The Sewing Circles of Herat

The Sewing Circles of Herat

Author: Christina Lamb

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2004-02-03

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0060505273

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Twenty-one-year-old Christina Lamb left suburban England for Peshawar on the frontier of the Afghan war. Captivated, she spent two years tracking the final stages of the mujaheddin victory over the Soviets, as Afghan friends smuggled her in and out of their country in a variety of guises. Returning to Afghanistan after the attacks on the World Trade Center to report for Britain's Sunday Telegraph, Lamb discovered the people no one else had written about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war. Among them, the brave women writers of Herat who risked their lives to carry on a literary tradition under the guise of sewing circles; the princess whose palace was surrounded by tanks on the eve of her wedding; the artist who painted out all the people in his works to prevent them from being destroyed by the Taliban; and Khalil Ahmed Hassani, a former Taliban torturer who admitted to breaking the spines of men and then making them stand on their heads. Christina Lamb's evocative reporting brings to life these stories. Her unique perspective on Afghanistan and deep passion for the people she writes about make this the definitive account of the tragic plight of a proud nation.


A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2008-09-18

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 074758589X

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A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love


The Places in Between

The Places in Between

Author: Rory Stewart

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0156031566

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Rory Stewart recounts the experiences he had walking across Afghanistan in 2002, describing how the country and its people have been impacted by the Taliban and the American military's involvement in the region.


Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

Author: Suad Joseph

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 9004128190

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Family, Body, Sexuality and Health is Volume III of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures. In almost 200 well written entries it covers the broad field of family, body, sexuality and health and Islamic cultures.


Three Women of Herat

Three Women of Herat

Author: Veronica Doubleday

Publisher: Tauris Parke Paperbacks

Published: 2006-03-31

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781845110260

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In the years before the communist coup and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Veronica Doubleday set up home in the ancient city of Herat with her husband, who was researching Central Asian music. At first, her only glimpses of women were as shadows--faceless and voiceless. Gradually, however, she formed friendships with three young mothers who welcomed her into their lives, taught her their customs and music and shared the details of their everyday existence. She witnessed their most personal moments: the births and deaths of their children, their marriages and celebrations, religious holidays, healings, and rituals. After the Soviet invasion in 1979, she lost touch with her friends, but returned to Herat recently, adding another chapter to this poignant story.


Dancing in the Mosque

Dancing in the Mosque

Author: Homeira Qaderi

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 006297033X

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A People Book of the Week & a Kirkus Best Nonfiction of the Year An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother’s unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life. No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.


Chasing Tales

Chasing Tales

Author: Corinne Fowler

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9042022620

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Chasing Tales is the first exclusive study of journalism, travel writing and the history of British ideas about Afghanistan. It offers a timely investigation of the notional Afghanistan(s) that have prevailed in the popular British imagination. Casting its net deep into the nineteenth century, the study investigates the country's mythologisation by scrutinising travel narratives, literary fiction and British news media coverage of the recent conflict in Afghanistan. This highly topical book explores the legacy of nineteenth-century paranoias and prejudices to contemporary travellers and journalists and seeks to explain why Afghans continue to be depicted as medieval, murderous, warlike and unruly. Its title, Chasing Tales, conveys the circulation, and indeed the circularity, of ideas commonly found in British travel writing and journalism. The 'tales' component stresses the pivotal role played by fictionalised sources, especially the writing of Rudyard Kipling, in perpetuating traumatic nineteenth-century memories of Afghan-British encounter. The subject matter is compelling and its foci of interest profoundly relevant both to current political debates and to scholarly enquiry about the ethics of travel.


Afghanistan's Islam

Afghanistan's Islam

Author: Nile Green

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0520294130

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"This book provides the first ever overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. It covers every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval and early modern periods to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Uzbek, its depth and scope of coverage is unrivalled by any existing publication on Afghanistan. As well as state-sponsored religion, the chapters cover such issues as the rise of Sufism, Sharia, women's religiosity, transnational Islamism and the Taliban. Islam has been one of the most influential social and political forces in Afghan history. Providing idioms and organizations for both anti-state and anti-foreign mobilization, Islam has proven to be a vital socio-political resource in modern Afghanistan. Even as it has been deployed as the national cement of a multi-ethnic 'Emirate' and then 'Islamic Republic,' Islam has been no less a destabilizing force in dividing Afghan society. Yet despite the universal scholarly recognition of the centrality of Islam to Afghan history, its developmental trajectories have received relatively little sustained attention outside monographs and essays devoted to particular moments or movements. To help develop a more comprehensive, comparative and developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam from the eighth century to the present, this edited volume brings together specialists on different periods, regions and languages. Each chapter forms a case study 'snapshot' of the Islamic beliefs, practices, institutions and authorities of a particular time and place in Afghanistan"--Provided by publishe


My Forbidden Face

My Forbidden Face

Author: Latifa

Publisher: Virago

Published: 2008-09-04

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0748109129

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Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor. Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedoms - walking down the street, looking out a window - were no longer hers. She was now forced to wear a chadri. My Forbidden Face provides a poignant and highly personal account of life under the Taliban regime. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope. Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group.