khaled hosseini

Afghanistan: A Model for Abuse of Women
Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman

“Hosseini’s new book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, focuses on the lives of women in a most indelible way. He does not propagandize; he just tells the story of two women from different classes who attempt to survive under the Taliban and under a brute of a Pashtun husband. I am reading this and thinking of my late Iranian mother-in-law, who was born into a world not very different from today’s Afghanistan, but who was lucky enough to live through the modernization of Reza Shah Pahlavi, who began the process of turning most women’s lives around. Afghanistan has not been as lucky. Their own modernizing shahs were assassinated, and even modernizing Russian Communism was defeated by the most benighted factions, mostly Pashtun. What was the issue behind the Afghan revolt against the Russian occupation? The emancipation of women, of course.”

(Not the issue, in my humble opinion, but one of the issues. The main issue, obviously, was seeing their homeland occupied.)