1. religion and spirituality
2. islam

2ECOND THOUGHT
A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council
fall 14
on
[the BETWEEN TWO WORLDS issue]
1
Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND
BRIDGING
CULTURES
note
from the
executive
director
When my husband Tom was in journalism school, he vividly remembers one of
his professors offering a cautionary tale to the class: “If you want your audience
to engage with you, never begin a news story with the phrase, ‘More violence in
the Middle East today…’” The point of the lesson–people shut down when the
message is constant and overwhelming.
Tom relayed this story to me when I told him of my dream for the humanities
council to hold an event dedicated to exploring America’s role in the escalating
violence in the Middle East. His class took place in 1995 and things have only
gone from bad to worse. Such an event would be a hard sell to a war-weary
population. Indeed, I found myself turning away from the images of violence and
hatred scattered across the news and social media. As a mother, I didn’t want to
know how many other mothers had to go to bed each night with children to bury
in the morning—whether they were moms to American soldiers or war refugees
didn’t matter. It’s hard to watch anyone living through a nightmare when you feel
helpless to help end it.
“So you don’t think we should do it?” I asked him, disheartened.
“No,” he replied. “I think that’s exactly why you need to do it.”
His response fairly describes our mission at the council.
Our board and staff have worked hard to find a group of people with a foot in
both American and Middle Eastern worlds, people who can bring the tragedy
overseas back down to a human level and help connect our audience in Fargo
in some small way with people in Kabul, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Gaza, and
Tehran. Our hope is to move beyond headlines and politics in order to bridge
cultures and begin envisioning new paths toward peace and justice.
We are so glad you decided to take this journey with us.
Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt
Executive Director
features
[contents]
Cover photo by Josh Rushing.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
4 Angels in Evin
By Roxana Saberi
14 To Any Would-Be Terrorists
By Naomi Shihab Nye
18 Lunch in Nablus City Park
By Naomi Shihab Nye
22 West of Kabul, East of New York
By Tamim Ansary
26 An Afghan-American Speaks
By Tamim Ansary
30 Journey From the Land of No
By Roya Hakakian
36 No Faith At All
By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi
40 With Our Own Eyes
By G. Willow Wilson
44 America’s Greater Jihad
By Josh Rushing
52 Between Two Worlds
Complete Schedule of Events
ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the
North Dakota Humanities Council.
Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Editor
Janet Daley Jury, Associate Editor
Erin Goodale Price, Copy Editor
To subscribe please contact us:
North Dakota Humanities Council
418 E. Broadway, Suite 8
Bismarck, ND 58501
800-338-6543
council@ndhumanities.org
ndhumanities.org
Any views, findings, conclusions, or
recommendations expressed in this magazine do
not necessarily represent those of the National
Endowment for the Humanities or
the North Dakota Humanities Council.
[between two worlds]
Roxana Saberi is a senior producer/reporter for Al Jazeera
America in New York. From 2003 to 2009, she lived and worked as
a journalist in Iran, filing reports for organizations such as Feature Story
News, NPR, BBC, ABC Radio and Fox News. She was writing a book
about Iran when she was arrested in 2009 in Tehran and falsely accused of
espionage. She was released after 100 days. Back in the United States, Ms.
Saberi wrote Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran. She also
worked as a freelance journalist, with articles appearing in The Washington
Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST
TAKEN HOSTAGE IN IRAN
R O X A N A
S A B E R I
Saberi has also spoken across the United States and has traveled to Europe,
South America, and the Middle East to speak with the public, media, and
government officials about Iran, human rights, and overcoming adversity.
She has received the Medill Medal of Courage, the Ilaria Alpi Freedom of the
Press Award, the NCAA Award of Valor, a Project for Middle East Democracy
Award, a Concordia College Sent Forth Alumni Award, and an East-West
Freedom Award from the Levantine Cultural Center. She was named one
of Jaycees’ 2011 Ten Outstanding Young Americans and was honored by
the Japanese American Citizens League as an “Outstanding Woman.”
Saberi grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, the daughter of Reza Saberi, who
was born in Iran, and Akiko Saberi, who is from Japan. She was chosen Miss
North Dakota in 1997 and was among the top ten finalists in Miss America
1998. She graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, with
degrees in communications and French. Saberi holds her first master’s degree
in journalism from Northwestern University and her second master’s degree in
international relations from the University of Cambridge.
2
[between two worlds]
The most compelling passages [in Between Two Worlds] are about a form of religious experience —
the struggle of this young American-Iranian as she moves from false ‘confessions’ calculated to secure
freedom to fierce truth-telling that grants her an inner liberation so powerful that even death is no
longer frightening. ‘Roxana,’ her father says, ‘just remember: they can never hurt your soul.’ Truth,
in other words, is impregnable.
– Roger Cohen, The New York Times
3
4
[between two worlds]
As my cellmates and I were preparing for bed that night, our door swung open
again. This time, a thin young woman in loose-fitting prison pajamas shuffled in. Peeking out
between her long bangs, below one eye, was a dark red gash.
“Did they hit you?” the three of us wanted to know, once our new cellmate, Sara, had arranged her
blankets in the middle of the floor.
She smiled conspiratorially, her swollen cheek pushing into her left eye.
Sara told us she was arrested early that morning with her fiancé and two of her girlfriends. They had
been asleep at their friend’s apartment when several plainclothes
intelligence agents burst in. The intruders were looking for the
owner of the apartment, but because he was absent, they decided
to detain the four college students instead.
ANGELS
IN EVIN
By Roxana Saberi
“Did they hit you?”
the three of us
wanted to know...
Sara’s fiancé had resisted arrest, so the men started to beat him.
Sara reacted by punching one of the agents in the head. In turn,
he whacked her in the face with a hard object, leaving the wound
beneath her eye.
Eventually the agents collected the four friends and forced them
into a van, which was parked so close to the apartment complex’s
front door that the only way out of the building was into the
vehicle. They had been interrogated all day, Sara explained. Now her two
girlfriends were in another cell, while her fiancé had been taken
to the men’s ward of 209. She chuckled softly as she related this story, as if she found these events
quite amusing.
Sara and her fiancé had predicted they might one day end up in prison. They were active in a leftist
student group, had taken part in university demonstrations, and several of their classmates had
been detained before them. Imprisonment, I knew, was one risk Iranian students faced for political activism, which had been
growing increasingly dangerous—especially after the hard-liners expanded their control over
universities following Ahmadinejad’s 2005 victory. Student activists could also be dealt lesser
punishments, such as suspension, expulsion, or the denial of entry to graduate school.
Given the possible costs, only the most daring students continued to openly call for human rights
5
[between two worlds]
and democracy. Many other young Iranians preferred to
follow the political scene from the sidelines or to stay out
of it altogether, believing they had little part in determining
their country’s future.
Despite her own discouraging news, Sara wasn’t worried. She
said she had learned from some classmates what to expect in
jail.
“What have you told your interrogators?” I asked.
Nevertheless, Iranian youth remained a large and
potentially potent force. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s
70 million people were under thirty, and around 3.5 million
Iranians were enrolled in universities.
As hotbeds of political ideas and activities, Iran’s campuses
had played a major role in shaping the nation and had
often served as launching pads for protests that spread
into society. Soon after anti-shah university students
helped the revolution succeed, the new regime shut down
universities for more than two years to implement its
Cultural Revolution, which aimed to purge universities of
students and academics with leftist or liberal tendencies
and to purify the curricula. The Cultural Revolution also
transformed the student movement in Iran, with the Unity
Consolidation Office, or UCO, becoming the predominant
student organization.
The UCO pledged total support for Ayatollah Khomeini
and became a tool for the regime to cleanse universities of
opposition. But as a new generation of students emerged
in the early 1990s, the group began to shift. Although
still loyal to the Islamic Republic’s main tenets, it turned
against conservatives and transformed into a proponent of
civil society, pluralism, and freedom of expression. Many
students supported President Khatami and the reformists.
Gradually, however, they became disillusioned with the slow
pace of reforms.
Iran’s student activists could now be divided into four main
groupings. The first included Basijis who swore absolute
loyalty to the supreme leader and his policies. The second
was a democracy-seeking movement led by the UCO,
which had split into various factions and included many
secular students. The third were modern-thinking Islamists
who supported reform within the existing system. And the
fourth were leftists, such as Sara, who advocated socialism,
particularly Marxism-Leninism.
“It depends on what they ask me,” she said. “I try to either tell
them the truth, or if I can’t, I say nothing at all.”
Sara gave me an example of how one of her interrogators
pressured her to name other members of her student group.
Instead of answering directly, she had said something to the
effect of, “We stand for equality and brotherhood. Don’t you
believe in those values?” He had replied yes. “Then,” she had
parried, “you must be a member, too.”
First Roya, then Silva and Nargess, and now this twenty-year-old
student had used a variety of methods to resist their captor’s
demands to lie or to admit to crimes they did not commit.
They had stood up to threats and pressures knowing that by
telling the truth and proclaiming their innocence, they could
jeopardize their chances at freedom.
“Do your parents know where you are?” I asked Sara,
wondering if her family, like mine, was in the dark.
“I think so,” she said. “My brother was arrested last year and
was later released on bail. After that, we decided that in case
I was next, he should call me every night at a certain time to
make sure I’m OK. If my phone is turned off at that time, he
should assume I’ve been detained.
Sara was concerned, however, that her parents would be
terrified their daughter was now reliving their son’s ordeal, so
that afternoon, she asked the guard on duty if she could call
them. Sara’s chief interrogator would have to approve, she
was told. The rest of the day and all of Monday passed with no
reply.
When Haj Khanom brought breakfast to our cell on Tuesday
morning, Sara pushed aside the tray and flatly announced: “I
want no breakfast, no lunch, and no dinner. I won’t take my cold
medication. I only want to call my parents, and I refuse to eat
anything until I can.”
–––––––––––––––––
The next day, Sunday, March 1, Sara was taken to court and
charged with having links to communist opposition groups
abroad. So was her fiancé. Their two friends, however, were
to be released on bail.
6
“As you wish,” Haj Khanom said, her characteristic smile a little
subdued by this outburst. “You can’t get what you want here by
not eating.”
I had never witnessed anyone go on a hunger strike, although
[between two worlds]
I had met and reported on Akbar Ganji, a famous Iranian
political dissident who had been freed from Evin in 2006
after fasting for more than seventy days. His strike was
highly publicized, and it intensified demands by the
international human-rights community for his release. He
later went abroad, where he continued to speak out for the
movement of democracy in Iran.
had abided by many orders that were in conflict with my
conscience. It may have been late for me to start resisting,
but if those women could do it, why couldn’t I?
But because no one outside of Evin knew of Sara’s strike, it
was difficult to predict how effective the move would be for
her.
“No,” I repeated, a little louder.
Sara reduced her daily diet to three cups of tea and three
dates, a box of which we purchased each Tuesday. She was
already so skinny that her collarbones protruded from her
neck, and the rest of us were worried she wouldn’t last long.
–––––––––––––––––
I sat facing the wall with my eyes bound in the interrogation
room, where Javan had summoned me one day later that
week. I thought he might quiz me about my conversation
with the magistrate, but instead he informed me that my
father had started to “make some noise.”
“No,” I told Javan meekly.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Why not?” The pitch of his voice had become higher than
usual.
“Because,” I said, straightening up in my chair, “I don’t want
to lie anymore.”
Javan fell silent. Several seconds went by. He must have been
analyzing my unexpected act of noncompliance.
I heard a pen drop onto my desk, followed by the swoosh of
a piece of paper. Then came the interrogator’s voice, once
again under control. “Write: ‘I don’t want to call my father,’
and sign it.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret the word “noise.”
I lifted my blindfold, picked up the pen, and wrote: I don’t
want to call my father unless I am allowed to tell him the
truth. Then I signed it.
“Really?” I asked. “Does he know where I am?” Even if he
didn’t know, he must have decided he could no longer stay
quiet—ignoring what I had been pressured to tell him by
phone nearly three weeks earlier.
Javan took the paper and read it. Without another word to
me, he instructed a guard to return me to my cell.
–––––––––––––––––
The interrogator answered my question with an order. “His
noise is not helpful for you. Call him. Don’t tell him where
you are. Say you’re fine and he should remain quiet.”
