Afghanistan has a rich history that could be pivotal in the much-vilified South-Central Asian country’s restoration. (Hector Welgampola, UCA News)

With links to ancient India’s Gandhara civilization, part of the area was immortalized as Kandahar, a name some Westerners trace to Iskander, or Alexander the Great. The Macedonian warrior stretched his empire in 334 BC to the borders of the Sassanian Empire. Another part was Bactria, homeland of Zarathustra, founder of Zoroastrianism.

In the first Christian century, Saint Thomas the Apostle preached the Gospel in the region, leading eventually to the growth of nine dioceses and an archdiocese. The area also includes Bamyan, which had links with the Buddhist-Taoist Jesus sutras. Sadly, in 2001 the city became better known for the desperate Taliban’s destruction of 6th-century Buddha statues.

Over cyclic phases of Islamization and Talibanization, the region became the cockpit of Western powers after Britain midwifed the birth of modern Afghanistan in the 19th century. As noted in Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Glimpses of World History,” the landlocked country was created as “a buffer State between the two great empires of Russia and England.”

FULL STORY

Other parts of Asia can offer multireligious lifeline to Afghans ^[1] (UCA News)

PHOTO

Afghanistan  (Flickr ^[2] / CC BY 2.0 ^[3])