The Bookseller of Kabul
Asne Seierstad was a Norwegian journalist in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban and its religious police. She spent three months living with the Khan family to write this biography of their adjustment to the Soviet invasion, later the Mujahedeen rule, then the Talibans, and finally today’s government under Hamid Karzai. Her study of the Islamic culture during these chaotic years clearly reveals the conflict between Western and Muslim standards for husbands and wives, sons and daughters, as well as other social mores in Afghanistan.
The two words the author uses most often to describe the Khan household are "bullet-holes" and "dust", but it applies to most all homes in Kabul. Although Sultan Khan makes good money as a bookseller, his small home had to make room for 13 people, all relatives. He himself was imprisoned during the Communist regime because "...he made money after the capitalist model." Now he is the head of the house and rules over his wife and children, his second younger wife and her child, plus his brothers and sisters and mother. No one complains, because Afghan mothers want sons for just this purpose. Wives who cannot have sons are not always popular.
During the Taliban years, women were usually kept in the house, but if they went out, they had to wear a burka, which covers them from head to foot and makes them appear as "horses with blinders." Younger women, "... had no right to meet, to love, or to choose" a husband. The parents took care of that, usually picking a close relative in their family.
Leila, Sultan’s youngest sister, did all the housework in the overcrowded home, cooking in the small kitchen, serving food on the living room floor, and finally arranging sleeping mattresses on that floor. Because the rest of the family took advantage of the 19-year-old-girl, she hoped to get away from the family, either to work or to marry. She finally had to tell the one man that interested her and who wanted to marry her, that "My family will decide whether I love you or not!"
Mansur, Sultan’s oldest son, who had just made a pilgrimage trip to Prophet Ali’s tomb so as to purge himself of his sins, stepped in and hoped to discourage the suitor. He depended on Aunt Leila being there at home just as her mother Bibi Gul did. Her vow was "No one is going to take Leila before I die."
Many of the Taliban decrees no longer exist in Kabul. After 9/11, American forces helped end that regime in their search for Osama bin Laden, bombing and destroying much of Afghanistan in the process. But many Afghan men, who once fought on the side of the Taliban, go from side to side in war. They claim, "No one can own us, they can only hire us."
The Bookseller of Kabul is a moving account of the Islamic people and how they continue to live in one of the most war-torn countries in the world. The book was published in 2002 and then translated into English in 2003.