My Forbidden Face

I just finished My Forbidden Face--Growing up under the Taliban: a Young Woman’s Story. This story horrified me not only because it is true but also because the young woman is only two years younger than me. When the Taliban came to power in 1996 I was graduating from high school and starting college. At the same time that I was reveling in my ever expanding world and freedoms, this young woman was mourning as her world shrank to her family’s apartment and she lost all her freedom. The Taliban prohibited women from being educated, parents could not even educate their daughters at home; women could not work from working; they could not wear colorful clothing or white shoes; women could not show their faces in public and must be accompanied by male relative if they ever did go outside. Women were also forbidden from seeing a male doctor and with the prohibition on women working, this meant women were forbidden to receive medical care. Before the Taliban, over half the doctors in Kabul were women, including the narrator’s mother. The Taliban also mandated that all girls over the age of fourteen be married and if they discovered an unmarried girl she was forced to wed a Talib. For the next five years the narrator, her mother, and her sister became virtual prisoners in their own home afraid to even open the door in case it was the Taliban come to carry them off for not being married. The rare times the narrator did venture from her home she witnessed violent acts of the Taliban against the Afghani people. But locked in their home, the narrator, her mother and her sister tried to continue on. Her mother secretly saw women patients, and the narrator and her sister started a secret school to teach not only girls but boys so they could learn something more than what the Taliban distorted interpretation of the Koran.

Throughout the story the narrator comments that the Taliban’s agenda is the genocide of the Afghani people through the destruction of their traditions and the women. They seek to make the women nothing more than chattel whose only use is to bear the Taliban sons. She rightly remarks that have forgotten that all men are born of women. Many times the narrators also comments that the majority of the Taliban are not Afghani but Muslim extremist from other countries. What would it be like to come of age in such place? After reading this book I have new gratitude for being born in the United States and the freedoms that I enjoy not only as a woman but as a human being. I am grateful that I am can saw my face; that I can speak my mind, pursue education and learning, and even to choose whom I married.

After I finished reading My Forbidden Face I gave it to my husband to read. He asked me if it made me feel sick to read, I told him “Some parts, yes.” He nodded his head, “Yes, me too. How can people treat women that way?” My husband is the sensitive one in the family and I fell in love with him for his sweet and kind nature especially towards women. He is the son of a very strong woman and brother to six sisters. He respects women more than he respects his own life. He is also very forgiving but not towards those who mistreat women. This book disturbs him not only because of the treatment of women but because he wandered if in some ways he might be like Taliban. He also prefers women to dress modestly. I told him that is the difference: he prefers women to dress modestly he does not compel any woman, including me, to be modest in dress. Nor does he prefer modesty because a woman’s body is shameful or something to fear but because it is beautiful and should be respected. That, I think is the greatest difference.