David B. Edwards
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 1998-1999
Children of History: Genealogies
of the Afghan Jihad
The current book project of David B. Edwards, 1998-99 SAR resident scholar,
is a sequel to his first book, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines
on the Afghan Frontier, and the continuation of a long interest and
involvement in the Afghan conflict. Titled Children of History: Genealogies
of the Afghan Jihad, the book explores the ascendence of Islamic political
authority in Afghanistan by looking at three leaders who played important roles
during the formative period of the war. The three leaders are Nur Muhammad
Taraki, the secretary-general of the Marxist political party that took power
in 1978; Samiullah Safi, the head of one of the first tribal uprisings to break
out against the Marxist government; and Qazi Amin Waqad, one of the leaders
of the radical Islamic political parties that came to dominate the Afghan resistance
from the time of the Soviet invasion until the emergence of the Taliban militia
movement in 1995.
"My
approach in both this book and my earlier work has been to use individual lives
as a lens for viewing wider political processes," explains Edwards. "My
first book used oral family histories, miracle tales, and royal proclamations....This
book centers on autobiographical accounts of men who have played important roles
during the early stages of the current conflict in Afghanistan." Edwards
also uses such texts as tape cassettes of jihad poetry, speeches, propaganda
photographs, and political pamphlets to place these leaders in historical and
cultural context.
"This project is humanistic in a more profound
sense as well," says Edwards, "in that my ultimate goal is to understand
the cost of the war in human terms. The three leaders were chosen not only because
of the positions of authority and prestige they have occupied, but also because
of the various ways in which they exemplify the dislocations and uncertainties
of Afghan society over the last forty years. While some of their deeds would
be considered 'heroic' in Afghan terms, the meaning of these deeds is ambiguous
at best, and my highlighting of that ambiguity is meant to trouble our understanding
of the war's significance, which has been vastly simplified and distorted in
the western media...One of the goals of the book then is to capture a sense of
what went wrong: why did these men choose the paths they did, what were the implications
of those choices, and what does this history tell us about the trajectory and
possibility of political community in the late twentieth century?" Edwards
adds.
Since 1975, Edwards has spent approximately four and
a half years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, most recently in the summer of 1995
when he travelled throughout eastern Afghanistan. He has conducted research in
Afghan refugee camps, has visited a number of mujahidin bases, and has conducted
extensive interviews with more than eighty prominent Afghan political, tribal
and religious figures. This summer, he is planning on returning to Afghanistan
to complete research on a third book, tentatively titled Mirror of Jihad: Afghanistan,
Ethnography and the New World Order, which will bring together his personal experiences
and observations from over twenty years of research on Afghans and Afghan political
culture.
"As someone who originally studied literature and
creative writing," Edwards observes, "the accurate and sensitive treatment
of lives and times has always been of central concern to me, and it remains so
today. My goal in this third, and I hope final book on Afghanistan is to leave
behind a human-scale history that will help people understand the immense tragedy
that unfolded in Afghanistan in the last quarter of the twentieth century."
Affiliation at time of award: Associate Professor and
Associate Dean, Anthropology and Sociology, Williams College
Photograph: Turkoman rug weaver from Afghanistan.
Haripur refugee camp, North-West frontier province of Pakistan. Copyright
David B. Edwards, 1984.
Return to Resident Scholars
1998-1999.
