A Man Made of Dust
January 15, 2025
“What is Beshara thinking as he sits on that public bench on Mar Elias Street, staring for hours at the void before him?”
Salar Abdoh
Salar Abdoh: On “How to Keep Your Decency and Your Humanity in a World That Has Gone Insane”
November 14, 2023
His new novel, A Nearby Country Called Love, offers tenderness, nuance, and surprise in Iran.
Suspended States
August 7, 2022
It is as if losing one’s way of life, even a little bit, might mean losing the war.
Malali and Me
May 31, 2022
Motherland was something without content or form, something utterly abstract — something that, in relation to a country like this, could only occupy the minds of those who’d never had it.
Inside the Afghan Resistance
May 24, 2022
The first photographs from the longest-lasting fight against the Taliban
“Why the Afghans Did Not Fight”
October 8, 2021
How American "help" turned the Afghan army into sitting ducks
“It was as if the Taliban were still there”
September 6, 2021
Photographer Jassem Ghazbanpour was in Kabul when the Taliban fled. What he saw twenty years ago feels, today, like an eerie premonition.
“We’ve been burning for twenty years and more”
September 1, 2021
Perhaps no outsider understands Afghanistan better than Iranian journalist Mohammad Hossein Jafarian. In a series of ongoing exchanges, published here in real time, Jafarian interrogates the nuance and complexity too often elided by outsiders.
Best of Guernica: Aliyeh Ataei’s The Border Merchant
August 31, 2021
A smuggler, a person of the border, can shapeshift; he can be Robin Hood or Noah. He can make people’s lives better, as he claims, or he can funnel them into this prison.
Out of Mesopotamia
October 9, 2020
The ground shook and shook. Above us the sound barrier was being broken. Americans? A convoy advanced toward us.
The Border Merchant
November 6, 2019
On the remote border between Afghanistan and Iran, an enigmatic smuggler makes a living selling hope.
The Cleric and I
April 9, 2018
Trailing a religious fighter in an Iraqi province where ISIS is an existential threat, looking to learn what drives men and women to take bullets for one another.
The Road to Tel Afar
May 29, 2017
Following the Hashd al-Shaabi, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq fighting ISIS, I’d become more superstitious in small ways—and the more superstitious I became, the more I feared loss.
Cities of the Future: The Avenue of Faiths
June 15, 2016
On the crowded bus there was an Iraqi woman who was utterly lost; she did not know where her hotel was. With their broken Arabic, the other riders managed to figure out where she was staying and told the driver. The driver, in turn, halted the bus right in front of the Iraqi woman’s hotel— the hotel of a woman from a country Iran had fought a bloody eight-year war with.
How to Be a Woman in Tehran
March 16, 2015
Boundaries of Gender: I stay because, as my mother never stopped repeating, I am my own woman, but also my own man.
Salar Abdoh: A Hanging at the House of Artists
February 18, 2013
The public execution of two petty thieves sends a message to Tehran's artists and intellectuals. A dispatch from the gallows.
Kumandan Qurban and the Bus to Badakhshan
March 18, 2012
An untold tale from the days of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan.
Thank you, Asghar Farhadi
February 21, 2012
In the vacuous muddle of political chic and seasoned disingenuousness that often taints visual art and films from Iran enters a filmmaker who makes work for Iranians.
The Heroin Lab of Darayem
September 12, 2011
Iranian-Arab filmmaker Majed Neisi attempts to shoot a heroin lab… at great risk to his own life.
This is Afghanistan
July 27, 2011
| Iranian American writer, Salar Abdoh, corresponds with his friend Majed, a documentary filmmaker, in Afghanistan. Majed reports here on his travels in the Middle East. |