West of Kabul, East of New York

In his 2002 memoir, West of Kabul, East of New York, Afghan-American author Tamim Ansary describes his personal journey to reconcile the two differing and often conflicting cultures that shaped his life and led him to think of himself as a “split soul.” Born in Afghanistan in 1948 to an Afghan father and Finnish-American mother, Ansary moved to the United States in 1964.

Ansary narrates his life story in a conversational, compassionate tone, addressing differences between Eastern and Western culture, religion, and politics. West of Kabul, East of New York is both a means for Ansary to bridge the schism within himself and a way to share a greater understanding of the real Muslim world with the increasingly Islamophobic West. Ansary ultimately determines that he is “a kaleidoscope of parts now—and so is Afghanistan. So is the world, when you get right down to it."

In the prologue to West of Kabul, East of New York, Ansary describes his emotions on September 12, 2001—the day after the extensive terrorist attacks on the US World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Listening to enraged talk radio hosts and their callers demanding violent retaliation against Afghanistan for the Taliban’s part in the attacks, Ansary is inspired to write an e-mail. He sends his message to twenty friends, but within a week, it has reached tens of millions, making it the first truly viral e-mail of the Internet era.



In the e-mail, Ansary writes, “I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden…but the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan.” Ansary calls the Taliban a “cult of ignorant psychotics” and compares Bin Laden to Hitler. The people of Afghanistan, Ansary writes, are poor, starved, beaten down, and impoverished from the war with the Soviets and now are overrun by the criminals of the world.

Ansary is flooded with calls and messages from friends he hasn’t heard from in years, strangers, and even television shows such as Oprah and World News Tonight. The anti-Taliban group, the Afghan Northern Alliance, contacts Ansary asking him to be a spokesman for Afghanistan. This request makes Ansary wonder exactly who he is. American? Afghan? He reflects on his family. His mother was the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan. His father was a university professor in Kabul, with deep ancestral roots in a nearby village. Ansary himself left Afghanistan to finish high school in the U.S., attending Reed College in Oregon and eventually relocating to San Francisco. He became a journalist, editor, and writer. Ansary struggles to harmonize the way of life he grew up with in Afghanistan with his adult life in the U.S. However, Ansary realizes that he can talk with others about Afghanistan, Islam, and extremism because those are all issues that he has been wrestling with himself. He uses his newfound fame to offer a message of diversity and shared humanity.

Part 1, “The Lost World,” focuses on Ansary’s family history and his childhood in Afghanistan. Ansary describes how the importance of the family compound underlies a fundamental difference in mindset between the East and the West. He explains that the West believes life in the East is divided along gender lines, but in reality, the division is between public and private spheres. Inside the family compound is the private world for Afghans that Westerners rarely see. In the compound, family members even have different names. Within the family group, or “clan” as Ansary calls it, people find comfort and relaxation being together. It is the opposite in the West, Ansary writes, where people seek out solitude and alone-time to regenerate.



In “Looking for Islam,” the second section of the book, Ansary describes his travels through the Middle East. One of the main reasons Ansary embarks on his journey is his younger brother Riaz. Even though Riaz spent less time growing up in Afghanistan than Ansary, he has embraced orthodox Islam, something Ansary cannot relate to. The practices seem too austere and too extreme. Ansary states that his life philosophy is “no matter how sure you are, you might be wrong.” He has “no personal God,” but instead embraces a secular mysticism. Feeling a divergence from Riaz, Ansary thinks that perhaps he can understand Islam and Riaz’s conversion better through his journey. He starts his trip in late 1979 just as the Soviets invade Afghanistan. Ansary travels through Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey, but not Afghanistan. In his search to learn more about Islam, he is instead troubled to find rapidly growing Islamism—Islamic militancy and fundamentalism—which is nothing like the faith with which he grew up.

In the final section of West of Kabul, East of New York, titled “Forgetting Afghanistan,” Ansary describes how, although he is Americanized, he still feels his Afghan roots in his soul. He observes how he, Riaz, and his older sister, Rebecca, all adjusted to their biculturalism differently. “Growing up bicultural is like straddling a crack in the earth. If the cultures are far apart—like those of Afghanistan and America—one feels an urge to get entirely over to one side or the other. My siblings and I grew up with such divided souls, and we responded in different ways.” Rebecca turned her back on her Afghan heritage. Riaz became radicalized to the point that he and Ansary are now estranged. Ansary alone both honors his Afghan culture and embraces his American lifestyle. He still speaks Farsi and continues to write about Afghanistan. Ansary concludes that "for all of us, surrendering to diversity is probably the only plausible path left to attaining unity.”