It’s 33C degrees in Rome. The beaches are already full and the bars are playing loud music serving cold beers. “The problem is not fasting,” says Youssef, a young Moroccan who works as a barman. “The problem is the environment. It is extremely difficult to remain in Ramadan mood while working on a beach.”

Indeed, being a Muslim in Italy is not an easy task. It is not only the hot weather, the 17-hour-long fast during Ramadan or the most infamous temptations of la dolce vita that��make staying devoted difficult. In largely Catholic but secular Italy, Islam is not yet recognized as an official religion. It is a political embarrassment for a European country that is home to almost 2 million Muslims.

“The first official request was made the early 1990s,” explains Mohammed Ben Mohammed, a Tunisian who’s lived in Italy for over 20 years and current president of one the oldest Islamic centers in Rome, Associazione Culturale Islamica in Italia. “It has been over 25 years that we are still waiting.”

Integration

Meanwhile, the Muslim community has been working hard to integrate with the local society. The Islamic center, where Mohammed also serves as imam, for instance, is located in one of the most important suburbs of eastern Rome. In a little over a decade, this working-class corner of the city previously known mainly for its high crime rate has become an important hub for both commercial and social life, and not only of the Arab-Roman community.

Mohammed Ben Mohammed © Elena Hanim Onem

Although the gentrification process is related to many factors, it is significant that the mosque did not result in the creation of an immigrant “ghetto,” as many would have feared. “We are perfectly integrated with the local society,” Mohammed says proudly. “Even after 9/11 we never had the negative reaction from our neighbors. The only problems come from media and politics.”

The public debate around Islam in Italy is, in fact, extremely shallow. When major network channels visit the local mosques, they usually do so only to ask for comments about the latest terrorist attacks in Europe or to question the building violations of informal mosques. Articles and commentary about Islam are mainly relegated to terrorism and women’s rights issues.

This has created not little diffidence, especially from the Muslim immigrant community, which is a large majority. Many avoid making public comments for fear of being misunderstood due to language limitations. Others, however, are quite outspoken.

In Tor Pignattara, a multiethnic area in Rome inhabited mainly by the Bangladeshi community, public events about Islam are not a rarity, especially during Ramadan. One in particular was organized by Dhuumcatu, an association created in the 1992 by Bangladeshi migrants with the aim to improve intercultural dialogue in Rome. The idea of Dhuumcatu was to offer iftar dinner to the neighbors, making Italians more aware of Muslim practices.

It did not pass unnoticed that some of the commari — typical Italian gossipy neighbors — began to eat before sunset, while the Muslims were still waiting. “We know it is more out of naiveté than rudeness,” was the comment. “Events like that are extremely important,” adds Paola, an Italian woman who took her family to eat the offered meal. “Unfortunately, they receive little support and publicity by the local institutions,” she notices.

Since the Time of Mussolini

The official recognition of Islam as a religion would certainly be an important step to implement at an institutional level. Back in the 1920s, Benito Mussolini is reported to have said an absolute “no” to the construction of a mosque in Rome. But it was in fact , and in a very fashionable area. Today, the Mosque of Rome is��, although it��is not officially recognized as a mosque, but remains registered as an Islamic cultural center.

Certainly, Italy has changed a lot since Mussolini’s time. Yet, “In 10 months that I am here, I realized that Italians have very little��knowledge of Islam,” notices Salah Ramadan Elsayed, the��Egyptian imam of the Mosque of Rome who graduated from the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Elsayed studied languages and translation at Sapienza University of Rome and fell in love with the city. Now, he is back in the Italian capital with the difficult task of defeating the widespread prejudice toward Islam. “Many Italians and Europeans are actually very interested in knowing the reality of Islam,” he explains. “I think they perceive there is something wrong about the image they receive in the media, so they come to this Islamic center to find out the truth.”

The mosque��is indeed the referent point for the Muslim community in Italy. Its minaret is the only one in the city, and serves as a symbol of Islamic culture, integration and prosperity at the heart of Catholicism. It did not take long before it became part of the city’s life. Not only people interested in Islam come here, but also those who come for the exotic sweets and spices of the Friday market.

