My life there was indoors. My adventures were interpersonal. Although I gazed at the mountains every single day, I could only dream about walking or climbing them. I am now seeing the country as if for the first time. I peer at photographs and read old newspaper clippings. I read the works of those intrepid adventurers who hiked or rode into the Afghan mountains, into the pink, red, and beige deserts, to the edge of the sapphire-blue lakes. Many Western travelers cheerfully rode buses without brakes and trusted they would survive the thousand-foot drops on the incredibly narrow mountain roads.
These travelers, both men and women, crossed shaky bridges over roaring rivers, braved desert storms, walked enormous distances during frigid winters, and visited all the cities and provinces of the Silk Route. In 1960, the year before I arrived, two British mountain climbers, Joyce Dunsheath and Eleanor Baillie, set out to climb Mir Samir, a 19,882-foot mountain in the Hindu Kush. A snowstorm trapped them at 17,500 feet. They write, “As far as our vision was concerned Mir Samir [the peak] was not there. . . . We made no plans—we sat back, trying to keep warm in our little tent, while the blizzard raged outside, and did crossword puzzles from the 7th Daily Telegraph book.”
Only the British can remain so calm and so eccentrically cozy as their very death stares them down.
At great risk to themselves, an Afghan soldier and porter who accompanied Dunsheath and Baillie on their expedition rescue them. The men inform the women that they are in “considerable danger . . . that [they] would be swept away tent and all.”
Oh, how I wish I could have climbed a mountain in Afghanistan! But although I have climbed mountains since, I am now only an armchair traveler who lives through Dunsheath and Baillie. Still, even the hardy Brits needed the Afghan equivalent of Everest’s Sherpa guides to save them.
The country can be deadly cold and inhospitable. I have never known such cold as I experienced in Kabul in my first and only winter there. And I was in a grand house, not in a wooden or mud hut perched on a mountainside where icy storms are as common as . . . ice storms. Abdul-Kareem never mentioned how extreme the weather is in Afghanistan, and I never independently investigated the matter. From afar, looking at exquisite photographs, one might conclude that deep snowdrifts are dreamy and that deadly desert storms are beautiful.
From 1965 to 1979 Roland and Sabrina Michaud visited Afghanistan and published a brief essay and ninety-eight spellbinding photos of twelve cities or provinces, including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Nimruz, Tashburghan, Balkh, the Wakhan Valley, Bamiyan, and Nuristan. These photos depict the Afghanistan I might have known had I been allowed to travel—a timeless, gracious, truly exotic, and, except for the Kuchis and female children, an almost womanless place but nevertheless a country alive with dervishes, blacksmiths, shepherds, camel drivers, shopkeepers, men in teahouses, armed Pushtuns—all the faces of humanity.
I visit these places now in photos and in books. I meet Afghanistan for the first time in precisely this way.
I am a child of the New World and am used to fast subway trains, supermarkets, and kitchen machines that make cooking an easy matter. Being in Afghanistan enables me to see how most people have lived for millennia—at a much slower pace, valuing that which is given, knowing that all outcomes are uncertain.
For years at college Abdul-Kareem talked to me about the glories of the Moghuls, the dazzling minarets, the Gandahara School of Art, the fields of red tulips, the exquisite gardens that each conqueror and every Afghan emperor, shah, emir, or king has tenderly created. I am eager to see it all.
“Let’s visit the Baala Hissar” (the High Fort), I suggest. “It’s right in town. Are there tour guides in Kabul?”
The Baala Hissar is the fortress and palace that has been the home of many Afghan kings, beginning with the Moghul emperor Akbar. Abdul-Kareem is annoyed.
“This is now your home. In time you will see everything. Please don’t act like an American tourist.”
I want to see Bamiyan, which has been visited by many millions of people for two thousand years. In her book Valley of the Giant Buddhas, the Scottish Saira Shah, writing under the name Morag Murray Abdullah, describes the statues of Buddha that reside there: “[There are three] standing Buddha figures, the two largest 35 [113 feet] and 53 metres [172 feet] high, are of such striking appearance that they far overshadow such sights as the Pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt, or the rose-red city of Petra in Jordan. Originally covered in red and gold . . . the draperies and ribbons, as well as the crowns and other decorations, point to a unique culture-mixing of Persian, Sassanid, and Greek.”
