I was in the years of my adolescence when my country was overtaken by a political revolution and a change of government.
My country was still in the midst of rebuilding its own order when our western neighbour, which regarded itself as our rival, took advantage of the military weakness of those days, launched an armed invasion, and seized a wide expanse of our land.
Before the army and the government could accomplish anything or stand in the enemy’s way, it was the people who defended the borders with their own lives, who halted the enemy, and who fought for years until they drove him out of the motherland.
That war left behind close to a million dead and martyred, and my own two brothers were among them.
After the war, my years of travel began. I settled in several countries, learned several languages, met my wife, and together we began a life full of adventure. For more than thirty-five years I worked at several different occupations at once, and along the way I came face to face with a great many people: from princes of the Arab countries and well-known European figures to prominent politicians, international merchants, university professors and social activists. Few people, perhaps, have been granted so much good fortune all at once — to learn at close quarters from the thought, the belief and the way of life of such men and women.
In those years I saw many disagreements and many conflicts between nations, and alongside them I saw peoples who lived shoulder to shoulder in peace and calm. Joyful hardships and sorrowful calms, the poor and the rich, celebration and mourning — all of them stood forever face to face, and yet all of them lived side by side. Little by little I came to see that the waves of contradiction within societies are just like the waves of the sea: sometimes small, sometimes terrible. And I understood that the world we live in, if it is not tamed, can be very wild indeed.
One day I came to the conclusion that after every calm a storm is on its way, and after every storm a calm will come. I learned that in a time of peace one must think of war, and in the midst of war one must think of the time that comes after it. Those who think sooner, and seek a remedy sooner, will be the ones who prevail.
Now, decades after the Second World War and after that long era of the Cold War, I believe that behind this prolonged stillness the energy of a great war has gathered before us. If we do not decide soon to resolve the common problems of the world; if we do not shorten the distances between people; if we do not set discrimination aside; and if we do not find a wide and new discourse for mutual understanding between nations — then we shall lose the future.
The proposal I have prepared in this book for the people of my own time is one of those very remedies which could bring the world back to calm.
I hope you will take pleasure in reading this book — and that you will decide for the future sooner rather than later.
And now, at the end of this road, I have become a grandfather.
A child has just been born: small, helpless, and unaware of the world that awaits her. She does not yet know into which century she has opened her eyes, nor what trials this century holds in store for her generation. But I know. And because I know, my sleep is not easy.
If you want the truth of it, I wrote this book for no one as I wrote it for her.
So I offer these few pages as a gift to that newborn: to my own granddaughter, and through her to all the children of the earth who are opening their eyes in these years. I shall not see the world I wish for you. But if one day, in the world you build, people can go easily to visit one another; if no child in the remotest corner of the earth is left without medicine and without schooling; and if no mother is ever obliged to give up her child to a war without cause — then know that your forebears, to the measure of their strength, had tried.
The road I found, I set down on paper and entrusted to you. The building of it is yours.
May God keep you, and may He make the road smoother for you than it was for us.
Kianosh Rahmani, author