The Rhys Show #92: Tamim Ansary
Understanding The US Exit from Afghanistan from an Islamic Worldview
This newsletter goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people. Please share it with a friend who would like it. And welcome to all the folks who joined this in the past week!
Hey team! Hope you had a good Halloween. I love it. Such a good holiday. Kids are so cute when you ask them about their costumes.
This week I’m excited to share my podcast with Tamim Ansary:
#92 Tamim Ansary: Understanding The US Exit from Afghanistan from an Islamic Worldview
This may feel different from last week’s piece on DeFi 2.0, but they’re actually both about the same thing—narrative.
First, on Tamim. He’s a brilliant historian but is quite underrated. Maybe it’s because he started out as an encyclopedia and textbook editor instead of becoming a professor at an Ivy League. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
His book Destiny Disrupted is my first Goodreads 5-star in around a year. It gives world history from the Arab and Islamic perspective. As this Goodreads reviewer notes:
I have a Master's degree in Middle Eastern studies. I have long wanted to find a book that I could recommend to people as "the book" for those wishing to understand "the Middle East." Destiny Disrupted is that book.
It answers questions like:
Why didn’t Islam have a Protestant Revolution?
Why should histories of the West and the Middle East actually be seen as competing narratives?
Why doesn’t Islamic extremism like the West? (Islam: “You are decadent.” West: “We are free.”)
Games Without Rules is another brilliant book from Tamim. It details Afghan history by highlighting how collectivist societies work (something that Westerners like me are so confused by).
Individualist Westerners see society operating in a “civilized” way—through impersonal institutions like governments that treat all individuals the same. The West plays “Games With Rules.”
But in rural Afghanistan, everyone operates through contextual relationships. Westerners see it as a “Game Without Rules.” It’s confusing!
Psychology is the dark matter that flows behind the scenes throughout history.
To understand why the US didn’t “succeed” in Afghanistan, look to collectivist vs. individualistic psychology.
Finally, I’m currently working through Tamim’s most recent book, The Invention of Yesterday. It takes the “history as narrative” frame to develop a universal narrative that our interconnected hivemind can all get behind (instead of these parallel world histories of the West, Middle, and East).
I learned a lot from Tamim. Here are some highlights of our discussion:
How Tamim Thinks About History
Tamim: Every history of the world is actually the story of “how we got to here.”
And so embedded in that narrative, there's an assumption about who the “we” is at the center of the story. And also, where is the “here?”
It struck me that every history of the world is a somebody-centric narrative about how we got to where we are today.
In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim shows two of these narratives. The Western narrative centered around the Mediterranean:
And the Middle Eastern narrative (or Middle World):
Progress Narrative vs. Restoration Narrative
Tamim: There is a really fundamental narrative that became the narrative of the West. I call it the progress narrative. I would characterize it as the view that the project of civilization is to make progress. Every day can be better. The through-line of history is sometimes things happen and there's regress and then you collect yourself and you continue to make progress. There's no end to it.
You can see how that fits right in with capitalism. Because capitalism, the core underlying impulse there is that more is better.
As the progress narrative was being born in the West, the “restoration narrative” was putting down roots in the East.
This narrative says: There was this holocaust with the explosion of Ghengis Khan and all that accompanied that. Then right on the heels of that, the black plague which swept across the world.
As the recovery happened from those that period of disorder and holocaust, the Islamic world and the Chinese world had a very recent glorious past to look back on and said, “we got to get back to that.” Restoration.
But in the West, the very recent past before the Black Death was peasants. You know, not the best. Everybody was peasants and everybody was poor. In the wake of the Black Death, it really was true that every day could be better than the last. And there was a glamor to innovation.
Narratives Need To Want To Spread
Rhys: Exactly. I like the idea of the progress vs. reformation.
I'm currently writing this book called What Information Wants. Memes and ideas spread through society. All of these ideas need attention, capital, and progress. If they don't, then they die.
So with religions, we can see it very clearly with stuff like jihad turning from struggle into an active conquering of other places. With Christianity, you can see it through having lots of kids or missionary work.
I think it’s correct to think of capitalism similarly. It has this progress narrative, which wants to fuel itself. In order to do that, it needs to make development happen, A.K.A. industrialize all the things.
We then discussed Afghanistan:
Rural Afghanistan vs. Modern Afghanistan
Tamim: The problem that exists for every ruler of Afghanistan is that they have to present two faces to two different sides.
First, they need to present themselves to the inner, rural Afghanistan where Islam is so intertwined with traditional clan life that has developed in Afghanistan over thousands of years. That's going to be a conservative bloc.
A ruler needs to represent themselves as the protector and hero of Afghan Islam to the inner world.
But also as the suit-wearing guy who speaks a foreign language to the imperial powers.
This balance can be seen throughout history.
Tamim: You got this guy, Amanullah Khan, who actually traveled in Europe. He said, hey, this is good. Let's make Afghanistan more European. He came back and he did all the things that a social progressive would want. They banned child marriage, banned the dowry system, all of that.
The rural folks had an uprising and a new person rose to power. The pendulum swung back. Under him there was a Ministry of Vice and Virtue. If you were a woman out there without a veil, you were grabbed and put back in your house. If you were eating outdoors in the month of fasting, you got a beating.
