The Bookseller of Kabul

Burning Books

On a freezing cold afternoon in November 1999, a bonfire blazed on the roundabout at Charhai-e-Sadarat in Kabul. Street children gathered round the flames that cast dancing shadows across their dirty faces. They played a game of dare – who could get closest to the flames? Grown-ups stole a glance at the fire and hastened by. It was safer that way; it was obvious to all that this fire had not been lit by street watchmen to warm their hands. It was a fire in the service of God.

Queen Soraya’s sleeveless dress curled and twisted and turned to ash, as did her shapely white arms and serious face. King Amanullah, her husband, burnt too, and all his medals with him. The whole line of kings spluttered on the fire, together with little girls in Afghan dress, Mujahedeen soldiers on horseback and farmers at a Kandahar bazaar.

The religious police went conscientiously to work in Sultan Khan’s bookshop that November afternoon. Any books portraying living things, be they human or animal, were torn from the shelves and tossed on the fire. Yellowed pages, innocent postcards, and dried-out covers from old reference books were sacrificed to the flames.

Amidst the children round the bonfire stood the foot soldiers of the religious police, carrying whips, long sticks and Kalashnikovs. These men considered anyone who loved pictures or books, sculptures or music, dance, film or free thought enemies of society.

Today they were interested only in pictures. Heretical texts, even those on the shelves right in front of their eyes, were overlooked. The soldiers were illiterate and could not distinguish orthodox Taliban doctrine from heresy. But they could distinguish pictures from letters and animate creatures from inanimate things.

Finally only ashes remained, caught by the wind and swirled with the dust and dirt in the streets and sewers of Kabul. The bookseller, bereft of his beloved books, was bundled into a car, a Taliban soldier on either side. The soldiers closed and sealed the shop and Sultan was sent to jail for anti-Islamic behaviour.

Lucky the armed half-wits did not look behind the shelves, Sultan thought on his way to detention. The most prohibited books he had stashed away ingeniously. He only brought them out if someone asked specially for them and if he thought he could trust the person who asked.

Sultan had expected this. He had been selling illegal books, pictures and writings for many years. The soldiers had often menaced him, seized a few books and then left. Threats had been issued from the Taliban’s highest authority and he had even been called in to the Minister for Culture, in the Government’s attempts to try and convert the enterprising bookseller and recruit him to the Taliban cause.

Sultan Khan willingly sold some Taliban publications. He was a freethinker and of the opinion that everyone had the right to be heard. But along with their gloomy doctrines he also wanted to sell history books, scientific publications, ideological works on Islam, and not least, novels and poetry. The Taliban regarded debate as heresy and doubt as sin. Anything other than Koran-swotting was unnecessary, even dangerous. When the Taliban came to power in Kabul in the autumn of 1996 the ministries were emptied of professionals and replaced by mullahs. From the central bank to the university – the mullahs controlled everything. Their goal was to re-create a society like the one the Prophet Muhammad had lived in on the Arab peninsula in the seventh century. Even when the Taliban negotiated with foreign oil companies, ignorant mullahs sat around the negotiating table, lacking any technical expertise.

Sultan was convinced that under the Taliban the country grew increasingly poor, dismal and insular. The authorities resisted all modernisation; they had no wish to either understand or adopt ideas of progress or economic development. They shunned scientific debate, whether conducted in the West or in the Muslim world. Their manifesto was above all a few pathetic arguments about how people should dress or cover themselves, how men should respect the hour of prayer, and women be separated from the rest of society. They were not conversant with the history of Islam or of Afghanistan, and had no interest in either.

Sultan Khan sat in the car squashed between the illiterate Taliban soldiers, cursing his country for being ruled by either warriors or mullahs. He was a believer, but a moderate Muslim. He prayed to Allah every morning, but usually ignored the following four calls to prayer unless the religious police pulled him in to the nearest mosque with other men they had snatched up from the streets. He reluctantly respected the fast during Ramadan and did not eat between sunup and sundown, at least not when anyone was looking. He was faithful to his two wives, brought up his children with a firm hand and taught them to be good God-fearing Muslims. He had nothing but contempt for the Taliban whom he considered illiterate peasant priests; they originated from the poorest and most conservative part of the country, where literacy was low.

The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin, better known as the Ministry of Morality, was behind his arrest. During the interrogation in the prison Sultan Khan stroked his beard. He wore it according to Taliban requirements, the length of a clenched fist. He straightened his shalwar kameez; it too conformed to Taliban standards – tunic below the knees, trousers below the ankle. He answered proudly: ‘You can burn my books, you can embitter my life, you can even kill me, but you cannot wipe out Afghanistan ’s history.’

