In the year 1993, German media reported on the burning of books in Afghanistan.  Pictures of intellectuals who became poor, selling their books on the street as fuel, were seen everywhere. The Mujaheddin took over the control and started to fight each other and for the first time, the war reached the capital, Kabul.

These reports gave the impulse for the foundation of the Mediothek für Afghanistan e.V. A group of German and Afghan students and scientists decided to collect books and other media about Afghanistan.

It was their aim to protect the intellectual inheritance of the country from the destructive strength of the war. The call for book donations was supported by many Islamic scientists and  researchers interested in Afghanistan, which also included a well known German scientist and researcher on Islam, Annemarie Schimmel, who later joined the advisory board of the organization.

Today's leader of the Mediothek, Ahmad Sultan Karimi, traveled determinedly to Kabul to save the library of his father, a lawyer and activist of the constitution movement, from the chaos of war. Under highly dangerous conditions he managed to take the 2000 works on donkey carts in big brass boxes to Pakistan. With that he put the foundation stone for the media collection which gave the Mediothek its name.

Sultan Karimi traveled from that time on to Afghanistan twice every year to buy additional books and establish contacts with intellectuals. Months before every journey, he had to let a beard grow to not be prosecuted by the Taliban, who were in the meantime ruling in parts of the country. A subsidiary of the Mediothek was opened in Pakistan to store the books.

The Mediothek got a second pivot leg as in the middle of the nineties: School projects. The rulers had suspended the payments of teachers’ wages. The Afghan state did not look after its public tasks anymore. The educational system collapsed because many teachers did not go to school anymore. For this reason the Mediothek started to initiate school projects of its own in Afghanistan. In addition, a school for Afghan refugee children was supported in Peshawar/Pakistan.

A third pivot leg joined at the end of the nineties. The Mediothek committed itself to the Afghanistan research increasingly. Since the war almost had made researches impossible, the scientific interest in the country had gone back steadily. With annual meetings, conference volumes and the construction of a researchers network the Mediothek did its best to revive the Afghanistan research

At the beginning of 2001, long before the fall of the Taliban regime, the Mediothek opened its second subsidiary in Kabul, to coordinate school projects from there and to be able to offer an incoming point to culture creating people. The Taliban accepted the Mediothek as a help organization - though only men with long beards were allowed to work there.

The Mediothek opened community forums in six provinces in May 2002 few months after the fall of the Taliban (in result of the attacks of September 11th, 2001 in the USA.) To this day, there was and there is hardly any public place where people can meet and exchange themselves in Afghanistan. This function should be taken on by the community forums.

Sultan Karimi had already built up the necessary local contacts during the war. The Mediothek was also in Kunduz actively long before the German public became interested in the town due to the creation of the German reconstruction team (PRT) at the end of 2003.

A community forum in Jaji in the province Paktia had to be closed again at the end of 2003. The employees were threatened by Islamic strengths who are particularly strong in the close bordering area to Pakistan. Also, the regular work of the forum was interrupted by combat missions of the U.S. commanded coalition troops regularly.