Lecture—Mid Manhattan Library October 7, 2014

“I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan.”

I love my opening sentence. It reminds me of Isak Dinesen’s “I had a farm in Africa,” from her book Out of Africa. Both Dinesen and I had romances with whole continents, entire cultures—we both had grand adventures that transcended any single relationship. Such adventures can be costly and are sometimes fatal but they also provide a writer with pure treasure.

Thank you for inviting me to speak in a library. I love libraries. And, I am a book person. I love to read and, even more, I love to write books. It is how I breathe. I love beautiful books—leather bound, gold embossed, books with beautiful covers—the kind Bride has--the very kind of book which I fear will, in the future, be relegated to glass cases in museums. I can hear the museum guide telling children that “this is how people used to access information.”

This is my fifteenth book. I had a Dream Team at Palgrave-Macmillan in terms of the publishing process and as a 42 year veteran in publishing trust me: this really counts. To my amazement and pleasure, Bride won a National Jewish Book Award. And, it received very good industry, pre-publication reviews and endorsements from just the right people. Walmart is now selling the kindle and paperback editions of this book.

SKIP FOR TIME

Bride was reviewed, in brief, in People magazine, featured in a contest in Elle magazine, (where it received lovely reader reviews), serialized by the New York Post and by publications in England and Australia, reviewed in the Globe and Mail, twice at Huffington Post, and in Al-Arabiya, The Weekly Standard, Psychology Today, The Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe and in the American-Jewish and Israeli media.

Bride was reviewed 144 times at amazon—so far; about 4,000 people at Goodreads added it to their shelves or to their “reading lists” and 98 people actually reviewed it there. I was interviewed by MSNBC, FOX, PBS, NPR, BBC, Al-Jazeera, CSPAN covered a reading I did in Coral Gables, Florida, at Books and Books and aired that reading many times. I appeared at the 92nd St Y.

What can I say? As an author I have no complaints. Allow me to note that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Times of London, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and the New Yorker have yet to notice its existence. Perhaps that will change. This is nothing personal. It is a political reality. Even if one has formerly been praised and frequently reviewed and interviewed in such venues, as I have, all that counts for nothing when the subject is Islam and the author is no longer exactly politically correct.

CONTINUE

And so, I once lived in a harem but I also nearly died there too.

Here’s what happened.

When I was only eighteen years old, and thought I knew everything, I fell in love with, and after a thirty month courtship, married, a glamorous, wealthy, very westernized, foreign student whom I met at college. I was Rita Hayworth. My Afghan “Prince” was the Aga Khan; I was Gertrude Lawrence, he was Yul Brynner, I was Fanny Brice and he was Omar Sharif.

We never once discussed religion. Not a word about Islam. He seemed pleased that I was a Jew. He had not prepared me for what life would be like in his country, even temporarily. For example, he never told me that his father had three wives and 21 children, that many women still wore burqas or hijab, and that I would be pressured to convert to Islam and would have to live with my mother-in law.

By the way: A harem simply means the “women’s quarters.” Women, children, female servants live there. It is forbidden to all men who are not relatives. It is like a Catholic nunnery or a woman-only hotel. And, if you can’t leave without permission or without a male escort, you are both in a harem and living in purdah, in seclusion.

When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport--which I never saw again. Suddenly, I was the citizen of no country and literally the property of a large polygamous Afghan family.

I had expected a life of freedom, travel and adventure, but this marriage had transported me back to the tenth century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.

I lived gender apartheid long before the Taliban came to power. Looking back, I understand how that may have turned me into a firebrand feminist for life.

Why did I write this book now?

Afghanistan and its people seem to have followed me into the future and right into the West. Islamic hijab (headscarves, which I do not oppose), and niqab (face masks) and burqas (sensory deprivation isolation chambers or ambulatory body bags), which I do oppose, are here in America, on the streets and in the headlines.

Afghanistan has landed in the West and the West is still deployed in Afghanistan—and on our way back to the barbaric and bottomless pit of the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Afghanistan is the country where I was once held hostage; it is the country which sheltered Bin Laden after he was exiled from Saudi Arabia and Sudan; he hatched his 9/11 plot in an Afghan cave. And now, the entire civilian world—both Muslim and infidel-- is being held hostage by Al Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like Jihadists. What an eerie coincidence.

