An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (27 page)

In the past I had criticized some Western feminist groups for their simplistic feminism, self-aggrandizement, anti-Americanism, and wrongheaded optimism. I also shared Abdul-Kareem’s feelings that Afghanistan had become a symbolic pawn in people’s dramas and that the do-gooders’ own operating expenses were bound to eat up most of the monies they raised—even before corrupt Afghan middlemen demanded their share of the take.

Allow me to apologize to these feminists here and now. At least they tried to do something.

For a time the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) was the favored group among certain feminists. Association members once had a speaking engagement in New York City. A long line snaked around the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village to hear them. People were being turned away. As I turned to leave, my companion, Kate Millett, stood her ground and forcefully thundered, “Do you know who she is? This is Phyllis Chesler, and I am Kate Millett, and we have to get in.” I was mortified, but Millett’s audacity worked. The crowd parted for us—just like the Red Sea.

But the RAWA representatives were so young and so shy. They did their best; under the circumstances they could do no wrong. And yet—the Soviets had already tried a Marxist approach to women’s liberation in Afghanistan. Resistance to that canny imperial attempt has so far led to more than thirty years of fighting with no end in sight. RAWA’s message was far more popular on the American feminist left than in Kabul or Kandahar.

Some organizations have been effective in their efforts on behalf of individual Afghan women. Sunita Viswanath, a cofounder and board member of Women for Afghan Women (WAW), has rescued women in Afghanistan who have been brutally attacked. Viswanath mentioned one case, that of a girl named Mumtaz, who has recently received press attention. She was “sprayed with acid and had burns over 42 percent of her body because she refused a marriage proposal. Thanks to the graciousness of the Indian government and to generous funding from individuals, WAW was able to send her to India for treatment.” According to
Viswanath, “We are committed to a grassroots approach to addressing Afghan women’s human rights. We work closely with mosques, schools and other trusted community institutions, and we have developed excellent working relationships with government ministries, police and courts. As we have expanded to eight [now nine] provinces in Afghanistan, there has never been a province or community that hasn’t welcomed us.”

Similarly the Afghan Women’s Fund, which is headed by Fahima Vorgetts, has established microfinancing projects and provided Afghan village girls with an education.

The plight of Afghan women and children troubles me deeply. I do not believe that Western feminists or activists will be able to bring about a gender-egalitarian state in Afghanistan—but I praise them for exposing the realities of gender apartheid and for trying to save individual Afghans. They are doing God’s work.

I only wish that such well-intentioned feminists also understood that certain tragedies cannot be reversed through social work and education; that traditional Afghan mullahs and their followers will resist, unto death, women’s freedom; and that the Afghans themselves have to choose modernization. It cannot be imposed by imperial or infidel powers.

Ironically, like the American feminists, whom he loves to criticize, Abdul-Kareem once tried to make a difference. He too was part of a group of high-minded dreamers and progressives whose accomplishments were swept away.

C
an Westerners or infidels abolish misogynistic barbarism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran—and in an Islamist era? Sometimes I fear that raising women’s expectations only leads vulnerable women to have unrealistic hopes that doom them to early and violent deaths or to very unhappy lives. But I strongly believe in universal human rights and reject all cultural relativism as racist and sexist. I cannot hold one standard for Western women and another, lower standard for Afghan or Muslim women and men.

But if I cannot reach Abdul-Kareem on the issue of women—and he is an educated, secular, assimilated, Afghan
American—
how can anyone hope to reach men who are uneducated and fanatically religious—and who live in Afghanistan?

As I’ve said, Abdul-Kareem reads the news for hours every day. Yet he claims to know nothing about any Afghan’s committing an honor
killing in the West. I mention a high-profile case that has dominated the world press for many months. He says he knows nothing about it.

“Abdul-Kareem, the killers are Afghans, the victims are Afghans, too. The victims are all Muslims. Are you sure you’ve read nothing about them?”

“Not a word. Not that interested.”

