Kudos to Imran Omer – he has the audacity to take the perspective of a Taliban fighter (of course not to absolve him from his crimes, but to shine a lKudos to Imran Omer – he has the audacity to take the perspective of a Taliban fighter (of course not to absolve him from his crimes, but to shine a light on his perceptions) and to confront Western readers with the historic realities of people living in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Most people in the West (me included) do not know enough about these regions, although some local conflicts have been prompted and shaped by Western politics. Just as Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (in which Kashmir plays an important role), “Entangled Lives” immerses its readers in these conflicts and shows how they affect families over generations.
Omer’s book tells the story of Raza, who grows up as an orphan in a radical religious school in Pakistan. He falls in love with Perveen and they run away – when they are caught, the head of the school sells impertinent Raza to the Taliban, and they in turn send him off to fight in Afghanistan. When Raza arrives in Kabul in 1996, the Taliban are still a milita, and Omer describes the period during which they gained power and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The narrative features real historic figures like the head of the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan, Norbert Heinrich Holl, and we even witness the brutal killing of Mohammad Najibullah, former President of Afghanistan.
But this is not the only timeline we are following: Before Raza leaves Pakistan, he gets a hold of his mother’s diary through which we learn about his family background. Raza’s mother was not only caught up in the ethnic tensions in Pakistan, she also experienced the Bangladesh Liberation War (Bangladesh was a province of Pakistan from 1947 to 1971). Raza’s grandmother, about whom we hear only briefly, also lived through turmoil: She witnessed the unrest in the times of the Pakistan Movement that brought independence from the British Empire in 1947. Three generations who have known nothing but violence and war.
Apart from Raza, the story has a second protagonist: Rachael comes to Afghanistan as an American war reporter when she first meets Raza as a young Taliban fighter. Raza tells her his story when he ends up in Guantanamo (no, this is no spoiler, it’s actually the opening scene of then book).
It’s pretty challenging to follow this story when you’re unfamiliar with the political developments in the region, but it is also rewarding: After finishing the book, you will know a lot more stuff that, let’s be real, you should have known already. Nevertheless, the book is also a little overburdened: Omer had many ideas for his narratives, and while none of them are bad, it’s just a little too much. For instance, that Rachael also faces relationship difficulties due to cultural differences is just too obvious a narrative move. There are many, many intricacies here, and while this speaks for an author who really thought out his material, it overwhelmed me a little.
My main issue though is that Raza is an atypical Taliban (when sent to the war, he says: “I am being led to the slaughter, what’s there to be proud of?”; Rachael also perceives him as unusual among the Taliban) - although his whole education consists of radical indoctrination, he always holds the viewpoint of a man who sees through the charade and fights against his will, because he has nowhere else to go. While there might be Taliban who think like him, the perspective of someone who bought into the ideology and did or did not change his mind when he saw what it practically meant might have been more relevant, or the perspective of one of the many fighters who joined the Taliban because they thought their regime will finally bring a united and peaceful Afghanistan. With Raza, we seem to encounter a pretty unusual terrorist.
But maybe I am mistaken and the phenomenon Omer describes was more widespread; on his publisher's website, it says: "While the war touched the society as a whole, it was the vulnerable people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder who were most affected. Young men that were seduced by the madrassahs, working under the patronage of the state, were sacrificed in the fire of the war. Entangled Lives is the story of those young men." After all, Omer was born in Karachi and witnessed the chaos in Pakistan which resulted from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. Still, the question remains whether these poor fighters were generally really as aware of their situation as Raza. One thing is clear though: Not all Taliban are simply "poor and desperate young men with nowhere else to go", this would be a far too simple explanation for this terrorist organization.
All in all, books like this are extremely important, because they shine a light on historic conflicts Westerners usually don’t know much about (or were you familiar with the recent history of Pakistan?). There is a risk that we grow numb towards the destiny of the people who live in these regions, a destiny that we do not understand because we only see televised bits of it, and Omer is one of the voices who fight against this.
Excerpt: “As if to urge us on, the blood of our fellows began to drip down from the sides of the pickup, reminding us with all its ferocity that we were now officially a part of a war in which our roles would be minor, but our sacrifices would be major.”...more
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