The battle for Afghanistan’s libraries | Financial Times

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The battle for Afghanistan’s libraries

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As cultural and educational institutions face up to Taliban rule, there are still ways for the west to help

Richard Ovenden - SEPTEMBER 24 2021

Richard Ovenden SEPTEMBER 24 2021 25 Print this page Newsletter: FT Weekend Get a shot of weekend inspiration with the best in life, arts and culture. Delivered every Saturday morning. After Najiba Hussaini was killed in July 2017 by a Taliban suicide bomber, her fiancé-to-be Hussain Rezai decided that the best way to honour her memory would be to found a library in her name. The Najiba Hussaini Memorial Library grew into a collection of more than 12,000 volumes and a computer lab, helping to provide education for children — both male and female — in Nili, a city in the central Afghan province of Daykundi, where Hussaini, a 28-year-old civil servant, was born and grew up.  

The foundation that Rezai established envisaged the creation of more libraries in each of the provinces of Afghanistan. But on August 18, as the Taliban consolidated their hold over the country, the Najiba Hussaini Memorial Library was attacked; video footage shows the building smashed and the collection ransacked. Rezai, now in Italy, says he is “devastated” at what has happened: “Everything we have built has ended in a nightmare.” 

In the popular imagination, libraries are seen as safe and serene, places where study is undertaken in an atmosphere of quiet contemplation. Yet in Afghanistan today, libraries and archives are under attack. Librarians are either unable to come back to serve their community or in fear of what the Taliban will inflict on them. Many have fled the country or are in the process of leaving, often at great personal risk.  

The public library in Kabul and the National Archives there now have a limited staff presence, but no services are provided. University libraries are all currently closed, and the student body is being divided along gender lines. There are not many libraries outside Kabul, and they are closed: many government employees are uncertain about their future. Female employees, such a strength of Afghanistan’s libraries, are not allowed to work. 

The regime’s deputy minister of culture, Zabiullah Mujahid, who has claimed Taliban responsibility for suicide bombings over the past two decades, recently told his ministry to reopen buildings. But the place of women, who have been a disproportionately high percentage of the workforce, is of huge concern. Will they ever be allowed to return to their former roles? The Taliban regime has recently confirmed its policy of excluding girls from high schools — confounding those who predicted that the new government would promote a more moderate stance on this fundamental issue. 

Studying at the Kabul Public Library in 2019. In Afghanistan, libraries have been seen as safe places for girls and women © New York Times/Redux/eyevine 

The presence of female librarians encouraged women to come and use libraries, as they felt that libraries provided a safe place to study. Masuma Nazari, the former director of the National Archives, told me: “In Afghanistan, libraries are safe and good places for girls and women. Families allow their girls to visit libraries to read, meet and talk to their classmates and friends. In addition to reading and learning in libraries, they can laugh, cry and share their life experiences together. If this time the Taliban increase restrictions on girls and women, they lose this safe place, as happened in the first period of Taliban rule. Libraries should not be taken from Afghan girls.”  

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In recent weeks, great efforts have been made by cultural organisations in the Middle East, Europe and North America to help Afghans working in the cultural heritage sector to leave the country safely. 

As Bodley’s librarian at the University of Oxford, I work together with colleagues to promote learning and research, and the university’s Oriental Institute has a number of scholarly projects that have been active in Afghanistan, relying on Afghan partners to support their research effort, including in archives. As a consequence, I have become a small cog in the Oxford end of an international co-operative effort, led by the Smithsonian Institution, the universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago and several NGOs, to try to provide safe passage out of Afghanistan for 120 cultural heritage workers and their families — at times a dramatic and nerve-racking experience.  

People were mobilised across the globe to support this initiative, and I was able to reach out to a colleague, Sohair Wastawy, the former executive director of Qatar National Library, to bring Qatari support to the effort to get these workers to the airport in Kabul, where a plane had been chartered to fly them out. The suicide bombing of August 26 ended hopes of the airlift, which was due to include an Afghan citizen — let us call him Max — who had been helping Oxford researchers using archives. Further efforts to get Max, his wife and two-year-old child to the airport then followed, but he was caught, beaten and his laptop and money stolen on one of these attempts. The fact that he is from the persecuted Hazara minority made his predicament even more dangerous.  

