Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future edited by Sunita Mehta. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 240 pp., $13.95 paper.

Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan by Sally Armstrong. New York. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002, 208 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Veiled Courage: Inside the Afghan Women's Resistance by Cheryl Benard. New York: Broadway Books, 2002, 293 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban, A Young Woman's Story by Latifa. New York: Talk Miramax, 2002, 210 pp., $21.95 hardcover.

Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom in Afghanistan by Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer. New York: Doubleday, 2002, 309 pp., $19.95 hardcover, $12.99 paper.

Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom by "Sulima" and "Hala" as told to Batya Swift Yasgur. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002, 256 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Repression, Resistance and Women in Afghanistan by Hafizullah Emadi. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002, 264 pp., $64.95 hardcover.

Torn Between Two Cultures: An Afghan-American Woman Speaks Out by Maryam Qudrat Aseel. Sterling, VA: Capital Books, 2003, 208 pp., $24.95 hardcover.


WHEN THE UNITED STATES made its opening gambit in the war against terrorism by bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, the need to liberate Afghan women from the Taliban regime lent moral justification to the attacks. Among some who had long sought to bring into view human rights abuses under the Taliban, such justification rang hollow. Riffat Hassan, a feminist Muslim theologian and contributor to Women for Afghan Women, one of a number of recently released books on the topic, observes that the "'liberation' of Afghan women from Taliban rule occurred as a by-product of the U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan." Indeed, Hassan believes that were it not for the September 11 attacks, Afghan women "would have continued to live and die in horrific conditions under Taliban rule."

The emergence of Afghan women as a human rights cause in the last year raises anew questions about the relationship between politics and the information market. Under what circumstances do issues appear in global purview, and why do some engage an American audience more than others? With respect to women in Afghanistan, the interest relates to how women's rights historically have been leveraged in the West to justify intervention on behalf of "Eastern" women's liberation. A quick glance at the covers of new books on Afghan women says a lot about how much both politics and publishing rely on this history to make their sales. Their titles--Behind the Burqa, My Forbidden Face, Veiled Courage, Veiled Threat--exploit long-standing myths in the Western imagination about the veil, Islam and women. Pitched into the American book market in the current climate, these titles, and the photos of unindividuated blobs of burqa-clad women that illustrate their covers, may inadvertently serve a political purpose.

The good news is that beyond the veil-obsessed titles and covers of some recent books, there is a wealth of analysis documenting the situation of Afghan women and placing it in cultural, historical and political context. Ranging from personal testimonies by ordinary Afghan women and professional human rights advocates to rigorous scholarship and more freely declarative journalism, these books attempt to account for the rise of the Taliban and their singularly brutal ruling tactics. Most of the authors of these books have taken the current interest in Afghan women as an opportunity not only to bring to light the details of their current situation, but to lay out the complex political interactions that permitted it, while proposing steps for the future. Taken together, they raise provocative points specific to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but which may also inform policy in other contexts, especially since it appears likely that the United States is about to enter a new era of engagement in the Middle East.


THE FIRST POINT, which cannot be stated often enough, is that the grotesque situation in which Afghans found themselves under the Taliban has nothing to do with Islam. It has to do with politics. This bears repeating precisely because of the way in which the case for Afghan women is being made in book titles that reference Islamic cultural markers such as the veil. However, there is no civilization or religion whose ideals tolerate the Taliban's treatment of women and men. No relativist accommodation of tyranny--in the name of tolerance--need be made.

Books such as Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong's Veiled Threat confuse the issue by reviewing theological arguments about gender and religion. Armstrong's is a well-intentioned, but rhetorically over-written and garbled, account of the culture of Afghan women. More invidiously, while reviews of the tenets of Islam, Islamic history and theological considerations of women's roles have their place, that place is not in a discussion of the Taliban. The claim that "the interpretation of Islam by the post-Taliban regime will likely determine the country's future" is not only untrue, it feeds the premise that Islamic societies lie beyond the exigencies or possibilities of modern social and political frameworks.

The second point consistently made in new books about Afghan women is that gender is a crucial practical and theoretical consideration in rebuilding Afghanistan. This means not only that women must play substantial policy-making and other public roles, but also that the roles of men and masculinity must be factored in. In Women for Afghan Women this argument is examined at length. Several contributors to this excellent collection of essays, poems and photographs are members of the organization from which the book takes its name, a group of Afghan and non-Afghan women from the New York area who do fundraising and advocacy work. The collection provides both basic information for a newcomer to Afghan history and culture, and sophisticated critiques and analyses of the steps being taken toward a viable future. Sima Wali's introduction eradicates, in about a page of bullet-pointed remarks, some of the factual confusion that has arisen around who Afghans are--historically and ethnically distinct from Arabs or Iranians--the languages they speak, chiefly Dari and Pashto, and their relationship (none) to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Wali, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Refugee Women in Development, also devotes part of her introduction to the necessary reconstruction of our understanding of gender. "It may surprise Westerners," she remarks, "to discover that the stereotype of Afghan men as women-haters and oppressors is incorrect." This perception has ramifications in the arena of international policy. Wali points out that the well-meant effort of the US government to redress Taliban decrees against female education by earmarking funds for girls' education "created yet another problem--educational programs that exclude boys." In their absence, parents send boys to the Quranic schools, madrasas, "the very same institutions that indoctrinated and educated the Taliban." The essays that follow usefully place women's rights and struggles in local and global contexts. Sara Amiryar, for example, asks in a brief essay whether the conventional institution for dispute resolution, the Loya Jirga, will serve women. Angela King reviews UN policies and actions regarding Afghan women since 1997.