My grand adventure has lasted for more than fifty years. When my Afghan husband fled the oncoming Soviet invasion he returned to America and knocked on my door. Jews and Americans have a long tradition of welcoming immigrants and I did not turn away from him, his wife, and their young children. I recount our conversations which took place between 1980 and 2012 in my book. They serve as a continuing dialogue between East and West.

Some readers have criticized me for having opened my door to a man who betrayed me—but please understand. I was no longer at his mercy, he had no power over me, we were no longer in Kabul, I had my own life and I was pleased to be a token part of an extended Afghan family. I became friendly with his wife and children.

Was my time in Kabul all bad? No, but such adventures do not come cheaply. A Westerner does not travel to the Wild East without risking dysentery, malaria, parasites, hepatitis; being kidnapped and held for ransom; or sold at auction into an imperial harem. When I became ill with a deadly strain of hepatitis, my Afghan family treated my high fever as a case of "female hysteria” or “weak foreign nerves," and then accepted my illness as God's will. For days, I thought I would die and be buried in a Muslim cemetery and soon be forgotten, my world-work left undone.

What saved me? Was it sheer luck—perhaps; was it my will to live?—probably. Did God save me? Possibly. Or, was I destined, to sleep in Ishmael’s tents just long enough so that now, fifty years later, I would have something important to say about gender and religious apartheid and about Islamic fundamentalism and Jihad?

Many Western women adventurers to Muslim lands have flourished. Their fabulous tales have been long forgotten. I tell some of their stories in this book. For example, in 1846, Harriet Martineau, the British-born author, visited the Arab Middle East. She writes about the harems of Cairo:

Everywhere they pitied us European women heartily, that we had to go about travelling, and appearing in the streets without being properly taken care of—that is watched. They think us strangely neglected in being left so free, and boast of their spy system and imprisonment as tokens of the value in which they are held. . . . There cannot be a woman of them all who is not dwarfed and withered in mind and soul.

Ironically the nineteenth-century harem dwellers in Cairo and Istanbul could not believe how confined their female Western visitors were in their corsets, hoops, and bustles, which the harem women insisted on examining in detail.

So there I was, a first-generation American, a scholarship “kid,” living in a country which had once been the crossroads of the known world; in a palatial home surrounded by awesome, snow-capped mountains, and where paganism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism had once flourished. Yes, Buddhism. Before the Arab invasion resulted in the forced conversion of the Afghan people to Islam—like so many others around the globe, Afghans were once Buddhists, pagans, Zoroastrians, Hindus--and Jews lived among them.

The Jews and Hindus of Afghanistan were the country’s traders and currency exchangers. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, they were impoverished literally overnight by royal edict and a series of agreements. I only discovered this shocking fact as I was researching this book. I also discovered that there had been a Nazi-Afghan alliance in the 1930s and 1940s, an alliance which continued after World War Two, when Afghanistan sheltered Nazis who might otherwise have faced international criminal trials had they remained in Germany. I met many friendly Germans in Kabul. Were they escaped war criminals? I will never know.

My dreamer-husband had brought a Jewish-American infidel bride back with him to a country that had made alliances with German Nazis and that had also given Nazis a safe haven after the Second World War. I write about what happened to the Jews and Hindus of Afghanistan and how their fate directly affects me.

In my opinion, this is the most sensational chapter in the book. King Amanullah traded with Germany; King Nadir Shah is the King who impoverished the Jews and Hindus (but who also kept them hostage in the country). By the way, confiscation of property, grievous taxation, overnight impoverishment, being kept hostage, even jailed, or forced into exile, is quite typical for Jews and other infidels in Muslim countries. Nadir Shah wanted a modern banking system by Muslims and for Muslims. A new and modern bank was formed. My father-in-law, a very dapper fellow, was one of the three founders of this very bank.

My husband could never have studied for a decade in America or met me at a private college had his family not prospered so mightily. And by the way: My father-in-law and my husband did nothing wrong. The wrongdoing was entirely that of King Nadir Shah.

