Kara Kush - Hardcover

Shah, Idries

4.21

146 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585673218 ISBN 13: 9781585673216

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2002

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Adam, convinced that a resistance movement is imperative, rallies his followers, the ill-equipped patriots, to fight back. Idries Shah, the author of this gripping story, is the best-known Afghan writer of our time. His books on Sufism, philosophy, history, and travel, are known the world over. Shah was the descendant of a thousand-year-old Afghan family, and an author and teacher who found success explaining the East to the West. Kara Kush, first published in 1986, is his only novel: a fascinating adventure in which a gifted writer set out to inform the world about Afghan society, history, and culture. According to interviews with Shah, the novel is based on fact and eyewitness accounts.

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From the Publisher:

In December of 1979, Soviet tanks rolled across the borders of Afghanistan, beginning a period of barbaric aggression that triggered a turning point in modern history. Idries Shah’s brilliant novel chronicles the courageous 10-year resistance of the Afghan people, an epic story of triumph over tyranny that deserves to be immortalized. Kara Kush is the definitive story of freedom fighters. It is a story of patriotism-in-action, mobilized and fueled not by a mass-media propaganda machine, or the charisma of a single individual, but by a thousands-of-years-old tradition of proud independence, deep love of one’s land, and fierce will to survive. Kara Kush was first published in 1986, at a time when most of the outside world dismissed the Afghan resistance as a rag-tag lot of rival guerrilla factions in a futile holdout against an invincible military machine. With extraordinary insight into human nature and the course of human history, Kara Kush told the real story.

According to author Idries Shah, almost all the people in the text of the novel actually exist - or did. The accounts of battles and raids, precise military details, and the stories of Soviet and Red Afghan atrocities were all from "primary sources " - eyewitnesses, participants, defectors, victims, and prisoners. This remarkable book, among all other sources, offers keys to understanding not only this important strategic region, but the very phase of world history in which we find ourselves today. Much more than a novel, even more than a tribute, Kara Kush stands as a model of human vision, leadership, cooperation, and capacity - at a time when we need it most.

About the Author:

Idries Shah (1924-1996), whose family lived in Afghanistan for a thousand years, is an internationally known authority on the region and his books on Sufism are considered seminal. The Sufis, first published in 1964, is a first-of-its-kind modern statement on Sufism. Shah is the author of more than twenty books and has a readership spanning East and West.

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