A FASCINATING AND ELEGANTLY WRITTEN exploration of the relationships of gender to politics is offered in Cheryl Benard's Veiled Courage. Benard's introduction to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) began in 1982, when she went to Pakistan to assess the delivery of international aid to refugees. The Afghan refugee situation has existed since the late 1970s, when the 1979 Soviet invasion, followed shortly by an American-backed guerrilla war, led to the flight of two million Afghans to the borders of Pakistan and Iran. This number would increase to five million by the mid-1990s.

Benard chronicles the shift in her own views about Afghan women. Aid workers sometimes discussed among themselves the particular problems of female refugees: the high mortality rates for women and newborns in childbirth, an epidemic level of domestic violence, the low female literacy rates. "The outcome of these discussions was always the same," she recalls. "There was nothing you could do... you weren't here to change people's cultural traditions... [I]t was pointless to offer services that would benefit the women, because the Afghans just didn't want that. They were used to things being this way." Benard was distressed by such conclusions, but the sex-segregated organization of society in the camps made it difficult to find out what women themselves might think, since they so rarely appeared in public. When offered the opportunity to visit a women's hospital near Peshawar, Benard discovered women suffering not so much from medical ailments as from social and political ones. They had been abused by husbands, become ill after extended forced seclusion, or had sunk into depression when sons as young as eight years old were forcibly taken to fight a "holy war" against the Soviets. Their attitudes changed Benard's views: "These women were not resigned, they hadn't grown indifferent to the deaths of their children, they didn't accept loveless arranged marriages as a given, they didn't feel secure in the arms of an extended family, they weren't content in deep traditionalism."

Benard's discovery eventually led her to RAWA. The feminist political association was founded by an extraordinarily charismatic woman known as Meena in the late 1970s, and would later be the only organized opposition group to thrive during the period of Taliban rule. Benard's collection of testimonials by members and supporters enhances her history of this unique organization. Meena herself was killed by Pakistani police with ties to the Afghan secret police in 1987, but the memory of her leadership continues to permeate RAWA and is among the elements Benard identifies as basic to the group's coherence.

RAWA's leadership and membership principles are also distinct. At its core are eleven elected women. Membership has expanded into the thousands through the painstaking work of its existing members, who cultivate interested outsiders, both women and men (although only women can be members), through lengthy conversations and correspondence. RAWA members--active, literate, confident--also serve as role models for women demoralized by extreme circumstances and by a culture that trivializes their worth. The willingness of members to make extended personal contact with supporters, as well as challengers, pays off. As Benard observes, RAWA's tactics illustrate how ordinary people are transformed into resistance fighters. Women who might in other circumstances be denied political participation, such as illiterate widows, are given tasks in the party. Their participation ties them even more firmly to RAWA's aims: to change fundamentally the position of women in a culture in which female inferiority is a deeply embedded value, and to create a basis for Afghan civil society.

Benard devotes the final third of the book to the role of RAWA in the post-September 11 future. She presents an interesting comparison between Al-Qaeda and RAWA: both have flourished in the same unstable atmosphere, and both constitute what she calls "postmodern" political movements, combining archaic and contemporary modes of communication to be effective. Their difference, of course, is that from "the global ideology mix, [RAWA] had picked democracy and equality; al-Qaeda had drawn anti-Westernism and authoritarianism."

Benard concludes with a stringent critique of the global diplomatic flurry that followed the fall of the Taliban. RAWA is again in the forefront of undermining static traditions, by working to "subvert the autonomy project of modern diplomacy, which wants to mold Afghanistan into a nice conventional male-preponderant nation-state according to the old criteria of ethnic composition" in a context in which ethnicity may not be the most relevant or fruitful means of creating a national consensus. Like other close observers of the situation, Benard warns of the consequences if the issues of male socialization and masculinity remain unremarked: "In various places, young men who have never known a single day of normal life are being psychologically misused for someone's dreams of glory. Not just their own populations, but the rest of us, too, are likely to pay the price."


AMONG THE MOST POWERFUL and simply rendered books to appear recently is a personal narrative by "Latifa" (a pseudonym), My Forbidden Face. The cover shares the lurid titling and imagery that markets Afghan women to the West: a photograph of a burqa-clad head with two eyes barely visible behind their embroidered lattice. But the contents of Latifa's book reveal a sharp intellect with a literary and political prescience that should put her on the same shelf as Anne Frank.

