DAY I: History is written by the Victors.

If history is written by the victors, then for Slavs and Tatars—whose area spans nearly an entire continent, from Berlin to Beijing–that history is conflicted. Victors live near the defeated, drink tea and vodka with them, and depending on the decade, sometimes go so far as dressing up in their adversary’s clothes, essentially playing political masquerade. The heady 1990s–a decade that witnessed the demise of one large narrative (called Communism) and the ascent of several smaller ones–recedes like a seductive tease in the sunset of the West. Winners and losers are not defined socio-economically but with the large brush stroke of Great Games in Great Places.

A lack of visibility, both on the horizon and behind our backs as it were, keeps us constantly shifting not only gears but scales. At micro moments of intimacy–the naming of a child for example–we invite the macro elephants of geopolitics or historicity, through the back door of convention. Rarely do we come across toddlers named Adolf, be’smellah: regardless of your ideology or ability to swallow revisionism, he did not win anything. There are names, however, those of victors, that we wish to see more in pre-schools and soccer fields around the Occident: namely Genghis, or for the more indie-minded, Attila. While for WASPS and Jutes he may be a symbol of ruthless brutality, let us not forget that Genghis Khan is responsible for people of an otherwise “fairer complexion” having distinguished cheek bones and almond eyes, as demonstrated by the Slavs. Recent years have seen a rehabilitation of Genghis, as bestsellers try to outstrip one another on his benevolent rule, but none dare give the gift of Genghis to their progeny. He might be your enemy, but he remains a hero to an area spanning from the Balkans to China, where the name can take the form of Chingiz or Jenghiz. Not to mention that, given the rise of the East, it would not be such a bad idea to start hedging one’s bets now…

DAY XXII: Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani

At home, we are no less displaced than abroad. We are not nomads. Instead, we are rooted to one too many places. What’s more: the places in our heads and hearts sometimes fail to recognize the ones on the maps and vice versa. You and I are the hair on a mother’s head, pulled in different directions by her numerous children. It hurts but, as John Cougar once sang, it hurts so good. The country we call home, the country we used to call home and the country we dream to call home are all very distinct and disparate places. It is the result of a productive schizophrenia: we are in all of them at once, a ravishing sensation but one tempered by the slow, sobering devastation of never being in any one entirely.

As foreigners living in foreign lands, we are

often asked to choose between identities, despite the terminology itself being skewed if not altogether faulty. On one end, the very contemporary term ‘immigrant’: implying, almost defacto, a desire for integration, as a key factor for success in the host country. On the other, the romanticized if passé term ‘émigré’: an evocation of whitened knuckles, gripping an increasingly fossilized sense of ‘home’. Either way, we lose.

Instead, we look to precedents. Some people have to blur, even betray, one identity to fight for another. In music, this person would perhaps be Bob Dylan or David Bowie. In Central Asia and the Middle East, it would be Jamal al-din Al-Afghani.

Born a Persian in 1838, Jamaluddin Asadabadi became Jamal Al-Din Al-Aghani (i.e. from Afghanistan) to mask his Shi’ite and Persian roots and gain the confidence of Sunni leaders when on the run from Iran. When in Afghanistan, he came to call himself Istanbuli (i.e. from Istanbul), to further cover his tracks.

Only multiple identities allow for multiple careers, or ideological thresholds. Al-Afghani is credited with no less than the following: the founder of Islamic modernism, a fierce polemicist against (especially British) Imperialism in the region, an influential emigrant publisher, a counselor to the King of Afghanistan and Ottoman Sultans, and on-again-off-again adviser and fierce critic of Persia’s Nasser Al-Din Shah. Al-Afghani was the best kind of adviser, one who never relents, who never fears speaking truth to power. Who never worries about job security even if this means risking a somewhat harsher punishment than losing one’s retirement benefits or company car, say, for example, imprisonment and deportation, naked, strapped to the back of a mule. Some claim him to be the founder of what later became the Muslim Brotherhood and yet there is increasing evidence that Al-Afghani was a skeptic, if not an atheist. If false, it shows the dizzying, seductive complexity Al-Afghani embodied. If true, it proves he used religion in the same way he used ethnicity and identity: as tools of expediency. Either way we salute him for, either way, he won.

DAY XXXI: The Fruit of Fundamentalism

Of late the pomegranate runs a similar risk to the foreigner who ‘passes’ as a local: integration often means emasculation. Originally from the Caucases, the pomegranate has been embraced by hordes of the health-conscious in the extreme West (California) for its particularly high concentration of antioxidants. We accuse the contraction: the pomegranate has become the pom or, thanks to a particularly exploitative trademark, Pom’s. Regrettably, this is a tried and true tradition amongst immigrants: Pavel becomes Paul, Hossein becomes Henry, but we would petition to leave the Pomegranate alone.

Via a turn of linguistic fortune, we can redeem the aesthetic and atavistic violence of the pomegranate. In French, the word for pomegranate and grenade are one and the same. If we look to its explosive nature–surely the only fruit to require a change of attire for fear of its irreparable stains–it is for another health benefit: namely, its anti-Occident character.