Istalif

We drove along the course of a river, between regal lines of trees ablaze with autumnal colours. 

For my piece about my father’s experiences on the night before the D-Day landings in Normandy, I spent some time looking through some of his old photos and documents. That’s how I stumbled across his account of a day in a mountain village which had clearly marked him.

We drove along the course of a river, between regal lines of trees ablaze with autumnal colours. Vineyards stretched out on either side of the road with patches of grapes which looked like purple carpets laid out to dry in the sun. Criss-crossed irrigation ditches divided the land into neat geometrical squares and oblongs, and farmstead sheltered behind curtains of poplar and silver birch.

Well, we could be in Europe still, though you’ve probably guessed, not in England.

The last leg of the journey was along a dirt track winding upwards in a long series of hairpin bends. We approached Istalif through doorlike gaps in several massif walls and parked the Land Rover in the shade of a long line of eucalyptus on the edge of the gorge.

Right. So we’re talking about Istalif. Quite possibly not somewhere you know or have even heard of. I certainly hadn’t. So where is it? 

Helpfully, my father provided the answer: 

Istalif is in Afghanistan. It clings to a mountain flank some 35 miles north of Kabul, at almost 7000 feet… On the far side of the plain in the hazy distance, the Hindu Kush snow-capped peaks tower into the sky. On all sides as far as the eye can range, the horizon is circumscribed by mountains, rugged, arid and inhospitable.

As far I can establish, Istalif is a little closer to Kabul, the Afghan capital, than that, and not quite as high. But it seems to be a remarkable place, as his photos showed.

Istalif is topped by a mosque backed by a stately copse from which the houses tumble down in a jumble of whitewashed cubes scattered haphazardly in a pattern disciplined only by the configuration of the mountainside.

Istalif, topped by a mosque, backed by a stately copse
One of my father’s many photos from his visit

My father was struck by the way age-old crafts, long-vanished from so much of the world, were still carrying on in the village as though he was in the land “where time stands still” – the title he gave his piece about the town.

Here in the bazaar all the ancient crafts were practised. Cotton material was being hand-blocked… 

Leather was tooled into colourful shoes, camel saddles and garments. Woven split cane produced … lampshades, baskets, table mats and many other objects… Gold and silver chiselled into filigree were transformed into glittering assortments of brooches, rings, many-stranded necklaces, pendant earrings and any number of trinkets…

Istalif main street bustling with crafts

He was struck by the craft for which the village was best known, the production of is characteristic blue pottery.

Potters moulded clay into the perennial classic shapes, later to be glazed in traditional shades of blue varying from peacock to turquoise.

It felt to him as though he was witnessing a scene not from the autumn of 1961, when he was there, but from biblical times:

As I stood watching the vistas of the teeming bazaars, the men with their flowing robes, turbans and sandals, the asses bending under their loads, the supercilious camels and the shapeless dogs lying in the sun, I was reminded of an illustrated copy of the Bible I saw many years ago.

Istalif main street with supercilious camels

A lot has happened since 1961, and time certainly hasn’t stood still in Istalif. My father watched the news of the Russian wars in Afghanistan with horror, since he retained great affection for the country. But he died long before the worst disaster was inflicted on the village he’d enjoyed visiting so much. 

Serious fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan ravaged much of the area around Istalif, destroying crops and livestock. Then, in 1998, the Taliban occupied the town. They burned much of it and forced large numbers to flee. Lives were lost and livelihoods destroyed.

As the new millennium opened, Istalif would not have displayed the same kind of scene my father witnessed nearly four decades earlier.

People have begun slowly to return. Some trades have resumed, including the blue pottery. But once again, Afghanistan faces an uncertain future. 

American-led troops are still in Afghanistan. They join a long list of foreign forces that have tried to control the country over nearly two centuries. Back in the nineteenth century, it was Britain that tried to tame the Afghans. The British Empire believed that it carried, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, “the white man’s burden”, the duty to bring to peoples of darker complexion the benefits of civilisation only the white-skinned truly appreciated. 

Those who were to be enlightened often failed to appreciate the advantage of having the British telling them how to live, and might even fight back. Indeed, the Afghans resisted so hard that Britain sent an Army of Retribution to teach them a lesson (the lesson presumably being that no inferior people has the right to resist British invasion). Among other actions, that army sacked Istalif pretty effectively in 1842, killing rather a lot of people in the process, including civilians.

In the late twentieth century, the Russians had a go at invading Afghanistan. The Taliban then tried to impose their version of enlightenment on a population as sceptical of them as their ancestors had been of the British. Finally, the Americans are leading the way and have apparently made as much progress as the Taliban, the Russians or the British before them.

Today, the Americans want to cut their losses and get out. It’s hard not to imagine that the Taliban will sweep right back in as soon as they’re gone. And Istalif will, in all likelihood, find its slow road to recovery blocked again.

All that made reading my father’s short description poignant. He painted a picture, not of an ideal life, but at least of a peaceful and productive one. Wouldn’t it be uplifting if outsiders got the heck out of the place and let people there go on living their own lives and progressing at their own rate?

Perhaps even towards whatever version of enlightenment they feel is appropriate for them...