I am referring to a Canadian honor-killing case. Mohammed Shafia, a wealthy and polygamous fifty-nine-year-old Afghan father, murdered his three biological daughters and his infertile first wife. His second wife, who was the biological mother of the three daughters, and their biological son, helped him do it. The murders took place at the Rideau Canal, near Montreal.

According to Canadian reporter Christie Blatchford’s account of eyewitness testimony, Mohammed Shafia ran his family like a “totalitarian regime.” The children were taught to spy on each other and parental or paternal permission was needed “for anything beyond breathing, and the girls were virtually under guard.” An uncle said that the women lived “like political prisoners.”

What crime did they commit? They wanted to wear Western clothing and have Canadian (infidel) friends. One daughter wanted to marry a Pakistani man who was deemed inappropriate. Shafia’s first wife supported the daughters.

On the stand Shafia sobbed when he spoke of his daughters. Shafia “attempted to paint a picture of himself as a loving, liberal-minded, generous patriarch—a bit of a free spirit even, prone to handing out money and kisses—whose only wish for his children was happiness.”

But the police caught Shafia on tape cursing his dead daughters and describing them as whores, adding, “May the devil shit on their graves!” When challenged about this, he claimed that the expression is merely an old, harmless, and meaningless Kabul refrain.

Shafia was also recorded saying that “they betrayed and violated us immensely. There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this—by God!” When asked in court if he had killed his daughters and his first wife, Shafia answered, “We never give ourselves permission to do that. Our Koran would not allow ourselves to do that.” He also said, “How could someone do that?”

In 2012 all three Shafias were found guilty on four counts of first-degree murder each, and each was sentenced to life without possibility of parole for twenty-five years—Canada’s maximum sentence. In other
words they were sentenced to about six years for each murder. In 2012 Mohammed and Hamed Shafia, his son, filed notices of appeal based on alleged judicial errors. Tooba Yaya, his second wife, is also expected to appeal her verdict.

Mohammed Shafia lived in the West, but he still followed Afghan tribal law, not Canadian law. In Afghanistan there would have been no arrest, trial, or discussion. Even in the postfeminist twenty-first century, in the West, for certain kinds of Afghan men, their women remain their property, to dispose of as they wish.

Abdul-Kareem has consistently denied that such killings ever took place in Afghanistan. Not when he was there, not that he knows about.

But even while I was in captivity, I was told that men had the right to kill their wives, daughters, and sisters. A female relative and a foreign wife both whispered this to me. You can imagine my disbelief and my terror. Another female relative praised a man because, although his wife had behaved badly, he had not exercised this right. I also heard stories about women who killed themselves for no apparent reason and in ways that seemed suspicious.

These are stories one does not forget.

Imagine what it might be like to grow up knowing that, if you disobey or accidentally fail even slightly to do exactly what is expected of you, your own family members might suddenly kill you. Imagine the psychological makeup of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh girls who come from families that believe honor killing is a necessary and acceptable practice. The consequent psychological insecurity, anxiety, paranoia, self-monitoring, vigilance, and aggression toward other women are unimaginable.

An honor killings differs from Western domestic violence. It is a carefully planned conspiracy on the part of one’s own family of origin to murder a daughter. Hindus perpetrate such heinous murders but only in India and mainly for caste-related violations; Muslims do so both in Muslim-majority countries and in the West—and for the slightest female disobedience, either real or imagined. Although older, married mothers are also honor murdered, the victims of a classic honor killing are teenagers or young women. Their murderers are valorized and glorified, not arrested, tried, and sentenced.

In 2009, 2010, and 2012, I published studies of honor killings. From that moment on, women who had escaped being honor killed and their immigration lawyers began turning to me for help as an expert witness in their asylum cases. Muslim feminists reached out to thank me.

But talking to many of my non-Muslim Western feminist friends was as frustrating as talking to Abdul-Kareem. They feared that my research would be used by racists to target Muslims. Even those feminists who despised the burqa initially failed to oppose honor killings because for them too racism continued to trump sexism—even femicide, even human sacrifice.

