In 2002, the Pakistani border city of Quetta — home to a sizeable Hazara community living in exile from their home in the mountainous Hazarajat area of Afghanistan — found itself subject to a particularly fierce Taliban raid. Believed to be the descendents of Genghis Khan’s Mongol army, the Hazaras have been persecuted throughout history for their ethnicity and belief in Shia, as opposed to Afghanistan’s majority Sunni, Islam. Khadim Ali, then 24, was sent by his parents to Iran for his own safety. There he visited the tombs of his literary idols — Ferdowsi’s in Mashad, Hafez’s and Saadi’s in Shiraz — and noticed throughout the land the widespread destruction of miniatures and murals caused by centuries of conflict. Later that year he enrolled at Lahore’s prestigious National College of Arts (NCA) and traveled to Bamiyan in Afghanistan — infamous for the destruction of the 180-foot Buddhas by the Taliban in March 2001 — for inspiration.
     Travelling the 200 or so kilometers from Kabul to Bamiyan, Ali saw propaganda posters made by the Taliban in which they took the name of Ferdowsi’s hero Rustam and gave him the avatar of an omniscient eagle. Taliban radio broadcasts of “I am Rustam, I fly over Afghanistan, I see everything” reinforced this reappropriation of history. Considering The Shahnameh follows the philosophies of Zarathustra, his messages of free will and the choice we have between good and evil, the Taliban’s reappropriation of the poem’s hero is ironic to say the least. In the shadow of the defiled sandstone cliffs, Ali set up an “illustration workshop” with the local children, asking them to draw whatever they pleased. The children drew their surroundings; grenades, tanks, weapons, and what he describes as “demonesque characters”. Asking whom these devils were, their answer for Ali was simply “Rustam.” Ali explains that “because the storytelling culture is vanishing in Afghanistan, they didn’t know about Rustam and Sohrab. This child thought Rustam was the Taliban.” Within one generation, the Taliban had erased an entire cultural memory that had lasted hundreds of generations and replaced it with their own, self-serving mythology.
     Saddened yet inspired, when Ali returned to the NCA, he took the children’s drawings of demons and those of The Shahnameh and began drawing his own, horned and bearded demons with the Pashtun facial features of the Taliban. Ali placed these figures sitting cross-legged in mock meditative poses, occasionally accompanied by Arabic numerals — a riff on Afghan textbooks that taught counting and reading through the language of war and politicized Islam — “I for Infidel, J for Jihad”, etc.
     Ali named the series Rustam and within three years and half a dozen exhibitions across Pakistan, Ali was invited to exhibit at the Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, in 2006. Following that he became the artist in residence at Japan’s Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and at the end of last year he exhibited at London’s Green Cardamom gallery. In every city in which Ali exhibits he also holds illustration workshops at local schools, teaching young English, Japanese, and Australian children about the lives of the Hazara children and the ancient craft of miniature painting.