Bijan Omrani | |
|---|---|
 Bijan Omrani | |
| Born | 1979 York, England |
| Occupation | Writer, scholar, teacher |
| Nationality | British |
| Subject | Travel, Classical History, Afghanistan and Central Asia, Middle Eastern Current Affairs |
| Spouse | Samantha Knights KC |
| Website | |
| bijanomrani | |
Bijan Omrani is a British historian, journalist, teacher, barrister and author of Persian descent. His work ranges from Classical scholarship to current affairs across Asia.
Omrani was born in York, England, in 1979. He studied at the Wellington College, Berkshire before reading Classics and English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford. He later studied at King's College London. He has a doctorate in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Exeter. [1]
Omrani is related to one of the British Army officers responsible for demarcating the northern boundary of Afghanistan in 1885 and surveying Afghan tribal territories in the North West Frontier Province, the artist and surveyor Lt Richard Eyles Galindo. [2]
His paternal family is from north-western Iran, and his maternal one from England, though with the British Empire in India in the 18th–19th century.
He is married to Samantha Knights KC, a barrister at Matrix Chambers.
Omrani taught Classics at Eton College and Westminster School where he contributed new Latin verse to school ceremonies. He was editor of the Asian Affairs journal from 2014-2022. He was called to the Bar in 2018. [3] He is an Honorary Associate Research Fellow in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. [4] He also lectures at the British Museum, Royal Society for Asian Affairs, SOAS, King's College London, and the Pakistan Society. He is a trustee of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.
He is the author of several books, as well as a frequent contributor for specialised articles pertaining the Afghanistan-Pakistan border problems. His 2005 book on Afghanistan, co-authored with Matthew Leeming, was described in The Telegraph in 2022 as "one of the best books of any genre ever written about the country". [5] He has previously questioned the legal basis of the Durand Agreement but now he considers it to be valid but unsatisfactory, and that there is an urgent need for a wider regional solution to the problem perhaps based on a recognition of the line but combined with shared sovereignty in the neighbouring tribal areas.
Omrani was interviewed by France 24 in 2011 about the Afghan-Pakistani border problems, [6] and was also featured in The New York Times in 2011, after an incident on the Pakistani border. [7]
His 2017 book, Caesar's Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul, has the distinction of being endorsed both by the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, [8] as well as the French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who took the book to read whilst on the road campaigning during the European Elections in May 2019. [9] Omrani was interviewed about the book on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme after its UK launch in June 2017. [10] The book was shortlisted in 2018 for the American Library in Paris Book Award, for "the most distinguished book of the year, written and published in English, about France or the French."
He is a regular contributor to the Literary Review, [11] The Critic, [12] and The Oldie. [13] In public debates has critiqued the notion of cultural appropriation. [14] [15]
In 2021, Omrani led a successful campaign to keep the National Trust property Shute Barton open to the public. [16] [17]
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Tajikistan to the northeast, and China to the northeast and east. Occupying 652,864 square kilometers (252,072 sq mi) of land, the country is predominantly mountainous with plains in the north and the southwest, which are separated by the Hindu Kush mountain range. As of 2021, its population is 40.2 million, composed mostly of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks. Kabul is the country's largest city and serves as its capital.
Abdur Rahman Khan GCSI was Emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to his death in 1901. He is known for uniting the country after years of internal fighting and negotiation of the Durand Line Agreement with British India.
Balochistan is a province of Pakistan. Located in the southwestern region of the country, Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan by land area but is the least populated one. It is bordered by the Pakistani provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the north-east and Punjab to the east and Sindh to the south-east. It shares International borders with Iran to the west and Afghanistan to the north; It is also bound by the Arabian Sea to the south. Balochistan is an extensive plateau of rough terrain divided into basins by ranges of sufficient heights and ruggedness. It has the world's largest deep sea port, The Port of Gwadar lying in the Arabian Sea.
The foreign relations of Afghanistan are in a transitional phase since the 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the collapse of the internationally-recognized Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. No country has recognised the new regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Although some countries have engaged in informal diplomatic contact with the Islamic Emirate, formal relations remain limited to representatives of the Islamic Republic.
The history of Afghanistan as a state began in 1823 as the Emirate of Afghanistan after the exile of the Sadozai monarchy to Herat. The Sadozai monarchy ruled the Afghan Durrani Empire, considered the founding state of modern Afghanistan. The written recorded history of the land presently constituting Afghanistan can be traced back to around 500 BCE when the area was under the Achaemenid Empire, although evidence indicates that an advanced degree of urbanized culture has existed in the land since between 3000 and 2000 BCE. Bactria dates back to 2500 BCE. The Indus Valley civilisation stretched up to large parts of Afghanistan in the north. Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army arrived at what is now Afghanistan in 330 BCE after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire during the Battle of Gaugamela. Since then, many empires have established capitals in Afghanistan, including the Greco-Bactrians, Kushans, Indo-Sassanids, Kabul Shahi, Saffarids, Samanids, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Kartids, Timurids, Hotakis and Durranis.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan maintains a large network of diplomatic relations across the world. Pakistan is the second largest Muslim-majority country in terms of population and is the only Muslim majority nation to have possession of nuclear weapons.
