Afghanistan, once a land of freedom and spirituality (Bamiyan, Band-e Amir), has become a field of ruins: the Buddhas dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, Kabul retaken in 2021 without resistance, and Afghan women once again silenced. The hopes carried by figures such as Malala Yousafzai (Nobel Peace Prize winner) and the Panchir resistance fighters contrast with the reality of a country at the mercy of warlords and traffickers, where the Taliban now sell Buddhist relics to collectors.
In Pakistan, the Swat Valley, its “lost paradise,” has suffered Taliban occupation, while Quetta, once a provincial town, has become a haven for refugees and trafficking, where Saudi madrasas indoctrinate a youth with no future. The story of Asia Bibi, sentenced to death for blasphemy after drinking from a “Muslim” well, resonates as a sinister echo of his own incident in the Baloch desert—a reminder that xenophobia and religious intolerance have become systematic there.
Iran, where he had met young people eager for freedom in 1972, is now stifled by the mullahs’ regime, where women are imprisoned or raped before their execution, as revealed by Manoocher Deghati’s testimony about Evin prison. The Iranian exiles he meets in Germany confide in him their nostalgia for a pre-revolutionary “golden age,” while he questions his own naivety at the time: he who dreamed of overthrowing the Shah now sees the disastrous consequences of these revolutions.
I oscillate between anger (against American imperialism, European indifference, the cowardice of Afghan men abandoning their wives) and despair (in the face of the destruction of Buddhist sites, the commodification of relics, the Talibanization of Pakistan). Yet there remains a glimmer of hope thanks to the resistance of the exiles—Farzad, Navid, Maryam—these “free spirits” who are rebuilding their lives in the West while remaining connected to their homeland.