Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium: A History of Afghanistan Through Clothes, Carpets and the Camera by Tim Bonyhady

Author:Tim Bonyhady [Tim Bonyhady]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Asia, Central Asia, Social Science, Developing & Emerging Countries, sociology, General
ISBN: 9781922459169
Google: FOQnEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Text Publishing
Published: 2021-08-03T23:22:14.135953+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Kalashnikov Culture

Bazaars have famously been settings for storytelling, sources of rumour and sites of political power, intrigue and dissent, as well as domains of trade. They have rarely been thought of as places where an artist might go to discover what is for sale and respond by innovating. Yet like art galleries and museums, bazaars have sometimes played this role, as happened in 1987 when Safer Ali, a Hazara rug maker, who had just fled to Iran from Herat, first visited Mashhad’s main carpet bazaar. When he saw a group of fellow refugees examining a rug, Safer Ali initially could not understand why these dealers paid it particular attention. Then he saw that, instead of conventional geometric, botanical or zoological patterns, guns and helicopters filled its central field.

This experience recurred time and again as people around the world saw war rugs for the first time. They would not realise they were looking at anything novel, then be amazed to discover they were. The question was: would they embrace or reject it? As Safer Ali watched the dealers in the Sa’id Bazaar, he ‘had the feeling that they were insecure, they didn’t quite know what to make’ of the guns and helicopters. Some found the rug ‘interesting and admired it’. Others were ‘less enthusiastic, even angry about the barefaced divergence of the motifs’. Safer Ali, an experienced weaver of Turkmen rugs, was so excited that he decided to make war rugs too. While many other refugees in Pakistan and Iran simply replicated designs from Afghanistan, Safer Ali was among those who chose to develop new ones that tended to be clearly partisan, supporting the mujahideen.

We know of Safer Ali because of Masoud Farhatjar, who left Herat before the Saur Revolution to complete his schooling in Copenhagen, then moved to the German city of Freiburg im Breisgau where he attended university and became a rug dealer. When Farhatjar acquired his first war rugs, he showed them to Eva Gerharts, the director of Freiburg’s Ethnographic Museum, one of several such institutions in Germany to recognise the rugs’ significance while others in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands fixed on Afghan children’s art. Gerharts responded by becoming the first museum director to buy war rugs and, at Farhatjar’s suggestion, staged an exhibition in 1994, curated by German ethnologist Karin Knauer.

Farhatjar and Knauer were exceptional in interviewing weavers to discover their motivation and identifying war rugs, wherever possible, as the creations of named individuals rather than anonymous makers. On one of his regular trips to Iran, Farhatjar bought three of Safer Ali’s war rugs for the Freiburg museum, questioned him about his work and photographed him at his vertical loom. On another trip to Pakistan, Knauer interviewed women weavers and Farhatjar interviewed men.

By then, many war rugs were being made in response to market demand. Some weavers were copying designs not their own, unaware of their meaning. When interviewed by Knauer and Farhatjar, several weavers explained that they made war rugs because they sold better than traditional designs.

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