The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes [Hardcover]

Christopher Kremmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2002

Apart from oil, rugs are the Muslim world's best-known commodity. While rugs are found in most Western homes, the story of religious, political, and tribal strife behind their creation is virtually unknown. In The Carpet Wars, award-winning journalist Christopher Kremmer chronicles his fascinating ten-year journey along the ancient carpet trade routes that run through the world's most misunderstood and volatile regions -- Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Christopher Kremmer's odyssey through the crescent of Islamic nations began in the early 1990s, when he arrived in Afghanistan to meet the communist-backed president, Mohammed Najibullah. On the outskirts of Kabul, mujahideen rebels were massing while the carpet dealers of the old city continued to ply their timeless trade. Kremmer was in Kabul when the mujahideen turned their guns on one another after ridding the country of the hated communists. He was there when the Taliban came and the army of religious students -- aided by the wealthy Arab radical Osama bin Laden -- emerged from the scorched earth to implement their vision of "a pure Islamic state."

Traveling through these territories, Kremmer chronicles Islamic societies as they were convulsed by dictatorship and greed and as refugees sought asylum in the West. He cemented lifelong friendships and met an unforgettable cast of characters, from nomads toiling on portable handlooms to shady merchants and leaders of the syndicates that control the bazaars. In the remote Hindu Kush, he celebrated Eid with the late Afghan guerrilla legend Ahmad Shah Massoud. In Kandahar, he took tea with Taliban leaders and went hunting for Osama bin Laden. He watched as a new generation questioned the power of the mullahs in Iran, while in Iraq the populace chafed under the weight of sanctions and Saddam Hussein's cult of personality.

The Carpet Wars takes readers into a world where even the simplest motif on a rug can be filled with religious, tribal, and political significance, places where life bustles with bargaining and gossip in bazaars and teahouses, while nations crumble, leaders fall, and the final confrontation between freedom and terror looms.

An edge-of-the-chair travel memoir, The Carpet Wars offers a personal, vivid, and revealing look at Islam's human face, wracked by turmoil but sustained by friendship, industry, and humor. It is also a historical snapshot of countries at the center of global confrontation that exploded onto the homefront on September 11, 2001.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Iran, Iraq, and the Central Asian republics, carpets are viewed as objects of reverence and expressions of the highest artistic achievement. As the region's second largest export behind oil, they are also big business. "The early Muslims inhabited lands where people were born on carpets, prayed on them, and covered their tombs with them. For centuries, carpets have been a currency and an export, among the first commodities of a globalized trading system," writes author Christopher Kremmer. Even in the midst of turmoil and war, a bazaar will spring up during breaks in the fighting and carpet merchants will quickly resume business as if nothing had happened. In this detailed look at the culture and recent history of these countries, the carpet trade serves as both backdrop and metaphor for the shadowy and complex politics of the region in which trickery, illusion, and manipulation are part of the game.

The result of 10 years spent as a journalist in the region, Kremmer's book explains how the fragile web of tribal and religious alliances and the influence of outside powers have impacted the politics and economy of the area and began a continuous cycle of exile and return, along with the rise of militarism and terrorism. The book also serves as excellent travel writing, with fascinating anecdotes and telling conversations and encounters that illustrate the customs of a region that is now the focus of international attention. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly

An Australian journalist who's covered the Middle East and Central Asia for 10 years, Kremmer travels through Pakistan, India, Tajikistan and other countries, following the paths of the carpet trade, the region's largest export industry after oil. The carpet is both his entry point into these largely Islamic worlds and a symbol of the rich tapestry of cultures that he discovers, but Kremmer isn't bound by this narrow focus: he talks not only to rug merchants and others involved in the trade, but to students, politicians, cab drivers and heads of secret police. Obviously enamored of the region and its peoples, Kremmer lovingly describes the rituals and texture of their lives, from tea ceremonies to the clamorous bazaars. At the same time, Kremmer weaves in a great deal of history, both of the 500-year-old carpet trade and of the political upheavals in the area since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Whether in Baghdad or Peshawar, he shows how strife in the form of the Gulf War's aftermath and the tyrannical rule of the Taliban affects the economic fortunes of his subjects. Though somewhat sprawling, this work is a standout for its lucid historical overviews and, more importantly, the dramatic, intimate depictions of daily life.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (HarperCollins); 1st American ed edition (April 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060097329
• ISBN-13: 978-0060097325
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling read, December 7, 2002

By 

saliero (NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes (Hardcover)

Christopher Kremmer's book takes you on a journey through the Central Asian countries most frequently in the news today, and provides an incomparable insight. The largest, and first, section, is an account of events in Afghanistan, which he has witnessed first-hand as a foreign correspondent.

