It is still 9/11/11 and Kamile is still eager to talk about Turkey. The matter has been in the news quite a bit recently, and I am interested in her views on the subject. I ask, “When will Turkey admit to the Armenian genocide?”
Both Abdul-Kareem and Kamile speak at the same time and say exactly the same thing.
“Turkey will never do it. The Turkish Republic did not commit those crimes, the Ottoman Empire did. Why would they admit to a crime they didn’t commit?”
At this point Abdul-Kareem lowers his voice and says, almost in a whisper, “If Turkey does this it would be exposing itself to the kind of thing the Jews do.”
He rubs his thumb and index finger together, indicating moneygrubbing and greediness.
“The Armenians would demand reparations. It would be endless.”
I can barely breathe.
It gets worse—far worse—as Abdul-Kareem suddenly launches into a first-time tirade against Israel in a particularly ugly way. What he says is inaccurate, unoriginal, irrational, and practically anti-Semitic. Is this something he really believes? Or does he feel hurt by what I have said about honor killings? Is this his payback?
This is crazy. Abdul-Kareem married a Jewish woman. Many of his friends in Kabul were Jews, and most of the people who helped him escape the Soviet occupation and become established in America were Jews. What has poisoned his bloodstream against the Jewish state?
He is not a mosque goer. He gets his information only from the secular media. He reads the British newspapers, English editions of German and Arab newspapers, perhaps the Turkish press, the Afghan media, and of course the mainstream American media. He has not gotten his information from an Islamist mosque.
In many ways Abdul-Kareem is now another kind of stranger. When I first met him, he passed as Western, indeed as a version of a cultured and wealthy Brit or as an affable colonial-era chap. I had no idea he would be force marching me back into the tenth century. I am so sad we no longer talk about films and books; our most neutral discussions are about our various age-related medical problems. On politics . . . we now disagree.
It is getting dark now. It is still 9/11/11—and Abdul-Kareem has still not acknowledged the plain fact that one of Afghanistan’s ruling warlords was the man who provided Osama bin Laden with shelter, a hiding place, and the time to choreograph the 9/11 attacks.
But that is not the worst of it. Once again he has managed to silence both his first wife and his second wife.
In 2002 Asne Seierstad, the Norwegian journalist, published The Bookseller of Kabul. It is a best-selling expose of a commendably bookish and hospitable Afghan man, Shah Mohammed Rais, who liked to present himself as a Western-style liberal but who was quite the misogynist tyrant at home.
Seierstad lived with him and his two wives for four months.
At the age of fifty Rais took a second wife; she was sixteen at the time of her marriage. His first wife was inconsolable. Although he constantly preached the importance of education, Rais refused to send any of his children to school; instead he forced them to work twelve-hour days in his various stores. Seierstad notes, “The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. . . . Family law—decided by the men in the household—is more important than government legislation. . . . If we can’t understand the Afghan family, we can’t understand Afghanistan.”
Like the bookseller of Kabul, Abdul-Kareem is a misogynist, a charming misogynist, an educated and seemingly assimilated misogynist, but awful where wives and feminism are concerned.
Abdul-Kareem is ruining the book I want to be able to write. What a triumph of the human spirit it would be if I could show that a relationship could flourish between an American and an Afghan, between a Jew and a Muslim, and especially between a feminist and a misogynist.
I have made it a point of honor to step gingerly around all these differences, pretending that they are not as important as my commitment to this connection. Abdul-Kareem has done so, too.
Since Abdul-Kareem came back to America, he has always called to see how I am, how my son is, how my family is, and to wish me happy holidays on both Jewish and national occasions. I rarely call him on Muslim holidays.
He remembers me as a young woman; I barely remember myself at that age. He knew my parents, now long dead. He and his wife and children came to my fiftieth birthday party. I have photos of us standing together, smiling; even my mother seems glad to see him.
Abdul-Kareem acted honorably toward me as an Afghan husband. I was a virgin, and he married me, and he intended to stay married to me for a lifetime. From his point of view he remained true to our young love; I betrayed it as only a Western woman can.
Why would I cut him out of my life completely?
And yet: What happened in Kabul, coupled with Abdul-Kareem’s growing conservatism about women, is now getting in the way of our having an enjoyable time together.
Perhaps Abdul-Kareem sees me as also having become more conservative, more of a patriotic American, less a citizen of the world. Maybe he views my feminism as a betrayal of the kind of young woman I once was and whom he once loved.
It is a miracle we can talk to each other at all.
I fought against my captivity in Afghanistan—yet here I am, still talking to my jailer.
The Kabul I once knew and the Kabul that existed from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a Westernizing Kabul, is no more and is not likely to return anytime soon. All those who worked toward and instituted a modern constitution were either murdered or driven into exile.
This country, which once held me captive, remains a country and a region in which—incredibly—America is now trapped, just as I once was.
Thirteen
America in Afghanistan
My visit with Abdul-Kareem on 9/11/11 saddened me. He was not his usual hospitable self.
We were first torn apart by how Abdul-Kareem mishandled what happened in Kabul. Now feminism seems to be dividing us.
