The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  New Yorkers commonly encounter Afghan men in the 200 or so fried-chicken takeout joints they have come to own in the city's black and Latino neighborhoods and in the 800 ubiquitous sidewalk coffee carts where skyscraper workers line up for their morning fixes. They might be treated by an Afghan doctor in the hospital emergency room or ride in a taxi with an Afghan cabdriver, and there are even half a dozen Afghan police officers. The women, though, are more out of sight. A quarter of Afghan women have never been to school, and only half have completed high school, according to a study by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College, and Kaisa Hagen, a student there. Only one-quarter work outside the home. The reason is Afghanistan's deeply patriarchal culture, which seems to have migrated here.

  “Men have corrupted views of Islam and actually believe women are second-class citizens and are there to take care of them,” said Manizha Naderi, the director of Women for Afghan Women, which offers counseling and instructional programs out of a threadbare office on Union Street. “They don't let them go to school or to work.” Males have so much higher status in a family that it is not uncommon for men to re-marry if their wives bear them only daughters. And violence toward wives, Naderi said, is more common than the community will admit. “There's a saying that the food your husband feeds you doesn't come for free,” she said with a wry grin. “And men actually think they have a right under the Koran to beat their wives.”

  Naderi, now in her thirties, was four years old when her parents left Kabul for Kandahar and there paid a driver to smuggle the entire family— her father, an electrical engineer, her mother, and three children—on a single motorcycle across the desert into Pakistan. She described that improbable dusty adventure for me in poignant detail.

  We left Kabul on a bus. My mother had sewn any money and jewelry in her undergarments under her burka. She had to carry it on her body because there were lots of thieves on the way to Kandahar. Many times along the way thieves and mujahideens stopped to search the bus and the passengers. They took my father out every time. We were afraid that they might shoot my father, but thankfully they didn't. When we reached Kandahar, we spent a night in the house of a relative of my aunt's husband. Then the next day, we had to cross the desert. We hired two motorcycles— one for my aunt's family and one for our family. I was five at that time. I remember that day very clearly. I was sitting in front of the driver, on the engine, then it was the driver, then my father and then my mother. My father was holding my three-year-old brother in his arms. My mother was holding my nine-month-old sister. I remember the way we were sitting very clearly because the engine of the motorcycle had burned my thigh and I was crying. My mother was angry at me for crying. We traveled one hour through the desert into Pakistan.

  Thousands of other Afghan families fleeing the Soviet occupation that began in 1979 made similarly treacherous odysseys to seek asylum in the West. A second wave of refugees—at least 7,000—came here after the Taliban took power in 1996. Many of those who could not abide that government's unbending zealotry—thieves had their limbs amputated, women were banned from schooling themselves or working—flocked to the New York area but others to Afghan enclaves in the Washington, D.C., area or Fremont near San Francisco. Fremont is home to 10,000 Afghans, and the Bay Area beyond has another 30,000. Altogether, the United States has 200,000 Afghans. Though it is slowly prospering and stepping into American routines, Flushing's Afghan community is still quite poor, with a sizable proportion of families receiving Medicaid or on welfare. The median Afghan family income of $27,273 is about $11,000 below the city's median.

  There are sharp differences among the Afghans that are not revealed in statistics. Afghans I met in Flushing told me that refugees from Kabul are less bound by tradition than those from the villages. Those who fled the secular Soviets are more conservative than those who fled the Taliban. Some bear scars from having joined the mujahideen, the fighters for Afghan independence who eventually ousted the Soviets in a CIA-financed effort. Yet more than a few Afghans here are champions of the harsh Taliban. Afghan politics plays out in Flushing. Mohammed Sherzad, a Flushing imam, was once the spiritual leader of the city's largest Afghan mosque, Masjid Hazrat-I-Abubakr Sadiq, on Thirty-third Avenue. A domed temple of turquoise and white with slim arched windows and a lanky minaret, the mosque contrasts with the surrounding workaday blocks of redbrick houses and apartment buildings. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Sherzad ejected a group of its founders, contending they channeled money to the Taliban. The group took him to court, accusing the imam of a disingenuous power play, and regained the mosque. Sherzad, an ethnic Pashtun—the same mountain people from whom Karzai hails—is now imam of a smaller mosque with the identical name on the second floor of a low building on Union Street.

  Some Afghan Muslims who have been here for decades are so acculturated they put up Christmas trees. Others, including some who speak English with a Queens accent, are returning to a new Afghanistan or at least shuttling back and forth, even though it is a land where indoor plumbing is scarce, few roads are paved, and the Taliban is resurgent. One Afghan American opened a cement-mixing plant in Kabul and divides his time between there and Flushing; another, a cabdriver, returned to his home in Mazar-i-Sharif in September 2003 to marry an Afghan woman. Naderi also shuttles back and forth. In 2003, she and her organization opened a secular school for 1,500 boys and girls in the teeming Zar-e-Dasht refugee camp in Kandahar that after three months was absorbed into the government system. She's also organized conferences to spread the word on what rights women have under Islamic law, as opposed to what men tell them they have. In 2006, three years after we first spoke, Naderi and her family returned to Afghanistan for good.