Then, there was the matter of the burqa. I was terrified when I first saw women wearing burqas—ghostly garments—huddled together at the back of the bus. My Afghan family laughed at my “over-reaction.” My reaction was considered "abnormal," not the practice of burying women alive in public. I now know that such garments are not required by Muslim religious law. “Modesty” is required of both men and women.

In the 20th century, Muslim women were twice unveiled in Afghanistan, and in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, North Africa, and to varying degrees in the Arab Middle East, e.g. Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, etc.

My Afghan husband kept assuring me that the dreadful burqa and my captivity would both soon pass. He lived to see this dream come true for about ten to fifteen years in Kabul and Herat until it was shattered again, perhaps forever.

Then there were the realities of life as a daughter-in-law when one’s mother-in-law has absolute authority over all the women in her home. My mother-in-law treated the female servants very brutally; they were her private whipping girls whom she freely hit, cursed, and fired at will.

She feared me, envied me, hated me--as a woman, an infidel, a Jew, an American, and mainly, as a “love match” bride, something considered too dangerously Western. She personally allowed—or perhaps ordered-- the servants to stop boiling my water and washing my fruit, which led to my dysentery also known as The Kabul Trots. Unboiled water may have led to the hepatitis from which I nearly died. Perhaps she really wanted me dead. Many Afghan mothers-in law do torture and murder their daughters-in-law as well as their own daughters.

Despite my many sorrows, I will never forget the warmth and kindness of my young brothers-in-law and my two sisters-in-law who understood how unhappy and endangered I was. The female servants were very shy, very sweet, and entirely without malice. The people in general have a ceremonial genius and a wild sense of humor.

x x x x

Why did I write this book now?

In my lifetime, Afghanistan has literally turned into a Margaret Atwood dystopian novel—even darker and more misogynistic than The Handmaid’s Tale. Given the increasing persecution and subordination of Muslim women, I decided to connect my own five months in purdah to the surreal lives of Afghan and Muslim women and feminists today.

I believe that my very American feminism was forged in Afghanistan. It is a feminism that some Muslims and ex-Muslims share and support. The feminists, dissidents, and apostates in Islamic countries and in Muslim communities in the West are heroes who face death and are routinely assassinated for their beliefs; it is amazing how quickly others take their place. This is one of the major resistance movements of our time.

Today, such heroes are my inspiration and some are my closest intellectual and political companions. Together, we oppose Islamism and Sharia-ism, fundamentalist cults, totalitarianism, gender and religious apartheid, and the use of terrorism against civilian populations in the name of religion. We support the western enterprise which believes in a separation of religion and state, human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of religion and dissent, and free speech.

We have one universal standard of human rights; and therefore, we are not politically correct. We are anti-racists, not “Islamophobes,” and therefore, we do not believe in multi-cultural relativism: one standard for Westerners, another, lower standard for those in developing countries. We are also pro-Israel.

The Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000 and 9/11 also changed the direction this book would take. How could I write about Afghanistan and Muslim women without also writing about Jihadic terrorism and its war against Muslim civilians and against both Israel and the West?

I have now published three studies about honor killings in the Middle East Quarterly and am at work on a fourth. I have also submitted affidavits on behalf of girls and women in flight from being honor killed who are seeking asylum in the United States. Law enforcement officials, including detectives and lawyers, including prosecutors have thanked me for my work in this area—have used the work.

Really, why did I go to Afghanistan?

To see the wide, wide world. To learn, first-hand, that America and life in the West are the luckiest places to be; to learn that the plight of women and other living beings in what was once the seductive but very wild, wild East, leaves everything to be desired.

Why did I go to Afghanistan? Why else than to be able to tell you about it now, at this moment in history. It was kismet, bashert, fated, written in the stars; clearly it was my destiny.

END READING FROM THE BOOK

“What, if anything, do I owe Afghanistan, a country where I once lived and where I nearly died? I was there. It remains a part of me. I am now a tiny part of the country’s history. I will never forget my time there, the natural splendor that I at least glimpsed.

This is an accounting of sorts. A young Jewish American woman once came to this wondrous, Asiatic country and fled harem life. She finally uncovered the history of what happened to the Jews of Afghanistan, and she has told their story in order to redeem her soul. A young Jewish American woman once loved a young Muslim Afghan man, and although it could never work out, they continued talking to each other down through the decades of their lives.

