"Afghans Have Been Cut off from Their Memories"

In Afghanistan book stores are few and publishers in many cases still face opposition from the authorities, says Mohammad Shah, publisher and book store owner. A portrait by Christoph Burgmer

photo: AP
Afghan people read and buy books, magazines and newspapers at a stand in Kabul.

​​Charahi Sedarat lies in the middle of the Shahr-e nou District, the "New Town". The special thing about this square in Kabul is the two-storey building on its southern end – a washed-out, nondescript house, though its yellow tiled façade is visible from afar.

"SHAH M BOOK CO." is written in faded letters on the wall of the house. The bookshop window is still covered up, as it was in the days of the Taliban. There are no book displays. And it is impossible to get a good look inside, even through the glass door.

Mohammad Shah, the owner of the bookshop, wears western clothes. We drink green tea out of mass-produced Chinese glass cups with handles. Mohammed Shah sits cross-legged on the little Iranian prayer rug, leaning back, relaxed, against a bookcase.

An encyclopaedic range of books

Since the days of social upheaval in the 70s, when Afghanistan opened up to the outside world, the bookseller has never closed his shop for more than a short time. This was a place where you could always find books. From the very first day, the bookseller insisted on offering as broad a range of books as possible, literature and reference works, tourist and museum guides, children's books and textbooks.

Today, 100 copies sold, as in the case of a vice minister's memoirs, makes a book a minor bestseller. The bookshop has a cramped atmosphere, heightened by the fact that all the walls are covered with shelves and the tunnel-like entry area ends up in a windowless rectangular room after just a few yards. Unadorned tables stand in the middle, displaying reference literature on electronics and computer technology along with Persian-English textbooks.

But the bookshop is more than a simple retail space. It is a private archive, living room, lounge and study in one. A few steps further is another room, a kind of windowless storage space no larger than a broom closet. Here unsorted books from the past decades tower up to eye level, books in Russian, English, French, German, Persian, Dari, Pashtu, Hazara, Uzbek and many other languages.

The lore of a century-old scholarly culture

Most of all, the bookshop is a place where the lore of a century-old, Persian-influenced scholarly culture is cultivated. It is an andaruni, an "inside", isolated and protected from the dangerous "outside", the biruni. Here, in the andaruni, the story of the long Afghan war is told as the loss of a cultural tradition.

"The Afghans have been cut off from their memories, their collective memory has been obliterated." Mohammad Shah speaks without fear. He is one of those who refuse to let themselves be manipulated by the interests of today's rulers. He does not share their view of history.

"The new rulers are sending agents to spy out my bookshop again." Mohammed Shah tells of everyday problems as well. At this year's book fair in Bombay he bought English-language children's books, but they did not pass customs and have been waiting at the Kabul Airport for the past three weeks.

The threat of children's books

The bookseller's 21-year-old son, Irai Shah, is just back from the Education Ministry. "All books from abroad have to be passed by the Education Ministry as well as customs. Just imagine – the Afghan bureaucracy is preventing the import of children's books on the grounds that they are too dangerous for children."

His father gets up to show me the customs documents. Sure enough, they mention only a few boxes of English-language children's books.

"The arguments are bogus. Everyone in the bureaucracy wants to earn their bit, and they ask you for money. It's a clever system of theft. A customs officer told me I'd have to get an import permit from the Ministry of Education and Culture, because I'm importing books.

"We opened the boxes at the airport so that I could present one of each of the books to the ministry. But the customs official helped himself first. He found the books very attractive and told me that his children were sure to like them."

Like a scene from a Kafka novel

In Kabul, a book's path to its reader is as circuitous as the anything in Kafka's "Castle". "Then I went to the ministry, but no one was there. When I came back the next day, I found several young employees animatedly laughing, phoning and chatting with one another.

"They told me to leave the books there and come back the next day or the day after. Now I've been going there every day for the past three weeks. The books end up costing twice their purchase price."

Mohammad Shah has developed his own strategy for defending himself against this kind of extortion. He has introduced his own pricing system: foreigners pay the highest price, and Afghans whom the bookseller considers to be rich have to pay more as well. This way they help ensure the bookshop's continued existence.

The importance of education

"You have to support Afghans who want to read, who want to educate themselves, and I'll go to all lengths to do that," says Mohammed Shah, "because education is our only hope for a better future."

Christoph Burgmer

© Qantara.de 2004

Translation from German: Isabel Cole