Tamim: Then in 1978, the urban Communist Party overthrew the royal dynasty. They immediately began an extreme program of social progressive laws enforced by the military. They would send the troops to a village and say, bring out your women. We're going to take them off and educate them.
For the guys in those villages, the government comes with soldiers and says give us your women. That's not a good look.
So pretty soon there’s a rebellion everywhere. The Soviets did the same thing that everyone does. They held the cities while the countryside was rebelling. Then they eviscerated the countryside. They bombed it. They strafed the herds. They did what they could to empty the villages because that's where the guerrillas were finding their safe refuge.
How Violence Begets Violence
Tamim: So you get six million refugees in Pakistan, another six or so in Iran. Those refugees were not families. They were women and children. The men of those families were still in the country fighting.
You got this 10-year period where the Afghan men were living in a world that was all men and whose only business was war. The women and children were living in these squalid refugee camps. That's where the kids grew up and they became the Taliban.
A friend of mine who was delivering USAID was a photographer. When he came back, I saw these pictures of children and said they just look like kids. He said, these are damaged kids. They are going to be trouble.
Hurt people hurt people.
Then we began to discuss the US War In Afghanistan…
Taliban vs. Talibanism
Tamim: The word Taliban was often used. I thought it was misused because the word suggests a particular group. The news would say they got the number 12 guy or number 3 guy. But actually, the problem was Talibanism. Talibanism was some kind of melange the idea of Islam, plus the idea of the old Afghanistan, plus the old tribal Afghanistan.
Poor US Teens Fighting Against Poor Afghan Teens
Tamim: This was not the forever war. This was the aggressively forgotten war.
Drone warfare enabled the American public to ignore it even more. Unlike the Vietnam era, when there was a draft, people like me were like, oh, we hate this war, we might be there. But now the volunteers that the sign up are people who are they have economic difficulties and this is their way out.
It’s poor, poor country boys from America fighting poor country boys from Afghanistan.
Elites on both sides are just unaware.
Why Has The Jihadist Narrative Spread?
Tamim: Human identity is the ability to see society’s story where you play an important or meaningful character. They looked at that society and didn't see themselves in there. They saw a story in which they were not a character.
A lot of the power of the jihadist narrative comes from tapping a narrative that is a childhood nursery rhyme folktale for Muslim kids. They grow up with that story of Medina long ago where the guy went into a cave and an angel said, “you are going to speak for God from now on. Your world is full of warfare. But we're going to tell you how people should live and this war is going to end.”
Then he went and he gathered his followers in Medina under new laws. The people of the biggest empires on Earth—the Byzantines, the Persians—they try to crush this little group. But they failed because God was on the side of this little community whose only real power was they were doing it right.
That's like a bedtime story for kids. So when you grow up, the structure of that narrative is there. Now somebody comes and says, hey, the world is divided into Dal al-Harb and Dal al-Islam. Yes, Islam looks like it's been beaten down and there's only a few of us left, but some of us have rediscovered the golden apple. We're going to start to do that again. We're going to live just the way they did in Medina. Then it'll happen.
There's a supernatural belief there, a magical belief.
Just like we have medium-message fit, I like to think of this as Narrative-Narrative Fit. (The new jihadist narrative is fit with the existing childhood narrative.)
Jihadism is LARPing
Rhys: This reminds me of the insurrection at the US capital. It’s LARPing. The shaman guy was LARPing. He was doing something that, from their little weird perspective, was taking back and stopping the steal.
They were able to meme this weird reality into existence.
Jihadists feel similar.
Narrative As Organism
Tamim: Yes, exactly. That's what it is. You were talking about how information wants certain things. When you say that, you're representing information as having willpower.
I have a version of that myself which is that narrative is exactly analogous to a biological organism. It has a will to survive and prosper.
This is the main thing I think about these days.
There’s a neuroscientist perspective here. Our perception is not like a video screen. Instead we have senses that feed into a model inside of our heads. Our responses are based on how new data fits in the model. If the response brings us good things, then OK, the model must be right. And if it leads to some harm, then the model needs to be corrected.
But the model is always what we're living inside of. The model is a narrative, an unfolding story. In normal times, when things are more or less the same every day, the narrative works. It helps classify new information coming to us as relevant or irrelevant and or true or false.
Narratives keep themselves going by groups of people sharing them. By virtue of their shared narrative, they have a group self, a social self.
The social self can come under threat of extinction when the narratives are not working.
What Is The Universal Human Narrative?
Tamim: So these days, I’m thinking—is there some single story you can tell that has the human story?
We're verging on merging into a single civilization. Shouldn't there be an attempt now to look back and construct the world history that answers the question, how did we get to here? That's what I tried to do with The Invention of Yesterday. To tell that story.
Conversation outline below. Check out the full podcast here. Thanks for chatting Tamim!
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out Roote, an online school and research hub for systems change.
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
Laurel Petterson, Eric Tang, Chris Densmore, Maciej Olpinski, Jonathan Washburn, Ben Wilcox, Audra Jacobi, Sam Jonas, Patrick Walker, Shira Frank, David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Jim Rutt, Zoe Harris, David Ernst, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Malcolm Ocean, John Lindmark, Collin Brown, Ref Lindmark, James Waugh, Mark Moore, Matt Daley, Peter Rogers, Darrell Duane, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, and Katie Powell.