There is a photograph taken in Tehran in 1979 by Hengameh Golestan, one of Iran’s most well-known photographers.
It depicts a large group of women, attired smartly in dresses and overcoats, some with smiles on their faces, some with their hands raised, made-up, elegant, distinguished, protesting the just-passed Hijab law.
Another one of Kabul, taken by a certain Dr Podlich, shows a classroom full of half a dozen or so people.
In the front, again, there are women, this time three of them, seated with their legs uncrossed, in thigh-length skirts, listening intently to what the teacher has to say. One of them betrays a dangerous seriousness; the other a patronising competence.
Staying in Kabul, this time in black and white, two medical students are discussing fervently with their professor. They are looking at the photo; it looks like a limb, but one cannot be sure.
They, too, are all female. They are perhaps discussing a new case, a patient, or the best way of going about carrying out their next assignment. All of them have short hair, tied up in exquisite buns and/or wavy pixie cuts. This one is taken in the 60s.
These are snapshots before my time, taken out of context, when my parents were barely teenagers. These are photographs presented to us to show us how certain places were before fundamentalist Islam took over, before the influence of politics combined with religion wreaked havoc with the free-flowing nature of certain societies.
Bangladesh, too, was like this at one time. It has, as I’ve grown older, been taken over by minute and irrelevant discussions on tiny details of Islam, by hijabs and niqabs, by mandatory visits to the mosque for every single waqt of prayer.
Our collective family albums could pay homage to a time before time, when the women stood straight on their wooden chairs and looked into the camera with daggers, and the men, always so straight while standing up, tastefully kept their ascetic faces stern and serious.
This kind of tendency to romanticise an age that has left us is not uncommon. We speak of the golden age as if it was something established, something the people were very much aware of at the time.
A time when everything was almost as it should be. Photographs such as these are shared with the thought that such an age we can never have back, but look, see how beautiful and lovely it was at that time.
How people connected, and cared, and lived for each other; how life was simple and easy and all we were happy with was the life we had and the people we knew.
In truth, however, such a time never existed. People of that time probably vied for a time before phones and televisions, and before that, for a time before radios perhaps. But it cannot be denied that we currently find ourselves at a very unique point in history.
With the advent of the Internet and other, faster means of communication, we have been placed in an age where we know more about us and the world around us than ever before.
We are able to, at once, know something instantly and let someone know instantly. Every one of us is a witness and a journalist, a victim and a criminal.
Everything has, in short, become something.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, political scientist Francis Fukuyama had said that we had reached “the end of history,” that we had established the correct method by which the world needed to run, ie democracy, and civil liberties were seen to be apex of people’s psychological and socio-political evolution.
But the story of radical Islam, especially post-9/11, has created a new history, a new wall that has created a divide, a dichotomy of extreme ideologies, between the East and the West, between liberalism and conservatism, between us and them.
These divides had, perhaps, always existed. But had they been so poignant in their implementation? Even the current idea of all-inclusive culture and society is a result of an acute awareness of the divisions which define us.
People like Donald Trump and groups like ISIS serve to highlight the fact that this divide is, in fact, very real and tangible. Heretics and extremists have been shoved together into a gladiator ring to fight to the death until only one victor remains, or none at all.
What some fail to realise is that there is no one true solution to any of these problems. Yes, it would be ideal if all of us were perfectly attuned to the needs of others, and respected each other’s cultures and religions, and wanted to live together in some perfect cocoon of self-actualisation without harming or oppressing our neighbours.
But that will never happen, not as long as our respective cultures are actively incompatible with what the other side has to say and believe.
So: Where are we headed? To bring up the issue of Trump and ISIS again, the fact that these people have a platform on which they stand, one which isn’t as shaky as we may want to believe, is troublesome, and could lead us everywhere and anywhere. When jokers can take over and pretend to run the world, it is only a matter of time before they start to do so for real.
We know that we are at a precipice, and the coming few years will change our world as we know it. We are headed towards lands unknown, shores untouched, skies that have yet to see the light of day.
When we reach there, though, will we come out the other side, our heads held high, or under the bleak, strange darkness of a wild and hostile empire?