Pashtunistan is a historical region located on the Iranian Plateau, inhabited by the indigenous Pashtun people of southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan in South-Central Asia, wherein Pashtun culture, the Pashto language, and Pashtun identity have been based. Alternative names historically used for the region include Pashtūnkhwā (پښتونخوا), Pakhtūnistān, or Pathānistān. Pashtunistan borders the geographical regions of Turkestan to the north, Kashmir to the northeast, Punjab to the east, and Balochistan to the south.
The Great Game was a set of political, diplomatic and military confrontations that occurred through most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century—involving the rivalry of the British Empire and the Russian Empire over Afghanistan and neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia, such as Turkestan, and having direct consequences in Persia, British India, and Tibet.
The Durand Line, forms the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, a 2,670-kilometre (1,660 mi) international land border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in South Asia. The western end runs to the border with Iran and the eastern end to the border with China.
Waziristan is a mountainous region covering the former FATA agencies of North Waziristan and South Waziristan which are now districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Waziristan covers some 11,585 square kilometres (4,500 sq mi). The area is populated by ethnic Pashtuns. It is named after the Wazir tribe. The language spoken in the valley is Pashto, predominantly the Waziri dialect. The region forms the southern part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is now part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The 16th-century Pashtun revolutionary leader and warrior-poet Bayazid Pir Roshan, who wrote the oldest known book in Pashto, was based in Kaniguram, Waziristan.
Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, was a British Anglo-Indian diplomat and member of the Indian Civil Service.
The Inter-Services Intelligence is the largest and best-known component of the Pakistani intelligence community. It is responsible for gathering, processing, and analyzing any information from around the world that is deemed relevant to Pakistan's national security. The ISI reports to its Director-General and is primarily focused on providing intelligence to the Pakistani government.
Husain Haqqani is a Pakistani journalist, academic, political activist, and former ambassador of Pakistan to Sri Lanka and the United States.
A series of occasional armed skirmishes and firefights have occurred along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border between the Afghan Armed Forces and the Pakistan Armed Forces since 1949. The latest round of hostilities between the two countries began in April 2007. Militants belonging to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar also use Afghanistan's territory to target Pakistani security personnel deployed along the border. The Diplomat says that the presence of terrorists belonging to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan on Afghan soil is the reason for sporadic shelling of Afghanistan's territory by Pakistani security forces.
The Emirate of Afghanistan also referred to as the Emirate of Kabul Persian: امارت افغانستان, romanized: Amārat-i Afghānistān) was an emirate between Central Asia and South Asia that is now today's Afghanistan and some parts of today's Pakistan. The emirate emerged from the Durrani Empire, when Dost Mohammad Khan, the founder of the Barakzai dynasty in Kabul, prevailed.
Afghanistan–Pakistan relations refer to the bilateral ties between Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In August 1947, the partition of British India led to the emergence of Pakistan along Afghanistan's eastern frontier, and the two countries have since had a strained relationship; Afghanistan was the sole country to vote against Pakistan's admission into the United Nations following the latter's independence. Various Afghan government officials and Afghan nationalists have made irredentist claims to large swathes of Pakistan's territory in modern-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Pakistani Balochistan, which complete the traditional homeland of "Pashtunistan" for the Pashtun people. Afghan territorial claims over Pashtun-majority areas that are in Pakistan were coupled with discontent over the permanency of the Durand Line, for which Afghanistan demanded a renegotiation, with the aim of having it shifted eastward to the Indus River. Territorial disputes and conflicting claims prevented the normalization of bilateral ties between the two countries throughout the mid-20th century. Further Afghanistan–Pakistan tensions have arisen concerning a variety of issues, including the Afghanistan conflict and Afghan refugees in Pakistan, water-sharing rights, and a continuously warming relationship between Afghanistan and India.
Louis Dupree was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and scholar of Afghan culture and history. He was the husband of Nancy Hatch Dupree, who was the Board Director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University in Afghanistan and author of five books about Afghanistan. The husband and wife team from the United States worked together for 15 years in Kabul, collecting as many works written about Afghanistan as they could. They travelled across the country from 1962 until the 1979 Soviet intervention, conducting archaeological excavations.
Florentia Sale was an Englishwoman who travelled the world while married to her husband, Sir Robert Henry Sale, a British army officer. She was dubbed "the Grenadier in Petticoats" for her travels with the army, which took her to regions such as Mauritius, Burma, Afghanistan, India, and various other areas under the control of the British Empire.
This is a list of books in the English language which deal with Afghanistan and its geography, history, inhabitants, culture, biota, etc.
Hassan Abbas is a Pakistani-American scholar and academic in the field of South Asian and Middle Eastern studies. His research focuses have been on security issues pertaining to governance, law enforcement and counterterrorism. Abbas worked in the governments of Benazir Bhutto (1994–1996) and Musharraf (1999–2001). He currently resides in the US.
