An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  I married someone else. I don’t know who this husband is. But I do want to see the city, the camels, the nomads, the men on bicycles, the stalls, the tea-houses (choi chanas). I want to hear the singing birds in the bazaar.

  And so I finally escape. Looking both ways, I walk out feeling like a criminal. I pass a kebob stand and a sweets seller. As I walk, the mountains fill me with awe, and the air is clear and fresh. I have no idea how to get to the bazaar so I take a bus that seems to be going in the right direction.

  The buses are fancifully painted, riotously emblazoned with designs, sunrises, amulets, colors galore. I board one. The driver stares at me. I smile at him. He jerks his head in the direction of the back of the bus.

  At first I think I see only a pile of clothing back there, but eerily the clothing, which is huddled together, is actually moving. Oh, my God! This is not clothing—these are women, all huddled together, wearing burqas, balancing babies and bundles in the female-only section. I am horrified, slightly hysterical.

  Women literally have to sit at the back of the bus. This is before Rosa Parks, before the American civil rights movement begins in earnest. At dinner I can talk of nothing else. My relatives look away. Abdul-Kareem insists that I am “prone to exaggeration,” and “overly dramatic.” Then he hisses at me.

  “If you are only patient and quiet, you will see changes around here that will surpass anything you’ve ever seen in America.”

  He honestly believes that the burqas and the gender segregation (or gender apartheid, as I call it), will, soon enough, disappear. He defends Afghanistan against my “American superiority.”

  “You Americans are so quick to criticize. But we are not savages. In many ways we are far more advanced than you are in America. Here we do not throw our elders away. Here we do not divorce our wives. Here we know things about life, about hospitality, that you Americans will never be able to emulate.”

  He has a point. But have I become an American so that Abdul-Kareem can again become an Afghan? Am I his necessary foil, his sacrifice, so that he can reenter the Middle Ages and rise?

  I think that Abdul-Kareem is scared. He is a different person. What have they done to him?

  Twenty years later Abdul-Kareem and I are talking in my Manhattan apartment. He insists that the moment I left Kabul—well, perhaps five years after my departure—a “goddam revolution” had taken place and naked-faced Afghan Muslim women walked the streets of Kabul just as women did in Paris or New York.

  “C’mon, my second wife worked at an embassy and drove around Kabul in her own convertible. She was never veiled. There were women wearing miniskirts on the streets. The Russians ruined all that.”

  I say: “Abdul-Kareem, your second wife may have been born a Muslim, but she was not an Afghan woman. And the Russians were the ones who insisted on female literacy and education. They were the ones who’d indoctrinated Afghans with such beliefs. And, as for the miniskirts: I don’t think of them as a sign of women’s liberation.”

  Fifty years later I am sitting with a very knowledgeable woman who once lived in Kabul. She too insists that the late 1960s–1970s was a time of women’s liberation. Maybe it’s true, maybe for one bright and shining decade some social progress was made.

  As proof she shows me a government publication from the early 1970s that has photos of women wearing only headscarves (hijab), or work-related headgear like nurses’ caps, rather than burqas. I laugh. Then I say, “Most of these photos look carefully posed. They are meant to make Afghanistan look modern. The government was backing modernization at the time. But look how little spontaneity there is, especially in the street scenes.”

  She pressures me. I relent. “Okay,” I laugh, “the rules regarding female dress codes were relaxed for educated city women in the late 1960s and 1970s, but that’s it. Then the Soviets invaded, and the mujahideen and the Taliban returned women to the back of the bus and to their ghostly sheets.”

  Maybe I resist acknowledging this early and genuine Arab Spring (so to speak) because I regret having missed it. But with the knowledge of hindsight I also know how fragile and short-lived this progress was.

  I am now looking at an online photograph taken in Kabul in 1972. It depicts women in burqas on Jadi Maiwand, one of the main streets of the city. Perhaps some women were indeed naked faced in Kabul. Others, like the women in this photo, were not.