I reflected for a moment on this latest command. My bâzju
was noticeably irritated. On the one hand, my father’s
actions might hurt me if my captors decided not to release
me in order to demonstrate that they were impervious to
outside pressures. On the other hand, media attention, if
that’s what my father was drumming up, could compel them
to free me sooner—that is, if they even admitted to having
me in custody.
In any case, my interrogator was telling me to lie once
again.
“You seem very distressed,” Nargess remarked.
Vida and Sara had fallen asleep, while I had lain awake,
tracing a stain on the ceiling as I thought about the day’s
events.
I looked at Nargess. She was cradling the Koran in her lap as
she often did. Since she had joined our cell, she had begun
to appear healthier. Her eyes were no longer puffy from
crying, and she had regained some of the weight she had lost
in solitary confinement.
“Sit here,” Nargess said, patting a folded blanket beside her.
I crawled onto it, and she took my hands in hers.
The women I had met over the previous several days
had defied their interrogator’s demands to lie, while I
“Think of me as your sister,” she said, gazing into my eyes. “If
7
[between two worlds]
you want, you can tell me what’s bothering you. You can trust
me.”
So I told her. I told her about my false confession and my
desire to recant it, but not to my interrogator. I also implored
her not to tell any of this to anyone, fearing if Haj Agha found
out, he might have me killed as he had vowed.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said to Nargess in a muted voice.
“If I tell the truth, I may never be released. But if the only
way I can go free is to lie, then freedom has little value. I now
know that I was very weak, especially after meeting women
like you.”
“Regardless of
what they might do
to me now, my soul
will be at peace.”
Nargess blushed. “I am glad I didn’t succumb to these
people’s threats to tell lies,” she said softly. “Regardless of
what they might do to me now, my soul will be at peace.” She
rubbed my palms gently. “I will pray to God to help you.”
Then she released my hands, tenderly rain her fingers across
the Koran, and asked, “Do you want me to do an estekhâre
for you?”
Estekhâre, I had learned years before, was a Muslim tradition
of divining answers to questions; in this case, by consulting
the Koran. The practice was fairly common in Iran, where
many people turned to fortune-tellers for answers to their
personal and financial questions and problems.
I had largely regarded fortune-telling as superstitious, but
now I was willing to search for clues to my fate through almost
any means.
“You know how to do estekhâre?” I asked Nargess.
She nodded solemnly.
“OK, please do,” I said.
She closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers around the top
edge of the Koran. “Look into your heart, and specify your
intention or wish,” she whispered.
I immediately made two: that no one would ever be harmed
because of the falsehoods I had told in this prison and that
I would be freed within the week. Then I told Nargess I was
ready.
She uttered some incomprehensible verses, opened the
Koran without looking, and read the page before her. She
8
[between two worlds]
shook her head and shut the book. Then she glanced up at me
and said, “You made two wishes.”
that week, she still hadn’t received permission to make her
phone call. She seemed determined, however, to persevere
with her hunger strike until her wish was granted.
I was astounded. “How did you know?”
Nargess smiled as if the answer to my question was obvious.
“The Koran said so,” she said, closing the book delicately.
“Make another wish—this time, only one.”
I paused, deliberating over whether instead of making a wish,
I should ask a question. “May I pose a question instead?” I
asked Nargess.
“Sure.”
I raised myself to the balls of my feet and hugged my knees.
A minute or two passed as a multitude of possible questions
rattled around in my head. My entire dilemma, I realized,
rested on whether I should let my lies persist or put a stop to
them while I was still in jail. In short, should I risk my freedom
to pursue the truth?
“I’m ready,” I whispered.
She recited some more verses, opened the Koran again, ran
her eyes over the page on the left side, and read the last
sentence to herself. She nodded slowly, as if turning over the
words in her mind, then reread it.
Finally she looked up and said with conviction, “Do it. Even if
you suffer, in the end you will prevail.”
Those were not the words I had wanted to hear. I had wanted
Nargess to say something like, “Stick to your story until you
are free.”
Sara was headstrong in other ways, too. She refused to walk
around the prison yard, despite the fact that the twentyto thirty-minute sessions four times a week were our only
chance to go outside. The yard was insulting, Sara declared,
and it existed only so that prison officials could announce
to the world that they were humane enough to give us an
opportunity for outdoor exercise.
She didn’t have the energy to walk, anyway. After she had
stopped eating, she spent all day lying on her blankets,
watching TV from two feet away, straining her nearsighted
eyes because her interrogators had confiscated her glasses.
The more weight Sara lost, the more disgusted at our
captors I became. A simple phone call to her family, which
should have been every detainee’s right, was a privilege
that Sara was prepared to starve herself to obtain.
Yet the weaker she grew, the stronger her resolve to
continue became, as if she was deriving fortitude from this
act of resistance.
As I witnessed Sara’s hunger strike, I mulled over starting
something similar. Unlike Sara, my goal wasn’t to gain
permission to call my family, although that was something
I had recently requested from my interrogator. Instead, I
wanted to punish myself for having yielded to my captor’s
demands. I brushed aside the thought that this frame of
mind was unhealthy, and the day after Sara began fasting, I,
too, decided to stop eating.
Yet I knew in my heart that what she told me was right—
painfully but beautifully right.
I wasn’t actually starting a “strike,” so I didn’t formally
announce my intention to the guards as Sara had. I simply
began to decline my meals. The guards noticed, of course,
but did not attempt to change my mind.
Tears started to roll down my cheeks as I realized that I had
given up the truth on account of fear of man and fear of death.
Yes, I wanted to live, but what kind of life was worth living? The
one in which I would have a clear conscience; the one in which
I did what I thought was right—even under pressure. At last, I
understood that I had to tell the truth—even if it cost me my
freedom, even if it cost me my life.
Because I had never thought about how to try to live
without food, I decided to follow Sara’s daily regime of
three cups of tea and three dates, which my father had once
told me were the most nourishing food to have if you were
ever stranded in the desert with nothing else to eat.
–––––––––––––––––
Sara had started to look rather sickly. As the days passed
My initial three days were the most difficult. First my
stomach growled wildly, demanding to know why I was
withholding its nutrition. Then it began to ache, pleading
with me to soothe it. By the fourth day, Saturday, it had
9
[between two worlds]
begun to adjust to its deprivations and, except for an
occasional grumble, had resigned itself to quietly awaiting its
unknown future…
–––––––––––––––––
Nargess flung herself on the floor, crying. “Thank God! Thank
God!”
She had just come back that Saturday, March 7, from court,
where she had wept before her magistrate, swearing that she
was not a spy and had never done anything even remotely
political. In between sobs, she had explained with heartfelt
sincerity how she had gone on pilgrimages to Mecca x
number of times and made donation to y mosque, and how
could such a devout Muslim ever be a spy?
The magistrate had decided, as he had once before, to
release Nargess on bail, and she had been permitted to call
her family for the first time since her arrest several weeks
earlier. The court would keep the deed to her home until her
trial, whenever that might take place—if ever. But for now, this
wasn’t important to Nargess.
The magistrate was an understanding and fair man, she
maintained, much more decent than her chief interrogator,
who hadn’t wanted to release her. When I asked her to
describe the magistrate’s appearance, she said his right hand
was embellished with two large rings.
Saturday was a good day for Sara, too. Her interrogator had
allowed her to call her parents, but only after she broke her
strike with a meal and only if she told them she was fine. She
did as directed, then tried to comfort her grieving mother
by making up the prediction that she would be released in a
couple of weeks. Despite these fibs, Sara was happy to have
spoken to her parents, and she returned to our cell with an
exultant grin.
I tried to share in my cellmate’s joy but couldn’t. For them,
freedom seemed within reach. But for me, there was only
uncertainty…
–––––––––––––––––
“Wake up,” Skinny told me the following morning. “You’re
going to court.”
It was Sunday, March 8, the day that Haj Agha had said I
would be sent to the magistrate’s office, where, if I wanted
10
to be freed, I should repeat my confession and agree to
everything the magistrate said.
I tried to hurry as I splashed water on my face and put on
my chador, but I was dragging after more than four days of
having eaten virtually nothing.
“I’ll pray for you,” Nargess said, as Skinny led me out the
door.
A male guard loaded me into a van, where he handcuffed me
to a young woman prisoner I hadn’t seen before. My wrists
had become so small that I could have easily wriggled free.
Two male prisoners sat in front of us, also shackled together.
“Don’t speak to one another,” the guard ordered from the
passenger seat, before we headed out the prison gate and
toward the Revolutionary Court.
“Please give me the strength to tell the truth,” I murmured to
myself with my eyes closed, “whatever the result might be.”
The guard began to say something to me, but the driver, who
must have glimpsed at me in his rearview mirror, interrupted
him and said, “Let her be. She’s not talking to anyone. She’s
praying.”
With my free hand, I drew my chador over my face and
continued, whispering over and over, “Please give me the
strength to tell the truth, whatever the result might be.”
When we arrived at the court about thirty minutes later, the
guard unlocked our handcuffs and led us to the second
floor. As we neared the Security Division, a balding man
approached me. “Miss Saberi?” he asked.
“Yes?” I said, stunned that anyone other than guards and
officials would recognize me.
“I’m your attorney, Abdolsamad Khorramshahi.”
This was news to me. I had never seen or heard of him.
Perhaps Javan had cunningly appointed a regime attorney for
me—if this man was even an attorney. With his outdated suit,
stooped shoulders, and stubble on his chin, the only thing
that gave him the aura of a lawyer was his leather briefcase.
My guard admonished the man for talking to me and took
the other woman prisoner and me into the magistrate’s
office. She and I sat in the front row of chairs in front of the
[between two worlds]
magistrate’s desk. Khorramshahi followed and sat down a
few rows behind us.
The magistrate greeted him warmly enough and remarked
that he was surprised to have heard he was representing
me. “Don’t you usually cover social cases instead of political
ones?” the magistrate called out.
I glanced back at Khorramshahi, who was just smiling
politely. Then I resumed my prayer. “Please help me tell the
truth today,” I whispered, “Even if you may suffer, in the end
you will prevail.”
“What are you praying?” the magistrate asked, evidently
having noticed the movement of my lips.
After I wrote each answer, he would read it, then write down
a new question on another sheet and hand it to me. At one
point, the magistrate interrupted himself.
“How is the state of Ohio?” he asked, without altering his
tone.
He was looking at me with what appeared to be complete
earnestness.
“I hear it’s a beautiful place,” I said. “It borders the Great
Lakes.”
The magistrate nodded and began to write his next
question. Then, without shifting his gaze to me, he asked,
“Could you get me a visa?”
“Something in English,” I said quietly.
I had no way of telling whether he was joking.
“What is it?”
“I was saying, ‘Please help me tell the truth today.’”
“Sure, if you set me free,” I said, only to see what his
response might be.
He gave me a puzzled look, then began to leaf through a
file on his desk.
“That’s what we’re working on today,” he replied, as he
passed the next sheet to me.
For the next half hour or so, I waited as the magistrate
interrogated my fellow prisoner by having her write down
answers to his written questions. Through the few words
they exchanged, I gathered that the woman had been in
solitary confinement for twenty days and was charged with
propaganda against Islam. After the questions finished, the
magistrate told her she would be freed on bail that day. She
thanked him, and the guard took her to sit in the hallway.
So I really was supposed to be released soon. He had
asked me about a deed for bail last time, and now he was
talking about my freedom. He had set Nargess free, and he
seemed more believable and powerful than Haj Agha and
Javan. Should I still recant? I asked myself, as I read the next
question: Who was Mr. D, and what was your connection to
him?
It was my turn.
The magistrate asked me why I had once spoken to the
Japanese ambassador to Tehran at a dinner party, why
I had traveled to Lebanon, and why I had tried to assist
my jailed acquaintance—all questions repeated from
my interrogations five weeks earlier. He also wanted to
know why I had interviewed various political figures in
Iran. I explained that I was writing a book and that these
people were among the approximately sixty Iranians I had
interviewed to try to depict for foreigners a balanced and
colorful view of Iranian society.
I sat motionless for a moment, my pen hovering inches
above the paper. If I wrote the truth, I could remain locked
up for year. But if I continued to cooperate as Haj Agha and
Javan had instructed, I would be freed.
In sum: Truth = Prison. Lies = Freedom.
From Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran (Harper,
2010). Copyright © 2010 by Roxana Saberi. Reprinted with the
permission of the author, 2014. www.roxanasaberi.com
The magistrate also asked whether I had had any classified
documents, and I answered that as far as I was aware, I
never did.
11
[between two worlds]
Naomi Shihab Nye is a voice that America needs in its time of trouble. Her clarity
combined with her verbal kindness and her knowledge of multiple cultures provide a
strong, audible message that the only hope for reconciliation and understanding lies in
the ideals set by the human heart.
12
– Billy Collins
[between two worlds]
A WANDERING POET TELLING
PALESTINE’S HIDDEN STORIES
N A O M I
S H I H A B
N Y E
Award-winning Palestinian-American
poet Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a
Palestinian father and an American mother in St.
Louis in 1952. Just four years earlier, her father
and his family lost their home in Jerusalem
following the establishment of the state of Israel.
As Nye explains, “When you grow up in a house
with someone who lives with a very strong sense
of exile, when they are disconnected from the
place they love most, that casts a certain light on
how you see everything—your sense of gravity,
history and justice.” In 1966, Nye’s family moved
to Jerusalem but left following the outbreak of the
1967 war. They relocated to San Antonio, Texas,
where she resides today. Nye explains, “I think as
a Palestinian American that’s part of my job—to
tell the stories that the news does not take the
time to tell. We have to tell what we know.” Nye has traveled to Palestine frequently and has
given readings at all major Palestinian universities.
“I feel an urgency that Arab-American writers find
a way where we can be more useful.”
Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a
“wandering poet.” She has spent forty years
traveling the country and the world to lead writing
workshops and inspiring students of all ages.
Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage,
the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her
experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada,
Mexico, Central and South America and the
Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to
our shared humanity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor
of more than thirty volumes. Her book of
poetry 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the
Middle East was a finalist for the National Book
Award. Her collection of poems for young adults
entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab
American Book Award in the Children’s/Young
Adult category. A new novel for children, The
Turtle of Oman, was published in August 2014.
Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow,
a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner
Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received
a Lavan Award from the Academy of American
Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award,
the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the
Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and
numerous honors for her children’s literature,
including two Jane Addams Children’s Book
Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose
Award given by the New England Poetry Club,
the oldest poetry reading series in the country.
In January 2010 Nye was elected to the Board of
Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.
13
[between two worlds]
TO ANY WOULD-BE
TERRORISTS
By Naomi Shihab Nye
I am sorry I have to call you that, but I don’t
know how else to get your attention. I hate that
word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get
rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle
East? And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only
did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international
people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they
wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East,
in the United States and all over the world. If that’s what
they wanted to do, please know the mission was a terrible
success, and you can stop now.
Because I feel a little closer to you than many Americans
could possibly feel, or ever want to feel, I insist that you
listen to me. Sit down and listen. I know what kinds of foods
you like. I would feed them to you if you were right here,
because it is very very important that you listen. I am humble
in my country’s pain and I am furious.
My Palestinian father became a refugee in 1948. He came
to the United States as a college student. He is 74 years old
now and still homesick. He has planted fig trees. He has
invited all the Ethiopians in his neighborhood to fill their little
paper sacks with his figs. He has written columns and stories
saying the Arabs are not terrorists, he has worked all his
life to defy that word. Arabs are businessmen and students
and kind neighbors. There is no one like him and there
are thousands like him - gentle Arab daddies who make
everyone laugh around the dinner table, who have a hard
time with headlines, who stand outside in the evenings with
their hands in their pockets staring toward the far horizon.
I am sorry if you did not have a father like that. I wish
everyone could have a father like that.
My hard-working American mother has spent 50 years
trying to convince her fellow teachers and choir mates not
to believe stereotypes about the Middle East. She always
told them, there is a much larger story. If you knew the story,
you would not jump to conclusions from what you see in
the news. But now look at the news. What a mess has been
made. Sometimes I wish everyone could have parents from
different countries or ethnic groups so they would be forced
14
[between two worlds]
Photo by Josh Rushing.
15
[between two worlds]
tragedy and I want you to think about a few things.
I am amazed how
many understand the
intricate situation and
have strong, caring
feelings for Arabs and
Palestinians even when
they don’t have to.
to cross boundaries, to believe in mixtures, every
day of their lives. Because this is what the world
calls us to do. WAKE UP!
The Palestinian grocer in my Mexican-American
neighborhood paints pictures of the Palestinian
flag on his empty cartons. He paints trees and
rivers. He gives his paintings away. He says,
“Don’t insult me” when I try to pay him for a
lemonade. Arabs have always been famous for
their generosity. Remember? My half-Arab brother
with an Arabic name looks more like an Arab than
many full-blooded Arabs do and he has to fly
every week.
My Palestinian cousins in Texas have beautiful
brown little boys. Many of them haven’t gone to
school yet. And now they have this heavy word to
carry in their backpacks along with the weight of
their papers and books. I repeat, the mission was
a terrible success. But it was also a complete, total
16
1. Many people, thousands of people, perhaps
even millions of people, in the United States are
very aware of the long unfairness of our country’s
policies regarding Israel and Palestine. We talk
about this all the time. It exhausts us and we
keep talking. We write letters to newspapers, to
politicians, to each other. We speak out in public
even when it is uncomfortable to do so, because
that is our responsibility. Many of these people
aren’t even Arabs. Many happen to be Jews who
are equally troubled by the inequity. I promise you
this is true. Because I am Arab-American, people
always express these views to me and I am amazed
how many understand the intricate situation
and have strong, caring feelings for Arabs and
Palestinians even when they don’t have to. Think
of them, please: All those people who have been
standing up for Arabs when they didn’t have to. But
as ordinary citizens we don’t run the government
and don’t get to make all our government’s
policies, which makes us sad sometimes. We
believe in the power of the word and we keep
using it, even when it seems no one large enough
is listening. That is one of the best things about this
country: the free power of free words. Maybe we
take it for granted too much. Many of the people
killed in the World Trade Center probably believed
in a free Palestine and were probably talking about
it all the time.
But this tragedy could never help the Palestinians.
Somehow, miraculously, if other people won’t
help them more, they are going to have to help
themselves. And it will be peace, not violence, that
fixes things. You could ask any one of the kids in
the Seeds of Peace organization and they would
tell you that. Do you ever talk to kids? Please,
please, talk to more kids.
2. Have you noticed how many roads there are?
Sure you have. You must check out maps and
highways and small alternate routes just like
anyone else. There is no way everyone on earth
could travel on the same road, or believe in exactly
the same religion. It would be too crowded, it
would be dumb. I don’t believe you want us all to
be Muslims. My Palestinian grandmother lived to
be 106 years old, and did not read or write, but
even she was much smarter than that. The only
place she ever went beyond Palestine and Jordan
was to Mecca, by bus, and she was very proud
[between two worlds]
to be called a Hajji and to wear white clothes
afterwards. She worked very hard to get stains
out of everyone’s dresses—scrubbing them with
a stone. I think she would consider the recent
tragedies a terrible stain on her religion and her
whole part of the world. She would weep. She
was scared of airplanes anyway. She wanted
people to worship God in whatever ways they felt
comfortable. Just worship. Just remember God in
every single day and doing. It didn’t matter what
they called it. When people asked her how she felt
about the peace talks that were happening right
before she died, she puffed up like a proud little
bird and said, in Arabic, “I never lost my peace
inside.” To her, Islam was a welcoming religion.
After her home in Jerusalem was stolen from
her, she lived in a small village that contained a
Christian shrine. She felt very tender toward the
people who would visit it. A Jewish professor
tracked me down a few years ago in Jerusalem
to tell me she changed his life after he went to
her village to do an oral history project on Arabs.
“Don’t think she only mattered to you!” he said.
“She gave me a whole different reality to imagine
—yet it was amazing how close we became. Arabs
could never be just a “project” after that.”
Did you have a grandmother or two? Mine never
wanted people to be pushed around. What
did yours want? Reading about Islam since my
grandmother died, I note the “tolerance” that
was “typical of Islam” even in the old days.
The Muslim leader Khalid ibn al-Walid signed a
Jerusalem treaty which declared, “in the name
of God, you have complete security for your
churches which shall not be occupied by the
Muslims or destroyed.” It is the new millenium in
which we should be even smarter than we used to
be, right? But I think we have fallen behind.
3. Many Americans do not want to kill any more
innocent people anywhere in the world. We are
extremely worried about military actions killing
innocent people. We didn’t like this in Iraq, we
never liked it anywhere. We would like no more
violence, from us as well as from you. HEAR US!
We would like to stop the terrifying wheel of
violence, just stop it, right on the road, and find
something more creative to do to fix these huge
problems we have. Violence is not creative, it is
stupid and scary and many of us hate all those
terrible movies and TV shows made in our own
country that try to pretend otherwise. Don’t watch
them. Everyone should stop watching them.
An appetite for explosive sounds and toppling
buildings is not a healthy thing for anyone in any
country. The USA should apologize to the whole
world for sending this trash out into the air and for
paying people to make it.
But here’s something good you may not know
—one of the best-selling books of poetry in the
United States in recent years is the Coleman Barks
translation of Rumi, a mystical Sufi poet of the
13th century, and Sufism is Islam and doesn’t that
make you glad?
Everyone is talking about the suffering that ethnic
Americans are going through. Many will no doubt
go through more of it, but I would like to thank
everyone who has sent me a consolation card.
Americans are usually very kind people. Didn’t
your colleagues find that out during their time
living here? It is hard to imagine they missed it.
How could they do what they did, knowing that?
4. We will all die soon enough. Why not take
the short time we have on this delicate planet
and figure out some really interesting things we
might do together? I promise you, God would
be happier. So many people are always trying
to speak for God—I know it is a very dangerous
thing to do. I tried my whole life not to do it. But
this one time is an exception. Because there are
so many people crying and scarred and confused
and complicated and exhausted right now—it is
as if we have all had a giant simultaneous breakdown. I beg you, as your distant Arab cousin, as
your American neighbor, listen to me. Our hearts
are broken, as yours may also feel broken in some
ways we can’t understand, unless you tell us in
words. Killing people won’t tell us. We can’t read
that message. Find another way to live. Don’t
expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read
Arabic poetry. Poetry humanizes us in a way that
news, or even religion, has a harder time doing.
A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, “If
we read one another, we won’t kill one another.”
Read American poetry. Plant mint. Find a friend
who is so different from you, you can’t believe
how much you have in common. Love them. Let
them love you. Surprise people in gentle ways, as
friends do. The rest of us will try harder too. Make
our family proud.
Reprinted by permission of the author, 2014.
17
[between two worlds]
LUNCH IN NABLUS
CITY PARK
By Naomi Shihab Nye
When you lunch in a town
which has recently known war
under a calm slate sky mirroring none of it,
certain words feel impossible in the mouth.
Casualty: too casual, it must be changed.
A short man stacks mounds of pita bread
on each end of the table, muttering
something about more to come.
Plump birds landing on park benches surely had their eyes closed recently,
must have seen nothing of weapons or blockades.
When the woman across from you whispers
I don’t think we can take it anymore
and you say there are people praying for her
in the mountains of Himalaya and she says,
Lady, it is not enough, then what?
A plate of hummus, dish of tomato,
friends dipping bread—
I will not marry till there is true love, says one,
throwing back her cascade of perfumed hair.
He says the University of Texas seems
remote to him
as Mars, and last month he stayed in his house
for 26 days. He will not leave, he refuses to leave.
In the market they are selling
men’s shoes with air vents, a beggar displays
the giant scab of leg he must drag
from alley to alley,
and students argue about
the best way to protest.
In summers, this cafe is full.
Today only our table sends laughter into the trees.
What cannot be answered checkers the tablecloth
between the squares of white and red.
Where do the souls of hills hide
when there is shooting in the valleys?
What makes a man with a gun seem bigger
than a man with almonds? How can there be war
and the next day eating, a man stacking plates
on the curl of his arm, a table of people
toasting one another in languages of grace:
For you who came so far;
For you who held out, wearing a black scarf
to signify grief;
For you who believe true love can find you
amidst this atlas of tears linking one town
to its own memory of mortar,
when it was still a dream to be built
and people moved here, believing
and someone with sky and birds in his heart
said this would be a good place for a park.
18
From 19 Varieties of Gazelle:
Poems of the Middle
East (Greenwillow Books, 2005).
