A Softer Side of Afghanistan
“People outside of Afghanistan have no idea what really exists here,” says Masim Fekrat, the 26- year old author of Afghan Lord, one of the country’s biggest and most vibrant blogs.
In 2005, readers around the world voted for his blog for Reporters Without Borders’ “Freedom of Expression” blog awards. His writing on occupied Kabul has earned him international recognition and led him to work for the BBC’s Farsi edition and international organizations such as NATO.
Masim blogs practically every day, focusing on the music, art and culture of his beloved yet troubled homeland, Masim Fekrat is no stranger to the harsh reality of Afghanistan. In its own way, it has shaped him into the worldly, cultured and discerning young man he is today.
A Self-Taught Expert and Expat
Fekrat grew up in a religious family in a village in Ghazni province. His childhood was poor and harsh, and he fled to Taliban controlled Kabul as a teenager. Where a local family took him in. Finding life there not to his liking, he took off like many other Afghan refugees and travelled around, staying in Pakistan, Iran, the United Arab Emirates.
His life as a nomad outside his homeland in the late ‘90s found Fekrat in the heart of the literate Afghan expat community, where he developed a love of poetry and classical music. He saved up any spare cash to buy CDs of classical and religious music in Islamabad record stores and discovered the Internet via Farsi and Pashto chat rooms.
“For me, the Internet became a portal not just for information” about Afghanistan and its people, but “literature, poetry, and music,” says Fekrat in an interview with New York’s New School Foreign Policy magazine.
Hopping Onboard the Afghan Blogosphere
In 2000, he discovered blogging through two virtual accomplices who were writing about Afghanistan and in 2002, the year after the US invaded Afghanistan, Fekrat joined the nascent Afghan blogosphere. His first blog, founded in 2002, was an anonymous and sophomoric effort on poetry and music. Fekrat moved around between a few jobs in journalism, but it wasn’t until 2004 that he decided to make blogging his vocation. Afghan Lord was born.
Fekrat to begin speaking to the world. Over the past five years his English has improved no end, and he writes sincerely — aching with wonder at the beauty of his culture and the horrors of war. Most of his posts focus on breaking news events; interspersed with his own takes on the politics of his homeland (domestic and foreign.) But he is also careful to include reflections life’s simple pleasures such as music and poetry.
Afghan’s blogosphere is small but becoming ever more significant, despite the fact that today only 1 in 30 in Afghanistan has Internet access.
We are people and we need connection…
“Before, people always had to ask ‘What is a blog?’ and that is changing,” Fekrat says in The New School interview.
“We are people and we need connection…”
He’s absolutely right and in order for that to happen, readers simple have to visit his blog.