  In 1969 Kodansha published a book of photos taken in Afghanistan as part of its Beautiful World series. In 1967 the author, Masatoshi Konishi, and the Tokyo University Group spent two months in the country; they took 106 beautiful photos of mosques, ruins, and holy sites; 67 photos depict people—mainly Afghan men. The public space still seems rather womanless.

  Only fifteen photos (22 percent) show female children, teenagers, and one elderly woman. Most, even the children, are wearing hijabs; many are wearing burqas. Konishi misidentifies what is clearly a child bride as a “seventeen year old” posed with her “twenty six year old husband.” The child, who looks twelve, is smiling, wearing a headscarf, but she is sitting on a bench, perhaps to disguise their too-obvious height difference.

  Perhaps there was a golden time, when some Afghan women wore short skirts and went out on dates and had boyfriends in Kabul. . . . Somehow, I still find this hard to believe, given my own experience and given what I now know about the history of Afghanistan.

  In 1928 the Afghan king, Amanullah Khan, scandalized his own people when he urged Afghan women to uncover their faces. That same year Amanullah had his queen, Soraya, remove her light veil in public. According to the American journalist Rhea Talley Stewart, the king personally advocated the removal of the face veil and condoned the “shooting of interfering husbands.” He said that “he would supply the weapons for this himself.” He also promised that “no inquiries would be instituted against the women.” Once, when he saw a woman wearing a burqa in Kabul, he personally tore it off and burned it.

  Ah—a king after my own heart.

  Religious Muslim scholars and other experts disagree about whether the Qur’an obliges women to wear burqas or face masks. Both men and women are advised to dress modestly; women are told to cover their bosom. As early as 1899, in his landmark book The Liberation of Women, the Egyptian intellectual Qasim Amin argued that the face veil was not commensurate with the tenets of Islam and called for its removal.

  Historically, most Muslim-majority countries either abolished the face veil or refused to enforce the custom. Muslim feminists, especially in Egypt, North Africa, Turkey, Iran, and Lebanon, fought hard for—and won—this right.

  In Afghanistan, King Amanullah discouraged the wearing of burqas but he did not prohibit women from veiling. Purdah, the seclusion of women, and polygamy were also officially discouraged but never prohibited by law or decree. And still Amanullah was forced to flee; he lived out his days in European exile.

  My father-in-law, Ismail Mohammed, was one of King Amanullah’s supporters. (God bless them both!) Ismail Mohammed was jailed and sentenced to be hanged for these political leanings. A mob of supporters freed him, and he fled to Iran.

  Unlike Amanullah, Ismail Mohammed was eventually allowed to return. Those who had engineered Amanullah’s departure then proceeded to plunge the country backward in time. Thereafter, for thirty years even the kings were cautious about the unveiling of Afghan women.

  Many people assumed that King Amanullah had lost his throne because he proceeded to modernize or Westernize the country too quickly and that his unveiling of women had led to his utter ruin and almost immediate downfall. However, the diplomat and scholar Leon B. Poullada disagrees. He points out: “Decades earlier, Abdur Rahman, who never got beyond the talking stage of social reforms, nevertheless was faced with ten serious internal rebellions, four of which were so extensive he classified them as ‘civil wars.’”

  Afghans are known to riot. Afghans co
nduct blood feuds. Afghans overthrow their kings and leaders. Fathers kill sons, and brothers kill each other, as do nephews, uncles, and cousins, in pursuit of the throne.

  In the late 1960s I found Hunter’s book about Afghanistan, The Past Present. I read it in one intense sitting. Then I went back, read it again, and underlined and typed up practically everything he wrote about women, the medieval-totalitarian nature of the government bureaucracy, the fanaticism of the mullahs, the existence of political prisoners, the tragedy of the burqa.

  Had I read this before I left for Kabul—would I have gone?

  I think not. But then I could not have written this book.