Copyright © 1994, 1995, 1998,
2002 by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Reprinted with the permission of
the author, 2014.
“THE WORLD LEADERSHIP
which has come to the United States cannot rest
solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology,
but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect
and admiration for the Nation’s highest qualities as a
leader in the realm of ideas and the spirit.”
– National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965
RECENT DONORS
FOUNDER $500 - $999
George & Cheryl Mizell
Robert & Susan Wefald
ASSOCIATE $100 - $499
Thomas & Jane Ahlin
In Memory of Everett C. Albers
Bethany Andreasen
Tayo Basquiat
F.J. Bavendick
Charles Bearstail
Owen & Catherine Carlson
Carol Christianson
Marilyn Cunningham
George & Janet Daley Jury
Robert Dambach
Earl & Patricia Donaldson
In Honor of Earl G. Donaldson, Jr.
Joann Ewen
John & Sherill Fosland
Kara Geiger
Thomas & Brenna Gerhardt
In Memory of Boyd Xavier Warren
Margaret Hagler
Kate Haugen
Dr. Joseph Jastrzembski
Mary Ann Johnson
Rita Kelly
Betty Mills
Merl & Kathy Paaverud
Lynnell Simonson Popowski
Jack & Leane Schaffer
Stacy L. Schaffer
Norm & Bonnie M. Smith
Naomi Thorson
Dwight Tober
Jaclynn Davis Wallette
Cecil Watson
Thomas A. Wentz
BUSINESS
Jacks Shoes
CONTRIBUTOR $25 - $99
Irene Askelson
Claudia Berg and Robert Matz
Dr. Richard E. Beringer
Mae Marie Blackmore
Roderick Robert & Leslie Carlson
Orrin Delong
Cami Dixon
Joyce Esckilsen
Nancy J. Farbo
Marilyn Foss
Elaine Fritz
Mary G. Frojen
Tina Grumbo
Bruce Hagen
Marilyn Hatlestad
Betty Haussler
Daniel Heath
Tyrel Hegland
Bryce & Maxine Hill
Patricia Hinkle
Margine & F. D. Holland, Jr.
Myron & Marcia Hovet
Jim & Beth Hughes
James W. Johnston
Theodore W. Kleiman
Arvid & Darlene Knutson
Christine Kujawa
Howard W. Langemo
Victor Lemke
Elizabeth A. Lucas
Edward & Vivian Mashek
James & Mary Olson
Gloria T Olson
Kristen & Jack Paris
Amy Phillips
C Plummer
Shirley Quick
Bridgette Readel
Helen Rudie
Kathryn Ruggles
Herbert L. Schultz
Jessie Veeder Scofield
Gene & Noreen Smestad
Dale & Julie Thompson
Gary Totten
Carolyn & Dale Twingley
Sarah Smith Warren & Jacob Warren
In Memory of Boyd Xavier Warren
JoAnn Wittmayer
OTHER $24 & BELOW
Betty Axtman
Patrick & Susan Esterly
Kathy Fagerland
Bruce Hagen
Joyce Markell
Do you enjoy programs that allow you to engage in meaningful conversations and continue to grow as a
person? If the answer is yes, then we have an important message for you: in order to continue providing
world-class programming to all people, we need your support. As program needs and costs continue to
rise, we ask that you please consider a donation to the NDHC. With support like yours, we are able to
serve North Dakotans of all ages, from all walks of life and in every corner of this legendary state.
19
[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
[between two worlds]
Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the
past, present, and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose,
he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding
of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other. And that
makes [A Destiny Disrupted], in this uneasy, contentious post 9/11 world, a
must-read. – Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner
21
[between two worlds]
WEST OF KABUL,
EAST OF NEW YORK
By Tamim Ansary
22
Photo by Josh Rushing.
[between two worlds]
For many long years, my siblings and I thought we were the only Afghans in America. When
I introduced myself to people, they’d say, “Interesting name. Where are you from?” When I said
Afghanistan, I could feel myself changing, not unpleasantly, into a curiosity. Few knew where Afghanistan was, and some were
amazed to learn it existed at all. Once, in a college gym class, a coach found my free-throw shooting form humorous. “Where
have you been all your life,” he guffawed, “Aghanistan?” When I said yes, he was taken aback: he thought Afghanistan was just
an expression, like Ultima Thule, meaning “off the map.”
The Soviet invasion put Afghanistan on the map, but it didn’t last. By the summer of 2001, a new acquaintance could say to me,
“Afghanistan, huh? I never would have guessed you’re from Africa.”
That all changed on September 11, 2001. Suddenly, everywhere I went, strangers were talking about Kandahar and Kunduz and
Mazar-i-Sharif. On September 12, the abrupt notoriety of Afghanistan triggered a volcanic moment in my own small life.
23
[between two worlds]
I was driving around San Francisco that day, listening to talk
radio. My mind was chattering to itself about errands and
deadlines, generating mental static to screen me off from
my underlying emotions, the turmoil and dread. On the
radio, a woman caller was making a tearful, ineffective case
against going to war over the terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington. The talk-show host derided her. A man
called in to say that the enemy was not just Afghanistan but
people like that previous caller as well. The talk-show host
said thoughtfully, “You’re making a lot of sense, sir.”
The next caller elaborated on what should be done to
Afghanistan: “Nuke that place. Those people have to learn.
Put a fence around it. Cut them off from medicine! From
food! Make those people starve!”
me. At noon I got a call from my old friend Nick Allen, whom
I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Somehow, he’d received the
e-mail and had felt moved to track me down and say hi.
An hour later, I heard from Erik Nalder, the son of an
American engineer, whom I had last seen in Afghanistan
thirty-eight years ago. He’d received my e-mail—I couldn’t
imagine how—and had felt moved to track me down and say
hi.
Then the phone rang again. A caller from Chicago. A hesitant
voice. “My name is Charles Sherman…” Did I know this guy?
“I got your e-mail…” I couldn’t place him. “You don’t know
me,” he said.
“Then how did you get my number?”
More than thirty-five years had passed since I had seen
Afghanistan, but the ghosts were still inside me, and as I
listened to that apoplectically enraged talk on the radio,
those ghosts stirred to life. I saw my grandmother K’koh,
elfin soul of the Ansary family. Oh, she died long ago, but in
my mind she died again that day, as I pictured the rainfall of
bombs that would be coming. And I saw my father, the man
who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, leave when the Soviets put the
country in a clamp. He was long gone, too, but if he’d lived,
he would be in Kabul now, an eighty-three-year-old man, in
rags on the streets, his ribs showing, one of the many who
would be starving when the fence was flung up around our
land.
I didn’t begrudge those callers their rage, but I felt a
bewilderment deeper than shock. No one seemed to know
how pitifully harmless Afghans were, strong contenders for
the Poorest People on Earth award, overrun by the world’s
most hardened criminals, and now, it seemed, marked out
to suffer for the crimes of their torturers.
I wanted to call that talk show, but when I came home, I
felt too shy. I’d never spoken to the media on any level.
So I went downstairs to my office and wrote an e-mail to a
few of my friends. I poured out to them what I would have
said to the public if I could have mustered the courage to
call that talk show. The moment I clicked on SEND, I felt
infinitesimally better.
Later that day, some of the people on my list asked if they
could pass my note on to their friends, and I said, “Sure,”
thinking, Wow, with luck, I might reach fifty or sixty people.
That night, I logged onto my server and found a hundred
e-mails in my in-box, mostly from strangers responding to
the message I’d hammered out earlier. It boggled my mind.
The power of the Internet! I had reached…hundreds.
The next day, I realized something bigger was rising under
24
“I looked you up on the Internet—anyone can get your
number…I just wanted to tell you that…your e-mail made a
lot of sense to me.”
I thanked him and hung up, but my heart was pounding.
Strangers were reading my e-mail, and anyone could get
my phone number. What if the next caller said, “Hi, I’m with
the Taliban”? What if Al Qaeda knocked on the door? How
long before some hysterical racist sent a brick through my
window?
I wanted to cancel my e-mail. “I’ve reached enough
people, thank you; that will be all.” But it was too late. I
couldn’t withdraw the e-mail. I couldn’t issue corrections,
amendments, or follow-ups. My e-mail spread like a virus
throughout the United States and across the world. My e-mail
accounts overflowed with responses, and the servers had
to start deleting messages I had not read. Radio stations
started calling—then newspapers—then TV. By the fourth
day, I found myself putting World News Tonight on hold to
take a call from Oprah’s people—inconceivable! I have no
idea how many people received the e-mail ultimately. A radio
station in South Africa claimed it reached 250,000 people in
that country alone. Worldwide, I have to guess, it reached
millions—within a week.
What had I written? I wondered. Why the response? I barely
had time to ponder these bewildering questions. The media
seized on me as a pundit. The questions came at me like
hornets pouring out of a nest, and all I could do was swing
at them. From those first few insane weeks, I only remember
Charlie Rose’s skeptical face looming toward me with the
questions,
“But Tamim…can you really compare the Taliban to Nazis?”
I tried to tell him about that guy I’d met in Turkey, the one
in the pin-striped suit who had wanted to convert me to his
[between two worlds]
brand of Islam, and the horror that had filled me as I read his
literature afterward, but my long-winded digression wasn’t
appropriate for that or any TV show. I stumbled out of the
studio, my mind reeling. What did I mean? The words I had
used in that e-mail were so brutal. The Taliban, I had written,
are a
CULT
of IGNORANT
PSYCHOTICS.
When you think BIN LADEN, think
HITLER.
I never would have used such language if I’d thought
millions of people were listening. I’m sure I would have
measured my language more carefully. But in that case,
probably no one would have listened. And had I misspoken?
Would I now renounce my words? I decided the answer was
no.
Two weeks later, my cousin’s wife, Shafiqa, called to tell me
there was going to be a memorial service for Ahmen Shah
Massoud that night, complete with speeches, videotapes,
posters, and more speeches. I should come.
Massoud was the last credible anti-Taliban leader in
Afghanistan, the man who put together the Northern
Alliance, a towering figure, assassinated by the Arab
suicide bombers two days before the attacks on the World
Trade Center. I admired Massoud, and his assassination
disheartened me, but I was just too spent to go to his
memorials service. “I need to rest,” I pleaded.
Shafiqa was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Listen,
Tamim, we are all proud of what you have done. You have
written a letter. That’s good. But Massoud slept with only a
stone for a pillow for twenty-three years. He scarcely knew
the names of his children, because he would not set down
the burden of liberating our country. I think he was tired at
times, too. I think you should be at his memorial service.”
I hung my head in shame and said I would be there.
The following week, a representative of the Northern
Alliance phoned me. “You have the ear of the American
media. You know how to say things. We know what things
must be said. Let us work together. From now on, you must
be the spokesman.”
“The spokesman? For what? For whom?”
“For our cause. For our country.”
I could feel my ears shutting down and my eyes looking for
the back door. Was Afghanistan really my country?
Dear reader, let me pause to introduce myself properly.
Yes, I was born and raised in Afghanistan, and I know Islam
intimately, from the inside, in my very soul. Yes, I learned to
say my prayers from my Afghan grandmother; yes, I know
the flavor of sundown on the first day of Ramadan, when
you’re on the porch with the people you love, waiting for
the cannon that will mark the moment when a white thread
can no longer be distinguished from a black one and you
can put the day’s first sweet date in your mouth.
But my mother was American, and not just any American,
but a secular one to the max, and a feminist back when
there hardly was such a thing—the daughter of an
immigrant labor agitator in Chicago who would have been
a Communist if only he could have accepted orders from
anyone but his own conscience. And I moved to America
at age sixteen, and graduated from Reed College, and
grew my hair down to my waist, and missed Woodstock by
minutes, and revered Bob Dylan back when his voice still
worked. I made a career in educational publishing, and if
you have children, they have probably used some product I
have edited or written. I am an American.
How could I be an adequate spokesman for Afghanistan or
for Muslims?
“Look, I have nothing to tell people but my own small
story,” I told the fellow from the Northern Alliance. “Maybe I
can help Americans see that Afghans are just human beings
like anyone else. That’s about all I can do.”
“That is important, too,” he said, his voice softened by
anxiety and despair.
