Tamim Ansary

Mir Tamim Ansary (born November 4, 1948, in Kabul, Afghanistan) is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. He is the author of West of Kabul, East of New York, a book published shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and is a columnist for the encyclopedia website Encarta.

Ansary was born in Kabul and lived there until high school when he won a scholarship to Colorado Rocky Mountain School, an American boarding school. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he wrote a widely circulated e-mail that denounced the Taliban and warned that, although he believed that United States would need to be deployed in Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, that, in the Ansary's opinion, this could start a third world war. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age".

His book West of Kabul, East of New York is a literary memoir recounting his bicultural perspective on contemporary world conflicts. West of Kabul, East of New York was San Francisco's One City One Book selection for 2008. Ansary also edited and published a group of essays by young Afghans entitled, Snapshots: This Afghan American Life with funding from a 2008 grant from the Christianson Fund.

In the middle of 2008 Ansary gave a series of lectures to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, associated with San Francisco State University, on the history and development of Islam. This series was rebroadcast on the local affiliate of National Public Radio [KALW].

...
Wikipedia