  I have always wondered if Abdul-Kareem knew about Hunter’s work. Abdul-Kareem certainly presented himself as having a vast knowledge of every book ever written about his country. However, over the years I have asked many experts on Afghanistan if they knew of this book. No one ever did.

  Hunter’s tone and concerns are so different from those of most travelers who have passed through—far different from my beloved Saira Shah’s version of the country, too. Of course, as Sirdar Ali Shah’s wife she might have been especially well treated, although she never quite acknowledges that this was the case. And she and her husband really lived outside Afghanistan and traveled widely. Every Western traveler has admired the humor of the generalized Afghans, their humility, and their ability to bear pain, cold, hunger, and illness with dignity and without complaint. Most of these travelers have essentially described Afghan men interacting with other men and with foreign travelers. The Afghans are all seen as enormously good-natured, somewhat shy, rather comic but warm, deeply religious, and famously hospitable. This is all true.

  The Pushtuns are admired, and rightly so, as do-or-die warriors with extraordinary characteristics: deadly accurate as snipers; proficient at tracking, hunting, trapping, and mountaineering; tribally loyal but bred to lifelong blood feuds; unspoiled; fond of poetry; and close to both Nature and God.

  The travelers, who wrote about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Afghanistan, were mainly writing about tribesmen from the hills or about poor people, peasants, farmers, shepherds, small shopkeepers,

  nomads, and house servants. They were not describing wealthy city dwellers or government or palace officials. They certainly did not describe Afghan men at home or in terms of how they treat their wives and children. How could they? Except for Saira Shah, who was both a woman and an Afghan wife, and the nineteenth-century Josiah Harlan, the first American who ever entered Afghanistan and who had lived among the egalitarian Kafirs in Nuristan, few travelers had ever been allowed to meet Afghan women. Many traveler-writers did not even realize that they had met only half of Afghanistan.

  In the 1930s, Rosita Forbes described the hearty good-naturedness of the Afghan men with whom she traveled—but she also described the Afghan chowdry/burqa’s narrow, grill-like opening for the eyes as constituting “a cruel mesh.”

  In the 1950s, the author and teacher Rosanne Klass described the Kabul bazaar as a “completely masculine world. The few women to be seen passed silently, shrouded in their chadris: disembodied phantoms.”

  In 1983, pre-Taliban, the American journalist Jere van Dyk wrote, “In over three weeks inside Afghanistan, I had not seen a woman up close. Those we had passed had turned away quickly, hiding their faces with the shawls that had covered their heads and shoulders. At a stream or beside a fire, I had tried to catch their eyes, although I had been told never to talk to or even look at them. The Afghans dedicate their poetry to women, but they seem to treat them like animals.”

  In The Past Present Hunter has riveting discussions about the Afghan burqa and purdah. I have since talked to many Muslim women and read many books written by them about the Afghan and Saudi-style burqa. Absolutely no Muslim woman has a kind word to say about it. (I am not talking about the headscarf known as hijab that does not prevent one from seeing, speaking, hearing, or being seen and heard.)

  The chowdry, or burqa—the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud—is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman’s already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world’s prisons.

  Imagine the added shock if a Western woman—or an Afghan woman who has lived and been educated in the West—has to wear this odious garment. I never did—although once, in the early 1980s, I bought an Afghan burqa in New York City’s Greenwich Village and offered some American feminists the opportunity to try it on, to see how it would make them feel.

  Post-9/11 the Norwegian author Asne Seierstad lived with a polygamous Afghan family. She experimented with wearing a burqa in order to see what “it feels like to squeeze into the trunk of a taxi because a man is occupying the backseat.” She writes, “How in time I started to hate it. How it pinches the head and causes headaches, how difficult it is to see anything through the grille. How enclosed it is, how little air gets in, how quickly you start to perspire, how all the time you have to be aware of where you are walking because you cannot see your feet, what a lot of dirt it picks up, how dirty it is, how much in the way. How liberated you feel when you get home and can take it off.”