This book is no dry history, nor is it merely a travelogue, nor is it merely an extended piece of journalism.

Kremmer comes to know and befriend people of different backgrounds within the region, and it is their stories, as well as the carpet trade and stories of emblematic carpets, through which the narrative is woven. We care about the future of the peoples of the region, because we care about what becomes of Kremmer's friends.

What Christopher has managed to do is to make the internecine politics, the inhumanities, the brutalities, comprehensible, through his humanisation of peoples who might in lesser hands be reduced to the merely 'exotic' or even worse 'unknowable and inhuman'.

Earlier this year I read 'Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan' by Jason Elliot.

I thoroughly recommend both these books if you desire to reach some understanding of a region of such importance to us all.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best travel books I have ever read, March 12, 2004

By 

David (Janesville, WI, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes (Hardcover)

I finished this book about six weeks ago, and I can't stop thinking about it.
So often travel literature-type books by westerners in these kinds of far-off places can be either too clever, cynical or condescending at one end of the scale, or, at the other end too reverent, with a reverence that seems to really be an I-hate-where-I-am-from complex. Both extremes can get tiring pretty quickly.
The Carpet Wars was exactly in the middle, and it was fascinating. It was extremely informative about the history, politics, religion and, yes, even the carpets of the region from Pakistan to Iran. Carpets were merely the thread (so to speak) that held the several first-hand accounts of travels to the region.
Kremmer is a master story teller, and very funny. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was more enjoyable, the story he was telling or the way he was telling it.
His accounts of places with which he is very familiar are told in the rich tones of a deep affection. When he is in a new place, like Isfahan, the account is in the vivid colors of someone seeing something for the first time, creating some of the best travel essays I have ever read. Seven weeks ago, Isfahan was just an exotic name to me, now it's at the top of places I hope I can see before I die.
Its hard to say what recommends this book more, the fact that it is throughly enjoyable, or deeply infomrative.
I haven't read Mr. Kremmer's book about Laos, but it is probably pretty good. Books like The Carpet Wars don't stick with you so long by accident.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Armchair Journay of Immense Interest, December 14, 2003

By 

Adriel C. Gray (McGaheysville, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes (Hardcover)

Anyone interested in the fine art of rug weaving, the cultures in which Oriental carpets originate, the geography of ancient trade routes including The Silk Road, the history, economics and politics of the Middle East, and present day travel through the strife-torn region will find immense treasure in Christopher Kremmer's The Carpet Wars. "The early Muslims inhabited lands where people were born on carpets, prayed on them, and covered their tombs with them. For centuries, carpets have been a currency and an export, among the first commodities of a globalized trading system" writes the author, who has spent ten years in Asia reporting for the Australian press. He uses Oriental rugs as his motif for writing about his travels in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Tajikistan, Kashmir, and the former Soviet satellite countries of Central Asia. {Here, this reviewer admits his interest enfolds some bias because of my own travels through the region as a Peace Corps worker in less turbulent times. Also, I have the good fortune of working in a store where a wide variety of the very finest examples of Oriental carpets are sold.}
In this book we read that second only to oil, hand made carpets are the region's principal export and were so long before Marco Polo made his famous travels along the Silk Road. Carpets created by various quarreling factions from the Middle and Near East are the focus for retelling how the fighting clans have damaged the carpet trade, effectively wiping out the middle and upper class of society, and left appalling poverty and misery in its wake. Kremmer describes how that even in the midst of war and turmoil, a bazaar will spring up during breaks in the fighting and the carpet merchants will quickly resume business as if nothing had happened. A disappointment for me was that the author omits a description of the many varieties and techniques of rug making; he remains focused on his travels through the Islamic world, giving us the benefit of his first hand witness to the misery.
Believing that only Allah can create anything perfect, the Muslim carpet makers often will deliberately craft a minor flaw in their handiwork that only a practiced eye might discern. Also, we learn that many rugs woven by people living under the duress of conflict will reflect their anxieties and turmoil through the symbols of war - airplanes, helicopters, tanks, and guns. But the rugs also will contain symbols of their makers' traumatic lives not altogether discernible or understood. Like the great paintings of the Renaissance, these works of art may never be fully comprehended. It is enough that fortunate owners of hand knotted and woven rugs might appreciate not only their beauty but also how they portray the soulful deeper meaning of the lives of their creators, leaving a legacy for generations to come. This book is an armchair journey of immense interest. Highly recommended.

More about this reviewer on the www at: http://acgray.tripod.com