Max then spent several weeks in hiding in Kabul, before paying a smuggler to get him and his family to Pakistan. He is there now — safe for the time being — and efforts are currently focused on urging the UK government to provide him with the necessary documentation for asylum in the UK. We owe him this, as his work supporting British researchers has ended up putting him and his family in grave danger.  

For the most part, however, colleagues in the library and archive sector outside Afghanistan have been able to do little more than watch while the situation deteriorates again. The library sector’s professional organisations in the UK have issued a statement of solidarity with our Afghan colleagues, insisting that the Afghan authorities comply with their international obligations under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property and its protocols, as well as the Unesco 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The trade in illegal antiquities will undoubtedly include books and documents stolen from collections in Afghanistan in the coming weeks. 

In the first period of Taliban rule, the country saw widespread attacks on culture, symbolised by the destruction of the vast statues of Buddha in Bamiyan province in 2001. But libraries and archives were also hit hard. Reading of materials in non-Pashto languages, especially Persian, was forbidden. Eight of Kabul’s 18 libraries were destroyed, seven more converted into religious buildings.  

At Kabul University library in 2001, during the Taliban’s first period in power, books are examined to ensure they conform to the group’s interpretation of Islam © Alamy Stock Photo 

On August 12 1998, the Taliban drove up to the doors of the Hakim Nasser Khosrow Balkhi Cultural Center, at the heart of which was an important public library, armed with rocket launchers and machine guns. Latif Pedram, its librarian, was powerless to stop its collection of 55,000 volumes from being deliberately destroyed, including major illuminated Persian manuscripts. Fazlollah Qodsi, the director of the National Library following the fall of the Taliban, highlighted that every copy of Afghanistan’s legal code was destroyed. Reading of the great Persian epic, the “Shahnameh”, was brutally suppressed by the Taliban, through house-to-house searches for banned books. Librarians such as Pedram were targets. “If they caught me, I would be executed immediately — on the spot,” he would later recall. 

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Over the past few decades, outside funding and internal resolve had allowed the sector to recover some of its ability to operate on behalf of the Afghan people. The Public Library of Afghanistan, dating back to the mid-1960s, served the people with a small but growing collection — but with insufficient investment to replace all of the resources destroyed by the Taliban in the mid-1990s.  

The National Archives of Afghanistan had, in recent years, received increased funding and improved support from the Afghan government. After the first period of Taliban rule, the National Archives were reopened by the then president Hamid Karzai, and proper record-keeping practices were introduced. The archives have been attacked once more in the past few weeks. The institution was looted as the Taliban re-entered the city in August, forcing its current director to post a plea to the Taliban on Facebook for protection, to preserve Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. His cry for help was not heeded, though the director of the National Museum of Afghanistan, Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, issued a statement later indicating that he and his staff had received support from the Taliban to protect his institution. 

At Kabul University, the library had been one of the best in the entire region. Founded in 1932, with a building dating from 1963, it had a collection of more than 200,000 volumes by 1992, employing some 50 librarians. Scholars from Iran, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India and elsewhere came to use the collections, and it had become, by the time of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the de facto national library. Following the Soviet-Afghan war, the library was in ruins, and a project was begun to rebuild the institution, to reconstitute its historic collections and deliver services to the community once again.  

A man in 1995 holds a book with a picture of Lenin on the cover — a leftover from the days before the Taliban first took power in Afghanistan © Getty Images 

The Taliban regime at the end of the 1990s put a stop to that. The library was shelled and the director at the time, Abdul Rasoul Rahin, counted 25 holes in the roof, with many of the historic documents finding their way into the illicit trade in ancient books and manuscripts. In recent years, a concerted effort to re-establish the institution had been made. However, its future has now been placed in doubt again; it has been closed since the middle of August. 