Mosque of Rome © Elena Hanim Onem

Now, even this monument appears in a state of decay. The complex had been supported and maintained by wealthy Arab kingdoms, but now the price of Middle Eastern wars, the growing international prejudice and the local economic crisis reached this corner of religious crossroads. Consequently, the notorious Roman nonchalance toward strangers has gone��into decline. “I believe it is up to us to make Italians understand a bit more about Islam,” says Mousumi Mridha, who works at Dhuumcatu. “Sometimes when I wear the niqab, I see that many get scared, so I often stop to explain why they shouldn’t be.”

Thus, many Islamic centers are opening their doors during Ramadan, inviting community representatives and institutions to share the iftar moment with the local Muslim community. They also offer donations and meals to the many refugees who find themselves in a foreign country without any support. But, as Imam Elsayed says, speaking on behalf of the Italian Muslim community: “We certainly need to do more.”

An obstacle to the official recognition of Islam in Italy is the lack of interest in Italian politics to find an agreement for integration. Many Muslims, although born in Italy, do not have Italian citizenship due to the constant delay of the ius soli law (“law of the soil”), which would grant Italian citizenship to those born in Italy to foreign parents. As a consequence, political representation and power of influence for raising Muslim concerns on a political level also becomes an issue. Italian political will and Islam find themselves at an impasse.

Grassroots society, however, seems to be a few steps ahead. Every day, in the blocks of the Italian cities and towns, both Muslims and locals are working in the important effort of cultural sharing: “It is when you are not familiar with something that you perceive it as a stranger. This is normal in every society,” explains Mohammed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Whether known to be the graveyard of empires or the land of lions, Afghanistan has always been perceived as the motherland of fearless, rural fighters. Yet the view of a mountainous, ruthless country does not give justice to the beauty of this historic land, regulated for centuries by codes and institutions that incorporated progressive thinking. Over 30��years of war and an unstoppable campaign against local tribal customs have contributed to enforce this conventional wisdom, portraying Afghans as conservative extremists who oppose any form of modernization.

Not surprisingly, this stereotype is also used by the Islamic State (IS). The group first set foot on Afghan soil in 2014, and it announced the establishment of the so-called Province of Khorasan the following year. “The people of Khurasan in general love Islam and warfare,” Shaykh Hafidh Said Khan, the appointed wali of Khorasan, told the IS��Dabiq��magazine, “and because of this, the region has a dormant force for supporting tawhid and jihad.”

The use of the term Khorasan is not casual. Historically, it refers to a broader area that includes northern Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The actual boundaries, however, have been the subject of tales and narratives that extend them to include the southern-central provinces of Afghanistan.

A controversial���󲹻徱�ٳ� (sayings of Prophet Muhammad), in particular, has later engraved the region with a deep symbolic meaning across many Islamist groups. It is said that an army will rise up from this region bearing a black banner, and it will lead Muslims to the final victory against the enemies of Islam. This has encouraged speculation, particularly referring to Afghanistan, spreading the belief that the Taliban or other groups like IS could be the prophesied army.

Religious Crossways

What many, including the Islamic State today, ignore is how the Afghan Islamic tradition is profoundly unrelated to this apocalyptic view. Throughout history, Afghan nationalist movements have been inspired by an Islam that did not fear to include elements of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, for centuries making Afghanistan one of the most spiritual and tolerant religious crossways. Even nowadays, in the old city of Kabul you can find an old temple where people worship Baba Ratan, a Sufi saint for Muslims and a guru for Hindus and Sikhs, famous for having professed miracles across India and Afghanistan, including Jalalabad, Kabul, Peshawar and Khorasan.

The impact of his teachings and poems is still alive in today’s Afghanistan, along with the spiritual footprint of other Sufi thinkers. Popular poetry, strictly related to religion and society, uses vocabulary of human rights and national pride, and Sufi scholars are believed to be the real architects of Afghan society.

This ascetic approach toward life is not relegated to the intellectual Afghan class. Afghan politicians recite lines of poetry in their speeches, and farmers use their birds as metaphors for life, recalling, perhaps, the lines that Iman Ghazali, the great 11^th-century Sufi, wrote��during his last state of illness: “A bird I am: This body was my cage/But I have flown leaving it as a token.” Even conservative clerics often use poems in Friday prayers, and the most violent warlords prefer to have pictures of themselves taken with flowers rather than an AK47.

