Lovers in a Political Storm

April 20^th, 2009, Washington  |  Joe Tsali 

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When I first arrived in Kabul, I hired a driver named, Hamid. Bearded and balding in his early thirties, he had very kind and honest eyes. He was one of the brilliant Pashtuns who in another life without war and forced displacement would have been a surgeon, a painter, or the son-in-law whom everyone is very happy to see at the family dinner.

Stuck behind a sandaled cart puller in a traffic jam in Shahr-e-Now, I noticed Hamid relax his usual smile just long enough to reveal deep anguish in his eyes.

"Can you talk about it?" I asked him, assuming it was political. Although we barely knew each other, he decided to confide in me.

"There is a woman I love." A gushing smile came to my face. I wanted to rib him, but he was angry about it. "Our family refuses us to be together. I fear our only answer is to run away together abroad. But where will we go? What if we have to come back?"

At the time, Hamid's love affair, like the ubiquitous loves-denied of global lore, sounded romantic. The untrained observer of love in Afghanistan would assume that the kids may need to run away, but eventually the parents will value keeping the family together over whatever prejudices they have about the suitor's tribe or ethnicity or sect or cultural liberalism. And love will prevail and so on. 

But yesterday, I had to recall Hamid and his troubled love when I found this recent story. This week in Nimroz province, in the deep southwest of Afghanistan, the parents of two young lovers halted the kids' elopement and turned them over to an ad hoc Taliban court which ordered their execution. The lovers were shot to death in front of their mosque before the eyes of the community.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/15/afghanistan-taliban-lovers-elope-nimroz

Listening to Hamid tell me about his lover's conundrum in Kabul, I had a dozen ideas about how he could fight the hydra and win his girl. But it has taken me a great deal of time and consideration to realize that none of those ideas would work in the deeply complex and nuanced context of today's southwest Asia.

Radical theocratic violence here is not well explained by an overview of the traditions of Islam, of the Salafist radical conservative scholars of Islam, of Pashtunwali, or of gender apartheid. There is no passage in the Koran telling parents to turn their children over to death squads. And I doubt the Taliban as a movement is writing a manual for its followers on how to destroy love for God's sake.

Love is political in southwest Asia, for many. To choose to act on love here is a political decision. And one will suffer or overcome the challenge contingent upon the nuanced psycho-political goals of the actors on the scene. 

In Hannah Arendt's book, On Violence, the author provides a deep examination on the origins of violence. Arendt suggests that humans are most likely to strike out when they have felt power and are then feeling it pulled out of their hands.

Taliban followers and Salafists in general are perhaps most obviously concerned with fulfilling their vision of God's will by political as well as social means. But could one imagine any sphere of life where radicals are losing power more quickly and thoroughly than in the romantic?

The world has seen this human quality before, not only in the Islamic world: The Spanish Inquisition, The Puritans, and beyond. Chechen and Montenegrin bridenapping evolved partly as a response to these trends. Travel to any cliffside village around the world and one will hear the story of two lovers who leaped to escape their family's displeasure. 

The Taliban have carved out a world that prohibits any form of romantic love outside of or prior to arranged marriage. Now having lived so long without it, with so many of their people fleeing this austere world they have created, that romantic love has become as rare as the rubies of ancient Balkh. To then see it suddenly appear - like a sparkle off of a bracelet in a crowd - and then find out it is not theirs, they become furious.