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Book Name:The Carpet Wars - A Journey Across The Islamic Heartland Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 595

CARPETS AND CITADELS

Oxblood red rich as a dull ruby laid out in motifs, a horse corralled in a zigzag line watched over by a bevy of peacocks, knotted intricately with a story of war and violence. The Carpet Wars is Christopher Kremmer's portrait of Islamic culture as it is today, and of a people in turmoil, knotted intricately together by the history of carpets, the most famous trade item of the Arabian Nights world. No one can hear the word ‘Afghanistan’ now without immediately thinking of September 11 and its aftermath, though once upon a time Afghanistan meant buzkashi, carpets and Alexander the Great.

Christopher Kremmer’s first visit to Afghanistan in the 1990’s was a significant one because he not only went behind the corridors of power, but deep inside the bazaars of Kabul as well. In both places he made friends and the friendships deepened over the years, providing, for those who seek it, a rare insight into a country whose chaos eventually produced the September 11 attacks and its anti terror crusade.

The story begins in the shop of Tariq Ahmed, a rug merchant of Kabul and stays with him, following his wanderings through countries and regions as war shuffles and him his rugs like a pack of cards. There are tales of Kabul warlords who in the aftermath of September 11 have become bywords. At the beginning of Id, Christopher Kremmer was invited to share the festivities with the Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Kremmer flies to his meeting in the Hindu Kush in a Soviet-built helicopter, which according to him looks like it was left over from a Mad Max film. Decorating the mouldering hulk are heavy curtains and two red velvet chairs. To add to the decadent grandeur is a red-and-blue Baluchi prayer rug. There is also a liquor cabinet, put in by the chopper’s last owner, the warlord Uzbek Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, from whom Massoud’s forces had liberated the "shuddering behemoth." The helicopter barely survives this trip—it heaves its last breath on a football field in Taliqan, in northeastern Afghanistan, surrounded by a horde of curious tribal children. All of this captures the rich complexities of travel, wars and carpets that form this extraordinary narrative.

Massoud was assassinated two days before the attack on the World Trade Centre. Gen. Dostum still lives, one of the survivors in an Afghanistan now free of the iron hand of the Taliban.

The Carpet Wars takes readers into a world where even the simplest motif on a rug can be filled with religious, tribal, and political significance, places where life bustles with bargaining and gossip in bazaars and teahouses, while nations crumble, leaders fall, and a fateful confrontation between freedom and terror looms. Whether it is the royal salons or the workshops where children toil feverishly knotting and inhaling dust. These are ancient places, historically layered with conflict and high culture, the one woven into the other. Carpet counterfeiters and dictators jostle for space and the former sometimes outdo the latter.

We ride on tales of filpais or ancient elephant foot carpets and, like magic, they convey us to other parts of the story. The carpet has travelled with the people of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India for so long that it serves as a barometer for the prevailing political climate as well being the thread that holds the narrative together.

A travel memoir with a difference, The Carpet Wars offers a personal, vivid, and revealing look at the humanity of those who live in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq and Iran, lives defined by turmoil but sustained by friendship, industry, and humour. At the heart of the book is a snapshot of those countries that galvanised the world with horror on September 11, 2001 – which gives it added interest for the average reader.

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