  But most Afghan families are here for the long haul and so find themselves struggling to keep up the essentials of their culture as their children are exposed to the louche ways of American teenagers in a ravenously consumerist culture. Families are particularly strict with daughters, enforcing curfews and requiring them to wear modest clothes and only meager makeup. For more than a few families, even the notion of educating their daughters beyond high school is regarded as daring, not just because education will tug them away from the attractive simplicity of traditional life but because the young women may start seeing young men on the sly. The most exigent families keep their daughters close after ninth grade, insisting that they return home promptly after school. Some will pull their daughters out of high school, even moving to another state if officials enforce the attendance law.

  For the young women who do attend school, the contrast between their lives and those of Americans often rankles. They see their American counterparts roaming the neighborhood freely after school and flirting with boys. Rebellious young Afghan women will leave the house with head scarves, then strip them off on the way to school and rouge their faces and line their eyes. On the way home, they wash off the makeup and restore the scarf.

  More community leaders, though, are encouraging girls to educate themselves. As we sat shoeless on the floor of his mosque, Imam Sherzad, an athletic, confident man with a trim beard who likes women in his congregation to have their heads covered, told me he looks favorably upon women who postpone having children until they finish college. “A good woman is one who is educated, both for her children and her society,” he said. “In the Koran a person who is not educated is not equal to a person who has education. The not educated is compared to a blind person.”

  Naderi estimates that almost half of young Afghan women here do end up going to college. Indeed, Dr. Tahira Homayun, a New York gynecologist whose husband is an economic adviser to Karzai, believes young Afghan women outperform their brothers in school because struggling families press boys to give up their classes for jobs needed to pay the bills.

  But economic necessities and the allure of education have had little impact on the ironclad convention that reserves for parents the authority to arrange their children's marriages. Naderi let me sit in on a basi
c English class taught by an Episcopal nun, Ellen Francis, who had learned Farsi in Iran (Dari, the language most Afghans speak, is a dialect of Farsi, more commonly known as Persian). All six students were dressed in robes and head scarves, and their hands were stained with henna, which women apply at the end of Ramadan to signal their return to the joys of physical life. There was a wide spectrum of experience. One woman in a purple jacket had been principal of a girls' school in Afghanistan, then fled after her husband was slain by a Taliban swords-man. Two women had never been to school. I watched the six women pronounce “bad,” “fad,” and “rat,” identify articles of clothing such as a sweater, socks, and pants, learn to follow such street directions as “Go two blocks straight and one block to the right,” and mouth some basic responses to Americans' questions such as “Fine, thank you. I am good.” They seemed eager to learn the lingua franca, yet when we spoke after class, with Francis translating, it was clear that tradition still runs as deep as the henna staining their hands.

  “Afghan people can't meet each other prior to getting engaged—it's an embarrassment for the family,” was the peremptory statement of a sixty-five-year-old woman, a mother of six, who, like everyone else in the class, was uncomfortable with having her name in print.

  Naderi and Mawjzada told me that an Afghan man's honor hinges on the pristine conduct of his wife and daughters. “If the girl has a good reputation, the family has a good reputation,” said Mawjzada, a coffee vendor's daughter who sometimes works for Naderi. If a young woman chooses to find her own spouse, her father's stature will be diminished, the family name will be tainted by gossip, and her sisters may afterward find it harder to marry. Many Afghan parents despair of ever finding matches for their American children—“They say all the boys are corrupted and all the girls are corrupted,” Naderi told me—and fathers will ask relatives in Afghanistan to scout for prospective spouses or will return home personally to seek them out.

  Not surprisingly, parents are more willing to close their eyes to a son who is a Don Juan, and ordinary dating for young men is certainly shrugged off. Bashir Rahim, a twenty-nine-year-old computer technician who lives in Flushing with his mother, three brothers, and five sisters, said that if he meets a girl who interests him at a family gathering, he might ask her for her address, then send his parents to her home to start a conversation about marriage. “In general men are in control all the time,” he said. “If they date, some parents won't agree with it, but they are more tolerant.”

  Young women learn by trial and error how far they can stretch tradition, but defying the code outright exacts a steep price. Those who choose to break conventions do so furtively. Naderi, smirking sardonically, told me that many young Afghan women here do have boyfriends, “but the family doesn't know about it.”

  Naderi, who came to this country as a nine-year-old in 1984, grew up in Jersey City, graduated Dickinson High School there, worked in a Wendy's, and was married at age sixteen to a man she chose, defying her parents. “I was a rebel,” she said with a mischievous smile. As a result, her mother, who is modern enough to wear Western dress, and her grandmother did not speak to her for ten years, not until her daughter, Karima, was born. “My mother still tells me she doesn't have a face,” she said. “She tells me she can't look at people because they know her daughter married in this way.”