Latifa, from a progressive and relatively well-to-do family of seven, was a sixteen-year-old student preparing to begin university life as a journalism major when the Taliban entered Kabul in September, 1996. In May 2001, she and her mother were given the opportunity to travel to Paris to inaugurate an information campaign about women sponsored by an advocacy organization, Afghanistan Libre, and Elle magazine. While there, the Taliban issued a fatwa against them for denouncing the regime and gutted their Kabul apartment. Latifa and her parents remained exiled in Paris, where Latifa was given the opportunity to write her book, an effort to "explain how a girl from Kabul, educated first during the Soviet occupation, then under Communist regimes throughout four years of civil war, was finally locked away by a monstrous power, her life confiscated when she was only sixteen." Latifa's narrative concludes in October 2001, just as the American bombing has begun. "I know," she writes, "that refugees on the borders of Afghanistan's neighbors endure hardships much worse than mine. What can I do--except tell you what my life has been like in the city of Kabul, a city of rubble and ruins?"

What, and how, she tells of her family life makes for a powerful critique of political hypocrisy, whether this means the flourishing black market in televisions under the Taliban (who banned television), the drug trade on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the perversions of humanitarian standards under their rule, or the news, in February 2001, that the Taliban's Minister of Health (in a regime that forbade women from receiving medical care) had traveled to France to discuss humanitarian matters. The eloquence with which this young writer expresses her convictions is moving; in their light it seems worth listening when they waver: "I've come to the end of my story, at a time when weapons are speaking in our place. As always… But who speaks for Afghanistan? I don't know anymore."

The eloquence and power of these writers makes it clear that women may speak for the nation. But it is worth keeping in mind how their images, and those of the liberated, individual voices and faces of American women to whom they are contrasted, can be manipulated into a moral justification for a range of objectives. Prisoners of Hope makes just such an unintentional contrast. It is narrated by Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, two young Christian missionaries from Waco, Texas, whose dream of "serving the poor overseas and expressing the love of Jesus" led them to Afghanistan in the spring of 2001. While there, they were imprisoned and put on trial by the Taliban. They were mid-trial in the autumn of 2001 and, in November, airlifted from the country by US Special Forces. The book makes a fascinating read for anyone interested in such an experience and in the genre of Christian salvation narrative; the young women perceive their imprisonment and the trials before them during interrogation as tests of their faith. But the narrative obtains a secular political currency via the endorsement of President Bush, whose remarks on their courage are recorded on the book's back cover. The front cover, a photograph of the women's beaming faces, radiates with the implication that the very ability to show one's name and face as a woman relates to a singularly American concept of freedom.

In symmetrical contrast to Prisoners of Hope stands Behind the Burqa. It recounts the quest for asylum in the United States by two sisters as told to Batya Swift Yasgur, a freelance writer who met them while reporting on detained asylum seekers. Although "Hala" and "Sulima" (pseudonyms) too ultimately arrive in America, they are pictured fully veiled on the cover of the book.

The tale within is well-told. Both sisters, sixteen years apart, describe their lives from early childhood to the present, setting their personal experiences against the conflict between communists and mujahadeen that structured much of their existence. Sulima, the elder of the two, recalls her father's increasingly extreme vision of Islam over the 1970s, a nationalist response to the rise of communism in Afghanistan that had severe repercussions for her. Ironically, Sulima, a Communist Party member, fled the country in 1979, when her reliance on Quranic edicts to educate rural women led her into conflict with the Communist president, Hafizullah Amin. Hala left the country in 1997, following the discovery of her work as a schoolteacher and her violent persecution by the Taliban.

All of the books mentioned here offer something of value to the reader interested in the recent history of Afghan women. At their most optimistic, all make it clear that the technologies and values of a globalizing world create new opportunities for women's empowerment, and for alliances across national boundaries on behalf of human rights. For those seeking analyses of the concrete possibilities for women to effect policy change, Women for Afghan Women and Benard's Veiled Courage are valuable reads.

Two other books not discussed here are also of note. The scholarly reader seeking an overview of the cultural and political roles of women in modern Afghanistan may turn to Hafizullah Emadi's Repression, Resistance and Women in Afghanistan. A number of his chapters, which place women's changing status in the context of a shifting state and capital structure, might be useful supplements to a college course. In a different vein, Maryam Qudrat Aseel, an Afghan American, has recorded her impressions in Torn Between Two Cultures. While written in a fairly banal and often sentimental style, it guides the reader through some of the misunderstandings Americans have about Afghanistan from a personal perspective. But the gem among all of these books is Latifa's My Forbidden Face. This concise memoir is riveting, insightful and quite lovely: a testament to the human capacity to grow beauty in the rockiest soil.