The Power of Poetry -- Culture and the Rule of Law

Discovering the beautiful legal documents at the National Archives of Afghanistan

The Power of Poetry -- Culture and the Rule of Law: When I was in Afghanistan as the rule of law adviser to the NATO police development mission, I had the opportunity to embed in Afghan police units as their senior commanders crisscrossed the country, inspecting checkpoints and police stations, and meeting with governors and community leaders. These trips were fraught with danger and discomfort. Being an American civilian woman embedded in an Afghan formation was not exactly normal, even for Afghanistan, but it was revealing.

I did it because in order to connect policing to governance, we had to understand what that relationship looked like: not to us, but to the Afghans.

What was surprising to me was how important history and culture were to the Afghan vision of the role of a modern police force. Hardened veterans of brutal wars and semi-literate in most cases, these were not men I thought would be concerned with the fine arts. But I was wrong. Their generals took great risks in order to introduce young police officers to historic sites, illuminated manuscripts, music, and the lore of the Silk Road. The Minister of Interior spent almost an hour inspecting rose gardens with me at a training center near Herat, asking my opinion of the landscaping and personally directing the planting of a particular flowering vine. The generals told me that it was important for their future leaders to understand the land and its people – they could not fairly enforce the law if they did not understand its cultural context and the values that lay behind it.  These were especially reflected, they explained, in their poetry, and in private conversations amongst themselves, they quoted both modern and ancient Persian poets, a lot.

Three years later, while in Kabul this past January, I had the privilege of visiting the National Archives of Afghanistan. The beauty of the miniature paintings depicting Persian fairy tales, illuminated texts, and gorgeous legal documents left me amazed and mystified. I had always been told by my rule of law development colleagues that the Afghans had no national legal tradition – that their law was all derived from the Holy Koran, and there was little else to build upon. But there in the archives and open to visitors, was evidence not only of 200 years of written law, but treasured, valued, embellished, poetic law. It was law as art and culture, just as the culture was embedded in the meaning behind it. The Afghans valued it. That was clear. But I and most of my colleagues had apparently missed that point.

So it was with great interest that I read about “I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan.” This recently-published book contains the poetry of approximately 20 Afghan Pashtun women and promises to be a revelation. We in the international community have spent a lot of time talking about the legal status of women in Afghanistan and we've certainly spent a lot of time and resources talking TO them. But as a rule, we haven’t been reading their poems. We haven’t been looking at the way they perceive their own experience, as expressed in their art and culture. Now we can. We probably should have been doing so all along. http://www.amazon.com/Am-Beggar-World-Contemporary-Afghanistan/dp/0374191875?tag=vglnkc4576-20