In the weeks that followed, however, the media kept
punching through to me, and I kept answering their
questions. It turned out that I did have plenty to say about
Afghanistan, Islam, and fundamentalism, because I have
been pondering these issues all my life—the dissonance
between the world I am living in now and the world I left
behind, a world that is lost to me. And as I kept talking, it
struck me that I was not the only one who had lost a world.
There was a lot of loss going around. Perhaps it wasn’t really
nostalgia for the seventh century that was fueling all this
militancy. Perhaps it was nostalgia for a world that existed
much more recently, traces of which still linger in the social
memory of the Islamic world. Lots of people have parents,
or grandparents, or at least great-grandparents who grew
up in that world. Some people even know that world
personally, because they were born in it. I am one of those
people.
From West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American
Story (Picador, 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Tamim Ansary.
Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.
25
[between two worlds]
Tamim Ansary, penned this piece on September 14, 2001, and
emailed it to a handful of friends. It subsequently went viral.
AN AFGHANAMERICAN SPEAKS
By Tamim Ansary
I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing
Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” Ronn Owens, on
San Francisco’s KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would
mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with
this atrocity, but “we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage.
What else can we do?” Minutes later I heard some TV pundit
discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must be done.”
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because
I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived in the United
States for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So
I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m
standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There
is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the
atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about
those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not
even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of
ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden
is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think
Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think
“the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration
camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with
this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They
would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban
and clear out the rats’ nest of international thugs holed up in their
country.
Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated,
suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there
are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan — a country with no
economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban
has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is
littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets.
These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not
overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the
26
[between two worlds]
Some say, why don’t
the Afghans rise up and
overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they’re
starved, exhausted, hurt,
incapacitated, suffering.
Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took
care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already
suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into
piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine
and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs.
Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s
Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means
to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the
bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they
don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But
flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be
a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing.
Actually it would only be making common cause with the
Taliban — by raping once again the people they’ve been
raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now
speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin
Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people
speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done”
they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many
as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms
about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of
Photo by Josh Rushing.
the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying.
And not just because some Americans would die fighting
their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s
much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to
Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they
let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be
first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where
I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and
the West.
And guess what: That’s bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly
what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches
and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam
would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he
figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West,
he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust
in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to
lose; that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s
probably wrong — in the end the West would win, whatever
that would mean — but the war would last for years and
millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
Reprinted by permission of the author, 2014.
27
[between two worlds]
Hakakian’s intimate anthropology opens a window on one life during turbulent times
in the Middle East. . . . This book does us the service of removing some of the region’s
mythical stereotypes . . . and illuminating a real contemporary culture we would do
well to know better. –Seattle Times
28
[between two worlds]
IRANIAN-AMERICAN WRITER
AND HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST
R O YA H A K A K I A N
Born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran, Roya Hakakian came to the United
States in 1985 on political asylum. An author and Farsi poet, Roya is a founding member
of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. IHRDC was founded in 2004 by a group
of human right scholars, activists, and historians to document the patterns of human rights
abuse in Iran and to promote accountability, a culture of human rights, and the rule of law in
Iran. Roya also serves on the board of Refugees International. Roya is listed among the leading new voices in Persian poetry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of
the Modern Islamic World and received the 2008 Guggenheim fellowship in nonfiction. Her
most recent book the Assassins of the Turquoise Palace about Iran’s terror campaign against
exiled Iranian dissidents in Western Europe has been named a Notable Book of 2011 by the
New York Times Book Review in September, made Newsweek’s Top Ten Not-to-be-missed
books of 2011 and was among Kirkus Reviews Best Non-Fictions of 2011. Her memoir of
growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran is entitled, Journey from the Land
of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran was a Barnes and Noble’s Pick of the Week,
Ms. Magazine Must Read of the Summer, Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of the Year, Elle
Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2004, and was named Best Memoir by the Connecticut
Center for the Book in 2005 and has been translated into several languages including
German, Dutch, and Spanish.
Roya lives in Connecticut.
29
[between two worlds]
JOURNEY FROM
THE LAND OF NO
By Roya Hakakian
New York City, July 13, 1999
It was an ordinary morning at the office. Wrapped in
a heavy sweater, sleeves pulled over fingers hiding form the arctic
indoor summer temperatures, I had every reason to expect this to
be a day like any other. CNN was on. A pile of several major dailies
lay on one side of my desk, and on the other was a second stack
of magazines I had brought back from the Delta Shuttle courtesy
stand. The first order of business was to answer e-mails, which I
usually managed to do while sipping a tall cup of latté. I glanced at
the names in the in-box, keeping an eye out for any breaking news
on the Associated Press wire service. The telephone rang.
“Roya speaking.”
“Hi, Roya. This is David, David Unger, calling from the New York
Times.”
“Oh, hi! You are…”
“An editorial writer working on a piece on the recent student
uprisings in Iran. You come highly recommended as a source. Is this
a good time?”
No. It was not a good time. It was never a good time to talk about
Iran. I rarely did. But this call, I knew, I had to take. Thousands
of students had taken to the streets in the largest pro-reform
demonstration since 1979. Now, in the demonstration’s third
day, the students were calling on the newly elected president,
Mohammad Khatami, to join their movement against the “hardline” elements in power, mainly the supreme leader, Seyed Ali
Khameni. Many had been arrested. A few had disappeared, among
them Elahe, a dear friend. And sitting in my office, watching the
news, seeing young men and women face the riot police, their shirts
bloodied, their faces hidden under rags, thugs charging at them
with batons, seeing them be clubbed and fall to the pavement, was
all too familiar. All too frustrating. There was nothing I could do to
help them or my missing friend, expect to talk to an editorialist. In
my guilty helplessness, I Had placed all hope in the New York Times
to save Elahe, the students, and Iran itself in a sharp cluster of five
hundred words or less. So I said, “Yes. I have been expecting your
call. But hold on for just a minute, please.”
This was simply a call between a television journalist and her
colleague in print. Still, I got up from my chair, peeked into the
hallway, and quietly shut my door. This was a call about Iran; no call
could be more personal. We began talking.
I had expected to hear from David. I had also expected the
30
[between two worlds]
conversation to proceed as it often does with Americans. They
come, I had decided, in two kinds: The misinformed, who think of
Iran as a backward nation of Arabs, veiled and turbaned, living on
the periphery of oases and fairly represented by a government of
mullahs; and the misguided, who believed the shah’s regime was a
puppet government run by the CIA, and who think that Ayatollah
Khomeini and his clerical cabal are an authentic, home-grown answer
to unwarranted U.S. meddling.
The first group always amused me. In their company, I would blame
every appalling trait in my character on my “Bedouin upbringing.”
Walking along Coney Island beach on a hot summer evening, I licked
the drops of ice cream off my palms, and when I saw the shocked
look on my date’s face, I explained that my lack of etiquette was
due to a childhood spent in a land where napkins and utensils were
unheard of. His believing blue eyes welled with tears of empathy.
A college roommate once asked what my family used for
transportation in Tehran. I told her we kept six camels of various
sizes in our backyard. My father rode the papa camel, my mother the
mama camel, my brothers the younger camels, and I the baby camel.
While my roommate’s common sense was still in the grip of political
correctness, I went on to design a fantastically intricate grid of fourlegged traffic regulations for bovines on even days and equines on
odd.
But that second group –those misguided Americans—exasperated
me. Bright individuals abandoned inquiry and resorted to obsolete
formulas: America had done Iran wrong. Therefore the clerics cut ties
with the United States. Therefore the clerics were leading the nation
to sovereignty. These individuals had yet to realize that though Iran’s
rulers fervently opposed U.S. imperialism, they were neither just to
nor loved their own people. This second group had not accepted the
notion that the enemy of their enemy was yet another enemy.
It took only one question for me to decide that David belonged
to the second group. He asked, “Do the ‘reformists,’ backed by
President Khatami, stand a chance against the ‘hard-liners’?”
This bipolar division between reformist and hard-liners was as crude
as my own division between misinformed and misguided American’s.
Reducing a nation of seventy million, with three thousand years of
history, to two simply camps infuriated me. The assumption that
Iran was on the verge of an imminent transformation if only one
faction managed to subdue the other had the ring of a sensational
headline, and though as a reporter I understood its logic, as an
Iranian I detested it. True watchers of Iran knew that Iran itself was the
“beloved” its great poets had serenaded for centuries: capricious yet
slow, inspiring hope in one breath and evoking despair in another.
However, David quickly added that the editorials did not always
reflect his own personal views. In fact, they often did not. This was
an important disclaimer. Several more nuanced questions followed.
His voice was tender. IF a deadline was looming, his voice did
not reveal it. In its timbre, there was time and infinite patience,
which encouraged me to tell him my worst fears. Every horrifying
possibility flashed through my mind: Elahe assaulted, bleeding in
a ditch or along one of the many canals of Tehran; or sitting before
31
[between two worlds]
interrogators, blindfolded, forced to write a recantation
letter. Talking to David, I dressed in words the horrors I was
conjuring. I told him so. I also told him that I had no faith in
the new president, or any other cleric, to deliver what the
students were demanding. I saw that the protestors were in
grave danger. In the most dignified way I knew, I begged him
to write with the utmost urgency.
The next day brought an editorial headlined FATEFUL
MOMENT IN IRAN; the next week , the quashing of an
uprising, the third week, the news of Elahe and her release
from custody; the next month, another e-mail from David—a
new editorial deadline.
–––––––––––––––––
In the weeks that followed, David’s notes continued to
arrive. He wanted to know about the reformists’ background
and their former allegiance; the Iranian relationship with
the Lebanese Hezbollah; the role of secular Iranians in the
revolution of 1979 and in the subsequent fallout. With Elahe’s
release, I had little incentive to talk about Iran. Writing to
David took real effort. I had to provide him with the “insider
facts,” information only natives are privy to, and add my
own views, which were embittered by my history. Every time
I wanted to substantiate an opinion, I drew upon a personal
experience I had never talked about before, until at last I
wrote, apologetically, that I could not continue. Despite my
reputation, I confessed that I was not a good source after
all. There were experts far better than I, whose names I
suggested. When it came to Iran, I admitted, I was anything
but objective. The past and the events of the years that
followed the revolution had biased me forever.
Within moments after I e-mailed him the note I thought
would be the end of al notes between us, a sharp beep
announced the arrival of a new e-mail.
From: David@Nytimes.com
To: RDH@cbsnews.com
Subject: The years that followed the revolution.
R,
Tell me about them.
d
When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves
and belongings, your memories become your belongings.
Images of the past, snippets of old conversations, furnish the
world within your mind. When you have nothing left to guard,
you guard your memories. You guard them with silence.
You do not draw your treasures into the light, lest exposure
soften their sharp—sad or gay—details (the best lesson I
ever learned from visiting museums). Remembering becomes
not simply a preoccupation but a full-time occupation. What
32
you once witnessed is the story that brought journalists to
your doorstep, but they left without the scoop. What you
once witnessed is what scholars sought in the archives but
did not find. What you once witnessed is what biographers
intended to write. But how much can biographers do if the
witnesses are silence?
When you belong to a breed on the verge of extinction,
a Jewish woman from the Islamic Republic of Iran living in
the United States, one small step can turn you into a poster
child for someone else’s crusade. And you know of nothing
more suspect than a crusade. Memory is the membrane
in which the past is sealed and also the blueprint of what
you once, when you were at your most clearheaded,
envisioned as the future. You keep silent. To guard all that,
true. But also because you cannot tell pain from anger. And
since you do not wish to displace them onto an innocent
listener, you do not allow yourself pain or anger. You walk
on. You must walk on. In the new country, you must begin
anew. To make yourself do so, you invent a metaphor. Not
a beautiful metaphor, but a practical one to propel you.
You imagine you are a secondhand car whose odometer
has been resent to zero by exile, that craftiest of dealers.
With all the old parts, you are recast as a brand-new human
engine. Within you is all the clanking, hissing, and racket of
past rides. But you muffle it all and press on.
David wanted me to speak. But he had no cruside. A
historian, he was looking for what he knew was still too
soon to have been written. He was a voice without a face.
Somewhere on the top floor of another New York City highrise he sat behind a desk. I had never seen him. All I knew
of him was the words that kept arriving. Our friendship
had been formed in written words, the only life those
memories could have if they ever were to be expressed.
