A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [145]
I had further complicated matters by deciding on a narrative that demanded not one but two central characters, both of them women. This was a decision that I’d made when I was putting the final edits on The Kite Runner—a father and son story set exclusively in the world of men. I wanted to write another love story set in Afghanistan but this time a mother/daughter tale and about the inner lives of two struggling Afghan women. I suppose there were some easier roads I could have gone down, but I chose this one because, both as a writer and as an Afghan, I couldn’t think of a more riveting or important or compelling story than the struggle of women in my country. Dramatically speaking, every other topic paled in comparison.
Unfortunately the image of the burqa-wearing woman walking past the stern, glaring face of the Taliban official has become familiar around the world, perhaps even iconic. When I was in Kabul in 2003, I met a man who worked as a bodyguard for a government official. He told me, kind of casually, a story about a woman he had seen beaten by a Taliban official on the street. In telling that story, he used a rather grisly if colorful expression. He said he beat her until her mother’s milk leaked out of her bones. In listening to that story it seemed unreal to me that this happened in Kabul. Not long ago, women in Afghanistan were professors at universities, they were doctors and lawyers, worked in hospitals, taught at schools and played an important role in society. They were women like my mother, who was university educated and a teacher of Farsi and history, eventually becoming the vice principal of a very large high school for girls. But that was in Kabul, and Afghanistan is not a nation of urbanized middle-class people. There has always been an ideological gap between liberal reformist Kabul and rural Afghanistan. The sad truth is that the Taliban-style oppression of women in certain regions of Afghanistan existed long before the Taliban was even a twinkle in the loving eye of the Pakistani secret intelligence. Whereas Kabul has been, relatively speaking, a hub for female autonomy, rural Afghanistan, especially south and east along the border with Pakistan, has been traditionally a patriarchal tribal region where men have decided the fates of women.
There, women have always lived in confinement. They have always worn the burqa on the street and rarely gone to school beyond the age of twelve so there was rampant illiteracy in those areas. For centuries, women there have been told when they will marry, who they will marry, and, incidentally, for how much. For the most part, rural Afghan women have led quiet, subterranean lives of obedience and service.
This may surprise you but throughout the last century there were multiple attempts to liberate, as it were, the women of Afghanistan, originating in Kabul. There was a king named Amanullah in the 1920s who actually banned the wearing of the burqa in public. He built the first hospital for women and the first school for girls. He brought teachers over from Europe and sent women to Europe to get an education. Amanullah tried to ban forced marriage, raise the minimum marrying age for girls to sixteen and ban the practice of bride price. Unfortunately, largely as a result of these attempts, there was a rebellion and he was run out of town. He ended up dying an old man in exile.
There were other attempts in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, some of which had fruition. In 1964, Afghan women gained the right to vote. But Kabul’s reforms have always been met by the patriarchal tribal leaders with mockery, contempt or in some cases mutiny, as in the case of poor King Amanullah.
So, as you can see, life was a struggle for some women in Afghanistan well before the Taliban. But it became all but unbearable with the outbreak of factional war, anarchy and extremism. In many ways, that’s when disaster really struck.
Women suffered not only through the bombings and indiscriminate