The Pass, which winds between hills on the course of two river beds, was once the route by which Islam was brought to the Indian subcontinent, to China, and to Southeast Asia. Today the Pass symbolizes the barriers between Islamic states and the degree to which Islam is itself presently embattled.

Since the September 11th attacks, which the U.S. government blames on Osama Bin Laden, all of Islam has come under suspicion by virtue of association. Finger-pointing at the Muslim world has prompted both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Muslim groups to speak out and distance themselves from the Taliban and bin Laden -- this at a time when it is politically necessary for Muslims to re-interpret their relationship with other Muslim groups.

Religions all have narrative accounts describing how their beliefs have spread: conversion narratives in Islam, Buddhism and Christianity, heritage narratives for Jews. The Khyber itself plays a role in the conversion stories of Pakistan and India's Muslim population, and now in the crisis narrative of Afghan Islam. It is at times like these, however, begging for interpretation as they do, that narratives open up at their "seams" --seams like the Khyber.

The area we now call Afghanistan has been Muslim since roughly the tenth century C.E., when Muslims successfully consolidated their political power; Muslims had established a presence in the region earlier, traveling East, but it took years to gain political control and build lasting Muslim dynasties. But the fundamentalism of the Taliban is far removed from the Muslim practices that have long been traditional in Afghanistan. This fundamentalism has less to do with preserving tradition than with destroying artifacts and behaviors that don't meet strict scriptural standards. If Taliban ideology is a method of reading Afghan history, it's reading with a sledgehammer.

Afghan Muslims have long created origin stories that cement their ties to their religion. Much of their pre-Islamic history has been lost, clearing the way for this inventive rewriting. To find a pleasing answer to the question of what religion their ancestors practiced before Islam, Afghans try to connect themselves to the pre-Islamic traditions most compatible with the word of the Prophet. The British historian of the Pathans (Afghanistan's largest and most widely-spread ethnic group), Olaf Caroe, writes of one such theory: "They seek to link obscure beginnings, in a manner half historical, half mythical, with the great figures of the Hebrews, Kings David and Solomon."

According to this story, the Pathans are descended from a lost tribe that declined, or was unable, to return to Jerusalem after the captivity in Egypt. Because Islam claims to be the next natural step in a Jewish-Christian-Muslim sequence of prophets, it seems only appropriate that Islam should reach a lost Jewish tribe and bring it back into the fold. Other stories describe a close Pathan follower of Mohammed himself, a wanderer from Afghanistan, returning home to recruit followers for the Prophet.

In some Pakistani Muslim narratives, the Khyber Pass itself becomes a symbol of Islam. Mohammad Shafi Sabir, a Pakistani writing in the middle of this century in Peshawar, the province closest to the Khyber, expresses this idea: "Among the millions of traders, travelers, adventurers, scholars, writers and poets who benefited by it were also those sacred people who after great toils entered the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent and spread the light of Islam in this land of infidels."

The adventure through which Islam brings salvation to the subcontinent, then, moves through the Pass. What is now a border was once a gateway. The Khyber is a site of many histories: the current refugee crisis, former trading missions, the battles which alternatively lost and won territory for the British Empire -- and more grandly, narratives like Sabir's that link the Pass to the fate of Islam itself.

As Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Ballad of the King's Jest," suggests, what became a trade route from British India to Afghanistan, and a space where British travelers would make the transition from Near East to an increasingly exotic South Asia, was also a route for information about later conflicts:

And there fled on the wings of the gathering dusk
A savour of camels and carpets and musk,
A murmur of voices, a reek of smoke,
To tell us the trade of the Khyber woke.

The poem that begins by describing the Khyber as a trade route ends with the British fear of a military threat from Russia: "The Russ is upon us, thy clamour ran? / Surely an hour shall bring their van."

The British used the Khyber region as a buffer zone to keep their sub-continental possessions out of the reach of the Russians. In the 19th century, the battle between the two powers for control over central Asia was referred to as the Great Game. Buffer states like Afghanistan itself (which the British helped to strengthen because it suited their political purposes) were the pawns that spared the powers direct military conflict. Kipling's poem illustrates the point that Afghanistan has often been entangled in the affairs of larger powers, and that the Pass, a natural route through the frontier, could become a focus for anxiety.

In the 20th century, Afghanistan again became a border state, between British India (and after Partition, Pakistan), other Islamic nations, and the Soviet Union; history already starting to repeat itself. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, support flowed to Muslim Afghan resistance fighters from Iran, Pakistan and the United States, allowing extremists to present a strong Muslim front against Soviet oppression. Even when they lost control over their territory, activists fought insecurity by creating myths of national cohesiveness, using a more conservative Islam as a rallying banner. We all have myths about our own righteousness, after all. One of the privileges of life in America is that, secure economically and territorially, we have less need for the recourse of fundamentalism. Cultural rather than military insecurity inspires our religious conservatives.

While Taliban fundamentalism reflects a new development in Muslim society, the recent destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is only one more chapter in a very old story. Muslim groups, who displaced the Buddhists who lived in this area before their arrival, destroyed their monuments as well. The Khyber Pass itself contains no remnants of Buddhist dwellings or temples, but there are ruined Buddhist stupas in the hills that the Pass winds through.

Muslim states all contain relics of their territory's non-Muslim past, of course; their decision to destroy or preserve that past helps characterize their relationships with Islam. The Taliban destroy relics because they offend the Taliban's reading of the Islamic prohibition against images, or because they speak too much of the past presence of non-Muslims in Taliban territory. If they continue on their present course, the Taliban will legitimatize their fundamentalist rule by simply creating an entirely fundamentalist Afghanistan. Their destruction of the Bamiyan statues appalled the world not only as an assault on a religious and artistic monument, but because the Will-zur-Macht style of that assault offended our sense of how politics ought to be done. Of course, in the face of such attacks, areas like the Khyber hills, heavily marked with the signs of a religiously diverse past, increase in preciousness.

Contemporary Afghanistan is beset by difficulties even without considering a potential Taliban-U.S. conflict: drought and starvation, heroin production and distribution, civil war. Both Iran and Pakistan closed their borders to Afghans fleeing their country soon after America began to deploy forces to the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan is caught up in a very different kind of Great Game now, and the meaning of its Islams has already been changed by the Taliban's actions. Border regions are places of great decision, and the refugees massed there now face the task of defining their own relationship with Islam.

We in the West, meanwhile, are in the process of creating several more popular myths about Islam. Some of us demonize it, some of us are terrified of the consequences of that demonization. The idea that it has been maligned as a "terrorist religion" has become widespread enough that George W. Bush warned against that characterization in his national address. He also retracted his initial pledge to launch a "crusade" against Osama bin Laden. We are all learning to treat such religious rhetoric with greater care. Moreover, we are learning that the current conflict will test our interpretive skills as well as our political savvy. To understand how Islam will be read and re-read in the future, we must first learn the history of its interpretations.

Sites important to that history, such as the Khyber Pass, now take on new meaning. As in Kipling's poem, it is once again where news of conflict may be heard, and one of the channels through which war's refugees may travel: "The trade the Khyber woke."