Geopolitik, Identität und der Kampf um Gerechtigkeit
A personal and political history of Afghanistan, and of the identity, language and justice it lost.
Synopsis
The Lost Daughter of the Hindu Kush weaves the author’s family history into an analysis of Afghanistan, from the age of Khorasan and the Great Game to the second Taliban era.
The “lost daughter” is not a person. She stands for a world the author watched slip away: Persian identity, the ancient ideal of justice the Persian language calls dad, the freedom of women, and the cultural memory once alive on the slopes of the Hindu Kush.
Drawing on historical sources, family archives and personal testimony, the book asks how empires, borders and power politics shaped modern Afghanistan, and how language and identity became contested ground. It is part memoir, part geopolitical inquiry and part manifesto, and it closes on renewal rather than despair.
Historical and political interpretations summarised on this page reflect the author’s own analysis and perspective.
Land, language and the illusion of pure lineages
The Great Game and the making of a buffer state
Independence, monarchy and the first republic
Superpower rivalry and its cost for ordinary Afghans
From Bonn to Doha, 2001 to 2021
Gender apartheid and the erasure of a generation
Iran, China and Central Asia
Scenarios, and a call for unity in diversity
Excerpt
From the Author’s Preface · Excerpt from the English edition.
Two hundred years ago, my ancestors came to Kabul from Kashmir. The Kashmir of that era was no foreign territory; it was an organic part of a single, shared cultural sphere that united Kabul, Peshawar, and Kashmir under the legacy of the ancient Kabul Shahs. In that era, no line named Durand severed this land, and no artificial state named “Afghanistan” had yet been branded upon its forehead.
My ancestors, Persian-speaking Muslim princes from Kashmir, entered a world that still breathed as an indivisible whole. They arrived in a land where Persian was the absolute language of the court, administration, and intellectual thought, long before the sharp blade of colonial treaties and forced migrations tore this geography to pieces.
Editions
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English edition
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German edition
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