This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Stereotyping the Afghans
I would never classify myself as an expert, but I lived and worked for more than three years in Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad and have spent the past four years helping to get women — and many of my former colleagues — out of Afghanistan.
What Chris Bayliss asserts [BOYCOTTING AFGHANISTAN’S CRICKET TEAM WOULD DO NOTHING FOR WOMEN; ONLINE, 7 JAN] about Pashtun culture is an incorrect stereotype. It is true that traditional Afghan cultures aren’t progressive when it comes to women’s rights. But Taliban culture takes it much further.
Many men, particularly Pashtuns, want their children to be educated — the Taliban leaders ensure that their daughters study in Qatar and elsewhere. However, the idea that Taliban culture is Pashtun culture is wrong.
A cricket boycott against Afghanistan would work because the Taliban crave the legitimacy which would bring the release of frozen international funds that would both help the country and, more importantly, line Taliban pockets. Furthermore, such a boycott, and the loss of face it entails, would be deeply humiliating for them.
Ultimately it has to be the Afghan people who stand up for themselves and make change. Bayliss does what many foreigners have done: damning the Afghans with low expectations based on stereotypes and falsehoods.
Bronwyn Jones
Pristina, Kosovo
No thanks for the melody
Norman Lebrecht (MUSIC, DEC/JAN) is correct — the symphony must always be at the heart of orchestral concerts. I do not think, however, that his suggestion of introducing post-1975 symphonies by avant-gardists such as Maxwell Davies, Penderecki and Henze will do anything to help orchestras survive.
It is over 100 years since Schoenberg’s attempts to dismantle tonality and the net results continue to alienate much of the concert-going public.
I do, however, agree that we need new symphonies and there are unquestionably some as yet unheard, attractive works by composers who have turned their back on the avant-garde.
Speaking with experience as a composer of one such symphony myself, the problem is that if you contacted any major UK orchestra asking if it might be interested in giving your work an airing and offering to send a score, you probably wouldn’t even get an acknowledgement to your email.
John Petley
Cade Street, East Sussex
Parti pris, perhaps?
I recently read your article “How the Navy made Britain” by Phil Weir [DEC/JAN], a paean to Nicholas Rodger on the completion of his trilogy of books on British naval history.
I realise that it is not quite a book review: however, I would have expected Dr Weir to declare an interest if he is the same man mentioned in the foreword of the final volume in the trilogy, The Price of Victory: “Dr Philip Weir and Dr Kate Nicholls at different stages undertook much of the labour of compiling the appendices.”
To have directly contributed to the book he is so lavishly praising gives the appearance of a conflict of interest which may or may not have been mitigated by transparency.
Simon Harley
Seaton, Devon
The Editor responds: I am glad Mr Harley realises “that it is not quite a book review”, though perplexed by why he then complains about Dr Weir’s piece as if it were.
It is quite intentionally the “paean” he calls it. Who else should I have commissioned one of those from — an enemy of N.A.M. Rodger’s?
I’m glad we were able to run some praise for our greatest living naval historian, much as I’m happy to say here that I admire the excellent “Dreadnought Project” naval history wiki which Mr Harley helps run.
Picking nits
D. J. Taylor’s funny portrait of nitpicking Max Grub “Resentful Academic” [ARTY TYPES, DEC/JAN] surely needs no supplementing, but I can’t resist a slightly supercilious comment on Christopher Pincher’s odd conflation of tulip mania with “Merrie England” in the same issue.
The phrase about the “madness of crowds” to which he alludes came not from “Stuart scholars”, but from a Scot, Charles Mackay (1841), and the tulip bubble under discussion was an exclusively Dutch phenomenon of the previously hard-nosed 1630s; a far cry from the ritualistic world caught by Ronald Hutton in his classic account of Merry England after 1400.
Dr Matthew Scott
Kensington, London
Regiment of foot
You know you’re getting old when you realise cycle messengers are a dying breed [HENRY JEFFREYS, KNIGHTS ERRANT OF THE ROAD, DEC/JAN].
In my early days such duties were performed by someone on foot rather than bicycle, as many City businesses employed an in-house “messenger” — usually an old retainer in his seventies who trudged the familiar streets with documents and bank deposits. His wife was often employed as office tea lady.
Pensions weren’t as generous in those days. My grandfather (who graduated in 1892) was still pounding the pavements in his eighties.
Brian Page
Buckfastleigh, Devon