And in English. To write about Iran in Persian would be
daunting. Instead of reexamining the memories, I feared
that in Persian, I might begin to relive them. Persian could
summon the teenager at sea. English sheltered the adult
survivor, safely inside a lighthouse. I did not know how to
use the language of the censors to speak against them; to
use the very language by which I had been denied so much
as a Jew, a woman, a secular citizen, and a young poet.
The love of Iran was still in my heart, yet I could not return.
The irrevocable journey I had made was not the physical
one, out of Iran. It was the journey from “no,” from the
perpetual denials. And what I had painstakingly arrived at,
greater than even the new land, was a new language, the
vessel of my flight to vast possibilities.
–––––––––––––––––
I postponed writing David till I could be certain I wanted
to commit myself to telling him. His note had opened the
floodgates, and a world once shut away had come rushing
[between two worlds]
back at me. But how and where would I begin? In need of a
reprieve, I accepted a reporting assignment that took me to
Albany, Georgia, for a few days.
The Reverend Jerry Cochran had served in the U.S. Navy
in the early 1970s and was suffering from a lung disease.
Like most African Americans of his generation, Jerry had
been assigned the most undesirable tasks while in the
navy, among them the scrapping of the nonskid coating
off the deck of the USS Enterprise. Within two years,
Jerry had been diagnosed with a “respiratory disease of
unknown origin” and discharged. He believed the disease
had resulted from the polluted air he had inhaled while
working on the deck. Now a biopsy proved the presence of
elements, identical to those within the coating he had once
scraped, in his chest. The dust was gradually hardening
Jerry’s lung tissue and lessening his breathing capacity. Jerry
was slowly suffocating.
Driving past the cotton fields in rural Georgia, I mulled
over the many details that demanded my attention: the few
unclear facts, the original documents, footage to shoot,
sounds to record, his difficulty breathing and speaking,
his wheezing. I decided to arrive at Jerry’s church early, to
soak in my surroundings, an old habit that had got me far
as a child. I reviewed all the questions and went over what
I needed to prepare for the crew and our correspondent
before the on-camera interviews. This was a man on the
brink of death, I thought. He was about to trust his final
words to me. And it was up to me to show how he had been
mistreated and misdiagnosed and as a result was dying.
Inside the church, rows of children sat around tables, doing
homework. Mrs. Cochran welcomed me. She asked if I was
too tired or had had any trouble finding my way. The afterschool hours were the busiest at the church, she explained,
and she apologized for the noisy surroundings. But I
insisted on watching the children and staff go about their
business. For reasons I never understood, I have always felt
instantly at ease among black Americans and forget my own
outsiderness. I said, “I’m happy to wait here and watch the
kids. The reverend must be busy. I know I’ve come early.”
“The reverend has been on pins and needles for days
waiting for you,” she replied, sounding like an exhausted
wife who has had to contend with far too much for far
too long. “It’s not every day 60 Minutes comes to our
neighborhood.”
To find a quieter location for the filming, Mrs. Cochran
took me on a tour of the building. We walked past several
rooms, each filled to the ceiling with boxes of evidence the
reverend had gathered on his own condition and that of his
fellow servicemen. Years of correspondence had amounted
to pile after pile of documents: letters from the Veterans
Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and on
and on. Some bore the stamps of the White House, others of
the U.S. Congress. Behind the façade of an unassuming twostory structure hid a colossal archive. And at the end of its last
corridor, I imagined a gaunt man on his deathbed.
But I was wrong. In the last room, at the end of a hallway,
behind a desk, in a suit, sat a corpulent man, who rose
exuberantly to his feet and greet me. He looked hale and
cheerful. Upon seeing the buoyant reverend, I felt the worst of
a journalist’s fears rush over me: I was chasing a sham.
–––––––––––––––––
It took hours to pore over papers and sift through medical
reports till I found the documentary evidence that attested
to the severity of Jerry’s condition. But more compelling than
the records were his testimonies. At first, when he saw the
skeptical expression on my face, he slapped his chest and
said, as if before a judge, that his heart could no longer bear
the weight of a history denied. The disease in those boxes,
he pleaded, would kill him faster than the disease in his lungs.
He laid out photographs, exhibits for a jury of one, of himself
and his buddies, their arms on one another’s shoulders, their
faces bright with the proud smiles of young, invincible men,
standing in uniforms against the majestic background of the
sea. They dreamed of serving their country and hoped for
a great future. But the dust had buried their dreams. Two of
those young men were dead. Being forgotten had already
killed their spirits. The dust would finish the rest.
Jerry’s eyes fixed on my face as if expecting a confession.
He asked whether I understood what it meant to be bearing
a story never told. “I do,” I said with a voice on the brink of
breaking. He paused, examined my expression, and, seeing
that he had won me over, lowered himself into a chair, to rest
at last.
–––––––––––––––––
Back at the hotel, long past midnight, tossing in my bed, I
was restless to write. The feel of Jerry’s firm grip as we shook
hands still enveloped my hand, and his opening line kept
playing in my mind: “I have waited years for you to come and
hear my story.” So he began.
–––––––––––––––––
And so I began.
From Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in
Revolutionary Iran (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).
Copyright © 2004 by Roya Hakakian. Reprinted with the permission
of the author, 2014.
33
[between two worlds]
THE SON OF AN ACCLAIMED
SYRIAN ACTIVIST
FINDING HIS OWN LEGACY L A H A B
A S S E F
A L - J U N D I
Lahab Assef Al-Jundi was born
and raised in Damascus, Syria.
After immigrating to the United States, he
earned a degree in Electrical Engineering
and discovered his passion for writing
poetry. He published his first collection, A
Long Way, in 1985.
The son of acclaimed Syrian poet Ali AlJundi, the younger Al-Jundi writes poetry,
mainly in English, that transcends ethnic
themes to address issues of universal
significance. Both political and personal,
his richly evocative poems reveal a refined
consciousness, a keen perceptiveness, and a
serious engagement with humane concerns. His poetry has appeared in numerous
34
literary publications and many anthologies
including: In These Latitudes, Ten
Contemporary Poets, edited by Robert
Bonazzi, Inclined to Speak, An Anthology of
Contemporary Arab American Poetry, edited
by Hayan Charara, and Between Heaven and
Texas, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye.
His poems were selected in 2009 and
2010 by The Poetry Society of America for
display on Dallas’ DART trains (Poetry In
Motion Program) and on San Antonio’s VIA Transit system buses (Poetry On The move
program).
His latest poetry collection No Faith At
All was published in 2014.
[between two worlds]
We need his hope and calm, where brokenness begins long healing, and citizens
caught in tragic cycles of conflict find windows and doors to peer through, toward one
another. Please give yourself the gift of listening to him. — Naomi Shihab Nye
35
[between two worlds]
LIKE SALT
SUBMISSION
By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi
By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi
I once dreamt I was being chased
by a shepherd in a desert.
I surrendered
to death
I, briefcase in hand, in blue suit,
pressed white shirt and red necktie.
Plodded to her with my
Certificate of capitulation
He, clutching a long wooden staff,
in flowing tan gallabiya and checkered
black and white headdress.
She signed it—
Resurrection
I stopped and spun around to face him.
My shock was met by his—
I was looking into my own eyes!
He was seeing his face
as he stared at mine.
Arab American.
Does one end
where the other beings—
Two countries separated by a border?
Or do they overlap—
Floodlights of different colors?
Merge
like salt, silt and sand—
River finding sea?
Looked at me and sighed. Beat it
I have other things to do
I burned the document
and ambled off
~
I went to love and pleaded
Take me
Do with me as you please
If you are wine
I will drink you
Till this soberness is completely gone
If you are light
Please let me immerse myself in you
Let me breathe you
Till I am glowing from the inside out
There is no deeper longing than this
Love smiled and said
I am you
36
[between two worlds]
THE OTHER
SIDE OF
PARADOX
DO NO HARM
Center
is stillness
We can imagine
a world in peace.
What is hard to grasp
is why those who can
do not.
Lahab Assef Al-Jundi
Sight
no guarantee for light
Shadow
means nothing by itself
How long to dwell on death
to delight in life?
Have all questions been answered?
What if the answer is no?
Truth?
It is our shadow.
By Lahab Assef Al-Jundi
Nothing is wrong with Spring Break
but some linger there
for decades,
start a war.
Every empire, Roman to Ottoman,
f---ed things up and died.
Let us change course
while
there is time.
I see perfection
as I look back under my wing.
Ahead
a warm kitchen
and a good
friend.
All poems from No Faith At All (San Antonio, Texas:
Pecan Grove Press, 2014.) Copyright © 2014 by Lahab
Assef Al-Jundi. Reprinted with the permission of the
author, 2014.
37
[between two worlds]
G. Willow Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic, and the
kind of smart, honest writing mind that knits together and bridges
cultures and people. You should read what she writes. – Neil Gaiman
38
[between two worlds]
THE VOICE BEHIND THE
FIRST FEMALE MUSLIM SUPERHERO G .
W I L L O W
W I L S O N
G. Willow Wilson is a gifted young author whose writing explores,
across multiple genres, the most pressing issues of our time. An American convert
to Islam, Willow lives today in both Egypt and the United States. Her articles,
graphic novels, and books reflect her extraordinary cross-cultural experiences
with remarkable originality and courage.
Willow began her writing career at the age of seventeen as a freelance music
critic for Boston’s Weekly Dig magazine. Since then, she’s written the Eisner
Award-nominated comic book series Air and Mystic: The Tenth Apprentice and
the graphic novel Cairo. In a field typically dominated by male novelists Willow
stands out no less than the strong female characters she creates. Her first
novel, Alif the Unseen, was a New York Times Notable Book and a contender for
the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). She currently writes the
bestselling monthly comic book series Ms. Marvel for Marvel Comics. In her early twenties Willow moved to Egypt where she spent several years
working as a journalist. She was the first westerner to be granted a private
interview with Sheikh Ali Gomaa after his promotion to the position of Grand
Mufti of Egypt. Her articles about the Middle East and modern Islam have appeared in the New York Times Magazine,
the Atlantic Monthly and the Canada National Post. Willow’s memoir about life in Egypt during the waning years of the
Mubarak regime, The Butterfly Mosque, was named a Seattle Times Best Book of 2010 and has served as a common
read for communities and campuses across the country.
Seattle and Cairo are home for Willow, where she lives with her husband and two young daughters.
39
[between two worlds]
WITH OUR
OWN EYES
By G. Willow Wilson
In the upper reaches of the Zagros
Mountains, the air changed. The high
altitude opened it, cleared it of the dust of the
valleys, and made it sing a little in the lungs; low
atmospheric pressure. It was a shift I recognized.
We had been driving for hours, winding north
along a wide dry basin between high peaks; then
we turned west. Now the car, an old Peugot,
struggled upward along switchbacks cut into the
mountainside, past intersecting layers of rock
laid down over geological ages.
For a moment I was reminded intensely of home.
It had been almost a year since I had been
back to Boulder, in the foothills of the Colorado
Rockies. The snug valley where I had gone to
high school, learned to drive, where my parents
and sister still lived, could be seen as a tidy
whole from this height in cliffs much like these.
Looking down into the plain below, I felt as
though I was seeing double, and that an hour’s
hike along the switchbacks would bring me to
my own doorstep.
At the time, it was a sensation that seemed a
little perverse. I had just flown into Iran from
Egypt—this journey had begun thousands of
miles from my own country. That a mountain
and a change in the air in Iran should make me
think of home in the spring of 2004, the spring
of the War on Terror, the clash of civilizations,
the jihad, the things that had made my quiet
life almost unlivable, must be sheer perversity,
I thought then. I didn’t yet realize that the
Zagros Mountains had no name when they
were forced out of the ground millions of years
ago, and neither did the Rockies, that the call
of earth to earth might be something more real
than the human divisions of Iran and America.
I had faith, then; it was in the mountains that I
first thought of divinity, and these mountains
reminded me of that sensation. But I didn’t yet
have faith in faith—I didn’t trust the connections
I felt between mountains or memories, and
if I had been a little more ambivalent, I could
have allowed the Zagros to be foreign, and the
memory to be coincidence.
Fortunately, I didn’t.
Ahmad, my guide plus chaperone, pointed west
over the receding peaks.