  The Canadian author Sally Armstrong interviewed the Kabul psychiatrist Fatana Osman, who had never worn a burqa before the Taliban came to power. Osman described the experience as follows: “It was hot. Shrouded in this body bag I felt claustrophobic. It was smelly too. . . . It also felt like I was invisible. No one could see me. No one knew whether I was smiling or crying. . . . It was like wearing horse blinders. . . . [When I] tumbled to the ground, no one helped me.”

  Dear Edward Hunter names some formidable Afghan heroines whose stories match those of twentieth-century feminists in Persia, Turkey, and Egypt, all of whom fought tirelessly to end forced veiling. In Hunter’s opinion no one in Afghanistan or in the world has ever heard about these heroines and about their resulting punishments because Afghanistan did not allow a free press to exist. Thus arrests were secret. The people knew things, but these things never became public.

  Hunter introduces us to a heroine for the ages. Her name is Maga Rahmany, and she was the daughter of a Russian mother and an Afghan father. Maga had lived in France and in Turkey from the time she was seven until she turned fourteen. In 1938, when the family returned to Afghanistan, her father, suspected of reformist tendencies, was “soon thrown into the political prison in the King’s own palace,” where he would languish for many years.

  (Abdul-Kareem was right to be cautious: He had to please all those in power who resented, envied, and despised his foreign education and his potentially reformist tendencies. At the time I had no way of knowing this.)

  Hunter’s description of Afghanistan in the late 1940s is very similar to a Taliban-dominated country. Women were not welcome in public. They could not attend the all-male cinema because they would have to remove their “tomb-like shrouds.” They could not visit a male doctor or disrobe before one. They would describe their symptoms to their husbands, who in turn would inform the physician.

  Women were not allowed out without a male relative as escort; even then they had to be fully veiled. A woman could not ask “another man to escort her, she would be breaking purdah laws” by doing so. Maga’s father was in jail, her mother needed medicine, and Maga had no choice.

  Thus: “Maga took fate into her own hands, put on her ‘choudry’ and walked out alone into the streets, an unprecedented act at that time.” Worse: When her father was released from prison, Maga asked him to escort her to the cinema. He did so. Her presence caused a near riot. “Relatives stormed their home to protest. They warned that the two would be beaten up.”

  In 1950 Maga went too far; she dared to attend
her all-female classes at Kabul University without wearing a burqa—and she visited female friends at night unveiled as well. For this Maga was placed under house arrest for three and a half years. Police arrived with instructions that Maga not leave her home unless she shrouded herself—and they mounted a permanent police and military patrol outside her house. Maga refused to wear the burqa, so she remained indoors.

  This story reminds me of what happened to the first woman who unveiled herself in Beirut in the early 1920s. I heard the story from her daughter, Rhonda al-Fatal, who was at the time married to the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. When Rhonda’s English-educated mother taught her university class bare faced and without a screen, she was told she could never do this again. A police guard was mounted outside her home as well. And, like Maga, this early heroine refused to leave her home for more than a year.

  Maga studied at home in 1950, but the government refused to allow her to qualify for a diploma—and refused to allow her to leave the country to continue her studies elsewhere. Three years later Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan allowed Maga to work alongside her mother at the United Nations. According to Hunter, Maga may have “lost any hope of marriage. An Afghan man would require intellectual courage to marry an Afghan woman whose face was naked.” Maga’s bravery was meant to die with her.

  Thus, Prime Minister Daoud freed Maga from house arrest a mere eight years before my arrival. Cultures and people do not change all that much in only eight years.

  In 1958, three years before I arrived, Afghan women were unveiled for the second time in the twentieth century. I was told that bloody riots had broken out and government forces had reportedly killed hundreds of rioters. Remember: Unveiling was not mandatory and veiling was not prohibited. Women did as their families wished.