When Allah created the world, he collected the leftover stones and threw them onto the Earth: it was then that, according to legend, Afghanistan took shape.
Afghanistan is a proud country, a land of the indomitable, as history tells us, the list of expelled invaders, the fragility and failure of the various occupations. After the takeover of the Taliban, the country is in balance, between the regurgitation of a political movement inspired by a mythical past and the universal desire for modernity and democracy. Afghanistan is also the poorest country in Asia and is on the list of the poorest in the world. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2023 which compares the current state and evolution of gender equality internationally, Afghanistan is at the bottom of the ranking, earning the reputation of the worst country in the world in terms of gender equality.
In this scenario people live, survive and move in search of an everyday life, moving between different prohibitions every day and prayers that mark the hours of the day.
In a strange, silent place, where music is forbidden and education scares more than guns, children recognize the model of a weapon by the noise and young Taliban tell stories from the hill of Kabul: to possess the horizon. Afghanistan is the land of contradictions: its borders are only land but the women, blue, sway like a slightly restless sea. They have this fixation for birds, the Afghan people, the proud, the indomitable, never submissive people who are passionate about animals kept in cages.
They do not tolerate invading states, the response that two centuries ago the elderly chief of a local tribe gave to the British general Elphinstone, who wanted to convince him to accept the advantages of a stable government, sounds prophetic and still relevant: "We adapt to discord , to disorder and blood, but we will never adapt to a master", and yet there is no people with such an extreme sense of hospitality at home.
Contradictions... and discordances, while time passes in uncertainty and in an increasingly defined doubt: what is the next era? That of the civil war or of a new occupation?
Suspended, burned, dusty, veiled... from Afghanistan you learn one thing very quickly: that if you look at it, any disgusting piece of land is an epic poem, a sacred text, a love song, an atlas of ideas.
If you know how to look at it, an inhospitable state becomes the most beautiful of stories.