“If you kept driving that way, you would get
to Iraq,” he said. He was from Shiraz, and had
40
[between two worlds]
silver hair and laugh lines. Before the revolution he flew planes
for the Shah, whom he had hated, but not as much as he
now hated the mullahs. During one of our conversations on
the road from Shiraz to Isfahan, he told me he used to fast
during Ramadan and pray with some regularity. In his eyes,
though, the Islamic regime had so deformed his religion that
he stopped. Thinking I would judge him for this lapse lest
he provide a rationale (I was an American and a Sunni, and
therefore unpredictable) he told me he didn’t need to fast;
fasting was meant to remind one of the hunger of the poor,
and he helped the poor in other ways.
“Then why do the poor fast?” I asked him. The Ramadan fast
was required of all Muslims, not just the wealthy. He looked at
me out of the corner of his eye; evidently I was an American
Sunni who discussed theology. Among the middle classes,
theology had gone out of fashion in Iran. But I had just come
from Egypt, where the reverse was true. Ahmad left the
question floating in the air.
“Iraq?” I climbed on a rock near the edge of the promontory
where we were standing, having parked the car on the
shoulder of the road. My Nikes stuck out from under the
hem of my black robe. I had overdressed. In Khatami’s
Tehran, chadors and manteaux had been replaced by short,
tight housecoats and scarves that were barely larger than
handkerchiefs. Knowing only that Iran was under a religious
dictatorship, and Egypt was under a military one, I had dressed
as conservatively as possible. I didn’t realize that whatever the
political reality, Egypt was far more socially conservative than
Iran. The reasons for this would become clear to me only later:
when a dictatorship claims absolute authority over an idea—
in the case of Iran, Islam, in the case of Egypt, a ham-fisted
brand of socialism—frustrated citizens will run to the opposite
ideological extreme. The Islamic Republic was secularizing
Iran; in Egypt the short-robed fundamentalists multiplied and
multiplied.
“Yes, Iraq. I think at night farther southwest you could maybe
see the bombs falling. But far away; first the plain of Karbala,
then Baghdad.” Ahmad came to stand next to my rock, and
pointed northwest. “Karbala is where Imam Husayn is buried.”
“We have his head,” I said, thinking of the fasting argument.
“In Cairo. There’s a square named after him where the shrine
is.”
“What?”
“His head,” I repeated, wondering whether I should put an
honorific before his; Husayn ibn Ali was a grandson of the
Prophet and beloved by all Muslims, but particularly revered
by Shi’ites. I didn’t want to commit a faux pas. No matter
what Ahmad thought about fasting. I put one hand to my
back; the infection in my kidneys had manifested itself as a
dull spreading pain there, and a touch of fever. Living in an
industrial neighborhood in Cairo, not a clean city to begin
with, I had developed an unfortunate apathy toward my health.
“This is the first time I hear this about Imam Husayn,” muttered
Ahmad, and broke out into a laugh.
“It’s true,” I said. “The Fatimids brought him with them. At
least, that’s what the ulema tell us; maybe it’s all a lie and the
shrine is empty.” A light wind ran down the channel of the
valley below. I took a breath and held it for a moment, then let
it out in a sigh. Ahmad smiled a little.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s beautiful up here.”
–––––––––––
Later, in the car, Ahmad told me, “I think you are becoming a
little bit Arab.” He said so gently, but this is not a compliment
in Persia. On some level, I agreed with him—I was so
submerged in Cairo, so cut off from America, that something
was bound to change. Yet I still felt like myself. I was disturbed
because I had been told I should be disturbed; that the Arab
way of doing things, being opposed to the American way of
doing things, represented the betrayal of an American self.
But I had discovered that I was not my habits. I was not the way
I dressed or the things I did and didn’t say. If I were all these
things, then standing on that rock and looking west, I should
have been someone else.
But I remained.
When the term “clash of civilizations” was coined, it was
a myth; the interdependence of world cultures lay on the
surface, supported by trade and the travel of ideas, the
borrowing of words from language to language. But like so
many ugly ideas, the clash becomes a little more real every
time someone says the word. Today, it is a theory supported
not only in the West, where it was invented, but also in the
Muslim world, where plenty of people see Islam as irrevocably
in conflict with western values. When threatened, both
Muslims and westerners tend to toe their respective party
lines, defending monolithic ideals that crumble as soon as
the opposing party has turned its back. The truth emerges.
It is not through politics that we will be delivered from this
conflict. It is not through pundits and analysts and experts.
The war between Islam and the West is a human conflict, in
which human experience is the only reliable guide. We are
all standing on the mountaintop, and we must learn to look
out at the world not through the medium of self-appointed
authorities, but with our own eyes.
From The Butterfly Mosque: A Young Woman’s Journey to Love and
Islam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010.) Copyright © 2010 by
G. Willow Wilson. Reprinted with the permission of the author, 2014.
41
[between two worlds]
JOURNALIST AND MARINE CORPS
VETERAN OF THE IRAQ WAR J O S H
R U S H I N G
Josh Rushing has presented twentyeight episodes of Fault Lines since
helping launch the show in 2009. He has covered
a wide array of issues, such as NSA surveillance,
immigration, and the drug war. On any given day
“on location” has meant a death chamber, illegal
mine shaft, cocaine lab or battlefield, while “a day in
the office” has ranged from hunting seals with Inuit
in the Arctic to running from riot cops in Santiago.
A veteran of Al Jazeera English’s earliest days in
2005, Josh has been a leading presence on the
air since the channel’s beginning. Josh authored
42
Mission Al Jazeera: Seek the Truth, Build a
Bridge, Change the World, published by Palgrave
MacMillan in 2007. His writings and photography
have been widely published from AlJazeera.com to
National Geographic.
Josh became known to audiences around the world
as the US Marine featured in the 2004 documentary
film Control Room. He resigned from the the corps
as a captain after fourteen years.
Josh has four children and a very, very
understanding wife.
[between two worlds]
“Some people will try and ignore Josh Rushing’s message, but his story is too extraordinary
to be dismissed. Understanding his message requires strength and moral courage. I have
rarely been as impressed with another human being as I am with him.” – Richard Dreyfuss
43
[between two worlds]
AMERICA’S
GREATER JIHAD
Photo by Josh Rushing.
By Josh Rushing
44
[between two worlds]
In Arabic the word jihad means
struggle, or holy war. Many Islamic scholars
distinguish between what they call the greater and
lesser jihads: the lesser is the fight to defend the faith;
the greater is the struggle to overcome the chasm
between the best and worst within oneself.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
America has been engaged in its own jihads, both the
lesser and the greater. With troops deployed around
the world presumably defending their homeland
(while offending nearly everyone else), one might call
it a victory in this lesser jihad that at the time of this
writing there have been no new attacks on the United
States since the Twin Towers fell. However, reports
from the frontlines of America’s greater jihad—the
struggle for the nation’s soul, the ideas America is
supposed to represent—are much more grim.
For fourteen years as a U.S. Marine I dedicated my
life to defending America, but through a surprising
series of events I have found myself pulled from
the fight against foreign enemies and thrown
onto the frontlines of America’s greater jihad, as a
correspondent for Al Jazeera English.
I have an office four floors above our studio in a
building three blocks from the White House in
Washington, D.C. From this vantage point, in the
heart of our nation’s capital, I often find myself
traversing the battle lines of America’s struggle with
the best and worst of itself. Such was the case when
I went to shoot a story on America’s dwindling rural
population in Small (and getting smaller) Town, USA.
In a country consumed with immigration issues, I
wanted to explore a corner obsessed with emigration.
Producer Peggy Holter, cameraman Mark Teboe, and
I headed to Divide County (population 2,200) in rural
northwest North Dakota, just a few miles south of the
Canadian border. There I interviewed everyone, from
high school students to business owners, about the
value of their little piece of the heartland and the
risk of it emptying out as young people went away
to college and found little reason to return home
afterward. I first sensed something might be amiss
when a reporter from The Journal, the local paper,
showed up to cover me covering them on my first
day in the area. She was friendly enough, but after
chatting for a bit she admitted to her surprise
about how I was dressed. I thought blue jeans and
a button-down shirt might appear more casual than
what she was accustomed to seeing reporters wear
on television.
“No,” she said, “it’s just that when I heard there
was a crew here from Al Jazeera I thought you’d be
wearing robes and headscarves.”
Although this wouldn’t had been true even if I had
been working for Al Jazeera Arabic—the original
Al Jazeera—I took the opportunity to tell her about
Al Jazeera English, which at the time was preparing
its global launch, and the story on “vanishing
America” that we were pursuing in her neck of the
woods. She seemed fine with my explanation, we
parted amicably, and I didn’t give it much further
thought until she called me a few days later,
sounding more than a little distraught.
She told me that a couple of days after we met,
a man who identified himself as an agent from
Customs and Border Protection entered her office
and asked her to step outside with him. She asked
if she could bring her reporter’s notebook, to which
he sternly replied, “No need. I’ll be the one asking
the questions.” Once out of the office he began
to grill her about her encounter with me: Did he
look American? Do you think he was a citizen?
What kinds of questions did he ask? What were
they doing up here near the border? Did they take
pictures or videos? The agent informed her there
were potential international implications to my visit,
on which he was not at liberty to elaborate.
This impromptu interrogation left her upset,
and, since headlines at the time were exposing
(and criticizing) the U.S. intelligence services for
maintaining a list of private phone numbers they
sometimes tapped in search of potential terrorists,
she also worried about having been added to that
database. Would calling her mother to discuss
the interrogation put her on the list as well? She
e-mailed her brother in Washington State, who, like
his sister, found the story alarming, and hesitated
before calling to reassure her. When he hung up
45
[between two worlds]
the phone, he saw an unmarked car pull up in front of
his house. A man leaned out of the passenger side,
spray-painted a strange symbol on the sidewalk in
front of the house and drove off.
He was dumbfounded by what he saw, and had he
not taken a picture of it, even his sister may not have
believed him. Overcoming her fear, she wrote a
column about her bizarre encounter in The Journal,
while her brother recounted his own version of the
story on his blog. The fuse was ignited: from there, a
watchdog group that wrongfully associates Al Jazeera
with Al Qaeda picked up the story and released an
urgent media advisory about Al Jazeera probing the
United States’s unsecured borders. This story gained
national exposure when Fox News ran a note about
it on its ticker. A legion of conservative bloggers
propelled the incident even further, fanning the flames
of their xenophobic followers with visions of Arabs
teeming at the United States’s porous border with
Canada.
Back in North Dakota, the Customs and Border
Protection agent who had visited the reporter
was now tracing my footsteps, giving the same
big-brother treatment to everyone I interviewed,
prompting a series of nervous phone calls to me.
They were worried they might have said something
that could put their country at risk or, even scarier,
something that could put themselves at risk from
their own country. The agent effectively burned every
bridge I had crossed in North Dakota, ensuring that
46
there wasn’t going to be any follow-up interviews on
this story.
All of this might have been more amusing than
frustrating, were it not for a bolt of bad news I
received the same day I found out about the federal
agent following me. In an e-mail from an old friend, I
learned that one of my best friends from high school,
Matthew Worrell, had just been killed in Iraq when his
Little Bird helicopter was shot down in a battle south
of Baghdad. Like me, Matt had two sons who looked
just like him. Jake was three years old and Luke, which
is my son’s name as well, was eighteen months old.
Matt’s death hit me hard. At the funeral, his sons wore
tiny suits and Luke sucked on a pacifier with a red,
white, and blue handle that matched the colors of the
flag draped over his father’s coffin.
Matt’s death reminded me that the struggle, the
lesser jihad the United Sates currently faces, comes at
a high cost.
What angered me most was that Matt died serving an
idea of America—the idea of a nation with an open
mind and heart—that resembled the actual state of
America less and less, and seemed to be vanishing
faster than the people in North Dakota.
The nation was becoming blinded by fear, seeing
enemies where there weren’t any, and treating honest
inquiry—the kind guaranteed in the Constitution—
with suspicion or hostility.
[between two worlds]
Photos by Josh Rushing.
I called the agent who was on my trail, and this time the questions were for him. Why was he harassing the people
I interviewed? If he had questions, why didn’t he contact me? Was this part of his job? To protect America’s
unsecured Canadian border from the “threat” of Washington-based reporters? His stumbling answers were meek
at best.