  Naderi's friend Masuda Sultan had an even more wrenching story. She is an auburn-haired, brown-eyed Harvard graduate student who is urbane, poised, and gregarious. Her fair skin and unaccented English allow her to navigate easily in Western as well as Middle Eastern worlds. She has at times worn a head scarf or burka but is more comfortable in jeans. As she told me about her marriage, I found it difficult to match the young woman who endured her anachronistic experience with the person sitting before me. She was born in Kandahar in 1978, and when she was five her family escaped Soviet-occupied Afghanistan by hiring a car to spirit them across the treacherous Khojak Pass into Quetta, Pakistan. They came to Brooklyn and later moved to Queens. Her father prospered as a partner in Palace Fried Chicken in Harlem. Though she knew as early as age ten that she wanted to be a lawyer, her parents discouraged her. “Too much school,” they told her. “How are you going to find someone to marry?” Still, she was a star student, though one not immune to a newcomer's foibles. Throughout high school, she confused the words “prostitute” and “Protestant” and sometimes walked by a church with the nervous curiosity of someone passing a brothel.

  When she was fifteen and a student at Flushing High School, her father contrived with a friend to have her married to a doctor, a surgeon, who at thirty-one was twice her age. The friend, Sultan recalled, “suggested I would make a good match for his brother, knowing little about me except that my parents were good people. Family reputation is a big deal. I was reluctant. I wanted to go to college and thought I was too young.”

  She had seen the doctor only once before, and, after a betrothal ceremony called the nikah, which was held in a Flushing hotel and blessed by an imam, she got to see her future husband only three more times before the wedding, twice in the presence of a chaperone. “I didn't know how I was supposed to feel,” she told me. “Looking back, I should have realized that this wasn't the best match for me, but at the time I had no idea what to expect from a relationship. I'd never dated before.”

  Although she insisted she wasn't forced to go through with the marriage, in reality she didn't have much latitude. Her parents and the community had made clear to her that if she married an outsider—someone who was not both Muslim and Pashtun—she'd be disowned. “I agreed to this marriage and actually thought it could work out. When your actions are limited and you're from a certain world and you're young and you respect your family, you go along with their wishes even if you have extreme doubts. I saw my parents and people my age, and it worked out for almost all of them.”

  The wedding was held in Pakistan in August 1995, and the night before, her mother asked her to follow an old custom: provide the new in-laws with a bloodstained cloth as evidence of her virginity. Once they were married and back in New York, her husband rarely spoke to her and insisted she remain subservient. He acquiesced to her going to college but did not really grasp that Sultan would need several years more of graduate school to qualify as a lawyer instead of the schoolteacher her parents wished her to become. When it became clear after the wedding that Sultan wanted to put off having children perhaps until she had finished law school, her husband turned cold.

  “The core issue was really a different philosophy of what it means to be Afghan and what it means to be American,” Sultan said. “The expectation was that my life and career weren't really factors in terms of the priorities of us as a couple. Ultimately I was being treated as a child and my role was set and I was told what I could and couldn't do. We weren't speaking to each other on the same plane. I was the child and he the parent.”

  With the strain in her marriage evidently irreconcilable, Sultan lapsed into a deep depression. She stopped going to school, dropped housework, stopped seeing people, started taking antidepressants. Her parents tried to prevail on her to work things out. But after three years she and her husband lost the will to do so. Feeling despondent, she swallowed a bottle of his Valium. Afterward, she returned to her parents' Queens home. He finally agreed to a divorce, a rare and humiliating event among Afghans.

  Since living on her own was considered inappropriate, Sultan moved back into her parents' home, sharing a room with one of her two sisters, the hijab-wearing Sara. Among Afghans, blame for a divorce falls on the wife, but even her more secular friends found it difficult to believe that she could leave her husband for the reasons she did. “ ‘Did he beat you, or was he a womanizer?’ people wanted to know,” Sultan told me. “They were surprised why I left and looking for a legitimate reason why.”

  Sultan shuffled jobs for a time, including work for Women for Afghan Women. By the time I sat down with her for an interview, she was twenty-six years old,
had scuttled plans to become a lawyer, and was doing graduate work in public administration at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She ultimately completed her master's and began spending time in Afghanistan training women to become political and business leaders. “Economic empowerment is the key to letting women realize they have power in the world,” she told me. She was also working on a memoir she intended playfully to call My War at Home, which was published in 2006. She has received offers of marriage from divorced Afghan men—single men prefer virgins—but none appealing. “It's been difficult for my family, but they see I'm happy and have been able to keep my Afghan identity,” she said. “I'm still Islamic. I'm still me.”

  She was also surprisingly optimistic about trends in the Afghan community. Since her marriage, she said, some customs have slowly withered, and more families are aware of the importance of higher education for women. “Lots of girls have arranged marriages still, but more often than not the way it is happening is the girl knows the guy. They've met in school or at a family event. They basically arrange it with their families so it looks like an arranged marriage. It's a creative solution to the whole thing.”