Fateh Emam

Fateh Emam was born in 1929 in Kabul, Afghanistan to a family of wealthy merchants. He attended the French High School of Kabul where he obtained his diploma in the philosophy section.

In his adolescent years, he traveled to Hindustan, at that time under the yoke of the British Empire.

In 1949 he received a grant from the French government and was sent to study law at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Later obliged to join his father, who had been living in New York for 30 years, he sets off for the United States at the time of McCarthyism. Upon his arrival in New York, he spends the first three days on Ellis Island before finally meeting up with his father, whose intention is to mold his son into a businessman.

But Fateh’s aptitudes and aspirations are entirely different, and he eventually returns to Europe where he settles in Switzerland and earns a diploma in social and political sciences from the University of Lausanne, his newly adopted town.

Fresh from University at a time when the concerns of the Third World are becoming a topic of attention, he decides to return to Afghanistan to serve the needs of his country. After having worked for one year in the protocol department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he is sent to Moscow as an attaché to the Ambassador, where he is to learn Russian in the interests of the Ministry.

Ideological conflicts with the Royal Embassy of Afghanistan and Fateh’s opposition to the foreign policy of his country (a premise to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) cause him to flee the Soviet Union, returning to Switzerland and renouncing his diplomatic career.

After several temporary posts, he obtains a permanent position at the European Office of the United Nations in Geneva. However, postings for Afghans within international organizations being reserved exclusively for members of the Afghan oligarchy in power, the Afghan government opposes his nomination just as he is about to be sent on a U.N. mission to the Congo.

After acquiring Swiss citizenship, he then immerses himself in the administration of a private language school, as well as teaching at that same school. His professional activities are interspersed with numerous private and professional travels, for example to Tanzania to participate in the making of a film promoting tourism, and on a mission with the International Red Cross to Iran, to name just a few countries.

With new-found time on his hands upon his retirement, and in love with French language and literature, he decides to become a writer.

His varied studies, and lengthy professional and diplomatic career, which gave him an insatiable curiosity, have made this great traveler a privileged witness— and a somewhat reluctant participant— of the upheavals of modern history. This wealth of experiences has been assembled in his first book: Beyond the Salt Seas... a desire for liberty (Au délà des mers salées... un désir de liberté), an autobiographical narrative published in 2007 in French by the L’Harmattan Editions in Paris.

Encouraged by the success of his first book, Fateh Emam published his second manuscript in 2008, this time a novel titled The Arab Lover of Miss Anne (L’Amant arabe de Miss Anne), also at L’Harmattan Editions, Paris. In this second book, upon a background of worsening socio-cultural misunderstandings, particularly since 9/11, the relations between the white Christian societies of the West and the Arab-Islamic world in the midst of religious effervescence, are sensitively and modestly painted by Fateh Emam in a touching portrait of Miss Anne, a young woman of English nobility, and Mohamad Ben Moussa, a rich Egyptian playboy. These two enfants terribles of the cosmopolitan jet-set are forced to endure the prejudices of the West and fanaticisms of the East. Their love story could have been a coming-together of civilizations. Instead it ends in tragedy.

Fateh Emam passed away in October 2011 in Lausanne, Switzerland.