“Many Muslims around the world do not agree with the way of Sufism, and this is saying a lot about Afghan people. Things have changed in the past years, but most of our people are still very moderate, compassionate and caring about each other. We are one of the few cultures which have to allow Sufism to grow,” explains Mahmud Kaber Khalili, grandson of the great poet Khalilullaj Khalili and son of the political leader Masood Khalili. In his book,��Afghanistan Decoded, Mahmud Khalili has dedicated an entire chapter to his family’s historical��hujra—a meditation room built in 1962 decorated only by poems.

Even during wartime, the hujra has been preserved with the highest respect by mujahedeen and Taliban alike. Poetry, in fact, has always been considered to have a powerful social role in Afghanistan, and people from different economic and social background pay the same level of respect to poets. Poetry festivals are held regularly in many provinces of the country, even the ones controlled by the Taliban, who have a long-standing poetic tradition.

��brings together over 200 poems about grief and battle, as well as love and mysticism. Contrary to music, banned under the Taliban as religious propaganda, poetry had little to do with political ideology, and more with local traditions that characterized the Afghan identity.

Cultural Peculiarities

The Afghanistan Ministry of Information and Culture has repeatedly lamented this misinterpretation of Afghan culture, and how the international community has paid so little attention to this fundamental peculiarity of the Afghan life. “We are the victim of terrorism,” says the spokesperson of the ministry, Haroon Hakimi. “It is unfortunate that birthplace of so many scholars who were spreading peace and love to the world has been affected by war, and known mainly for that.”

Sufism, in fact, has been used as a counterterrorism strategy by the West, but not as a source of interpretation and understanding of a great civilization. Khorasan’s Sufi intellectuals and poets such as Rumi are popular in the West, but not well-known for their religious beliefs and spiritual interpretations.

Indeed, the Khorasan region is also home��of rigid interpretations of Islam, such as the Deobandi school, to which groups such as the Taliban belong. This interpretation is not much different from the Wahhabi teachings that inspired the Islamic State, and yet the space for political and social debate has always characterized this part of the region.

Baqi Hilaman Ghaznawi, a Sufi scholar and writer of many books in Dari and Pashto, explains: “Taliban are not al-Qaeda or Daesh [Islamic State]. In the 1990s, when they arrived, they respected our spiritual traditions.”

It is this spiritual narrative that characterizes the Khorasan region more than war and conservatism. The aesthetic passion for poetry and emotion of Afghans is something that can be felt in every aspect of their every day like. Yet neither the West nor the Islamic State are ready to recognize it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Lashkar-gah. Hospitals are tough. The disinfectant smell trapped inside these walls, along with that of plastic furniture, would flood anyone with a sense of anxiety. Yet here in Helmand, one of the most troubled provinces in Afghanistan, there is no space for laments and sorrows. “My job is to manage the pain, from the beginning, to the middle and after. Afghans never complain about pain. We have a ward full of kids, and you never see them crying,” says Joseph Rumley, the anaesthesiologist working with Emergency—an international medical charity who provide free health care to the victims of war in the province.

Indeed, suffering is a universal feeling. However, much of its extension depends on the relation between lack and desire, expectations and perception of self. “My biggest dream is to go home, have my family kill our own sheep, and eat it all together to celebrate my return,” says a 12-year-old girl, injured by a crossfire bullet while she was having breakfast with her mum and aunt in her house. She is from Marjah, one of the most highly-contested districts between the Taliban and the Afghan National forces.

A Different Destiny

For her, as well as for many of the young children living in these areas, it seems difficult to imagine something better than living peacefully with their family, gathered around a table heavy with food and drinks. Conflict has perforated the daily life of the local people so deeply, that sorrow has become a natural aspect of their existence. The knowledge and space for imagining a different destiny is something that does not belong either to their reality or to their dreams: “I never think about future. I never ask myself how and when all this will change. I have come to accept it, and I all I do is putting my faith in the hand of Allah,” says a man in his 50s, who is suffering from multiple injuries.

