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

until she turned fourteen. In 1938, when the family returned to Afghanistan, her father, suspected of reformist tendencies, was “soon thrown into the political prison in the King’s own palace,” where he would languish for many years.
    (Abdul-Kareem was right to be cautious: He had to please all those in power who resented, envied, and despised his foreign education and his potentially reformist tendencies. At the time I had no way of knowing this.)
    Hunter’s description of Afghanistan in the late 1940s is very similar to a Taliban-dominated country. Women were not welcome in public. They could not attend the all-male cinema because they would have to remove their “tomb-like shrouds.” They could not visit a male doctor or disrobe before one. They would describe their symptoms to their husbands, who in turn would inform the physician.
    Women were not allowed out without a male relative as escort; even then they had to be fully veiled. A woman could not ask “another man to escort her, she would be breaking purdah laws” by doing so. Maga’s father was in jail, her mother needed medicine, and Maga had no choice.
    Thus: “Maga took fate into her own hands, put on her ‘choudry’ and walked out alone into the streets, an unprecedented act at that time.” Worse: When her father was released from prison, Maga asked him to escort her to the cinema. He did so. Her presence caused a near riot. “Relatives stormed their home to protest. They warned that the two would be beaten up.”
    In 1950 Maga went too far; she dared to attend her all-female classes at Kabul University without wearing a burqa—and she visited female friends at night unveiled as well. For this Maga was placed under house arrest for three and a half years. Police arrived with instructions that Maga not leave her home unless she shrouded herself—and they mounted a permanent police and military patrol outside her house. Maga refused to wear the burqa, so she remained indoors.
    This story reminds me of what happened to the first woman who unveiled herself in Beirut in the early 1920s. I heard the story from her daughter, Rhonda al-Fatal, who was at the time married to the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. When Rhonda’s English-educated mother taught her university class bare faced and without a screen, she was told she could never do this again. A police guard was mounted outside her home as well. And, like Maga, this early heroine refused to leave her home for more than a year.
    Maga studied at home in 1950, but the government refused to allow her to qualify for a diploma—and refused to allow her to leave the country to continue her studies elsewhere. Three years later Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan allowed Maga to work alongside her mother at the United Nations. According to Hunter, Maga may have “lost any hope of marriage. An Afghan man would require intellectual courage to marry an Afghan woman whose face was naked.” Maga’s bravery was meant to die with her.
    Thus, Prime Minister Daoud freed Maga from house arrest a mere eight years before my arrival. Cultures and people do not change all that much in only eight years.
    In 1958, three years before I arrived, Afghan women were unveiled for the second time in the twentieth century. I was told that bloody riots had broken out and government forces had reportedly killed hundreds of rioters. Remember: Unveiling was not mandatory and veiling was not prohibited. Women did as their families wished.
    This brief but essential background may help readers understand what I was up against when, naked faced and bare headed, I went into town on my own, and took a bus—just as if I were riding down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
    In 1961, that first time alone on a Kabul bus, I was so stunned by the burqas at the back of the bus that I failed to notice that I, not the burqas, was the object of every man’s attention. Turbanned and baggy-trousered men, young men, old men, tall men, men with