Now I will never see them; no one will. Over the centuries Muslim Afghans mutilated, shot at, and destroyed the faces, hands, and legs of the despised infidel idols; six months before 9/11 the Taliban finally blew them up entirely.
People are amazed when I tell them that Islam is merely the newest religion in Afghanistan, that Zoroastrianism, Greco-Roman paganism, and Hinduism but especially Buddhism preceded Islam by ten to twelve centuries and continued to flourish there until the fourteenth century.
In the seventh century CE the Chinese Buddhist monk Hsuan-Tang documented the thriving Buddhist culture in Bamiyan. He found one hundred monasteries with several thousand monks in Bamiyan alone. In addition, Hsuan-Tang visited the Buddhist monasteries near Balkh, Kabul, and Jalalabad.
In 1269 that other merchant of Venice, Marco Polo, undertook an arduous journey to the courts of Kublai Khan, emperor of the world’s largest land-based empire. Polo ventured eastward through Afghanistan and wrote about the Buddhist monks there. He found that they were soft-spoken, wore orange, shaved the crown of their heads, and spent their time studying, praying, and chanting. Two thousand monks might be sheltered in one monastery. Polo described the Buddhist monks in Afghanistan this way: “They live more decently than the others for they keep themselves from . . . sensuality and improprieties. . . . They live in communities, observe strict abstinence in regard to eating, drinking, and the intercourse of the sexes, and refrain from every kind of sensual indulgence, in order that they may not give offence to the idols whom they worship. They have several monasteries, in which certain superiors exercise the functions of our abbots, and by the mass of the people they are held in great reverence.”
Had I stayed in Afghanistan, had I become Abdul-Kareem’s Afghan wife, I might have seen the Buddhas of Bamiyan and everything else as well: the Great Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif with its jeweled tile-work and arresting minarets, the mosque and tomb of Mirwais Baba in Kandahar. In photos the turquoise-blue domes of the mosques seem to melt into the sky. Instead, over the years I have read whatever has crossed my path about Afghanistan. I have spent hours looking at my worn copies of the Afghanistan News, a government magazine. I have twenty-nine of these magazines, which date from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. These magazines are now of immense historical value.
The magazine’s photos capture the country’s breathtaking natural beauty. The majestic snow-capped purple and blue mountains, the verdant valleys (the Panjsher, the Wygal), the shimmering deep blue lakes (the Bandi-i-Amir), the massive medieval minarets in Herat and Ghor—all the brightly bejeweled blue, turquoise, and green tiled mosques.
In 1959 the Afghan government publicly announced in the Afghanistan News that the “wearing of the veil is not part of Islam, the religion followed devoutly by the entire Afghan nation. . . . The Chadari [burqa], or veil, worn by townswomen in Afghanistan has no religious basis.” The government carefully notes that “it is not compulsory to go out with a chadari” and spells out the new clothing requirements. Women are required to wear “a scarf covering the head but leaving the face bare and a long-sleeved topcoat covering all the other garments, gloves, heavy stockings, and shoes.”
Thereafter the government magazine has a number of carefully posed photos of female students being graduated at Kabul University; they are bare faced and wearing mortarboards and smiling
. I see graduating nurses who are also bare faced and wearing nurses’ caps. The mothers and sisters who have come to cheer them on are wearing long headscarves and coats. I see Afghan airline attendants in snappy Western uniforms.
The country was on its way to modernization when the Soviet invasion and the fundamentalist reaction to it stopped all progress and sent the country hurtling backward into misery.
When I was in Kabul, Abdul-Kareem minimized the burqas, saw them as “on their way out,” became incensed if I criticized them. To this day Abdul-Kareem rails against the American choice of Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s president—and why?—because, among other things, Karzai does not allow his wife to appear in public.
