Grids that don’t go down

It’s an hour past dawn on Friday morning in the Hindu Kush foothills. The call to prayer, mercifully un-microphoned, woke me at 4:30. I lit a kerosene lantern, climbed a roof ladder, and positioned the antenna of my latest cutting-edge indulgence: a World Space satellite radio purchased at supposed discount in the Dubai duty-free. There’s no electricity in this village. And, as I learned from the radio before its Chinese batteries died, there’s no electricity at the moment in much of northeastern North America. The grid was down.

BBC reported “urban chaos.” Someone named Aaron Brown mumbled kindlier platitudes on CNN: It wasn’t terrorism. It wasn’t going to be for long. Having survived 9/11, New Yorkers could cope. The Bush PR machine explained how much better, “thanks to this president,” Americans are now prepared for calamity. One pundit on the World Radio Network waxed prolix on “the price of ever-greater connectedness.”

Meanwhile, in the hills above Kabul, first light appeared to the east.

I’m a morning person, diurnally at home in early rising Afghanistan. Everyone here is awake. Men folk have ambled back from the mosque. Livestock are being readied for pasture. A young boy named Abdul Qadir, the great-grandson of my cook in Kabul 30 years ago, has negotiated the ladder no-handed to bring me green tea, fresh bread, and a hard cheese called kroot. The women, still mostly invisible at this time of day and phase of cultural development, started their cook fires when it was still pitch-black.

The village had been scheduled for connection to a Kabul-based electric grid in the late 1970s. Then came the Communists and war and the Resistance and war and the Taliban and war and now, as my host puts it, “the Americans and we hope for the best.” The village, electrically speaking, remains unconnected. How much are the villagers missing?

Ask them. Most adult males and some of the women have visited Kabul, an hour’s walk and then three hours’ drive away. Some, like my cook before his death “during the war,” have worked there. They’re unequivocal: “Of course, we want electricity. We want lights at night. We want power for the mill when there’s no water. And with electricity we can amplify the call to prayer. ”

This last desire provokes an appreciative-grumpy sidebar on the azaan, that extraordinary sound which issues five times daily from every mosque in the Islamic world. Its call acts as the epicenter of community and religious connection. Whenever Muslims settle a new area, building begins with a mosque. The structure is oriented towards Mecca, and a minar or minaret is raised as a platform for summoning the faithful to prayer. Then houses, markets, public baths, and whatever other buildings are erected around the mosque (from the Spanish mezquita from the original Arabic masjid or “place of prostration”). The first Muslim community was established nearly 1,500 years ago. For all but one of those centuries Islam was unelectrified, and the call to prayer came, as still in this village, with an authenticity that pierced heart as well as ear. Wherever a settlement grew so large that the call could no longer be heard, a new mosque was built, and another muezzin (prayer caller) would utter the same prayer call at the same time. Small rings of sound, seldom overlapping, linked believers from Spain to the Philippines.

Then electricity introduced amplification, decibel doubling, and feedback frenzy. Clarity became cacophony. In Kabul these days you’re besieged simultaneously by three or four mike-hyped calls to prayer, often punctuated by sundry groans, shrieks, and whines of aural overload. Not normally one to second-guess progress, I mourn the rapid passing of pre-megawatt azaan.

With electricity still undelivered, the villagers depend on other grids – abstract but less vulnerable than the East Coast system that failed Thursday afternoon. Their primary form of connectedness is kinship. Last night we spoke of Abdul Qadir’s forebearer and my former cook, Ghiausuddin – “May God,” as these Muslims were quick to add, “grant mercy on his soul.” He died before the boy was born, but young AQ knows all about Gh. He told me what his great-grandfather looked like, what his life had entailed, who his other descendants were, and where they were today. Nearly a dozen had been killed “during the war.” That left two dozen more whom AQ named before I quit counting and went to bed. And all these, be it noted, were on his mother’s side of the family. We’re supposed to do his father’s side next time I come.

Quick exercise in auto-anthropology: From memory, name as many relatives, living and dead, as you can. I don’t know of any formal statistical study for Americans, but most of the students I used to teach could list between 10 and 30. Each year, because of a scholarship I administered, there was one Afghan in class. Without fail, his list was more than twice as long as anyone else’s. Reason: Because Afghans, like all pre-moderns, still depend on family for life’s essentials. With government and other external support groups weak and far away, you are your family. And you know who’s in it. By comparison, American family grids are skimpy and prone to collapse.

Sitting up here on the roof and looking beyond the village, I can see the ground plan of another grid: landscape itself. It stretches downhill in front of me towards the nearest town four miles away.

The town, built at the Kabul road head, has a K-6 school. AQ, aged 11, walks the dirt path both ways each day. Even if he weren’t a scholar – “and next year, God willing, there’ll be school for my sisters as well” – he’d know every centimeter of countryside. He’s worked it as a fledgling farmer and herdsman. Yesterday we strolled on what looked to me like level ground. Anxious to share their great-grandfather’s home turf with someone who’d actually known him, AQ and three siblings led me across rutted fields and irrigation ditches. They kept referring to places – a saint’s tomb, somebody’s abandoned orchard – as “up” or “down” from wherever we were at the time. It sounded odd on flat land. Then I recalled that for Afghans, perhaps for rural people everywhere, no ground is completely level. Dependent on gravity’s water flow for their crops, AQ has an elevation grid in his head. Connected to it, he was giving me – literally – the lay of the land.

How different from what urban American workers must have sensed on Thursday walking home, in some cases for hours, from offices. They’d never done it before. At least on foot, it was alien territory. And how much connectedness can there be with concrete?

Afghans want more concrete roads. They want more electricity. They count on us to bring these systems. But the big blackout back home Thursday got me thinking of different Afghan grids, other more durable forms of connectedness. Let’s hope the old Afghan grids survive what we’ve got to offer.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkasi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.