Kirjahaku

An Afghan American most recently known for an e-mail he wrote on his views on U.S. reprisals against Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks shares his experiences of Islam and the secular West, his feelings on Islamic militant religious fundamentalism, and his hopes for reconciliation between both civilizations. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

This book is an extended essay on conspiracy theory. It looks at conspiracy theory as a special case of a larger issue: the way that narrative shapes social reality and indeed our experience of reality. It begins by asking what we mean by conspiracy theory: how does this type of story differ from narratives about real conspiracies, which do at times occur. The search for answers takes the inquiry into psychology, evolutionary biology, social sciences, cultural analysis, and history. Conspiracy theory emerges as a certain type of story: a literary critic would recognize it as a story structure animated by an archetypal myth that all conspiracy theories tend to evoke in common, whatever their surface differences. To this archetypal template, the book assigns a term: the Truther Narrative. It goes on to spotlight instances in history when this narrative burgeoned and fed movements and explores these examples for ideas about how to deal with the surge of the Truther Narrative phenomenon in our own time.

"A must read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the Islamic world" (San Francisco Chronicle) We in the West share a common narrative of world history. But our story largely omits a whole civilization whose citizens shared an entirely different narrative for a thousand years as the Islamic world saw it, from the time of Mohammed through the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the events of 9/11 and beyond. In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world saw it. He clarifies why our civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe-a place it long perceived as primitive and disorganized-had somehow hijacked destiny. With sympathy to Muslim and Western perspectives alike, Destiny Disrupted offers a fresh and vital perspective on world conflicts we thought we understood.

In this "terrific" (San Francisco Chronicle) book, an award-winning author tells the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia and cultures, The Invention of Yesterday argues that world history is a narrative we're constantly inventing. Fifty thousand years ago, we roamed the world as countless autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers, each one telling itself a story of the world with itself at the center. We used narratives to organize for survival and explain the unfathomable, and these stories evolved into the bases for cultures, empires, and civilizations. When disparate narratives collided, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates how our propensity to invent a shared symbolic universe has shaped our journey from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age.

Collects poetry, fiction, essays, and selections from two blogs from thirty-three men and women poets, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers and video artists, photographers, community leaders and organisers, and diplomats. Some are veteran writers, such as Tamim Ansary and Donia Gobar, but others are novices and still learning how to craft their own story, their unique Afghan American voice.

The Western narrative of world history largely omits a whole civilization. Destiny Disrupted tells the history of the world from the Islamic point of view, and restores the centrality of the Muslim perspective, ignored for a thousand years.In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as it looks from a new perspective: with the evolution of the Muslim community at the center. His story moves from the lifetime of Mohammed through a succession of far-flung empires, to the tangle of modern conflicts that culminated in the events of 9/11. He introduces the key people, events, ideas, legends, religious disputes, and turning points of world history, imparting not only what happened but how it is understood from the Muslim perspective.He clarifies why two great civilizations-Western and Muslim-grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe-a place it long perceived as primitive-had somehow hijacked destiny.With storytelling brio, humor, and evenhanded sympathy to all sides of the story, Ansary illuminates a fascinating parallel to the world narrative usually heard in the West. Destiny Disrupted offers a vital perspective on world conflicts many now find so puzzling.

The history of modern Afghanistan is an epic drama, a thriller, a tragedy, a surreal farce. Every forty years or so, over the last two centuries, some great global power has attempted to take control of Afghanistan, only to slink away wounded and bewildered. Games without Rules recounts this strange story, not from the outside looking in, as is usually the case, but from the inside looking out. Here, the interventions and invasions by foreign powers are not the main event. They are interruptions of the main event, for Afghans have a story of their own, quite apart from all the invasions (a story often interrupted by invasions!) Drawing on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources, Tamim Ansary weaves an epic story that moves from a universe of village republics,the old Afghanistan,through a tumultuous drama of tribes, factions, and forces, to the current struggle. The drama involves a dazzling array of colourful characters,such as the towering warrior-poet Ahmad Shah, who founded the country the wily spider-king Dost Mohammed the Great, who told the British I am like a wooden spoon you can toss me about, but I will not be broken" and the late nineteenth-century Iron Amir," who said a telescope would interest him only if it could shoot bullets, since what use had he for the moon? A compelling narrative told in an accessible, conversational style, Games without Rules offers revelatory insight into a country long at the centre of international debate, but never fully understood by the outside world.

Forty thousand years ago, the human species existed as thousands of small, virtually autonomous bands, roaming a world almost entirely untouched their presence, each band in contact with a few neighbors but unaware of the thousands of others spread across the planet. Today, no life can unfold in isolation from the general flux and flow of human activity. Every habitable inch of the planet is inhabited by humans, there is no place left untouched by our presence, and events anywhere on this planet can have consequences felt by people anywhere else on this planet. The center of the world no longer seems to be this place or that place but the system as a whole. This journey - from vulnerable small groups to a planet-encompassing hive - is the subject of Tamim Ansary's elegant and gripping history. His object is not just to describe the journey, but to illuminate origins of distinct ways of understanding the world, organizing ourselves, and making sense of what we experience. What each of us sees when we look up at the stars-or at the political landscape of this moment-is shaped by a narrative begun many thousands of years ago; and by the environment, tools, and language that informed that narrative. Ansary also reveals our various gods and laws, our rulers and bankers, our philosophers and outcasts, each of which is a continuous presence in the various global cultures. They are the survivors in the human drama, whereas nation states, corporations, policies and political ideas are all susceptible to violent upheaval and dramatic erasure. Our current moment, Ansary shows, is one of revolutionary reinvention, as old habits are cast aside and reconfigured by the ever more intertwined world we have created. The whole of human history, after all, has been leading up to it.