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The RSAA blog publishes new posts every week, covering the whole range of Asian current affairs, culture, travel, exploration and recent history from the Levant to East Asia. Browse our recent posts!
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Robert Twigger: 50 Years after Idries Shah’s The Sufis
Robert Twigger is an acclaimed travel writer who has written on Japan and the Nile. Here, as a guest blogger for the Asian Affairs Weblog, he hails the 50th anniversary of the publication of Idries Shah’s The Sufis: It is 50 years since the publication of Idries’ Shah’s ground-breaking The Sufis, with its introduction by…
Afghan Marble Trade – interview
Matthew Leeming is an RSAA member who works in Afghanistan with Milio International to develop Afghan marble mines and the country’s capacity to process and export the stone. He is also co-author of the Odyssey Companion and Guide to Afghanistan. Here, he answers questions from the Asian Affairs Weblog:Â What is the state of trade…
Afghan Boundary Commission 1885 – quest for photographs
During the work of the Anglo-Russian commission, which, with the agreement of the Amir, settled Afghanistan’s north-western border with the Russian Empire in 1885-6, a series of photographs were taken. Paul Bucherer, the Director of the Afghanistan Institute in Switzerland, has compiled a catalogue of these photographs, with copies displayed on the Institute’s Phototheca Afghanica…
The Peshawar School Attack
Dr Robin Edward Poulton, an RSAA member who has lived amongst Afghan villagers, offers a heartfelt response to the recent Taliban attack on the Peshawar Army Public School in Pakistan: Taliban butchers are Pashtun cowards by Robin Edward Poulton[i] If you sit of an evening beside a fire in the Pashtun heartlands, you will hear…