Abdul-Kareem—[a misogynist, a deceiver, a dreamer, now a man living out his days in exile]--turned out to be one of my muses, as did Afghanistan itself. I have turned my brief sojourn—and my subsequent lifelong interest in the Islamic world—into a writer’s treasure.

I experienced what it was like to live with people who were permanently afraid of what other people might think—even more so than in Small Mind Town, USA.

Writing this book has put me in touch with the long-buried tenderness that I still feel for Abdul-Kareem—especially now that he has become a character in these pages. We remain connected in our own unspoken ways.”

PAGE BREAK

FOR DISCUSSION AFTERWARDS

I have dedicated the book to Abdul-Kareem’s wife, may she rest in peace. And, since the book was published last year, for the first time in 56 years, he has not yet called me. And I have not yet called him.

The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle against a new kind of terrible totalitarianism, a “perfect storm” alliance between Western intelligentsia and Islamist fundamentalist Jihadists. We cannot allow intolerance to flourish under the banner of Western tolerance.

Should America remain “boots on the ground” in this tribal, medieval country, Afghanistan? No, not really, but we must understand that as we downsize or depart entirely, all the humanitarian projects that our boots sheltered will disappear and the country will return to the 10th century.

The West cannot be expected to accomplish that which cannot be done. We are not morally obliged to do so. We can and should protect and rescue the immigrant women who live within our borders. We can accept political asylum requests—no wholesale relocation of both such potential victims and their persecutors.

Anti-Islamist Muslims despair when Western feminists insist that face- and body-veiling is a religious right. This is not true. But even if it were, naked-faced girls and women are honor murdered for refusing to veil both in the West and in Muslim-majority countries. This alone, is reason enough to oppose the veil.

I know that Muslim-on-Muslim violence is the greatest danger Muslim civilians face. Neither America nor Israel has anything to do with this.

Western governments should consult anti-Islamist Muslims—not the extreme fundamentalists who masquerade as “moderates.” The media should do likewise.

We should understand what an honor killing is and how it is different from western domestic violence and even different from western femicide. We should be clear about who is importing this custom into the West. It is an intimate family collaboration against a young girl or woman.

We should understand that the Arab and Muslim world have been totally brainwashed against Israel, Jews, and America and despises and fears freedom for women. It will take time to turn this around.

I lived as a member of an Afghan family and as such learned about the Afghan people in a way that the great Western travelers could not. Afterward I was often able to see the West with Eastern eyes.

The large families that only polygamy allows and the conviction that the sons of the same father, but not necessarily of the same mother, are truly brothers—then each polygamous family has a clan, a tribe of their own; twenty-fifty siblings ensure that one always has refuge, a social life, economic opportunities just as western aristocrats do. In an era of shrinking families, the option of a large family who accept you simply because were born into that family, is a great consolation as well as a burden.

Afghan men and women know that life can change in an instant; that happiness is brief and illusory; that one is utterly dependent on one’s faith and one’s family and on the strongest man in that family; that poverty, cruelty, and tragedy are to be expected; and that no one—not even one’s brother, certainly no foreign power, can ever be trusted.

Afghans believe that without a husband and sons a woman absolutely cannot survive and that women and children are a man’s property. They are his to protect or abuse. They are his to kill. It is the way things are.

Most Afghan men will not admit to these truths. They will denounce anyone who says so as a liar and an enemy. Exposing these facts is considered a crime.

Anti-Islamist Muslims despair when Western feminists insist that face- and body-veiling is a religious right. This is not true. But even if it were, naked-faced girls and women are honor murdered for refusing to veil both in the West and in Muslim-majority countries. This alone, is reason enough to oppose the veil.

The large families that only polygamy allows and the conviction that the sons of the same father, but not necessarily of the same mother, are truly brothers—then each polygamous family has a clan, a tribe of their own; twenty-fifty siblings ensure that one always has refuge, a social life, economic opportunities just as western aristocrats do. In an era of shrinking families, the option of a large family who accept you simply because were born into that family, is a great consolation as well as a burden.