But, oddly enough, Abdul-Kareem does not praise King Amanullah for having unveiled the women in the late 1920s. On the contrary, over the years Abdul-Kareem has condemned Amanullah as a bumbler, a fool, and a murderer. He believes that Amanullah murdered his own father. According to the American journalist Rhea Tally Stewart, in her massive work, Fire in Afghanistan 1914–1929, Amanullah became king in 1919 after a dramatic power struggle with his uncle, Nasrullah, who had probably conspired to murder his brother, King Habibullah, who was Amanullah’s father. Abdul-Kareem thinks that Amanullah and his mother, Ulya Hazrat, were behind the plot. Nasrullah immediately declared himself the rightful heir. According to Tally Stewart, “Nasrullah would have abolished all the existing aspects of modernity, which Amanullah ached to enlarge.”
As we know, this is a time-honored pattern among Afghans. Uncles vie with nephews; brothers and half-brothers kill each other for the throne.
Amanullah had grown up as the son of Habibullah’s most powerful wife—but he grew up in an imperial harem surrounded by many stepmothers (cowives) and step-siblings. Amanullah immediately liberated his father’s many wives when he became king—and he shared his vision of modernization and coeducation with his people.
He delivered public speeches about the importance of educating daughters as well as sons. According to Tally Stewart, in 1928 Amanullah called it shameful that Afghan women were not educated and compared them unfavorably to European women who worked and were active. In Amanullah’s opinion this was one of the main reasons Afghanistan was backward and Europe “more prosperous.” In another speech, mainly to Afghan women, Amanullah said, “In no Moslim country other than Afghanistan, not even Turkey or Persia, are women ‘buried alive.’ Veiling has retarded your progress. . . . I want to see you disregard the wishes of your husbands in regard to veiling.”
In the fall of 1928 King Amanullah spent five days publicly describing his proposals to end bribery, reform the military, provide old-age pensions, institute coeducation, improve trade—and unveil the women. The tribes rebelled, and by January 1929 the bandit tribal leader Bacha Saquo had driven Amanullah into exile.
Abdul-Kareem does not seem to like or trust his brothers. The brothers are all highly competitive, disdainful, and distrustful of each other.
These are brothers who would kill each other if they had the opportunity, especially if there were something substantial to gain.
Hassan, Agha Jan’s eldest son, is a good-looking, petty despot: close-shaven, well-dressed, short, and, in his view, cheated of his inheritance because his father had too many other sons.
He is furious that Abdul-Kareem and I have been given rooms in what he views as his home. Actually, this is Bebegul’s home but she had a fight with Hassan and either moved out or was forced into the redecorated servants’ quarters across the courtyard. Hassan is waiting impatiently to have a house of his own. One day, he explodes. He yells at me: “I’ve let you do whatever you do in my bathroom.” He makes it sound as if I use his bathroom to commit filthy, unspeakable crimes.
Abdul-Kareem’s two older brothers do not trust him at all. They don’t seem to like or trust each other; perhaps they cannot afford to be affectionate toward one another.
In a way the only man in the family is their father. This household has more than three wives. Ismail Mohammed’s sons are also married to their father. They talk about him incessantly. They watch his every move. They are starved for their father’s attention and affection—and of course are fixated on their inheritances. But they act like his wives. He is their main subject of discussion.
My brothers-in-law frequently make self-conscious jokes about their father’s virility and villainy. However, they still flush with pleasure when Ismail Mohammed openly favors or compliments one of them. They idealize, fear, and resent him. I believe that these sons long for their father’s attention and power. No mere woman can provide what such father-starved sons want. Sometimes my brothers-in-law adopt a wildly humorous attitude toward their father’s inability to show fatherly affection. They tell me, “Sometime after the war, our father used to listen to the American radio broadcasts about family life in America. He was very impressed by the fact that many fathers would go to their children’s rooms and kiss them goodnight.”
They pause and we all laugh. The sight of that proud patriarch making the rounds of some fifteen- or twenty-odd beds in the greatest of discomfort but in all seriousness must have been pretty funny.
