by Rod Nordland
DEDICATION
In memory of my mother,
Lorine Elizabeth Nordland
EPIGRAPH
With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.
ROMEO AND JULIET, ACT 2, SCENE 2
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Dramatis Personae
Map: On the Run in Afghanistan
Prologue
1 Under the Gaze of the Buddhas
2 Dead Father’s Daughter
3 Zakia Makes Her Move
4 A Rabbi Among the Mullahs
5 A Beautiful Place to Hide
6 Mystery Benefactor
7 Honor Hunters
8 The Irreconcilables
9 Birds in a Cage
10 Reluctant Celebrities
11 Back to the Hindu Kush
12 Mullah Mohammad Jan
13 In the Land of the Bottom-Feeders
14 A Dog with No Name
Epilogue
Supplementary Material:
The Jihad Against Women
Other Battles in the Afghan War of the Sexes
Photo Section
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Zakia, Ali’s lover, third daughter of Zaman and Sabza;
and
Mohammad Ali, Zakia’s lover, third son of Anwar and Chaman.
THE AHMADIS
Mohammad Zaman, Ahmadi family, Kham-e-Kalak village, father of Zakia;
Sabza, his wife, mother of Zakia;
Gula Khan, his second son, older brother of Zakia;
Razak, his fourth son, youngest brother of Zakia.
THE SARWARIS
Mohammad Anwar, Sarwari family, Surkh Dar village, father of Ali;
Chaman, his wife, mother of Ali;
Bismillah, his eldest son, brother of Ali;
Ismatullah, his second son, brother of Ali;
Shah Hussein, his nephew, cousin of Ali.
OTHERS
Najeeba Ahmadi, director, Bamiyan Women’s Shelter;
Fatima Kazimi, Bamiyan Province director, Ministry of Women’s Affairs;
Manizha Naderi, executive director, Women for Afghan Women;
Shukria Khaliqi, lawyer, Women for Afghan Women.
MAP: ON THE RUN IN AFGHANISTAN
Zakia and Ali escaped captivity and eloped, but were hunted by both Afghan police and vengeful family members. They managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers in the rugged mountains of central Afghanistan, traveling by foot, in cars and buses, and even by air to neighboring Tajikistan. The couple spent their honeymoon in caves and their first anniversary still in hiding.
PROLOGUE
It was a cold clear February day when we finished our first visit to see Afghanistan’s most famous young lovers and went out to what passes for an airport in Bamiyan town—a broad cinder runway with a fine view of the cliff niches that once held the Great Buddhas. There was a cyclone fence around a few shipping containers, one of which was the waiting room, another the office of airport management. The United Nations and a private Afghan company, East Horizon Airlines, which had some aging Russian turboprop craft, flew in only a couple of times a week so there wasn’t much point in real infrastructure. I remember sitting in the waiting room container next to a bukhari, the flimsy, usually rusted stove that burns everything from wood and chips to coal and diesel oil, trying to stay warm as I wrote my first article for the New York Times about the lovers. I thought, what a great story, though sad, and with a follow-up that was a death foretold. I expected that the next and final article would be about how the girl’s family came one night and dragged her from the shelter or how, out of loneliness and despair or a misguided willingness to believe in her brothers’ promises, she would emulate the example of so many other Afghan girls who left shelters to return to their families, believing they’d be safe, and were never seen alive again. We would all be outraged and then turn the page.
That’s how such stories usually end, but I was wrong, and theirs was just beginning.
1
UNDER THE GAZE OF THE BUDDHAS
Her name was Zakia. Shortly before midnight on the freezing-cold eve of the Persian New Year of 1393 she lay fully clothed on her thin mattress on the concrete floor and considered what she was about to do. She had on all her colorful layers—a long dress with leggings under it, a ragged pink sweater, and a long orange-and-purple scarf—but no coat, because she did not own one. The only thing she did not have on were her four-inch open-toed high heels, since no one would wear shoes indoors in Afghanistan; instead the heels were positioned beside her mattress, neatly left shoe on the left, right on the right, next to the little photograph she had of Ali, the boy she loved. It was not the best escape gear for what she was about to do—climb a wall and run off into the mountains—but it would soon be her wedding day, and she wanted to look good.
That night of March 20, 2014, was not the first time Zakia had contemplated escaping from the Bamiyan Women’s Shelter, which had been her home, her refuge, and her prison for the past six months, since the day she ran away from home in the hope of marrying Ali. Always before, her nerve had failed her. Two of the other girls who shared her room were awake as well, but they would make no move unless she did first. Though Zakia was still terrified and did not know if she had the courage to leave, she felt she was fast running out of both time and opportunity.
