As the Edinburgh International Book Festival enters its final weekend we heed the insistent call of the world outside. The Guardian's Jonathan Steele joins the barrister Sadakat Kadri to examine the tragedy of Afghanistan and the myths which surround sharia law. Steele argues that the US-led invasion of 2001 was condemned to repeat the failures of the Soviet invasion of 1979 because of a series of misunderstandings, of which the most pernicious was perhaps that the west had abandoned the country after the Soviet withdrawal. Kadri tells how interpreters of Islamic law have become progressively more ready to justify aggresion over the last three decades and what that means for the future.
The Argentine novelist Carlos Gamerro tells us how he just couldn't avoid the Falklands war in his first novel, The Islands, which has just been published in English. He examines how fiction can measure up to the horrors of a dictatorship and how the detective is the perfect vehicle for a literary investigation of society.
Reading list
Ghosts of Afghanistan by Jonathan Steele (Portobello)
Heaven on Earth by Sadakat Kadri (Bodley Head)
The Islands by Carlos Gamerro (And Other Stories)