“It was impossible to keep up, though,” Reza concludes. “Father stopped and went back to accepting our kisses on his hand. The whole thing was rather silly anyway.”
Are most Afghan patriarchs this distant toward their sons, this physically cold? Is this precisely the way to guarantee filial obedience and permanent rivalry among sons for their father’s withheld affection?
In her book about the Shah of Iran, the author Margaret Laing quotes Empress Farah, the Shah’s wife, who ascribes her husband’s reluctance to hug and kiss his own children to his not having been hugged or kissed by his own father; such things were not done.
This kind of father-son relationship seems to characterize many of the relationships between polygamous Muslim fathers and their sons. Some sons become subservient grovelers—who will never overthrow their father’s (or leader’s) tyrannical regime. The system works. Such sons end up adoring as well as fearing their father. Some sons—like Osama bin Laden, who was one of fifty-seven children—take a different route.
Bebegul’s second son, Reza, is much taller than Hassan. Reza has a British accent and a slow, wry wit. He is ironic about his return from England. He returned to Kabul for what he calls his “golden castles in Asia,” leaving behind a heartbroken young mistress and an illegitimate son . . . or so I was told.
Like Abdul-Kareem, Reza was also kept on a rather short financial leash. This is a government decision. They do not want young Afghans to experience the kind of high life that might make them think twice about returning home. Hassan was never allowed to leave the country, at least not as a student. I am not sure why, but I am sure that Hassan resents this enormously. It doesn’t matter that he is being groomed to one day take over his father’s place at the bank.
For now both Hassan and Reza work for their father. Hassan works at the bank, Reza at the import-export company, each in positions analogous to their order of birth. They parade and enjoy these positions as much as they feel cheated by them. Their salaries are minimal; they make no decisions, only their father does. At first Reza could not or would not adjust to life back in Kabul. He wanted no part of his father’s feudal and emasculating authority. Reza took to his rooms and brooded for almost a year. And then he emerged. Reza himself tells me, “I finally accepted it. I am working for my father, and I’m engaged to a girl whose mother is English. I’ve seen her once, and even though she doesn’t speak English, she is presentable enough.”
Aside from his minimal salary, which pays for cigarettes and snacks, Reza does not have enough money to live on his own. Reza visits his fiancée, Mahtab, and her parents every week. His is a modern engagement. Traditionally an Afghan bride and groom meet for the first time on the day of their wedding, which is essentially a ceremony conduc
ted only by and for men. The bride and groom meet afterward, when they first see each other reflected in a mirror.
As I came to learn, the bride cannot express any emotion whatsoever on her wedding day. If she looks happy, it will insult her mother and father, whose home she will be leaving forever. If she looks sad, that would be seen as an insult to her husband’s family, especially her mother-in-law, with whom she will be living.
Reza spends his spare time visiting the house his father is building for him. He does not like the house. “Nothing works, nothing is right. He did not hire an architect. He sketched the house in the margins of a newspaper himself.”
Reza’s only satisfaction resides in the still more inferior position at the office occupied by his older half-brother, Samir (the first son of Agha Jan’s second wife, Tooba). And Reza patiently points this and other facts out to Samir, and suggests and encourages him to petition their father for redress, sympathizing with Samir when their various strategies fail, as always. In this way Reza both reaffirms his slight edge over Samir and gets to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with their father at Samir’s expense. Thus victorious, Reza has genuine compassion for Samir, who is still unmarried.
Samir is an absurdly skinny, angular boy-man. A frayed black karakul (Persian lambskin) hat is perched on his small sad head. He looks frightened at all times. His father has never arranged a marriage for him. Rumor has it that once, when the women “went out for him,” the designated girl’s parents rejected the match.
One day Samir, on behalf of his mother, Tooba, and sister, Rabia, invites me for tea. He ushers me happily into his modest home with high shrill feminine giggles of greeting.
Tooba serves us a plate of English lemon cookies—a luxury they can scarcely afford. It is late afternoon and cold. The three of us, strangers in every way, happily drink our tea. A feeling of closeness passes between us in place of bright conversation.
An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir Page 11