Books were Sultan’s life. Ever since he was given his first book at school, books and stories had captivated him. He was born to a poor family, and grew up during the fifties in the village of Deh Khudaidad outside Kabul. Neither his mother nor his father could read, but they scraped together enough money to send him to school. As the oldest son any savings were spent on him. His sister, who was born before him, never set foot inside a school and never learnt to read or write. Today she can barely tell the right time. After all, her only future was to be married off.

But Sultan, he was destined for greatness. The first hurdle was the road to school. Little Sultan refused to walk it because he had no shoes. His mother sent him packing.

‘Oh yes, you can, you just see,’ she said and gave him a blow over the head. Soon he had earned enough money to buy shoes. He worked throughout his schooling. In the mornings before class and every afternoon until dark, he fired bricks to make money for the family. Later he got a job in a shop. He told his parents that the salary was half of what it actually was. He saved the rest and bought books.

He started selling books when he was a teenager. He had been accepted as an engineering student but could not find the appropriate textbooks. During a journey with his uncle to Teheran he happened upon all the required titles in one of the town’s many book markets. He bought several sets, which he sold on to fellow students in Kabul for double the price. And so the bookseller was born; he was thrown a lifeline.

Sultan participated in the construction of only two buildings in Kabul before book mania tore him away from the world of engineering. Once again it was the book markets in Teheran that seduced him. The boy from the country wandered around among books in the Persian metropolis, surrounded by old and new, antique and modern, and came across books he had never dreamt even existed. He bought crate upon crate of Persian poetry, art books, history books, and – for the sake of his business – textbooks for engineers.

Back home in Kabul he opened his first little bookshop, amongst the spice merchants and kebab stalls in the centre of town. This was the seventies and society teetered between the modern and the traditional. Zahir Shah, the liberal and rather lazy king, ruled, and his half-hearted attempts at modernising the country provoked sharp censure from religious quarters. When a number of mullahs protested against women of the royal family exposing themselves in public without the veil, they were thrown into prison.

The number of universities and establishments of learning increased, followed closely by student demonstrations. These were brutally put down by the authorities and many students were killed. A profusion of parties and political groups mushroomed – although free elections were never held – from radical left wing to religious fundamentalism. The groups fought amongst themselves and the unstable atmosphere in the country spread. The economy stagnated following three years of drought, and during a catastrophic famine in 1973, while Zahir Shah was consulting a doctor in Italy, his cousin Daoud seized power in a coup and abolished the monarchy.

President Daoud’s regime was more oppressive than that of his cousin. But Sultan’s bookshop flourished. He sold books and periodicals published by the various political groups, from Marxist to fundamentalist. He lived at home in the village with his parents and cycled in to the stall in Kabul every morning and back every evening. His only problem was his mother’s constant nagging about finding a wife. She constantly introduced new candidates – a cousin or the girl next door. Sultan was not ready to start a family. He had several irons in the fire and was in no hurry. He wanted freedom to travel and often visited Teheran, Tashkent and Moscow. In Moscow he had a Russian sweetheart – Ludmila.

A few months before the Soviet Union invaded the country in December 1979, he made his first mistake. The unyielding Communist Nur Mohammad Taraki ruled the country. The entire presidential family, from Daoud down to the youngest baby, had been killed in a coup. The prisons were overflowing, and tens of thousands of political opponents were arrested, tortured and executed.

The Communists wanted to consolidate their control of the whole country and tried to suppress Islamic groups. The holy warriors, the Mujahedeen, took up arms against the regime, a conflict that later turned into a merciless guerrilla war against the Soviet Union.

The Mujahedeen represented a profusion of ideologies and trends. The various groups published periodicals supporting jihad – the fight against the heathen regime – and the Islamification of the country. For its part the regime tightened its grip on everyone who was suspected of being in league with the Mujahedeen, and it was strictly forbidden to print or distribute their ideological publications.

Sultan sold periodicals published by Mujahedeen and Communist alike. Moreover, he suffered from collecting mania and could not resist buying a few copies of each and every book or periodical he came across, in order to sell them on for a profit. Sultan was of the opinion that he was obliged to procure whatever anyone wanted. The banned publications he hid under the counter.