"I read books, I wrote, I defined dreams to myself. [Friends and I] talked about our common dreams and what we can do for our country"
A Kabul University student, on how he used the library 

I spoke to a student at Kabul University, who told me how he used the library: “I read books, I wrote, I defined dreams to myself. In addition, sometimes my friends and I would sit around a table and talk about developments and the current situation. We talked about our common dreams and what we can do for our country.” Despite the many problems with the university library — lack of Wi-Fi, the collections insufficient — “we were able to empower ourselves there by reading books. I read many books, learned and critiqued ideas within the books.” 

The current situation means that for the past month he has been shut out of the university and cannot use the library: “I guess the Taliban are working on the curriculum to change it and the majority of the coming subjects are religious subjects. It makes me so worried. The library will be full of religious books and I prefer not to study them at all.” 

The internet has proved a crucial lifeline for those inside Afghanistan who are not supporters of the Taliban. They rely on email and social media contact from friends and colleagues both inside and outside the country. A small-scale fundraising initiative called The Airtime Project is trying to ensure that mobile phone accounts for Afghans can be topped up. “Keeping Afghan voices connected to each other and to the world is more important than ever,” says Patrick Fruchet, a former UN aid worker, who has been providing mobile phone credit to Afghans since the day after the Taliban took Kabul. 

A young woman pulls material from the newspapers and magazines shelves at the Kabul Public Library in 2019 © New York Times/Redux/eyevine 

At the same time, social media is being used to document and share footage of destruction and oppression. Unsurprisingly, internet access has been disrupted on numerous occasions since the middle of August, another hallmark of authoritarian suppression. Some western libraries, such as the Internet Archive, are actively archiving Afghan websites, in order to protect some of the country’s digital memory and its digital witness to the many terrible scenes that are unfolding. 

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It is not just citizens who benefit from easy access to information: oppressive regimes do as well. In ancient Mesopotamia, record-keeping for the purpose of raising taxation was perhaps the first example of comprehensive surveillance of people. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, citizens were closely monitored and documented in detail, and these documents would enable a fierce grip to be applied. In Afghanistan, there are reports of citizens destroying records of schools, for example, in order to prevent documentation from falling into the hands of the Taliban, which might trigger punishment killings. Bookshops are also destroying stock that might be considered heretical by the Taliban. 

In the west we are losing our libraries and archives not through brutal attacks, but through neglect and underfunding. To Afghans such as Nazari, this situation is scarcely believable. “Governments can compensate for the budget deficit in other ways,” she commented to me. In a country with few libraries, those who run them are passionate about the positive role they have for their communities, for the life chances of their fellow citizens, especially for their young people.  

It calls to mind the fate of the Great Library of Alexandria. That institution, the largest and most famous library in the ancient world, had begun as one of the jewels in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, bringing not just books and prestige but scholars such as Euclid and Archimedes, whose work in the library led to profound advances. A few centuries after they were active users, the library had vanished, and its demise was not brought about through the deliberate attacks that many accounts claimed. Rather than suffering from vandalism at the hands of Muslim conquerors — an example of Christian disinformation — the Alexandrian library was brought to its knees by a long, slow process of neglect and lack of funding.  

In Afghanistan, the ethos of libraries and archives that has developed over the past two decades has been progressive and open. They have been key institutions supporting education, especially for girls and women, and where a diversity of knowledge can be accessed. Their archives, which should be pillars of open government and civil society, are being undermined. As Arezou Azad, director of the Invisible East project at Oxford’s Oriental Institute, told me, we must continue to support libraries and archives in Afghanistan however we can. “To continue preserving Afghanistan’s cultural heritage and knowledge of its cultural history . . . is a fundamental basis for peace in the country, and for state building,” she said. 

The motto of the Afghan ministries in charge of information and culture before the Taliban takeover remains crucial: “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.” Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian and author of ‘Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack’ (John Murray)