
152
XXIV
245
XXV
259
XXVI
275
Copyright

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Page 5 - Ramazan when for a whole month the faithful children of Islam are forbidden to eat or drink from sunrise till sunset. As the flowery language of the Koran puts it: the fasting should end when a white thread can no longer be distinguished from a black one. The inhabitants of that district were extremely religious, and even the magistrates of the villages fasted strictly.

About the author (2003)

Tamim Ansary, who has written numerous books for children, is a columnist for Encarta. He lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife and their two children.