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A Thousand Golden Cities: 2,500 Years of Writing from Afghanistan and its People
In the Western mind, Afghanistan has come to mean many things in recent decades, most of them bad. Partly thanks to the relentless media coverage of the “War on Terror”, it has become synonymous above all with war and terrorism – from the Taliban to Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State – crushing levels of poverty and immiseration. In ways which would have been familiar to both Herodotus in the fourth century BC and Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth AD, it has also come to represent the latest testing ground for imperial hubris and overexpansion, another tomb in the “graveyard of empires”.
This is an extraordinarily reductive and one-dimensional portrait of a nation. Afghanistan is, and always has been, vastly more interesting than that. Its long and tumultuous history at the centre of the world, at the heart of cultural exchanges between East and West, encompasses high culture, low politics, domestic dynasties, international adventures, Great Power rivalry and a completely compelling vein of skulduggery.
This anthology will celebrate this rich, engrossing heritage with a captivating blend of history and geography, religion and culture, politics and poetry, drama and memoir, home-grown fiction and the self-serving literature of invaders. It will celebrate Afghan voices as much as those of foreigners who, for better or worse, have been bewitched by this staggeringly beautiful mountain kingdom.
This is an extraordinarily reductive and one-dimensional portrait of a nation. Afghanistan is, and always has been, vastly more interesting than that. Its long and tumultuous history at the centre of the world, at the heart of cultural exchanges between East and West, encompasses high culture, low politics, domestic dynasties, international adventures, Great Power rivalry and a completely compelling vein of skulduggery.
This anthology will celebrate this rich, engrossing heritage with a captivating blend of history and geography, religion and culture, politics and poetry, drama and memoir, home-grown fiction and the self-serving literature of invaders. It will celebrate Afghan voices as much as those of foreigners who, for better or worse, have been bewitched by this staggeringly beautiful mountain kingdom.
836 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 16, 2023
3 people are currently reading
211 people want to read
About the author
Justin Marozzi
12 books73 followers[Excerpt from http://www.justinmarozzi.com/about/]
Justin is a travel writer, historian, journalist and political risk and security consultant. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and Muslim world and in recent years has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. He graduated from Cambridge with a Starred Double First in History in 1993, before studying Broadcast Journalism at Cardiff University and winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania to read a Masters in International Relations. After working in the BBC World Service on ‘News Hour’ and BBC Westminster on ‘Today in Parliament’, he joined the Financial Times as a foreign correspondent in Manila, where he also wrote for The Economist. During his time in the Far East, he shared a Winnebago with Imelda Marcos, a helicopter with the Philippine president and his mistress, and a curry with Aung San Suu Kyi whilst under house arrest in Rangoon.
His first book, South from Barbary, was an account of a 1,200-mile expedition by camel along the slave routes of the Libyan Sahara, described by the desert explorer and SAS veteran Michael Asher as “the first significant journey across the Libyan interior for a generation”. His second, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, launched in Baghdad in 2004, was the best-selling biography of the world’s greatest Islamic conqueror and a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year: “Outstanding… Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians.”
In 2006, he wrote Faces of Exploration, a collection of profiles of the world’s leading explorers. He has contributed to Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (an interview with the Afghan mujahid hero Ahmed Shah Massoud), The Seventy Greatest Journeys, and most recently The Art of War (essays on Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane).
His latest book, published in October 2008, is The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, based on extensive research in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece. Apart from a year working for a British security company in Iraq, an encounter with the Grand Mufti of Egypt and an investigation into outwardly religious girls performing oral sex in car-parks in Cairo, one of the many highlights of the Herodotean trail was a retsina-fuelled lunch with the nonagenarian war hero and writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, Spectator, Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard, Standpoint and Prospect, where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world and defence and security issues, and has broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four.
Justin is a former member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where he has also lectured, and an Honorary Travel Member of the Travellers Club.