It did not take long for someone to inform on him. A customer was arrested in possession of books he had bought from Sultan. During a raid the police uncovered several illegal publications. The first book pyre was lit. Sultan was taken in, beaten up and condemned to a year in prison. He spent the time in the political prisoners’ section, where writing materials and books were forbidden. Months on end Sultan stared at the wall. But he managed to bribe one of the guards with his mother’s food parcels and books were smuggled in every week. Within the damp stone walls Sultan’s interest in Afghan culture and literature grew. He lost himself in Persian poetry and the dramatic past of his country. When he was let out he was absolutely sure of his ground: he would fight to promote knowledge of Afghan culture and history. He continued to sell illegal publications, by the Islamic guerrillas and the pro-China Communist opposition, but he was more cautious than before.

The authorities kept an eye on him and five years later he was arrested again. Once more he was given the opportunity to meditate on Persian philosophy behind prison walls, but now a new accusation was added to the old one; he was labelled petit bourgeois, middle-class, according to Communism one of the worst terms of abuse. The charge was that he made money after the capitalist model.

This all happened during the period when Afghanistan’s Communist regime, in the heat of suffering caused by war, tried to wind up tribal society and introduce ‘joyful’ Communism. Attempts to collectivise farming led to severe hardship amongst the population. Many poor farmers refused to accept land that had been compulsorily purchased from rich landowners, as it was contrary to Islam to sow in stolen soil. The countryside rose in protest and as a consequence the Communist schemes were seldom successful. In time the authorities gave up. War sapped everyone’s strength; after ten years it had claimed 1.5 million Afghan lives.

When the petit bourgeois was let out of prison, he was thirty-five years old. The war against the Soviet Union was, on the whole, being fought in the countryside and Kabul was left more or less intact. The grind of daily life occupied people. This time his mother managed to persuade him to marry. She produced Sharifa, a general’s daughter, a beautiful and bright woman. They married and had three sons and a daughter, one baby every other year.

The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and the inhabitants looked forward to peace at last. But because the regime in Kabul continued to be propped up by the Soviets the Mujahedeen did not lay down arms. They took Kabul in May 1992 and civil war broke out. The apartment that the family had bought in a Soviet-built block of flats was situated right on the front line, between the warring factions. Rockets hit the walls, bullets shattered the windows and tanks rolled over the courtyard. After they had cowered on the floor for a week, the hail of shells quietened down for a few hours and Sultan took himself and his family off to Pakistan.

While he was in Pakistan his bookstall was robbed, as was the public library. Valuable books went to collectors for a song – or were exchanged for tanks, bullets and grenades. Sultan himself bought up some of the books stolen from the national library when he returned from Pakistan to see to his shop. He got some real bargains. For a handful of dollars he bought works hundreds of years old, amongst them a 500-year-old manuscript from Uzbekistan for which the Uzbek government later offered him $25,000. He found Zahir Shah’s personal copy of his own favourite, the epic poet Ferdusi’s great work Shah Nama, and bought several books dirt cheap from the thieves, who were unable even to read the titles.

After nearly five years of intense fighting between the mujahedeen warlords, half of Kabul had been reduced to a pile of rubble and had lost 50,000 citizens. When Kabul ’s inhabitants woke on the morning of 27 September 1996, the city was totally quiet. The previous evening Ahmed Shah Massoud and his army had escaped up towards the Panshir valley.

Two bodies hung from a pole outside the presidential palace. The larger was soaked through with blood from head to foot. It had been castrated, the fingers were crushed, the torso and face battered and there was a bullet hole through the forehead. The other had merely been shot and hanged, the pockets stuffed full of Afghani, the local currency, as a sign of contempt. The bodies were those of former president Muhammad Najibullah and his brother. Najibullah was a hated man. He had been head of the secret police at the time of the Soviet invasion and was said to have ordered the execution of 80,000 so-called enemies of society. He was the country’s president from 1986 to 1992, supported by the Russians. After the mujahedeen coup Massoud became defence minister, with Sibghatullah Mujadidi as president for the first three months followed by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Najibullah sought refuge with the UN after an attempt to flee from Kabul airport was thwarted, and he remained thereafter in confinement in a UN compound in Kabul.

When the Taliban made their way through the eastern districts of Kabul and the Mujahedeen government decided to flee, Massoud invited the prominent prisoner to accompany them. Najibullah feared for his life outside the capital and chose to stay behind with the security guards in the UN building. Besides, as a Pashtoon he reasoned that he could negotiate with Taliban Pashtoons. Early the next morning all the guards had disappeared. White flags – Taliban’s holy colour – flew over the mosques.

Kabul ’s inhabitants gathered in disbelief round the pole in Ariana Square. They gazed at the men who hung there and returned quietly home. The war was over. A new war would start – a war that would trample all joy under foot.

The Taliban established law and order, but simultaneously dealt Afghan art and culture the final blow. The regime burnt Sultan’s books and turned up at Kabul Museum carrying axes, towing along with them, as a witness, their own Minister for Culture.

Not much remained in the museum when they arrived. All loose items had been looted during the civil war: potsherds from the time Alexander the Great conquered the country, swords that could have been used in the battles against Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, Persian miniatures and gold coins. Anonymous collectors from all over the world bought most of it. Very few artefacts were saved before the looting started in earnest.

A few enormous sculptures of Afghan kings and princes were left standing, and thousand-year-old Buddha statues and murals. The foot soldiers went to work, exhibiting the same spirit as when they had devastated Sultan’s bookshop. The museum guards cried when the Taliban started chopping away at what remained of the art. They hacked at the sculptures till only the plinth remained, in a heap of dust amidst lumps of clay. It took them half a day to annihilate a thousand years of history. All that remained after the vandals had done was an ornamental tablet, a quotation from the Koran, which the Minister for Culture had thought best left alone.

When the Taliban’s art executioners left the bombed-out museum building – it had also been a frontline target during the civil war – the guards were left standing amongst the debris. Laboriously they gathered up the bits and swept up the dust. They put the bits in boxes and labelled them. Some of the pieces were still identifiable: a hand off one statue, a wavy lock of hair from another. The boxes were put in the basement in the hope that sometime in the future the statues could be restored.

Six months before the Taliban fell the enormous Buddha statues in Bamiyan were blown up. They were close to two thousand years old and Afghanistan ’s greatest cultural heritage. The dynamite was so powerful that there were no bits left to gather up.

It was against the backdrop of this regime that Sultan Khan tried to save parts of Afghanistan ’s culture. Following the book pyre at the roundabout he bribed someone to get out of prison, and the same day he broke open the seal on the shop. Standing amongst the remnants of his treasures, he cried. He painted big black lines and squiggles over the living creatures in the books the soldiers had overlooked. That was preferable to them being burnt. Then he thought of a better idea – he pasted his business cards over the pictures. Thus he covered the pictures but could just as easily uncover them. At the same time he put his own stamp on the works. It might one day be possible to remove the cards.

But the regime turned relentlessly more ruthless. As the years passed it adhered more and more rigorously to the puritanical line and its goal of living ever more closely by the rules from the era of Muhammad. Once again the Minister for Culture called Sultan in. ‘Someone is out to get you,’ he said, ‘and I cannot protect you.’

That was when, in the summer of 2001, he decided to leave the country. He applied for a visa for himself, his two wives, sons and daughter to settle in Canada. His wives and children lived at that time in Pakistan and loathed the refugee existence. But Sultan knew he could not give up his books. He now owned three bookshops in Kabul. One shop was run by his younger brother, another by his sixteen-year-old son Mansur, and the third he ran himself.

Only a fraction of his books were displayed on the shelves. The majority, about ten thousand, were hidden away in attics all over Kabul. He could not allow this collection, which he had built up over a period of thirty years, to be lost. He could not allow the Taliban, or other aggressors, to destroy even more of the Afghan soul. Anyhow, he had a secret plan, a dream, for his collection. When the Taliban had gone and a reliable government returned to Afghanistan, he promised himself that he would donate the complete book collection to the looted public library in town, where once hundreds of thousands of books had adorned the shelves.

Owing to the death-threat Sultan Khan and his family were granted a visa to Canada. But he never went. While his wives packed and prepared for the journey, he invented all sorts of excuses to delay. He was expecting some books, the bookshop was threatened, or a relative had died. Something always got in the way.

Then came September 11. When the bombs started to rain down over Afghanistan, Sultan left for Pakistan. He commanded Yunus, one of his younger, unmarried brothers, to stay behind in Kabul and look after the shops.

When the Taliban fell, two months after the terrorist attack on the USA, Sultan was one of the first to arrive back in Kabul. At last he could stock up his shelves with all the books he wanted. The history books with black lines and squiggles he could now sell to foreigners as curiosities, and he could remove the business cards that had been glued over pictures of living creatures. He could once more show off Queen Soraya’s white arms and King Amanullah’s chest, plastered with decorations.

One morning he was in his shop, drinking a cup of steaming tea, watching Kabul wake up. He laid plans for how to realise his dream and thought of a quotation by his favourite poet Ferdusi. ‘To succeed you must sometimes be a wolf and sometimes a lamb.’ The time has come to be a wolf, thought Sultan.