Afghanistan Times
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A grand conference was held this week on Amir Ali Shir Nawai, the great intellectual, politician and poet during the Timurid dynasty in the last 15th century. Nawai had hands in most of his time’s sciences and arts. He was poet, writer, politician and linguist who served as adviser to Timurid King Hossein Mirza. Nawai belongs not only to Afghanistan where he was born, lived and died (Herat province). Many nations in the region have the honor to have connections with this great man whose mother tongue was Turkic Chagtai. Representatives from more than 10 countries of the region attended the Herat conference on Nawai not only as audiences, but they each had something to say about Nawai.
When President Ghani says in his message that commemoration of Nawai “means commemoration of an important chapter of cooperation between countries”, he means that the regional states can live in peace with each other. When an Uzbekistan official says that Tashkent is ready to rebuild Nawai’s tomb in Afghanistan’s Herat, this conveys a message of common culture and strengthening of these common things. Our ancestors were much closer to each other than we are now, they tried for expansion of the culture of peace and one person like Nawai could represent different societies by different perspectives such as birthplace and homeland, language and science.
Unfortunately, the situation changed later toward concerning matters. The neighbors started looking each other with the eyes of rival and this created distances or widened some distances already made. Foreign imperialists and expansionists who always want to be stronger by drinking the blood of poor people used the opportunity and encouraged us to become more rivals than friends to get their own goal “Divide and Rule”. When there are so many things that several nations are proud to and celebrate like Nowruz, then what is the need to live far from each other and call on the strangers to come from other continents and support us against our neighbors? We can use each others’ sources and share ours with them for development and advancement by following the path of our forefathers. If the nations of our region are united, they themselves can resolve their problems by helping each other. Now Afghanistan imports electricity from the neighboring countries which can be considered as sign of cooperation despite paying money. Our northern and southern neighbors use our soil as transit point for their export and import and that is also an example of cooperation that is hoped to further develop.