The battle for the control of Helmand, a Taliban’s traditional power base, has lasted for years and had lately intensified. Of the 14 districts, five have fallen to the Taliban and the others are heavily contested. Over 3,000 British forces in charge of defeating the insurgency in the area have left at the end of 2015, with the NATO-led Resolute Support mission coming to an end. Few of them remain working with the Afghan National Defense as strategy advisors, leaving the control of the military operation to the Afghan forces.

The Afghan National Army (ANA), backed by US airstrikes, is not present in sufficient numbers and struggles between lack of ammunitions and support from the national unity government. The reasons for this are difficult for the locals to understand. People speak about the capital Kabul as an outside world, far from their daily reality. The alienation is the result of a political unrest—of corruption, confusing strategies and perpetuation of an uncomfortable reality on the ground that goes to way back before the international troops started to withdraw.

If it is true that justice is the shield of the weak, Afghanistan seems to have regressed to a state of lawlessness, where few can enjoy life, an even the fittest struggle to survive. “The truth is that no one want to leave our country in peace,” says a young man stuck in the hospital bed for over two months due to a heavy leg fraction. Heavily medicated, he is ranting against foreign powers, unidentified local enemies and his right to pain. Because even pain in Helmand has become a luxury.

“I do not know what to think about my life. I have no hope in something different, I just deal with that,” says Chaista, a 19-year-old nurse, as she dresses the wounds of a child; like many other Afghans, she goes by just one name. Her life is divided between the walls of this hospital and her home in a village nearby. The fear that RPGs might hit her courtyard at night has become coexistent with her need for sleep. There is no space left for other thoughts and dramatic reflections. Children around her are dying in the minefields as they go to buy bread. Women are caught in the crossfire inside their homes—an environment that is supposed to be sacred and secure. Men are repeatedly injured on the battlefield: once, twice, maybe more, until they die.

A Surreal Struggle for Life

Life, whatever it means, must go on. “We did not see any changes in the past decade. It has always been like that, and probably will always be,” says Tawus, the head of local nurses at Emergency hospital. He, as many of his colleagues, does not see his work as simply a job. Free medical assistance, they all say, is the only kind of support they can give to their people.

In a surreal struggle for life, the maintenance of a functional body has become the last sign of presence given to human dignity. To those who visit their loved ones in hospital, this attempt is demonstrated by wearing their best dress: “Family is very supportive here, many comes from far away villages although the roads are very dangerous,” says Vesna Nestorovic, the medical coordinator of Emergency.

Yet, the sparkling of traditional local hats and hijabs can’t cover the dirt left as a sign of a struggling existence filled by a tormented resignation. While the international community was focused on removing cultural barriers, challenging the Afghan traditional way of life, it has failed to guarantee the conditions for an environment that allows any man to imagine something little more than bare survival. This is why, after years, the battle for Helmand is something that locals find difficult to understand.

No one has ever asked for their opinions. No one has ever listened to their laments. Even now, both belligerent sides keep failing to warn civilians of the beginning of their military operations, and bullets enter living rooms, interrupting the most normal daily activities. If freedom was the main objective of the international community, the world should know that after 15 years of intervention, Afghans still not have the freedom to cope with their grief. And yes, they have surrendered to that, not to anything else.

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The idea first started in New York City’s Soho district and arrived in Kabul’s Karte Seh—a recently rebuilt residential area. “[A] few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the co-working space of a friend in New York,” says Suleman Fatimie, a 36-year-old Afghan entrepreneur and the founder of the initiative. “I [got] inspired: Why not do something similar here in Afghanistan?”

, the first co-working space ever established in the country, is located inside the Afghanistan Centre for Excellence—a management consulting firm where Fatimie is a managing partner. From the outside it appears like any modern Afghan building, surrounded by walls with a central garden and enclosed by other��compounds. Inside, a fresh breath of warm colors and coffee inundate the office rooms, decorated with trendy designs and traditional elements of Afghan culture.

Bag Full of Ideas

There is a volleyball courtyard, a mini gym and a prayer room where men and women alternate in the time dedicated to salah��(prayer). But there are also meeting, conference and silence rooms, along with common areas where you can take a break and chat. The 50 employees of the Afghan Centre for Excellence, graduates from the best universities of the region, share the same facilities, increasing the opportunity for networking and enjoyable leisure time.

“[It is] not easy for Afghan[s] to accept the idea of not having a dedicated office,” explains Fatimie. “But slowly, we are getting used to it.”

