Mir Tamim Ansary (born November 4, 1948, in Kabul, Afghanistan) is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. He is the author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, West of Kabul, East of New York, and other books concerning Afghan and Muslim history. He was previously a columnist for the encyclopedia website Encarta.
Ansary was born in Kabul and lived there until high school when he moved to the United States. [1] In Afghanistan he attended Lashkargah School, [2] and Lycée Esteqlal. [3] He then attended the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in the United States. [4]
He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. [1]
Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he wrote a widely circulated e-mail that denounced the Taliban and warned that, although he believed that United States would need to be deployed in Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, that, in Ansary's opinion, this could start a third world war. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age". [5]
His book West of Kabul, East of New York is a literary memoir recounting his bicultural perspective on contemporary world conflicts. West of Kabul, East of New York was San Francisco's One City One Book selection for 2008. Ansary also edited and published a group of essays by young Afghans entitled, Snapshots: This Afghan American Life with funding from a 2008 grant from the Christianson Fund.
In the middle of 2008 Ansary gave a series of lectures to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, associated with San Francisco State University, on the history and development of Islam. [6] This series was rebroadcast on the local affiliate of National Public Radio [KALW]. [7]
Ansary's novel, The Widow's Husband, portrays the nineteenth-century British invasion of Afghanistan from both an Afghan and a British perspective.
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes was published in 2009 by PublicAffairs and won the 2010 Northern California book award, general nonfiction category.[ citation needed ] A review in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote "Ansary does a good job of depicting the fundamental societal and cultural changes that have shaped the history of Islamic civilization." [8] The book was also reviewed in the journal Literature and Theology . [9]
A memoir, Road Trips, Becoming an American in the vapor trail of The Sixties, recounts stories from Mir Tamim's years as part of the American ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture. [10]
His latest book, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection, was released in October 2019.
For over two decades, Mir Tamim moderated the San Francisco Writers Workshop in attempt to give back to younger writers what was given to him when young. [11] [12]
Tamim Ansary lives in San Francisco with his wife. They have two daughters.
the widow's husband.
Kabul is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Located in the eastern half of the country, it is also a municipality, forming part of the Kabul Province; it is administratively divided into 22 municipal districts. According to 2023 estimates, the population of Kabul was 4.95 million people. In contemporary times, the city has served as Afghanistan's political, cultural, and economical center, and rapid urbanisation has made Kabul the 75th-largest city in the world and the country's primate city.
The Hindu Kush is an 800-kilometre-long (500 mi) mountain range on the Iranian Plateau in Central and South Asia to the west of the Himalayas. It stretches from central and eastern Afghanistan into northwestern Pakistan and far southeastern Tajikistan. The range forms the western section of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Region (HKH); to the north, near its northeastern end, the Hindu Kush buttresses the Pamir Mountains near the point where the borders of China, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, after which it runs southwest through Pakistan and into Afghanistan near their border.
Badakhshan is a historical region comprising parts of modern-day north-eastern Afghanistan, eastern Tajikistan, and Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Badakhshan Province is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. Much of historic Badakhshan lies within Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in the southeastern part of the country. The music of Badakhshan is an important part of the region's cultural heritage.
Kabul, situated in the east of the country, is one of the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan. The capital of the province is Kabul city, which is Afghanistan's capital and largest city. The population of the Kabul Province is over 5.5 million people as of 2022, of which over 85 percent live in urban areas. The current governor of the province is Qari Baryal.
Nuristan, also spelled as Nurestan or Nooristan, is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, located in the eastern part of the country. It is divided into seven districts and is Afghanistan's least populous province, with a population of around 167,000. Parun serves as the provincial capital. Nuristan is bordered on the south by Laghman and Kunar provinces, on the north by Badakhshan province, on the west by Panjshir province.
The National Museum of Afghanistan is a two-story building located across the street from the Darul Aman Palace in the Darulaman area of Kabul, Afghanistan. It was once considered to be one of the world's finest museums. There have been reports about expanding the museum or building a new larger one.
The Basilic, or The Ottoman Cannon was a very large-calibre cannon designed by Orban, a cannon engineer, Saruca Usta and architect Muslihiddin Usta at a time when cannons were still new. It is one of the largest cannons ever built.
Lashkargāh, historically called Bost or Boost, is a city in southwestern Afghanistan and the capital of Helmand Province. It is located in Lashkargah District, where the Arghandab River merges into the Helmand River. The city has a population of 201,546 as of 2006. Lashkargah is linked by major roads with Kandahar to the east, Zaranj on the border with Iran to the west, and Farah and Herat to the north-west. It is mostly very arid and desolate. However, farming does exist around the Helmand and Arghandab rivers. Bost Airport is located on the east bank of the Helmand River, five miles north of the junction of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers. Because of the trading hubs, it is Afghanistan's second largest city in size, after Kabul and before Kandahar.
