Free An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir by Phyllis Chesler

Forbes described the hearty good-naturedness of the Afghan men with whom she traveled—but she also described the Afghan chowdry/burqa’s narrow, grill-like opening for the eyes as constituting “a cruel mesh.”
    In the 1950s, the author and teacher Rosanne Klass described the Kabul bazaar as a “completely masculine world. The few women to be seen passed silently, shrouded in their chadris: disembodied phantoms.”
    In 1983, pre-Taliban, the American journalist Jere van Dyk wrote, “In over three weeks inside Afghanistan, I had not seen a woman up close. Those we had passed had turned away quickly, hiding their faces with the shawls that had covered their heads and shoulders. At a stream or beside a fire, I had tried to catch their eyes, although I had been told never to talk to or even look at them. The Afghans dedicate their poetry to women, but they seem to treat them like animals.”
    In The Past Present Hunter has riveting discussions about the Afghan burqa and purdah. I have since talked to many Muslim women and read many books written by them about the Afghan and Saudi-style burqa. Absolutely no Muslim woman has a kind word to say about it. (I am not talking about the headscarf known as hijab that does not prevent one from seeing, speaking, hearing, or being seen and heard.)
    The chowdry, or burqa—the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud—is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman’s already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world’s prisons.
    Imagine the added shock if a Western woman—or an Afghan woman who has lived and been educated in the West—has to wear this odious garment. I never did—although once, in the early 1980s, I bought an Afghan burqa in New York City’s Greenwich Village and offered some American feminists the opportunity to try it on, to see how it would make them feel.
    Post-9/11 the Norwegian author Asne Seierstad lived with a polygamous Afghan family. She experimented with wearing a burqa in order to see what “it feels like to squeeze into the trunk of a taxi because a man is occupying the backseat.” She writes, “How in time I started to hate it. How it pinches the head and causes headaches, how difficult it is to see anything through the grille. How enclosed it is, how little air gets in, how quickly you start to perspire, how all the time you have to be aware of where you are walking because you cannot see your feet, what a lot of dirt it picks up, how dirty it is, how much in the way. How liberated you feel when you get home and can take it off.”
    The Canadian author Sally Armstrong interviewed the Kabul psychiatrist Fatana Osman, who had never worn a burqa before the Taliban came to power. Osman described the experience as follows: “It was hot. Shrouded in this body bag I felt claustrophobic. It was smelly too. . . . It also felt like I was invisible. No one could see me. No one knew whether I was smiling or crying. . . . It was like wearing horse blinders. . . . [When I] tumbled to the ground, no one helped me.”
    Dear Edward Hunter names some formidable Afghan heroines whose stories match those of twentieth-century feminists in Persia, Turkey, and Egypt, all of whom fought tirelessly to end forced veiling. In Hunter’s opinion no one in Afghanistan or in the world has ever heard about these heroines and about their resulting punishments because Afghanistan did not allow a free press to exist. Thus arrests were secret. The people knew things, but these things never became public.
    Hunter introduces us to a heroine for the ages. Her name is Maga Rahmany, and she was the daughter of a Russian mother and an Afghan father. Maga had lived in France and in Turkey from the time she wasseven