Behind Closed Doors

I a

rrived in Kabul a day earlier than expected, so, to keep me occupied, my interpreter took me to his cousin's wedding party—a women-only affair in a crumbling, Soviet-era housing estate. I was ushered through the apartment door into a heaving jewel box of glitter and gold lamé. About 40 women filled the tiny room, spilling over sofas and sitting in one another's laps. Space for a dance floor had been cleared between sprawling limbs, and a corpulent, velvet-bedecked woman gyrated to a popular Bollywood tune. When she tired, she was replaced by a girl whose undulating hips and gaudy makeup would not have been amiss in a strip joint. These were not the demure, burqa'd women I'd expected to meet in Afghanistan.

That night, I described the scene to a couple of male journalists who had been regaling me with tales of their hunt for Osama bin Laden with the U.S. Army. One of these battle-hardened reporters surprised me by saying, wistfully, "I wish I could have seen that." I realized that while I could easily go out on the next Army operation, my male colleagues would probably never get a chance to discover how Afghan women live behind closed doors.

Now, two female journalists have written memoirs that capitalize on their ability to slip across the cultural membrane that segregates men from women in Afghanistan. In The Bookseller of Kabul, Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad describes herself as bi-gendered: free to circulate among men but also able to enter the welcoming—and asphyxiating—world of Afghan women. After covering the fall of the Taliban, Seierstad joins the household of an erudite bookseller for four months. She is drawn to Sultan Khan (a pseudonym) because of his encyclopedic knowledge of Afghan culture—she calls him "a history book on two feet"—and his valiant role in protecting the country's literature from the Taliban by secreting ancient texts behind false shelves. But Seierstad quickly concludes that Khan's progressive views on Islam stop outside his apartment door. Inside, she reports, the atmosphere is a microcosm of the worst excesses of the previous regime. "The women were glad the Taliban era was over," writes Seierstad. "They could play music, they could dance, paint their toenails—as long as no one saw them and they could hide under the burqa."

		LATEST COVER STORY Jessica Lynch's Story November 17, 2003 Issue Past Covers Tortured Minds Nov. 10, 2003 ----------------- Eating Smart Nov. 3, 2003 ----------------- Bollywood Oct. 27, 2003 ----------------- Tomb Raiders Oct. 20, 2003 ----------------- Bali Remembered Oct. 13, 2003 ----------------- What Went Wrong? Oct. 6, 2003 ----------------- What's Next Sept. 29, 2003 ----------------- Japan's Koizumi Sept. 22, 2003 ----------------- The Saudis Sept. 15, 2003 ----------------- Dyslexia Sept. 8, 2003 ----------------- U.S. in Iraq Sept. 1, 2003 ----------------- Asian Journey August 18-25, 2003 -----------------   ASIA  Sri Lanka: Political Crisis  China: Pride and Prejudice ARTS  Books: Afghan Women  Books: Yu Hua comes West NOTEBOOK  Philippines: Tower of Trouble  Indonesia: New Terror Tactic?  China: The Longish March  Milestones  Verbatim  Letters GLOBAL ADVISOR  Learn Cooking from the best  Skiing around the world  Giving David a Bath CNN.com: Top Headlines

That's about all the emancipation the women are permitted. To Seierstad, the middle-aged Khan has been conditioned to think of them as chattel, taking a second spouse, a comely adolescent, when he tires of his aging wife. He forces his educated youngest sister to sacrifice her dreams of becoming an English teacher for an arranged marriage with her unemployed cousin, a man who has never opened a book. "In his heart he wanted Afghanistan to be a modern country," writes Seierstad, "but when it came to ruling his family, Sultan had only one model: his father." It's a view he adamantly disputes. Since the book's English-language release, "Khan" has revealed that his real name is Shah Mohammed Rais, has denounced Seierstad for abusing his hospitality and distorting his family life, and is threatening to sue her for libel. Seierstad, whose book has become Norway's biggest nonfiction seller ever, stands by her account of the Khan clan. Whatever the truth, it's not hard to see why her searingly powerful indictment has so shaken the Khans. At one point in the book, appalled by what she regards as their unquestioning acceptance of male superiority, she fumes, "I have rarely been as angry as I was with the Khan family, nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there."

In The Storyteller's Daughter, British-born Afghan Saira Shah is unable to deliver as much insight as Seierstad does into the culture of her "lost homeland." Shah's uneven account of her attempts to reconcile the enchanting Afghanistan of her exiled father's tales with her own harrowing encounters relies on clichéd Western stereotypes: the Taliban are evil oppressors, the mujahedin noble warriors. Few of her subjects come across as real—which is precisely what makes Seierstad's nuanced portraits so compelling. While traveling with her romanticized mujahedin, for example, Shah is devastated to learn that they have been selling U.S.-supplied weapons to Iran. Rather than examine their motivation, Shah laments the betrayal.

Though Shah chronicles appalling scenes—three sisters are forced to watch the murder of their mother by the Taliban—they are pared down to a made-for-TV pathos that is too easy to shrug off. In contrast, Seierstad's women, victimized by a tyrannical system that has changed little since the fall of the Taliban, are complex and disturbingly unforgettable. Neither Seierstad's closed world of the Khan household nor Shah's war-rent Afghanistan make for comfortable reading, but both books offer a rare glimpse of life beneath the burqa in a land that is too often portrayed as little more than a dusty battlefield.