The culture of Afghanistan has persisted for over three millennia, tracing record to at least the time of the Achaemenid Empire in 500 BCE, and encompasses the cultural diversity of the nation. Afghanistan's culture is historically strongly connected to nearby Persia, including the same religion, as the people of both countries have lived together for thousands of years. Its location at the crossroads of Central, South and Western Asia historically made it a hub of diversity, dubbed by one historian as the "roundabout of the ancient world".
Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS), founded in 1953, is a coeducational boarding and day school in Carbondale, Colorado. CRMS educates roughly 175 students in grades 9 through 12. The curriculum emphasizes rigorous college preparatory academics, exposure to visual and performing arts, educational experience in the wilderness, campus service crews, and required athletics. In 2020, school review website Niche ranked Colorado Rocky Mountain school as one of Colorado's best boarding schools and best high schools for the arts.
The Saur Revolution or Sowr Revolution, also known as the April Revolution or the April Coup, was staged on 27–28 April 1978 by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and overthrew Afghan president Mohammed Daoud Khan, who had himself taken power in the 1973 Afghan coup d'état and established an autocratic one-party system in the country. Daoud and most of his family were executed at the Arg in the capital city of Kabul by PDPA-affiliated military officers, after which his supporters were also purged and killed. The successful PDPA uprising resulted in the creation of a socialist Afghan government that was closely aligned with the Soviet Union, with Nur Muhammad Taraki serving as the PDPA's General Secretary of the Revolutionary Council. Saur or Sowr is the Dari-language name for the second month of the Solar Hijri calendar, during which the events took place.
Nanguyalai Tarzi – was a high-ranking Afghan diplomat who was the Afghan Ambassador to Switzerland and Permanent Representative to the United Nations office and other international organisations in Geneva. Tarzi has been the Ambassador of Afghanistan to India, and before that he was Permanent Representative to United Nations at Geneva and Afghan Ambassador to Switzerland, Ambassador of Afghanistan to Pakistan and Director of the United Nations Information Centres (UNIC) in Tehran, Iran. From 1980s to 1990s, Tarzi was Permanent Observer of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to the United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland and United Nations, Vienna, Austria and Senior Political Adviser and Deputy Permanent Observer of OIC to the United Nations, New York, United States of America. In the 1970s, Tarzi was the Afghan Diplomat in Washington D.C., United States of America.
The Barakzai dynasty also known as the Muhammadzai dynasty ruled modern day Afghanistan from 1823 to 1978 when the monarchy ended de jure under Musahiban Mohammad Zahir Shah and de facto under his cousin Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan. The Barakzai dynasty was established by Dost Mohammad Khan after the Durrani dynasty of Ahmad Shah Durrani was removed from power. As the Pahlavi era in Iran, the Muhammadzai era was known for its progressivist modernity in which Afghanistan was referred to as the "Switzerland of South Asia".
The Other Side of the Sky: A Memoir is a memoir by Farah Ahmedi with Tamim Ansary. The book profiles the life of Farah Ahmedi from the time she was born until she was seventeen years old.
Masuma Esmati-Wardak was an Afghan writer and politician. She was jointly one of the first women to serve in the Afghan parliament and served as Minister of Education.
The Centre d'Enseignement Français en Afghanistan (CEFA) consists of two Franco-Afghan schools in the center of Kabul, Afghanistan, together educating around 6,000 Afghan students.
The San Francisco Writers Workshop is one of the oldest continuously running writing critique groups in the United States, meeting every Tuesday night, except for major holidays, since 1946. Successful published authors who first workshopped their books in the group include Khaled Hosseini, David Henry Sterry, Aaron Hamburger, Joe Quirk, Michelle Gagnon, Kemble Scott, Tamim Ansary, Erika Mailman, Zack Lynch, Zarina Zabrisky, and Ransom Stephens.
Anti-American sentiment in Iran is not new; the chant "Death to America" has been in use in Iran since at least the Islamic revolution in 1979, along with other phrases often represented as anti-American. A 1953 coup which involved the CIA was cited as a grievance. State-sponsored murals characterised as anti-American dot the streets of Tehran. It has been suggested that under Ayatollah Khomeini anti-Americanism was little more than a way to distinguish between domestic supporters and detractors, and even the phrase "Great Satan" which has previously been associated with anti-Americanism, appears to now signify either the United States or the United Kingdom.
Kubra Noorzai (1932–1986) was an Afghan politician. She was the first woman to become a government minister in the country, serving as Minister of Public Health between 1965 and 1969.
[...]like my classmates at the Lashkargah School,[...]
Istlaqal was the second-oldest school[...]- The name of the Esteqlal school is spelled "Istlaqal" in the book.
The day the letter of acceptance arrived from CRMS,[...]
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