His business models are Google and Facebook, but the environment he and his team have created recalls aspects of the unique Afghan resourcefulness: “Here, when you wake up in the morning, you do not know if you are going to come back home alive. In an environment like that, we want to make sure the internal environment here is as much fun as possible.”

At the Afghan Centre of Excellence, they already call him “the creative man.” His bakery, Khanagi, opened few months ago in one of the most popular areas of Kabul, Shar-e Now, and it is already an icon to both Afghans and internationals. Yet Fatimie’s innovative approaches to work and the idea of a co-working space were greeted with concern by some of his employees. At the beginning, some women felt uncomfortable with the idea of not having their own private office. Others believed that sharing common spaces with “outsiders” could cause distractions from office duties.

Daftar © Ahmad Reshad Karim

However, this was not to last. Soon the project was welcomed and many have embraced the idea enthusiastically. Now Fatimie’s aim is to contrast a rigid hierarchy work model and support local start-ups by offering them a stimulated environment for $225 a month.

Co-working spaces have become one of the fastest-growing global trends over the last decade, but the idea is definitely new to Afghanistan. In the major urban centers, young people are still struggling to complete their education—divided between work and family duties. After graduation, the market offers very little reward for their efforts. The voice of youth in Afghanistan, as with other traditional societies, is rarely considered, and elders’ opinion is always more valued.

“When I [came] back from a year study abroad,” says Abdulhay Sadrey, a senior manager at the center, “I had a bag full of ideas, but it was hard to convince my friends and network to believe in it.”

Frustration

The frustration of a donor-based economy is also a major challenge.����private investment slowed down significantly in 2014, evidenced by a drop of nearly 50% in new firm registrations since 2012. A high unemployment rate forces many Afghans to work in the aid sector for foreign organizations, and ideas for creating new businesses remain largely unheard of.

Amid a hopeless, significantly traumatized society, pragmatism is more accepted than innovation, and loans are rare and difficult to obtain. Moreover, there are the basic budgetary needs to start a business. In Kabul, renting a building costs around $500 a month. However, with the cost of security and high-speed internet, the minimum budget of running an office exceeds $1,000.

Meeting the right contacts is extremely difficult. Besides the embassy networking channels and few Western institutions, there are no other public spaces where networks can be generated. Afghans meet mainly in private due to both security and cultural reasons. Insurgency groups have attacked several restaurants in recent years, and others had to close under security pressure and consequent economic challenges.

Suleman Fatimie at the Afghan Centre for Excellence © Ahmad Reshad Karim

By creating a co-working space, the aim is to help new start-ups to cope with these difficulties: “At Daftar, we would like to see a combination of established small companies and also have representative[s] of big companies. But mainly, we would like to see start-ups coming up and help them to grow,” Suleman explains.

Fatimie himself started as a young entrepreneur in Afghanistan with very little private investment but many ambitions. Having grown up in Pakistan, where his family fled in 1980 during the Soviet occupation, he moved to Egypt during his university days and finished his education in London. In 2012, he moved back to Kabul, switching between aid donors and the private sector.

After gaining enough experience, he thought it was the right time to implement his ideas and established a��management consultancy firm. Now, by creating a co-working space, he and his colleagues hope to facilitate the efforts of other young people who are facing the very same challenges.

“With a co-working space, people coming from different sectors can sit beside each other and share ideas. It is a unique benefit,” says Sadrey, who is also part of the committee entitled to select the suitable candidates for the workstations offered.

The first elected to join this initiative is Ahmad Naweed Ahmadzai, the Microsoft representative in Afghanistan. “It an amazing place,” he says, “far away from traffic and chaotic noise. I am so glad to work here.”

Representatives of small businesses, consultants and new local start-ups have also showed interest in renting space at Daftar. For now, there are just eight places available, but there are plans to expand soon.

“We would like to open other co-working offices also in Mazar Sharif and Herat,” mentions Fatimie.

The only requirements for being part of the project are: a positive attitude, a passion for teamwork and flexibility. These attitudes not only act as a catalyst of change toward a business mentality, but also as inspiration for a generation of youth, struggling every day to prove that creativity is alive and kicking in Afghanistan.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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