This was no small thing, although Zakia was then eighteen and legally an adult, a voluntary shelter resident rather than a prisoner, and in the eyes of Afghan law she was free to go whenever she pleased. But the law is only what men make it, and nowhere is that more true than in Afghanistan. What Zakia was about to do would change not only her life and that of Ali, who waited for her call on the other side of the Bamiyan Valley. She understood that it would change the lives of nearly everyone they knew. Her father, Zaman, and her mother, Sabza; her many brothers; and her male first cousins—they would all give up their farm and devote their lives to hunting down Zakia and Ali, publicly vowing to kill them for the crime of being in love. Ali’s father, Anwar, would be forced into such debt that his eldest son would lose his inheritance, and most of the family’s crops would be forfeited for years to come. Others would be touched in unexpected ways. A woman named Fatima Kazimi, who ran the women’s ministry in Bamiyan and had recently saved Zakia from being killed by her family, would flee to exile in Africa. Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi from New Jersey who that night scarcely knew how to pronounce Zakia’s name, would end up consumed by her case, lobbying at the highest levels of the United States government to intervene on her behalf. In the course of it all, this illiterate and impoverished girl who did not know her numbers up to ten and had never seen a television set would become the most recognizable female face on the Afghan airwaves. She would become a hero to every young Afghan woman who dreams of marrying the one she loves rather than the one chosen for her by her family, sight unseen. To the conservative elders who preside over their country’s patriarchy, however, Zakia would become the fallen woman whose actions threatened the established social order, actions that were yet more evidence of the deplorable interference of foreigners in Afghanistan’s traditional culture.
That is where I came in, because the articles1 I wrote about Zakia and Ali in the New York Times in 2014 would bring them that fame and arouse the ire of the conservative Afghan establishment. I didn’t know it at the time, but bef
ore long I would become their best hope to survive, entangling myself in their lives in ways that threatened my own values and professional ethics. That night, though, on the eve of the spring equinox and the Persian New Year,2 I had no idea what they were up to and was three days’ travel away from them elsewhere in Afghanistan. We were the last people on one another’s minds.
I had visited them in Bamiyan only a month earlier, so when I later heard what had happened, it was easy enough to picture the scene. For some reason the words of the Robert Browning poem “Porphyria’s Lover” sprung to mind, perhaps because it was about an impatient lover awaiting the arrival of his beloved:
The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
For elms, substitute the silver birches that are arrayed in proud double rows extending from the southern side of the Bamiyan Valley, where the women’s shelter was, along farm lanes cutting down toward the river that runs through it. Tall and slender, the birches are reminiscent of the needle cypresses that flank the lanes of Etruria, except that the silvery backs of their leaves and the mica-like bark all seem to sparkle even in the starlight. Bamiyan town is the capital of the province of the same name, a highland area on the far side of the Hindu Kush mountains, a place of green valleys between barren and forbidding ranges a long way from anywhere. The town is ranged over two broad flatlands on the southern side of the Bamiyan Valley; the lower one holds the ancient town, a collection of mud buildings little different from those there thousands of years ago, interspersed with newer concrete ones, the metal doors on shops in the bazaar painted in primary colors, and, not far below that, the river, still with patches of ice in the middle and snow on its banks.
A few hundred feet higher and farther south, there is the broad plateau that holds the small airport, with its terminal of containers,3 and a collection of new-build masonry edifices, which were mostly government and aid-group offices. These were constructed by foreign donors along freshly asphalted roads, engineering marvels donated by the Japanese or Korean governments, which are perfectly straight and flat but go nowhere in particular. Among those buildings is the shelter that Zakia was preparing to flee.
Bamiyan town, when it was lucky, would get four hours of electricity a day. There was none at this late hour, so there was no city glare from the darkened town, only the reflected brilliance of the firmament. Earlier in the evening, there was a cold, drizzling rain, but temperatures dropped around midnight and it became a light, windy snow.
The roadside birches promenade from the bottom of the valley up to the elevated plateau, where, even in the dark and at a distance of some two miles from the cliff faces, the niches that once held the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan are impressive. Their huge size and gaping black shapes are at once apparent and on first glance breathtaking, so unlike anything else in the world. The cliffs are just north of the river. The statue of Nelson from Trafalgar Square would be lost within the smaller, eastern niche, where once the Buddha known as Shahmama stood; the larger, western niche that held the Buddha known as Solsal could swallow the Statue of Liberty whole. Ancient craftsmen carved these with hammer, pick, and chisel in a labor of love that lasted lifetimes. Throughout history, Solsal and Shahmama were the two tallest standing Buddhas on the planet.4 They were fourteen centuries old when they were destroyed over a few days in 2001 by the Taliban, who ranged tanks in front of them and blasted away and then finished them off with high explosive charges.5 The Taliban rampaged through this valley during their regime, killing the Hazaras who live here by the thousands, motivated by hatred of their race (Asian rather than Caucasian) and their religion (Muslim, but Shiite rather than Sunni). The Taliban could not, however, destroy the whole vast sandstone cliff, a tawny golden color that reflects well in the darkness and remains an arresting sight. Between and around the niches of the Great Buddhas is a honeycomb of ancient passageways and caves, comprising monks’ cells and shrines, some as big inside as the nave of a European basilica, others only a tiny chamber for a long-ago hermit. The cliffs themselves appear to have been flattened by the carvings of ancient hands, to make smooth canvases from which to excavate their shrines, nearly a millennium and a half ago.
