Afghanistan Forum Speaker

Afghan-American author and lecturer Tamim Ansary has emerged as a major voice about Islam and the West. He has written the widely acclaimed literary memoir, West of Kabul, East of New York and collaborated with Farah Ahmedi on the New York Times best-seller, The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky. His latest book, Destiny Disrupted: World History Through Islamic Eyes, will be published by Public Affairs Books in May 2009. He has also written dozens of children’s books.

Ansary directs the San Francisco Writers Workshop, the oldest continuous free writers workshop in America. He lectures about Afghanistan, Islamic history, democracy, education, and writing, and teaches through the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a columnist on culture and society for Microsoft’s online encyclopedia, Encarta.com. Ansary’s commentary has been heard on the Bill Moyers Show, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Hardball, and National Public Radio. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters.

Ansary grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, where his father taught science and literature at Kabul University, and his mother taught English at the first girls’ school in Afghanistan. She was the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan as an Afghan. The family moved to Lashkargah, a small town in the middle of the desert in southwestern Afghanistan, the headquarters of a vast American-funded project to make the desert bloom. In 1964, Ansary moved to the U.S. to attend high school at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School. He graduated with honors from Reed College in 1970.

Ansary gained attention days after the 9/11 attacks, when he sent an email to friends denouncing Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime, but also those Americans then urging the U.S. to retaliate by “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age.” Within days the email had been circulated to millions of readers online. Ansary says that “America has an interest in a stable and peaceful Afghanistan friendly to the United States. The question we must ask ourselves is, what U.S. policies can help promote that outcome?”

Ansary will appear on the panel “Shifting the War from Iraq to Afghanistan: How Should VFP Respond?