Tamim Ansary
Mir Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he penned a widely circulated e-mail that denounced the Taliban but warned of the dangers of a military intervention by the United States. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age." His book West of Kabul, East of New York published shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is a literary memoir recounting his bicultural perspective on contemporary world conflicts. Ansary writes about Islam, Afghanistan, and history. His book Destiny Disrupted retells the history of the world through Islamic eyes. His new book The Invention of Yesterday explores the role of narrative as a force in world history Ansary directed the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 22 years.
“If everyone were allowed to interpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might diverged wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as there were people, the community would fragment, and the world swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not then vanish as if it had never been?”
“We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.”