There is a school of thought among the more hawkish academics of the West that the story of Rustam and Sohrab is a skewed parallel of the Oedipus myth, and its place in the common consciousness of Persian people is tied to the perception of the civilization being “backward”. Since in The Shahnameh the father killed the son, instead of the other way around, there isn’t the constant renewal gained from the killing of the patriarch that there is in the Western, Greek myth. I put this proposition, a highbrow propaganda in a time of war, to Ali the day before he was to travel to Kabul to work on behalf of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation — an NGO backed by Prince Charles dedicated to saving Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. His answer: “The father killing the son is a very symbolic moment of the book because throughout the thousands of pages of the book, it never mentions God except in that moment. It tells us that Rustam is not the perfect hero and there is no perfect ideal for the human being except God. We find the idea that no one and nothing in this world is ideal to be important. In The Shahnameh there is one very significant line that says, ‘Ignorance can cause your beloved to be killed by yourself.’ If they are relating this story to Muslim ‘backwardness’, I think they are wrong because The Shahnameh is the story of pre-Islamic ideology, it’s not about religion. It is truly about human nature, and the message that ignorance can cause tragedy.”
     The harmony of Ali’s compositions of the Bamiyan children’s surroundings — apple trees, bomb dropping planes, poppies, wolves and the buddhas themsevles — coupled with his elegant drawings of the bearded demons conflict with their content. The illustrations of Rustam, rendered on traditional waadi paper and adorned with gold leaf evoke Afghanistan’s lost lives, lost lands and destroyed cultural landscape of recent and historic misadventures. The grace of Ali’s images belie the intensity of their message. They engage with war while eliciting peace.