In Spring 2018, when I officially enrolled at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), I immediately began searching for Professor Michael Barry, neglecting to register both for my credit and non-credit courses. Due to his demanding schedule and deep engagement in Afghanistan’s socio-political landscape, it took me nearly the entire semester, but I still couldn’t manage to catch him for a casual chat on campus. As far as I remember, he didn’t seem to have an office either. For that reason, I began to think of him as my fellow Kuchi (nomad)—unsettled and always on the move, both within the highly-fortified campus and, in Kabul, a city which Professor Barry visited at the age of 15 for the first time.
At the end of the fall semester in the same year, I finally crossed paths with Professor Barry on the staircase of the Women’s Center—he was coming down just as I was heading up to attend a class. After our initial introduction in the middle of the stairs, and noticing my last name, Mosaver, he instantly asked me, “Shuma naqash hastid?”—meaning, Are you an illustrator? I replied that more or less, I once had been. I was named Samir by a Hindu friend of my late father in Khost, and I chose the surname Mosaver as it was a formal requirement for admission at AUAF. Before that, I had not been entitled to that kind of prestige, like many other things. The combination sounded typically Persian, so he addressed me in Persian in first place though, he could speak both Afghanistan’s official languages. His interest in me being a naqash, however, became clear to me only later, after taking his classes in the following semesters.
In Fall 2019, one year later, I registered for his class: Introduction to the History of Afghanistan (HIS 110). Greeting us in fluent Persian, Professor Barry began by drawing the world map—with his left hand—using a Japanese Snowman marker, and contextualized the worldview of Afghan rulers through a personal story he had experienced with a shopkeeper in Herat Province in August 1968, the same year the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Delivering most of the lecture in Persian, and a little in English, Professor Barry said, “I was deeply concerned that day.” But the shopkeeper, he recalled with a smile, simply said: “Ba ma chee?”—What’s it to us? “The shopkeeper,” he continued, “was unmindful of the fact that barely a decade later, the same Soviet Union would knock on his doorstep.” He later connected that story to the worldview of Afghan emirs and rulers in 18th and 19th centuries, who were little, or not at all, interested in what was happening beyond their national boundaries. “Their indifference to the global dynamics beyond their borders” he concluded, “risked Afghanistan’s survival in the face of rapidly changing geo-political rivalries.”
Hailing from a rural and nomadic background and studying in a traditional school only intermittently, I found his lecture entirely different—eye-opening and so elegant that left a perpetual impression on me. For other classmates who belonged to elite and urban Persianate backgrounds, it was even more compelling, mostly because it was delivered in their native language. Professor Barry had left the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University to teach at AUAF due to his deep love, admiration, and connection to Afghanistan, its people, and the history which he had mastered over decades of study. That day, I felt a deep sense of pride in being a student of such a peerless intellectual—one whom seem more Afghan, than American that day.
Despite being highly expose to risk, its students community and teaching faculty (both national and international) preserved its resilient spirit and legacy both by sacrificing their lives and taking persistent risk.
The year 2020 seemed to have heralded the beginning of our collective end. Think tanks, newspapers’ editorial and media opinions, and the tone of politicians and diplomats in the civilized and liberal West began to paint the Taliban’s image with an impressively moderate and colorful brush. The defenders of the Afghanistan’s juvenile democracy, human rights, and other progressive ideals became faint echoes, drowned beneath the rising tide of the Taliban’s justification. Founded by late Dr. Sharif Fayez in 2006 with support from then U.S. First Lady, Laura Bush and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the Institution until the collapse of the Islamic Republic was a story of sheer defiance. Despite being highly expose to risk, its students community and teaching faculty (both national and international) preserved its resilient spirit and legacy both by sacrificing their lives and taking persistent risk. Still reeling from the human loss, it had endured, AUAF appeared once again to be on the frontline of sacrifice, because in the Taliban’s lexicon the institution was already defined as the grand center of heresy, where wolves were trained in the skin of sheep to corrupt Islam. In the Spring Semester of 2020, one could sense the calm before the storm. Snow fell so heavily that the University canceled afternoon classes. With a few other friends, I attended a Peace and Conflict Studies class offered by Dr. Victoria Fontan in a newly constructed Bayat Building on the International Campus. For students like me, it was an optional, however, for those already enrolled in late Dr. Sharif Fayez’s class, Introduction to Translation Studies, it was a substitute credit course necessitated by his untimely and tragic demise in his residence on campus.
Being a walking encyclopedia of my homeland, Professor Barry was deeply dissatisfied with the unfolding events, both with silent consent and loud indifference. He knew what the future might hold for Afghanistan. In the same year, Afghanistan was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the university therefore cancelled all physical classes and adopted online courses to continue offering education. I returned home and was eventually appointed as Professor Barry’s teaching assistant, helping him record his sessions, upload them for students, mark attendance, and distribute other academic materials. At the end of 2020, my father fell victim to the virus and died after battling it for roughly a month and two days. His departure not only left me facing very difficult choices but also left me a profound sense of insecurity. In those trying hours, Professor Barry was a great support, even from far away in Venice, Italy. He insisted on being a tough individual willing to fight for Afghanistan in order to keep the country on the world map under any unfavorable circumstances. At the end of each session, he would conclude his lecture with the same statement, following a goodbye in three languages: ba aman-i-khuda, de khudai pa aman, good bye.
