{"book":"adl0957","page":147,"text":"110\n\njoke. Picnic parties are often arranged on holidays. They are\nvery fond of amusements. They play the flute, the rubab, a\nsort of lute or guitar, and the tanboor.\n\nBut the centre of Afghan life is the tea-house, hundreds of\nwhich dot every roadside. These are often clean open shelters\nwhich serve as clubs for the village people and passers-by.\nHere they gather round a big boiling samovar, quaffing tea, chat-\nting and discussing their social and economic problems in a friend-\nly atmosphere. Afghans are very fond of tea, especially green\ntea, drinking sometimes 15 to 20 cups in an hour. These tea-\nhouses are seldom without a rubabi (one who plays on the rubab)\nwith a large number of eager listeners making a circle around him\nkeeping time with the music and nodding their heads in apprecia-\ntion.\n\nThe Afghans love stories very much. The old men and\nwomen are great story-tellers, and the young folk listen with\ngreat interest to these stories, most of which are concerned with\nthe deeds of national heroes or those of genii and fairies. Dur-\ning winter they generally gather round the Sandali (a sort of\nstove) or the hearth, listening attentively to the grandma, who\nis an expert story-teller.\n\nThe basis of Afghan society is patriarchal, as it was in the\ndays of yore. Father or grandfather (generelly called Mushar\nor Spingere—the venerable old man) is the head of the family.\nHe must be consulted on all important family matters. No one\nshould marry without his sanction. Permission to marry a daugh-\nter of his family is asked of him by the suitor through the\nmediation of an intimate friend or elders of the locality. It is\na long and tedious process and sometimes takes weeks and\nmonths before an agreement is reached. The selection of the","chars":1758,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00147.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/147","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/147","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}