http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/books/25sult.html
War at Home': A Muslim Woman's Critique of Custom By JOSEPH BERGER Published: March 25, 2006 Masuda Sultan was 16 when her Afghan parents arranged for her to marry a doctor almost twice her age. She saw him just once before they were ritually joined, when she was 17, in an Islamic nikkah ceremony that was held in a hotel in Flushing, Queens. Masuda Sultan with street children in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003. Forum: Nonfiction Masuda Sultan, left, and her family fled Afghanistan when she was 5. They later settled in New York. Above, her book, in which she has written about her failed arranged marriage and her conflicted feelings regarding some of her family's traditions. By her account in her new memoir, "My War at Home" (Washington Square Press), the marriage was a blunder from the first. Although Ms. Sultan had grown up in New York, before the wedding night her mother asked her to follow an old custom: provide the new in-laws with a blood-stained cloth as evidence of her virginity. Once married, she writes, her husband rarely spoke to her, insisted she remain subservient and discouraged schooling beyond college. After three years, feeling despondent to the point of swallowing a bottle of his Valium, she walked away and returned to her parents' Queens home. And yet, Ms. Sultan, in an interview, said she wrote the book to enlighten outsiders about the virtues of an arranged marriage, like the confidence newlyweds have in a decision by their elders and the domestic bolstering a wife receives from her husband's family. "It's upsetting that people see your culture as backward, who say to me 'You poor victim,' " she said. "I think Westerners have a simplistic idea about arranged marriage. Mine didn't work out, but that was not the case for everyone, and it's not necessarily backward to do that." That contradiction captures how much Ms. Sultan, like many immigrants, oscillates between two worlds, in her case that of a traditional Afghan daughter and an urbane graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has ventured to Afghanistan some 10 times to fight for the rights of women. She has great affection for Afghans, but also misgivings about some traditions. That conflict is her memoir's recurring leitmotif. In telling her story, she has joined the growing ranks of Muslim women who are offering an insider's view of Muslim life at a post-9/11 moment when anxious Americans are curious, as Ms. Sultan says, about "what drives Muslims, how do they operate behind closed doors." In the memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran," Azar Nafisi describes a women's book club that debates the painful conflicts of living under Islamic law. In the novel "Brick Lane," Monica Ali writes affectingly about a Bangladeshi in London in an arranged marriage whose sister elopes in a "love marriage." And a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Nomani, published "Standing Alone in Mecca," about her pilgrimage to Islam's most holy site last year. More are on their way: Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights champion, will have a memoir out in May. And Ms. Ali's editor, Wendy Walker, is publishing a memoir in the fall by Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who was gang-raped by order of a tribal court to avenge her brother's supposed misconduct. David Ebershoff, an editor at large at Random House who edited Ms. Ebadi's book, said that these books have struck a chord with American readers because "the personal is a prism into the larger geopolitical story." Americans, he said, also respond to the conflicts of women having to juggle their working lives with more traditional roles of wife and mother - however perilous their experiences might be. In her memoir, Ms. Ebadi writes of the night that she was summoned to jail. On the way out the door she tells her daughters to order a pizza for dinner. Ms. Sultan feels the Islamic faith has been distorted by some believers, often, as with suicide bombings, for political ends. She recalls studying the Koran at an after-school madrassa and "having it shoved down your throat - the students recite and don't know what it means." "But the Prophet Muhammad encouraged questions, encouraged looking at other religions and coming to Islam because you think it is the best religion," she said. That is why, in trying to expand rights of Afghan women, she works to unearth what she sees as neglected concepts in Islamic texts - that a woman has a duty to be educated, that she can be paid for housework and that she can negotiate marriage contracts spelling out a husband's obligations. Ms. Sultan, 27, who has long brown hair and fair skin that, she says, allows her to navigate easily in both Afghan and Western worlds, hails from the same Pashtun tribe, the Popalzai, as does Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president. She has at times worn a head scarf or a burka, but is more comfortable in jeans. Her family escaped Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1983 when she was 5 by hiring a car to spirit them across the treacherous Khojak Pass into Quetta, Pakistan. She grew up in Flatbush and Flushing, which has the city's largest Afghan enclave, and was a star student, though one not immune to newcomer foibles. Through high school, she writes drolly, she confused the words "prostitute" and "Protestant" and sometimes walked by a church with the nervous curiosity of someone passing a brothel. Her parents tried to keep her away from what they saw as the corruptions of American life. She didn't go to the movies until she married. While she passed the admissions test for Stuyvesant High School, her parents - her father was a partner in a fried chicken restaurant, her mother a housewife - wanted her closer to home, and she enrolled at Flushing High. Their outlook explains why her parents wanted her to marry young. But, she notes, she was not forced to marry, as some Muslims are. "Their argument was that this guy is really a good match and someone like him may not come again," she recalled. After she left her husband for the first time, the couple's families got them to reconcile, but Ms. Sultan soon found herself "in real despair." Now, she said, "I can't imagine hitting that low a point." She continued: "I have more of a network now. Then I was very isolated." Yet, Ms. Sultan was firm in declaring that her failed marriage did not indispose her toward traditional Muslim men, whom she has often found to be loving. "My father is a very affectionate man who oddly is always helping out around the house," she said. "If my mother could change one thing, it would be to have him doing less in the kitchen." In the book, she describes a return to Afghanistan in July 2001 and how enchanted she was with the clannish warmth and cooking smells she remembered from childhood. "I knew that Afghanistan was the part of me I hadn't quite figured out yet," she writes with a congenial American vernacular. "I was like a floating piece of a puzzle, and if I connected to the larger pieces, I might have a better sense of where I belonged." Later trips to Afghanistan sharpened her understanding of why Afghans are angry at Americans despite their liberation from Taliban rule. Her most searing example: losing 19 kinfolk in what she considers an indiscriminate American bombing of a village outside Kandahar. "My cousin said, 'Is this not terrorism?' " she said. Within the United States, Afghans have been subversively transformed. Boys and girls court furtively or in Internet chat rooms. When suitors hit it off, they may ask parents to arrange the wedding, pretending they barely know each other. Still, Ms. Sultan said she would marry only a Muslim and might even allow her parents to introduce her to a prospective mate, though only on the condition that she get to know him. "I have to believe there are people out there who can appreciate traditional values around family and community, but who can also appreciate me in my assertive, outspoken manner," she said. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. Reading only, http://dear.to/ppi 4. Satu email perhari: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5. No-email/web only: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6. kembali menerima email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
