Tales of central Asia: the artist and the Islamist soldier

Adam Curtis traces (1 2) the relationship between conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti and 18th century Muslim rebel Sheikh Mansur who led the Chechens against the Russian empire under Catherine the Great. Mansur may have been born in Italy, a one-time monk called Giovani Batista Boetti who went to the region a missionary, fell in love with the daughter of a local leader, and converted to Islam. He was also, perhaps, an ancestor of the other Boetti - unless the letters from Mansur, found in Turin in the late 19th century, describing his Italian roots, were forgeries. Alighiero e Boetti, an artist with roots in the arte povera movement, arrived in central Asia - Afghanistan - in 1971. Seeking to expunge western ideas of creativity and individuality, the later Boetti paid Afghan weavers to produce embroidered designs for him, maps of the world and diagrams encoding the predicted date of his death. He also bought a hotel and took a lot of heroin; with the new flow of western travellers to the region, heroin became increasingly popular, and people started to smuggle it back to Europe. In the last few years, Italian soldiers have arrived in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, who are at once Islamist warriors and drug dealers.