Being a walking encyclopedia of my homeland, Professor Barry was deeply dissatisfied with the unfolding events, both with silent consent and loud indifference. He knew what the future might hold for Afghanistan.
On August 14, 2021, I woke up to the fall of Khost Province, the birthplace of Khost Protection Force (KPF)—a formidable, special operations CIA-backed military unit, which had kept the Taliban at bay for twenty years in Khost and other adjacent provinces. I went to the city center to witness and document one of the most disturbing moments in Afghanistan’s turbulent history. I saw the crowd was split along a visible line: the elderly and inhabitants of the rural regions stood in queues to congratulate the Taliban on their return, while students of the madrassas, dressed in shabby attire and wielding state-of-art rifles—M4 at their hands—were the ultimate force asserting authority. The young and the urbanites, on the other hand, carried the national flag to register their protest. The two competing forces finally collided at Sargardan Chowk, the city’s main intersection, erupting into violence and culminating in the cold-blooded killing of Zahidullah Khan, who had been rallying around the national flag alongside his comrades. Under the looming shadow, I found myself part of a harrowing chapter of the very history I had been trained to study in order to predict the future which was entirely over for my generation at least. Professor Barry and I contacted each other, and I reassured him about my safety—though it was not guaranteed. In a long email, he expressed his deep disappointment in the US unconditional withdrawal. Since he had already shared it with his colleagues, friends, diplomats and his fellow professors, I instantly deleted it after reading it.
Two days later, I moved to Kabul, taking my aging mother with me for safety. I brought her along so she could plea to the Taliban fighters on the Khost-Kabul Highway if I were identified as an AUAF student. Every pop-up checkpoint functioned as an ad hoc court, and the Taliban were stopping every car to identify members of the fallen security forces and others considered potential targets. I arrived late in Kabul, which had been entirely deserted. The Taliban rank and file had broken into the campus and widely celebrated its seizure on social media. A few days later, I was contacted via WhatsApp message by a BBC’s correspondent to join a discussion with Professor Barry on Newshour hosted by Julian Marshall—whose voice had long been familiar to me. During my school years, I used to listen to the BBC to improve my English; hence both he and Lyse Doucet were already known to me. The university delayed its fall semester but still managed to resume. I began attending my remaining classes, and so did Professor Barry, who returned to teach online and take part in policy discussions pertaining to Afghanistan. Despite being deeply affected by the ordeal, his friendly tone remained intact. Before I recorded a session, Professor Barry would call on students in both Pashto and Persian, given their names appeared on Google Meet, and conclude the class by bidding farewell in three languages, just as he had before the collapse.
For Professor Barry, his students’ names were a big deal. In many instances, he knew a long history behind each name. When a name sounded Persian, he would emphasize the final syllable of the first name, following the Persian grammatical patterns—for example, rendering Samir Mosaver as Samir-e Mosaver. However, when a name sounded Pashto, he would pronounce it without that stress and respond in Pashto to feel more connected. In the Graeco-Bactrian Class, when a student named Shaista asked permission to get a handout, Professor Barry let her by saying “pa dwaro stargo,” literally meaning “with both eyes.” In Pashtun culture, this idiomatic expression conveys whole-hearted approval and it is a warm way to value, welcome, or accept something very sincerely and without any hesitation. The name Shaista in Pashto means “beautiful,” though the student was a Tajik. Because of her name, Professor Barry responded in Pashto, assuming she was likely to be an ethnic Pashtun. As examined by Peter Tomsen, the Afghanistan conflict is recognized in contemporary recorded history as the longest-running one. Nonetheless, Afghanistan, on a positive note, does not share any secessionist movement rooted in ethnic strife; even the civil war of the 1990s stemmed from politico-ideological differences. Inter-ethnic marriages are common, and for this reason names in Afghanistan are frequently shared across ethnic groups. To make an initial guess about his students’ ethnic backgrounds, Professor Barry relied on their names and then communicated in what he believed to be their native language, in order to establish an emotional connection.
In August 2023, I was evacuated to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, with the generous support of US Mission to Afghanistan, as a visiting student to complete my undergraduate studies at the American university of Central Asia (AUCA). Since then, we have heard from each other only rarely. I found life in Russia’s backyard challenging—both in terms of university’s workload and the language spoken here. I experienced exile for the first time, though I had long encountered the concept in the pages of fiction with its compelling descriptions. The small community we had once formed to carry Afghanistan back to its rich past has now been scattered across several oceans and time zones. The person who bridges our past and present still sits by his computer—what he calls it a “machine”—in his residence in Venice, educating those left to their own devices by the “free world.” From Sufism to Islam in Spain, from the Modern History of Afghanistan to the Graeco-Bactrian Civilization, Professor Barry continues to train individuals confined to four walls of their rooms, “in a land without music.” Two and a half years ago, when I last served him as his teaching assistant, Professor Barry was online from a bakery in Paris to offer his class. For him, AUAF is a symbol of cultural dignity, while Afghanistan a noble and a humane cause to defend in a time when the whole world looks understandably elsewhere. At the end of the session, he asked me if I felt safe serving as his teaching assistant in a faraway village in Khost, I replied by reciting the poem from Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet:
If I don’t burn
if you don’t burn
if we don’t burn
how will the light vanquish the darkness?
Professor Barry paused, nodded with smile—quiet, proud as if hearing more than just words—placed his hand on his heart, his face lighting up, and affirmed, “Pa dwaro stargo!” We both waved, and I stopped recording the session, but his Pashto expression still rings in my ears.