All of which is more than just the backdrop to the story of the lovers Zakia and Ali, who as young children fled with their families into the higher mountains when the Taliban came to the valley and who returned after the massacres were over. What happened here long ago, and not so long ago, made these two young people who they are. It shaped not only the destiny that they had defied but also the other one they were on the verge of making on this night when the mountains all around them were struggling to hold on to winter and the Persian New Year was about to begin. In ways odd and thoroughly unexpected, the Taliban had turned Zakia and Ali’s entire world on its head and by both their defeat and their bitter resurgence had made the story of these lovers what it would be. Without the Taliban there would have been no Western intervention; without a Western intervention, the story of Zakia and Ali would have been a short tale with a bloody ending.
The warlords who fought the Taliban and later helped form the Afghan government that replaced them were, where women were concerned, as bad as and sometimes worse than the Taliban. Only the insistence of the Western countries on equal rights for women led to a constitution and laws that protected women, at least legally. Culturally was another matter. In recent years, as the Taliban threatened to return to power, Afghan leaders and their Western allies had grown unwilling to expend political capital challenging cultural conservatives on the government side. As a result most gains on behalf of women were made in the early years after the Taliban’s fall, with relatively little accomplished once the resurgent Taliban became a more potent threat after 2012. Western intervention had made it legal for Zakia to choose her own spouse and even to run away with him, but now Western timidity had stranded Afghan women like her in an uncertain limbo of cultural and official hostility.
Zakia was Tajik, and Ali was Hazara; she was Sunni, and he was Shia. Zakia’s family was opposed to her marriage on cultural, ethnic, and religious grounds. Now that she had run away, she’d violated another cultural taboo. In Afghan culture a wife is her husband’s property; a daughter is her father’s property; a sister is her brother’s. It is the men in a woman’s life who decide whom she will marry, and by running off with someone else Zakia was not just defying their will but stealing what they viewed to be rightfully theirs.
Ali stood outside the earthen wall surrounding the low mud buildings of his family farm compound in the village of Surkh Dar, on the far side of the Bamiyan Valley from the women’s shelter that held Zakia. The village was a short way outside Bamiyan town, a few miles past the larger, westernmost of the Buddha niches. Ali was twenty-one then, three years older than Zakia. He stuffed his gloveless hands into the pockets of his faux leather jacket, but it provided little warmth. He, too, was dressed in his finest, getting ready to meet his lover, the woman he hoped soon to make his wife. On his feet were his tan leather shoes with pointy toes, the only pair of footwear he owned besides plastic sandals. If it were not for the holes worn through the sides of their uppers and the caked mud on their soles, these shoes would have seemed more at home on the cobbled lanes of Verona than in the muddy late-winter fields of Bamiyan. Ali stamped the ground, not just to stay warm in the cold and the light freezing rain but because, accustomed as he was to long days of farm labor, any prolonged physical inactivity made him uneasy.
He mulled over how they would greet each other when they finally met for what would be the first time in months, not counting screaming scenes in the Bamiyan provincial courthouse. Would she call his full name, Mohammad Ali, the sound of which had always gladdened and surprised him when she whispered it over the line during the years of clandestine telephone conversations that characteriz
ed their early courtship? Zakia was the only woman, besides his sisters and his mother, he had ever heard speak his name. Or would she just say tu, the familiar “you” in their language, Dari, a dialect of Farsi or Persian? Three hours earlier she had called and said this would be the night that she made good her escape to elope with him and that she would call when she went over the wall, but it was not the first time she’d said that. As the hour crawled past midnight and his phone didn’t ring, he began to lose hope. He kept the cell phone next to his heart, in an inside pocket to protect it from the intermittent freezing drizzle. A battered old knockoff of a Samsung Galaxy, this cheap Chinese smartphone full of love songs and recorded birdcalls bore the story of his life.
One of the songs from their long courtship, which he’d chosen for tonight’s ringtone, played on a continuous loop in his head. It was from a song by Bashir Wafa, an Afghan pop singer, covering the story of the Prophet Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, who in the Islamic version of that ancient tale are named Zuleikha and Yousef:
If Zuleikha repents, sighing from the bottom of her heart,
Yousef will walk free, the fetters fallen from his ankles … 6
Sometime after midnight of the Persian New Year, he gave up. “I thought she must have been kidding with me and had decided against going through with it,” he said. He tried her phone for perhaps the tenth time, but there was no ring, only the impersonal phone-company message: the same nasal female voice both in Dari and in English announcing Zakia’s phone to be outside the coverage area. Just in case, he hung his phone on a nail in the wall outside because the signal in their village was too weak within his house. Then he went inside to lie down on his bed, like Zakia’s a mattress on the floor, this one of earth. He left the window of his room open despite the cold so he would be able to hear the phone sing; there was only a wooden shutter without glass, simply a pane of plastic sheeting stretched over the opening, which he slit at the bottom and peeled up just in case.