It did not take long for someone to inform on him. A customer was arrested in possession of books he had bought from Sultan. During a raid the police uncovered several illegal publications. The first book pyre was lit. Sultan was taken in, beaten up and condemned to a year in prison. He spent the time in the political prisoners’ section, where writing materials and books were forbidden. Months on end Sultan stared at the wall. But he managed to bribe one of the guards with his mother’s food parcels and books were smuggled in every week. Within the damp stone walls Sultan’s interest in Afghan culture and literature grew. He lost himself in Persian poetry and the dramatic past of his country. When he was let out he was absolutely sure of his ground: he would fight to promote knowledge of Afghan culture and history. He continued to sell illegal publications, by the Islamic guerrillas and the pro-China Communist opposition, but he was more cautious than before.
The authorities kept an eye on him and five years later he was arrested again. Once more he was given the opportunity to meditate on Persian philosophy behind prison walls, but now a new accusation was added to the old one; he was labelled petit bourgeois, middle-class, according to Communism one of the worst terms of abuse. The charge was that he made money after the capitalist model.
This all happened during the period when Afghanistan’s Communist regime, in the heat of suffering caused by war, tried to wind up tribal society and introduce ‘joyful’ Communism. Attempts to collectivise farming led to severe hardship amongst the population. Many poor farmers refused to accept land that had been compulsorily purchased from rich landowners, as it was contrary to Islam to sow in stolen soil. The countryside rose in protest and as a consequence the Communist schemes were seldom successful. In time the authorities gave up. War sapped everyone’s strength; after ten years it had claimed 1.5 million Afghan lives.
When the petit bourgeois was let out of prison, he was thirty-five years old. The war against the Soviet Union was, on the whole, being fought in the countryside and Kabul was left more or less intact. The grind of daily life occupied people. This time his mother managed to persuade him to marry. She produced Sharifa, a general’s daughter, a beautiful and bright woman. They married and had three sons and a daughter, one baby every other year.
The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and the inhabitants looked forward to peace at last. But because the regime in Kabul continued to be propped up by the Soviets the Mujahedeen did not lay down arms. They took Kabul in May 1992 and civil war broke out. The apartment that the family had bought in a Soviet-built block of flats was situated right on the front line, between the warring factions. Rockets hit the walls, bullets shattered the windows and tanks rolled over the courtyard. After they had cowered on the floor for a week, the hail of shells quietened down for a few hours and Sultan took himself and his family off to Pakistan.
While he was in Pakistan his bookstall was robbed, as was the public library. Valuable books went to collectors for a song – or were exchanged for tanks, bullets and grenades. Sultan himself bought up some of the books stolen from the national library when he returned from Pakistan to see to his shop. He got some real bargains. For a handful of dollars he bought works hundreds of years old, amongst them a 500-year-old manuscript from Uzbekistan for which the Uzbek government later offered him $25,000. He found Zahir Shah’s personal copy of his own favourite, the epic poet Ferdusi’s great work Shah Nama, and bought several books dirt cheap from the thieves, who were unable even to read the titles.
After nearly five years of intense fighting between the mujahedeen warlords, half of Kabul had been reduced to a pile of rubble and had lost 50,000 citizens. When Kabul ’s inhabitants woke on the morning of 27 September 1996, the city was totally quiet. The previous evening Ahmed Shah Massoud and his army had escaped up towards the Panshir valley.
Two bodies hung from a pole outside the presidential palace. The larger was soaked through with blood from head to foot. It had been castrated, the fingers were crushed, the torso and face battered and there was a bullet hole through the forehead. The other had merely been shot and hanged, the pockets stuffed full of Afghani, the local currency, as a sign of contempt. The bodies were those of former president Muhammad Najibullah and his brother. Najibullah was a hated man. He had been head of the secret police at the time of the Soviet invasion and was said to have ordered the execution of 80,000 so-called enemies of society. He was the country’s president from 1986 to 1992, supported by the Russians. After the mujahedeen coup Massoud became defence minister, with Sibghatullah Mujadidi as president for the first three months followed by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Najibullah sought refuge with the UN after an attempt to flee from Kabul airport was thwarted, and he remained thereafter in confinement in a UN compound in Kabul.
When the Taliban made their way through the eastern districts of Kabul and the Mujahedeen government decided to flee, Massoud invited the prominent prisoner to accompany them. Najibullah feared for his life outside the capital and chose to stay behind with the security guards in the UN building. Besides, as a Pashtoon he reasoned that he could negotiate with Taliban Pashtoons. Early the next morning all the guards had disappeared. White flags – Taliban’s holy colour – flew over the mosques.
Kabul ’s inhabitants gathered in disbelief round the pole in Ariana Square. They gazed at the men who hung there and returned quietly home. The war was over. A new war would start – a war that would trample all joy under foot.
The Taliban established law and order, but simultaneously dealt Afghan art and culture the final blow. The regime burnt Sultan’s books and turned up at Kabul Museum carrying axes, towing along with them, as a witness, their own Minister for Culture.
Not much remained in the museum when they arrived. All loose items had been looted during the civil war: potsherds from the time Alexander the Great conquered the country, swords that could have been used in the battles against Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, Persian miniatures and gold coins. Anonymous collectors from all over the world bought most of it. Very few artefacts were saved before the looting started in earnest.
A few enormous sculptures of Afghan kings and princes were left standing, and thousand-year-old Buddha statues and murals. The foot soldiers went to work, exhibiting the same spirit as when they had devastated Sultan’s bookshop. The museum guards cried when the Taliban started chopping away at what remained of the art. They hacked at the sculptures till only the plinth remained, in a heap of dust amidst lumps of clay. It took them half a day to annihilate a thousand years of history. All that remained after the vandals had done was an ornamental tablet, a quotation from the Koran, which the Minister for Culture had thought best left alone.
When the Taliban’s art executioners left the bombed-out museum building – it had also been a frontline target during the civil war – the guards were left standing amongst the debris. Laboriously they gathered up the bits and swept up the dust. They put the bits in boxes and labelled them. Some of the pieces were still identifiable: a hand off one statue, a wavy lock of hair from another. The boxes were put in the basement in the hope that sometime in the future the statues could be restored.
Six months before the Taliban fell the enormous Buddha statues in Bamiyan were blown up. They were close to two thousand years old and Afghanistan ’s greatest cultural heritage. The dynamite was so powerful that there were no bits left to gather up.
It was against the backdrop of this regime that Sultan Khan tried to save parts of Afghanistan ’s culture. Following the book pyre at the roundabout he bribed someone to get out of prison, and the same day he broke open the seal on the shop. Standing amongst the remnants of his treasures, he cried. He painted big black lines and squiggles over the living creatures in the books the soldiers had overlooked. That was preferable to them being burnt. Then he thought of a better idea – he pasted his business cards over the pictures. Thus he covered the pictures but could just as easily uncover them. At the same time he put his own stamp on the works. It might one day be possible to remove the cards.