The story of my misadventure in North Dakota resurfaced six weeks later when my executive producer, Joanne
Levine, mentioned it in an op-ed piece about Al Jazeera for the Washington Post. To accompany her article, the
Post editor retrieved an archived photo of a protest that had occurred outside Al Jazeera English’s Washington
studio. A group opposed to Al Jazeera coming to America—never mind Al Jazeera Arabic already had a bureau
in Washington and had been distributed in the States for years—had spent months on its website calling for
a protest, claiming that the launch of Al Jazeera English could lead to suicide bombings on the streets of the
United States. The group’s recruitment skills were about as effective as their planning foresight. According to the
Washington Post there were all of six protestors outside our office building, denouncing us as a “propaganda
shop on American soil.” A spokesman for the United States American Committee—the group responsible for
promoting the event—claimed that they had expected at least 200 outraged citizens to participate in what they
hoped would be a continuous, round-the-clock demonstration. But by six o’clock, the band of six had gone
home.1
I missed the show, though a few of my colleagues went by to see the protest, but like the people who had
organized the demonstration, they were disappointed with the turnout. Although a photographer covered the
diminutive demonstration, the Post did not print a picture—until they retrieved an archived photo of the April
protest to accompany Joanne’s commentary. The photo’s frame was tightly filled with a handful of protestors and
their handmade signs, without explaining they were the protest in toto; from the tightly cropped photo you might
have though the demonstration was huge.
This is a strange time for America. Everywhere it seems people are seeing things through a prism of their own
fears and stereotypes. When the reporter from The Journal in North Dakota heard that a crew from Al Jazeera
English was in town, she expected Bedouins on camels. The Border Patrol assumed we were doing reconnaissance
for a pending invasion. The reporter’s brother thought secret agents were marking him, but instead, the person in
the mysterious car was simply designating a trail for a bike race passing through the neighborhood that weekend.
The protestors believed we were bringing an anti-American agenda to the nation’s capital. And my friend died
1 “Al Jazeera Office Protested,” Washington Post, May 1, 2006, p. B3.
47
[between two worlds]
in a war initiated by fears of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and terrorist ties that didn’t
exist.
It doesn’t take an expert to see the signs of a
changing time. After being interviewed by Terry
Gross on her radio program Fresh Air about
my experiences in the war to liberate the Iraqi
people, I received an e-mail from a former Israeli
military officer who wrote to me: “Six months in
the desert doesn’t make you f---ing Lawrence of
Arabia.” Granted.
At a time when the historic conflicts of the
Middle East continue to impact us in a daily
fashion—from the friends we have buried, to
the news we watch every night, to the shoes
we remove each time we board a plane—I am
dumbfounded as to why more Americans aren’t
interested in the Arab world. Many Americans
seem to know very little about the Middle East,
and often broad-brush the whole area. When I
am invited to talk, I’m often asked to describe
life in Qatar, and regularly people are surprised
when I tell them of the luxury hotels, fine
seafood restaurants, and beautiful beaches. It
seems like people in the States often picture the
entire Middle Eastern region as the exploding
market place often depicted in Hollywood
interpretations of that part of the world.
I am dumbfounded
as to why more
Americans aren’t
interested in the
Arab world.
From Mission Al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the
Truth, Change the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.)
Copyright © 2007 by Josh Rushing. Reprinted with the
permission of the author, 2014.
48
Photo by Josh Rushing.
From my vantage point—working for an Arabbased media company in the heart of the
United States, trying to practice skeptical and
challenging journalism in a news environment
where those values seem increasingly less
important—my North Dakota experience has
all the elements of a good story: honest, hardworking people; fearful bureaucrats; ignorant
extremists; a good soldier who made the
ultimate sacrifice; and a few simple twists of fate,
such as the stranger marking the brother’s house
and the photograph taken out of context. It was
as rich and kaleidoscopic as any true picture of
our country; and it was business as usual on the
frontlines of America’s greater jihad, and my
own, personal mission Al Jazeera.
[between two worlds]
think bigger.
think differently.
Learn more about our
Community Innovation program.
Inspiring and supporting
communities in the pursuit of
innovative solutions to their
challenges.
BushFoundation.org/grants
investing in great ideas and
the people who power them
FREE WRITING WORKSHOP
OF ANY U.S. WAR
N O W
F O R M I N G
Participants will write monologues and
essays based on their experiences.
Workships facilitated by university
professors in Grand Forks, Fargo, Minot,
and Dickinson. For specific dates in
your area, please send an email to
info@ggfct.com or call 701-746-0847.
sponsored by
49
[between two worlds]
iHuman
exploring the intersection of technology and humanity
october 2, 2015
bismarck, nd
our digital society
This ideas summit is for anyone interested in the future of our digital society. Whether you
are a plugged-in tech addict or an off-line skeptic your assumptions about technology will
be challenged.
Leading innovators and researchers from both the tech industry and academia will share
their insights into the ways rapid advances in technology are creating both amazing
opportunities and dangerous new challenges. Digital developments are changing everything
from the way we worship to the way we wage our wars. We can harness the power of
virtual reality to create more dynamic learning spaces for our children, but we must also be
wary of the threat to personal privacy when so much of our lives are now uploaded.
Understanding the power and pitfalls of technology allows us to remain its masters instead
of its unthinking servants.
A program of
series
series
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS:
AMERICA AND THE
MIDDLE EAST
has been made possible by these
generous sponsors:
[between two worlds]
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS:
AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Hosted by Roxana Saberi
OCTOBER 9, 2014
Fargo Theatre 314 Broadway Fargo, North Dakota
9:00 AM
“BETWEEN TWO WORLDS” OPENING REMARKS BY ROXANA SABERI
9:30 AM
POWER TALKS ROUND 1 TOPIC: MY JOURNEY BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
G. Willow Wilson: Reading Comics in Cairo
As political and sectarian divisions grow in the Middle East and here at home, there are startling—and instructive—points of convergence. Through
the lens of pop culture (comics, films, TV and popular literature), I’ll explore some of the ways art and media have brought my friends and readers
together across the cultural divide, using one particularly vivid example—the reception of the dystopian film V for Vendetta by Egyptian audiences—
to illustrate how analysts missed an opportunity to predict the uprisings of the Arab Spring.
Roya Hakakian: A Journey Between Two Languages
I believe that the great transition that I made, my great arrival in America, did not occur when my plane landed in NYC. It occurred in stages and
when I managed to really live in English not as a speaker of second language, but as a bilingual speaker. The ease required that I truly begin to see
the world and think about everything, writing included, in the way that a native born American does. Only then was my journey to the US complete.
Tamim Ansary: Afghan-American or American-Afghan?
As the son of the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan, I spent my childhood moving back and forth between two
worlds daily. Decades later, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I found myself embraced as a mentor by the children of Afghan families exiled to
this land by the holocaust that befell Afghanistan—young folks who saw in my experience echoes of their own lives. How are these experiences
different, how are they similar, and what is universal about living in two disparate worlds no matter what those worlds be?
Josh Rushing: My Journey Along the Frontline with the Islamic State
I just returned from a reporting trip to Iraq where I traveled the entire 600-mile frontline between the Islamic State and Kurdistan from the Syrian to
the Iranian borders. Along the way what I witnessed shatters the simple binary of good versus evil that seems to be the daily narrative of the US
media’s telling of what’s happening there now. With escalating US military action in the region it’s more important than ever to understand what
we’re getting involved in.
Lahab Assef Al-Jundi: A Long Way From My Father’s Country In this first part I cover the period of my childhood in the newly independent country of Syria, reflecting on how being born to parents of two different
religions in a conservative society helped shape the foundation of my world view. I also touch briefly on the tumultuous times for family and country,
times whose reverberations are still impacting current events, from the conflict with Israel, to the raging bloody revolution inside Syria.
52
[between two worlds]
Naomi Shihab Nye: Finding Myself in Palestine
A journey through Palestinian heritage, family and the power of humanity. When a child of the American Midwest find herself suddenly in high school
in the Old City of Jerusalem, what elements of her father’s precious Palestinian heritage became more clear to her? How do we filter the experiences
of ancestors to find meaning in a world of mixtures? Is it possible to live in the dream we would wish for the world—Mutual Respect?
11:30 AM
LUNCH BREAK 12:45 PM
POWER TALKS ROUND 2
TOPIC: TODAY’S CHALLENGES AND TOMORROW’S REALITY
G. Willow Wilson: Generation Why
The Middle East is one of the youngest regions on Earth, with 30% of the population between ages 15-29. As this generation of revolutionaries
comes of age in the brave new world of social media, they are connecting with their contemporaries across the globe—and the results of these
alliances have the power to upset our understanding of world politics. But is people power enough to overcome the entrenched, autocratic “deep
states” whose counter-revolutions have so devastated the hopes of the Arab Spring? Roya Hakakian: Redefining the War on Terror
I will discuss what I believe we, as Americans, misread about the Middle East. That misreading leads us to faulty assessments and gets us investing
in efforts that yield little and are mostly not enduring. The challenge is to redefine the “the war on terror” as “the war against gender apartheid,” an
apartheid that I believe has, thus far, cloaked itself under the mask of religion/Islam. Tomorrow’s reality would then become a redefined “war.” It’ll
shift the current confrontation between Islam and Christianity or Judaism, or... to a confrontation between those who stand with women’s equality in
the middle east and those who don’t.
Tamim Ansary: In the Future, the Past Will Still Exist
There is a standard story in the Middle East and Central Asia, a story studded with stock terms such as terrorism, tribalism, and Islam, as well as
democracy, elections, and modernity. In Afghanistan—my land of origin—those terms include corruption, drugs and Taliban. That’s the surface
narrative and it isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. I want to peel it back to reveal another narrative beneath.
Josh Rushing: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World
As the world becomes increasingly skeptical of Western foreign policy, we have to interact with the international media to reach the people that are
most hostile to us. Engaging all sides needs to be standard operating procedure for our government in the new media battleground.
Lahab Assef Al-Jundi: Visions of Peace
Here I examine the personal transformation I navigated from life as an Electrical Engineer working for corporate America, to the breakthrough
that eventually led to a life of poetry, and a passion for peace. I look at the different kinds of peace, what each one means on personal, and mass
consciousness levels, and what roles poetry could play in bringing such visions to life.
Naomi Shihab Nye: The Stories That Need to Be Told
Stories are our gravity. Everything happens inside them. As a child once told me, “Everything was old before I was born.” What elements of old
stories can help us survive our new worlds? How do we record and remember the stories which will help to give our own lives shape? How do we
listen better?
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
PANEL DISCUSSION AND AUDIENCE Q & A (VIA TWITTER, TEXT, EMAIL)
5:00 PM
THINK & DRINK ADD-ON OPTION: MORE STORIES Casual, round table discussions with speakers at local venues, two drink tickets provided for each participant (must be 21 or older). Limit: 12 per session, tickets required.
Josh Rushing and G. Willow Wilson | Zandbroz Variety Store, 420 Broadway
Roya Hakakian and Tamim Ansary | Atomic Coffee, 222 Broadway
Lahab Assef Al-Jundi and Naomi Shihab Nye, moderated by Roxana Saberi | Juano’s, 402 Broadway
CLOSING SOCIAL—BOOK SIGNING (APPETIZERS AND CASH BAR)
Hosted by Miss North Dakota 2014, Jacky Arness
Ecce Gallery, 216 Broadway
53
North Dakota Humanities Council
418 E. Broadway, Suite 8
Bismarck, ND 58501
800-338-6543
council@ndhumanities.org
ndhumanities.org
We have ways of
making you think.
Board of Directors
CHAIR
Christopher Rausch, Bismarck
VICE CHAIR
Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks
Njla Amundson, Fargo
Bethany Andreasen, Minot
Aaron Barth, Fargo
Tayo Basquiat, Mandan
William Caraher, Grand Forks
Kara Geiger, Mandan
Carol Ratchenski, Fargo
Elizabeth Sund, Minot
Iris Swedlund, Velva
Jessie Veeder Scofield, Watford City
Karis Thompson, Fargo
Susan Wefald, Bismarck
STAFF
Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director
Kenneth Glass, Associate Director
Stacy Schaffer, Development Officer
Angela Hruby, Administrative Assistant
The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National
Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision
of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able
to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many
divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared
challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.
“Peace cannot be
kept by force; it can
only be achieved by
understanding.”
— Albert Einstein