Word: fatherness
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That night, my father spends hours at the police station, arguing until the truck driver is released. My dad is a law professor, not a military man, but Isfahan's finest aren't taking any chances, this being the season of the Shah's 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian empire. Just months before, the world's royals and Presidents had flocked to Persepolis - the stone city in the desert built by King Darius and sacked by Alexander the Great - to watch costume parades of ancient Persian soldiers, down Château Lafite-Rothschild 1945 and sleep on Porthault...
...strafe the city, our gardener and cleaner Mir Ali patrols the garden with an ax and a plastic baseball bat. The next day, the radio proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of Afghanistan. Tanks are wreathed in flowers, "doubtless following the prescription of some revolutionary handbook," my father writes home. The portrait painter down the street begins churning out likenesses of Afghanistan's new President, Marxist-Leninist Nur Mohammed Taraki. (See pictures of hidden Afghanistan...
Later, Taraki will boast that his coup took both superpowers by surprise. The Americans certainly were: it's rumored, though never confirmed, that the coaches of our Little League game that afternoon were CIA agents who missed the biggest news from their patch for years. All summer, my father cycles to his office at the Ministry of Justice in the sumptuous Darul Aman Palace. He's there to help the ministry frame a written legal code from tribal law, but as the summer wears on, the work dries up. The ex-minister remains in jail. Soviet advisers hustle through...
...that month. Carter assures them that the goal is "comprehensive peace." President Sadat says the American President has come on a mission, "to wipe out from the lands of prophets and religions all threats and evils of war, so that peace can prevail in the land of peace." My father is lecturing at Cairo University. In our apartment we tack up posters bought in the bazaar: drawings of a somber Sadat, wreathed by doves. Our Sadat posters last longer than Sadat does: two years later, he's dead, shot by extremists angered at his peace talks with Israel...
When ignored, history tends to repeat itself. Three decades after my father worked to build a codified Afghan legal system, a new generation of Americans are still trying to loosen the hold of pashtunwali, or tribal code, on Afghanistan's legal culture. The 2008 signing of a SOFA between Iraq and the U.S. had Iranian hard-liners once again warning against American imperialism. The treaty "does not allow the slightest grounds for the Iraq people's rule over their country and turns this country into a medieval colony for America," wrote Hossein Shariatmadari in the influential Iranian newspaper Kayhan. While...