Many people, including Abdul-Kareem, believe that Americans profile Afghans and Muslims for racial reasons. In my view Islam is a religion whose adherents represent all the colors of the human race.
Are Americans prejudiced against Afghans, whether because of 9/11 or because they are Muslims?
Not at all, according to Suraya Sadeed, an Afghan American businesswoman, author (with Damien Lewis) of Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse, and the founder of Help the Afghan Children (HTAC). Sadeed was born in 1952 in Kabul, where her father was the governor. They fled the country in 1982, four years after Abdul-Kareem did.
Sadeed began her humanitarian missions to Afghanistan in 1993. She brought blankets, medicine, cash, pencils, food—and walked right into Taliban Hell, where anything and everything was for sale: “Anti-tank missiles, a kilo of heroin, a thirteen-year-old virgin, a contract to assassinate someone.”
With daring compassion a naked-faced Sadeed challenged the Taliban fiends who used bayonets to rip up blankets meant for widows and orphans. In the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, Sadeed discovered that the camp directors were pimping out widows and their children. Those involved in this heartless operation also sold the food and supplies intended as payment to these women and their families.
By 9/11 Sadeed’s organization was out of funds. Afterward she feared that Americans would never send money again. But she sent an
e-mail begging for help to the thousands of Americans already in her database. She writes, “Barely a week [after 9/11] we had nearly $500,000 in the HTAC account. All I could think was: God, America—what a country.”
I think that Abdul-Kareem (and others who share his point of view) are wrong about Americans’ disliking or “racially profiling” Afghans.
After 9/11 other North American and European activists began traveling to Afghanistan. They exposed the plight of Afghan women; wor
ked in prisons, hospitals, and underground schools; trained Afghans as artisans and gemologists; and raised money for supplies. Some went to criticize American military policy, but others went to witness and to serve. Physicians, nurses, educators, beauticians, social workers, filmmakers, feminists, and sympathetic journalists arrived in droves.
Nasrine Gross has been living in America with her American husband for more than forty years; her mother once was a member of the Afghan Parliament. Gross founded a survival gardening project for Afghan women and a literacy project for married Afghan couples. (This was the only way that wives were allowed to attend classes.) I heard Gross speak in New York City a few years after 9/11. She showed a film about her work in Kabul—and she was surrounded by the Americans who support her financially.
The Afghan American doctors Nafisa and Qudrat Mojadidi and their filmmaker daughter, Sediqua Mojadidi, traveled back to Afghanistan in dangerous times to train physicians. Sediqua’s important 2007 film about their work is titled Motherland Afghanistan.
The Doctors Mojadidi specialize in family planning and obstetrical and gynecological issues, including post-childbirth fistulas. According to the film, 100,000 women in Afghanistan have unhealed fistulas. This means that feces passes through the vagina and that urinary and bowel incontinence or constant soiling occurs. Fistulas may also lead to serious and painful infections. Those afflicted are ashamed and often shunned by their families. Afghanistan also has the highest maternal death rate in the world and the world’s second-highest infant mortality rate.
(As I write this I pause. I might have given birth to a stillborn, and I might also have died in childbirth, had I not managed to get out of Kabul.)
According to the Mojadidis, the substandard hospitals in Kabul had literally no medical supplies. The promised American aid had not materialized. But eight hours from Kabul, in a Hazara tribal region, the Mojadidis, who are Hazara in origin themselves, found a clean well-stocked hospital: Dr. Simar Samar’s Shuhada (The Female Martyr) Hospital.
Perhaps the most heroic woman is Afghanistan’s own Dr. Simar
Samar. In her book, Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan, and in her film, Daughters of Afghanistan, Sally Armstrong, a Canadian author and humanitarian, honors Samar. I met Armstrong at her book launch party in New York City. Once again the rooms were filled with pro-Afghan Americans.
Armstrong traveled to Afghanistan in the late 1990s and bore witness to incredible atrocities. She describes a protest organized by women in Herat against Taliban rule. “According to eyewitnesses, the Taliban surrounded the women, seized the leader, doused her in kerosene and burned her alive.”
The Taliban guarded the single hospital in Kabul. Female physicians were not allowed to remove a woman’s burqa to perform surgery. According to Armstrong, “when one woman arrived with burns to three-quarters of her body, the Taliban allowed no burqa removal. ‘If I don’t remove the burqa, she will die,’ the doctor told the guard. He refused permission. The woman died shortly afterwards.”
Against all this stood Samar, who said, “I have three strikes against me. I’m a woman, I speak for women, and I’m Hazara—one of the most persecuted tribes in Afghanistan.”
Hazaras are Shi’a, not Sunni, Muslims. The religious war between these two branches of Islam has been—and remains—hot and heartless. Also the Hazaras are considered to be the descendants of the Mongol destroyer Genghis Khan.
Samar is a formidable woman. She rebelled against her family’s traditions and attended medical school. Under Soviet rule she opened a medical clinic in Ghazni. Under Taliban rule Samar refused to veil her face. When they told her to close her schools for girls or face death, she replied, “Go ahead and hang me in a public place. Then tell the people my crime: I was giving papers and pencils to girls.”
Samar ran a medical clinic in the refugee camps in Quetta, Pakistan, and in Kabul. The Taliban kept threatening her. She said, “You know where I am. I won’t stop doing what I am doing.” Instead of killing
Samar, Taliban members secretly began to bring their mothers and wives to her for care.
Other than through sheer will and character, how did she keep going? Samar had international support. She contacted “international women’s networks who rallied round,” Armstrong reports. “They pressured their governments to channel funds to the Afghan Woman’s Ministry,” a ministry that Samar headed from 2001 to 2003.
Unfortunately, under President Karzai, the fundamentalists managed to have Samar ousted from her elected position as vice chair of the Loya Jirga (a high-level council of the tribes) and dismissed from the cabinet. They also “called for her execution.” Since 2005 Samar has remained chair of the independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission and a UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan.
Consider the Afghan activist and politician Fawzia Koofi, who has been deputy speaker of the Afghan Parliament since 2005. Koofi has continued to fight on behalf of Afghan women and plans to run for the presidency in 2014. (I’d vote for her if I could.) In her book, Letters to My Daughters, she makes it clear that she will not relinquish her political ambitions despite tremendous intimidation and hatred. She writes, “During the latest elections, there were even more threats on my life: gunmen trailing my car, roadside bombs laid along my route, warnings that I would be kidnapped. On the day of voting, two people were arrested who admitted they had planned to kidnap me, take me to a different district and then kill me. They had links to another local politician.”
In the summer of 2012 Hanifa Safi, the acting head of women’s affairs in eastern Afghanistan, was killed by a bomb that exploded under her car; undaunted, Najla Sediqi took her place. In December of 2012 she was shot to death on her way to work. The bravery of these women is stunning and their executions tragic and infuriating.
Even before 9/11, Americans provided hospitality and informational networks for Afghans who had fled the Soviets. The American author Rosanne Klass, who is the former director of the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House, seems to have kept in touch with almost every Afghan she ever met—especially her male students who went on to study abroad and then returned to head academic departments and government bureaus at home. They are now either dead—murdered by the Soviets—or in exile in the West or elsewhere in the world. Klass has remained a motherly friend and networking resource for them all.
The best Western male journalists and Afghan experts (and there are many) have had little to say about Afghan women. As men, and through no fault of their own, they have had no access to them; their otherwise excellent reportage and analyses have failed to understand half the Afghan population—as well as something essential about Afghan men and Afghan society—because these reporters have had no entrée to family life.
Post 9/11, some Western women, including journalists, have had access to Afghan girls and women. Many of these Western women have taught in the underground schools, worked in the hospitals, and visited women in prison. They have done compassionate social work but have not often analyzed Islamist jihad. Thus women’s reportage about the tragic plight and extraordinary heroism of Afghan women has also missed an essential part of the story. Ann Marlowe, in countless articles, and Saira Shah, in her book and film, Beneath the Veil, are exceptions. They cover gender apartheid but in the context of the larger political, religious, and military issues involved.
In permanent exile my bon vivant former husband has become somewhat bitter—perhaps for good reason. The world—the “international community,” as represented by the United Nations—did not and does not really care about Afghanistan.
The Soviets murdered approximately 1.5 to 3 million Afghan civilians and created 5 million refugees who were trapped in refugee camps in Pakistan; millions of Afghan refugees might still be there.
According to an Afghan acquaintance of mine, as of 2013 “at least one and a half million Afghan refugees [were] still fe
stering in these camps.” He lived in Kabul during the Soviet invasion and was tortured first by the Soviets, then by the Taliban, and for the same reasons: he spoke English, knew Americans, and his wife worked for an international organization. He beseeched me to understand that the “Taliban is not really an Afghan phenomenon.”
“You were there, you lived with us, and you know that Afghans are not like that. This is orchestrated by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. My son works for the United Nations. Unfortunately he cannot help Afghans.”
Ah—the United Nations, that particularly naked emperor.
I have come by my disgust honestly. In 1979–80 I worked for the United Nations. It was an eye-opener. Some male diplomats sexually harassed or assaulted their female employees; some treated their home-country domestics as if they were slaves; many treated their wives in a similar fashion. They partied hard and were glad to be in Manhattan rather than in their impoverished, war-torn, and repressive countries. They were not here to represent the poor of their country but rather to represent its ruling elite.
In 1980 the UN itself claimed there were 1.6 million Palestinian refugees. This included actual refugees as well as their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, most of whom were born and grew up in other Arab countries—countries that systematically denied Palestinians citizenship. But by 1980 five million Afghan refugees had been forced out of their country. The UN showed little interest in supporting them. Although Afghans were also Muslims and in grave crisis, there was no anti-America or anti-Israel political mileage to be gained by creating a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Afghans, as the UN had done for the Palestinians.
Afghanistan—presently the focus of so much world attention—was essentially deserted by the world in its moment of agony.
During the Taliban years, before 9/11, the plight of Afghan women symbolized our greatest feminist nightmare. The tragedy of Afghan women demanded that we at least draw a verbal line in the sand against such brutal and unapologetic misogyny.
An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir Page 24