I have nevertheless continued to reach out to all feminists
because they run the shelters for battered women
in America and Canada. For example, when Seyran Ates, a Muslim Turkish lawyer from Berlin, came to stay with me, I suggested that we meet the director of a shelter for battered women. Seyran (whom I have mentioned before) was eager to do so. Seyran is a lawyer who was nearly murdered for her work with battered Muslim immigrant women: A fifteen-year-old client of hers
was
murdered in Seyran’s office. Seyran was also shot and nearly died.

Everyone in the shelter office is welcoming, excited to meet with both of us. But when
Seyran
tries to explain how an honor killing is different from Westernized domestic violence, the director (who is a smart, warm, and fiercely passionate feminist) does not agree.

“There are honor killings in Brazil due to machismo, and they get off with light sentences. I don’t see why Islam should be targeted or why our concerns should be with Muslim honor killings. Look around. There are so many women here who have been savagely battered to within an inch of their lives. They come from all backgrounds. Recently I was able to rescue a Muslim woman because her mullah and her brother stepped in and helped me.”

Both Seyran and I tried again to explain why battered women’s shelters in the West had to understand the difference between an honor killing and Western domestic violence. I said, “In Toronto a shelter worker sent a seventeen-year-old girl, Aqsa Parvez, home when her mother called, crying, to say she missed her. Within hours the girl was dead; her father and her brother killed her. What was her crime? She did not want to wear hijab. Certain kinds of Muslim families in the West are not the same as Christian, Hindu, Sikh, or Jewish families in the West. This must be understood if we want to help the girls save their own lives. An American-born non-Muslim battered woman may have her husband after her. Her Muslim counterpart may have her mother, father, sister, brother, uncles, grandfather, cousins, and husband all after her. She may require the equivalent of a federal witness protection program and a Muslim adoptive family.”

Seyran quickly backed me up.

“German fathers don’t routinely batter their teenage daughters or kill them, either. German brothers do not monitor and micromanage their sisters’ behavior the way Turkish or North African brothers do in Europe. Even a violent German family is not as violent as a violent Muslim family. I am a religious Muslim. I am not proud of these terrible behaviors. My family is not like this. I believe that the good Muslims must speak out.”

Everyone smiles a lot, but we get nowhere at this time. I would have to be obsessed with this subject in order to make even the slightest bit of difference.

A
bdul-Kareem may hold views with which I disagree, but he is now a white-haired man in his late seventies who walks slowly and carefully. Like me, he has fallen, broken bones, endured surgeries. He is his invalid wife’s caretaker.

Their grown children also take care of their parents. Their daughter, Jameela, lives at home; their son, Mansour, is there every weekend. They are
Afghan
adult children and are used to spending time with their parents, whom they will never desert. They bring their friends home with them. This is truly a civilized and enviable custom.

Abdul-Kareem and Kamile have, commendably, raised completely assimilated children. Both are secular, chic, and successful. Abdul-Kareem is safe in America, and I am glad of it—but his dreams have all turned to dust. This is the one subject we never discuss. The destruction of his country destroyed his career and ended his life as an honored and progressive Afghan.

I am glad that he got out before the full Soviet military invasion and long before the Taliban started their savage reign against women, before the Taliban began their cross-amputations with the grisly public displays of severed limbs, and before they began publicly stoning women to death. In short, Abdul-Kareem got out before the Taliban implemented Sharia law.

Abdul-Kareem has only one brief and grainy video of a garden party that his family gave on a sunny afternoon in Kabul many years ago. I have watched it with him a number of times. His children wave as they splash in the swimming pool; guests hold drinks and cigarettes. He has no photo albums. He does not even own a copy of the film that he wrote and directed.

I have known him for fifty-four years. Can this single relationship shed a useful light on the relationship between Americans and Afghans or between the West and the increasingly Islamist East?