Why I Don't Want to Live in Afghanistan

 

 

Why I Don't Want to Live in My Native Afghanistan Because My Mind Is Not My Own — It Belongs to the Tribe

 

Wahab Raofi

My uncle, a retired doctor, once told me about a patient who came to him complaining of a rash on his back. A closer examination revealed the cause: a colony of lice had taken hold in the skin, feeding quietly, invisibly, for who knows how long. The image never left me. Not because it was grotesque — though it was — but because it raised a question I couldn't shake: can something just as parasitic, just as hidden, colonize the human mind?

I believe it can. I call them the lice of the mind.

These are the thoughts, beliefs, and identities implanted in us before we are old enough to examine them — by our parents, our communities, our religions. Like lice, they are introduced early, burrow deep, and become so entrenched that by the time we notice them, removal is painful and often resisted. Unlike lice, we rarely even recognize them as foreign. We call them culture. We call them faith. We call them who we are.

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I was born into a Muslim family in Afghanistan. Before I could form my own questions, the answers had already been arranged for me. My tribe. My God. My place in the world. This is not unique to Afghanistan or to Islam — it is the condition of being human, of being raised inside any system of inherited belief. But in Afghanistan, the grip is especially tight, and the consequences of loosening it especially severe.

As a child I began to ask the questions I was not supposed to ask. Who is God, really? How did He come into being? If the Quran is His word, why does it read like the prayers of a man petitioning a god rather than a god addressing humanity? Why does it sanction so much violence, so many wars, so many contradictions? The more I looked, the more I saw not the word of the divine, but the fingerprints of a man — a 7th century man, brilliant and ambitious, working within the anxieties and power struggles of his time.

This was not an easy thing to see. It is never easy to see the lice. You have lived with them so long they feel like part of you.

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The need to explain the world is ancient and universal. Long before Islam, long before Abraham, human beings invented gods to hold the terror of existence at bay — storm gods, harvest gods, gods of war and spring. These were not failures of intelligence. They were the first attempts at philosophy, the mind reaching toward meaning with the tools it had. Over time, the Greeks pushed that reaching further, trading supernatural forces for natural ones, myth for reason, and in doing so gave birth to the tradition of inquiry that runs through Socrates and Plato down to the present day.

But in the Arabian Peninsula, a different path hardened. The Abrahamic tradition — built on absolute revelation, prophetic authority, and submission to divine will — became, in its Islamic form, not just a faith but a complete governing system. When Islamic civilization expanded, it carried this framework with it: a total architecture of life, from how you dress to who you marry, from the length of a man's beard to the rights of a woman to choose. Dissent was not debated. It was punished.

I do not say this to condemn every Muslim or to deny Islam's history of scholarship and beauty. I say it because ideas have consequences, and when a system of belief is sealed against examination — when questioning is treated as betrayal or blasphemy — it stops being a faith and becomes a tyranny. A tyranny more durable than any government, because it lives inside people rather than above them.

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This is what I saw growing up, and what I see when I look at Afghanistan today. A society where the lice of the mind have been passed from generation to generation for so long that most people can no longer imagine the possibility of life without them. Children are named to signal their tribe before they can speak. Boys are taught that their honor lives inside the bodies of their female relatives. Girls are taught that their highest purpose is obedience. And anyone — man or woman — who dares to question the inherited architecture of God, tribe, and custom risks not just social rejection but violence.

I have enormous love for the people of Afghanistan. I have none for the system that has been imposed on their minds.

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That patient on my uncle's examining table almost certainly did not know he was carrying a colony on his back. He had learned, over time, not to notice the itch. That is the most insidious thing about parasites — they do not announce themselves. They become background noise. Normal.

I left Afghanistan because I could not stop noticing the itch. Because once you see the lice, you cannot unsee them. And because a mind that has learned to ask questions cannot easily make peace with a world that treats questions as sins.

I don't want to live in my native country — not because I don't love it, but because I love the life of the mind more. And that life, in Afghanistan as it stands today, is not safe. It is not free. It is not yet possible.

Perhaps one day it will be. I have not stopped hoping for that. But hope, unlike faith, requires no submission. It only requires that you keep your eyes open