My dear friends,
At times, one overlooks how devastatingly hurtful political Islam is to Muslim women, in the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia....the list goes on.
Recently, I came across a
quote you may find useful
. It is
taken from
"
And the Mountains Echoed,
"
the latest novel from Khaled Hosseini, the Afghani author who wrote
"
Kite Runner.
"
First, the b
ack story
to the quote -
A
poet named Nila Wahdati (called "NW" in the quote below) moved to Paris from Kabul in 1955 with her young daughter. Wahdati is being interviewed in 1974 by a French literary magazine (the interviewer is "EB").
Please r
emember
that
this is a novel, so the characters are fictional.
Now, t
he quote:
EB: Which was why you moved to France in 1955.
NW: I moved to France because I wished to save my daughter from a certain kind of life.
EB: What kind of life would that be?
NW: I didn't want her turned, against both her will and nature, into one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or doing the wrong thing. Women who are admired by some in the West – here in France, for instance – turned into heroines for their hard lives, admired from a distance by those who couldn't bear even one day of walking in their shoes. Women who see their desires doused and their dreams renounced, and yet – and this is the worst of it, Monsieur … - if you meet them, they smile and pretend they have no misgivings at all. As though they lead enviable lives. But you look closely and you see the helpless look, the desperation, and how it belies all their show of good humor. It is quite pathetic, Monsieur … I did not want this for my daughter.
- Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it -- but all that had gone before." Jacob Riis