Justin is a travel writer, historian, journalist and political risk and security consultant. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and Muslim world and in recent years has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. He graduated from Cambridge with a Starred Double First in History in 1993, before studying Broadcast Journalism at Cardiff University and winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania to read a Masters in International Relations. After working in the BBC World Service on ‘News Hour’ and BBC Westminster on ‘Today in Parliament’, he joined the Financial Times as a foreign correspondent in Manila, where he also wrote for The Economist. During his time in the Far East, he shared a Winnebago with Imelda Marcos, a helicopter with the Philippine president and his mistress, and a curry with Aung San Suu Kyi whilst under house arrest in Rangoon.
His first book, South from Barbary, was an account of a 1,200-mile expedition by camel along the slave routes of the Libyan Sahara, described by the desert explorer and SAS veteran Michael Asher as “the first significant journey across the Libyan interior for a generation”. His second, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, launched in Baghdad in 2004, was the best-selling biography of the world’s greatest Islamic conqueror and a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year: “Outstanding… Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians.”
In 2006, he wrote Faces of Exploration, a collection of profiles of the world’s leading explorers. He has contributed to Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (an interview with the Afghan mujahid hero Ahmed Shah Massoud), The Seventy Greatest Journeys, and most recently The Art of War (essays on Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Tamerlane).
His latest book, published in October 2008, is The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, based on extensive research in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece. Apart from a year working for a British security company in Iraq, an encounter with the Grand Mufti of Egypt and an investigation into outwardly religious girls performing oral sex in car-parks in Cairo, one of the many highlights of the Herodotean trail was a retsina-fuelled lunch with the nonagenarian war hero and writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, Spectator, Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard, Standpoint and Prospect, where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world and defence and security issues, and has broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four.
Justin is a former member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where he has also lectured, and an Honorary Travel Member of the Travellers Club.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 29, 2025
an interesting read, & i did find some authors i would like to read more from, but some of the inclusions in this anthology are baffling to me. you would think "2,500 years of writing from afghanistan and its people" means that all of the works in this are from people indigenous to afghanistan (& the surrounding area, before the modern parameters of the country were stamped on the map), but no! only 41 of the 90 authors in this are afghani & of those that aren't we get:
* a whole swathe of history (17th century to just before the 21st) where there's one single afghan voice, otherwise just its colonisers (including rudyard "white man's burden" kipling for crying out loud!)
* an excerpt of a book by a scandinavian journalist who exploited an afghan family's welcome & story to her own ends, but we don't get the published response by the family to this
* a shit ton of us/uk soldiers & military-adjacent people, a real "highlight" of which was describing someone in the us military thus: few military personnel deployed to afghanistan can have used their time as fruitfully as captain edward zellem. all because he wrote some books on afghan sayings?
besides this, when it came to the poetry (particularly the older poetry), my major quibble was picking the translations of rumi by the guy who didn't even speak farsi but translated instead via other translations (why!). my secondary quibble was that surely there are translations of some of these works which are not by 19th century poets who want to turn it all into rhyming couplets. i am begging.
* a whole swathe of history (17th century to just before the 21st) where there's one single afghan voice, otherwise just its colonisers (including rudyard "white man's burden" kipling for crying out loud!)
* an excerpt of a book by a scandinavian journalist who exploited an afghan family's welcome & story to her own ends, but we don't get the published response by the family to this
* a shit ton of us/uk soldiers & military-adjacent people, a real "highlight" of which was describing someone in the us military thus: few military personnel deployed to afghanistan can have used their time as fruitfully as captain edward zellem. all because he wrote some books on afghan sayings?
besides this, when it came to the poetry (particularly the older poetry), my major quibble was picking the translations of rumi by the guy who didn't even speak farsi but translated instead via other translations (why!). my secondary quibble was that surely there are translations of some of these works which are not by 19th century poets who want to turn it all into rhyming couplets. i am begging.
September 17, 2024
Worth the long read if only for the discovery of Reza Mohammadi's poem 'To Love' on page 674.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews