I’ve been reading “Raising My Voice” by Malalai Joya, an Afghanistan woman who was expelled from the Afghan parliament in 2007 for criticizing the presence of warlords. When she was only a few months old, her family had to flee to Iran while her father fought the soviet occupation which began in 1978. She grew up in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. Iran did not let girls in the camps go to school, and her family eventually moved to Pakistan to a town that had a girl’s
school. She intersperses her own story with bits of recent Afghan history: how the CIA funneled money into mujaheddin groups chosen on the advice of Pakistan’s intelligence services. When the soviets were defeated many of the groups began fighting each other for power.

In ninth grade she became a school teacher, which gives us some idea of the level of education of many of the other women she was teaching; in a word, ZIP.

At sixteen, having completed year 12, she returned to Afghanistan. The Taliban were in power. Girls were not allowed to go to school (again!) and she began a girls’ school in a basement of sympathetic householder, teaching women the unthinkable: how to read and write. She smuggled books in under the Burqa she was forced to wear in the streets. (In an amusing aside she describes how you eat ice cream while wearing a Burqa: with great difficulty.) The Taliban forbade music and films,
but copies of the movie Titanic circulated among people who secretly had video players. Street vendors began naming their products after the film: Titanic shampoo, Titanic onions, Titanic potatoes. But the world is an even stranger place than most of us would imagine. Even as late as May 2011, America paid the Taliban $43 million as a reward for limiting opium growing. (Seriously! Just Google it.)

I’ve noticed that although there are a lot of references to Islam in the book, Joya doesn’t speak about her own religious beliefs or whether she has any. Unlike ‘I am Najood, Aged 10, divorced,’ (reviewed on one of the pages at the top of this blog) she doesn’t claim to draw strength from her religion. Nor, like Aayan Hirsi Ali in ‘Infidel” (also reviewed above) does she describe a religious period in her teenage years, followed by disillusionment. Here are no references (so far) to her visiting a mosque for religious purposes, or praying by herself.

So far I’m only up to page 100, where she has been expelled from the Loya Jirga (the council that was to frame the Afghan constitution in 2003.) I know she gets elected to the parliament in 2005, and expelled from that later in the book. So I’m waiting to see what else happens.

I’ll do another post by next Friday. For more – Wikipedia has an article on her. This book is published as “A Woman Among Warlords” in the US and Canada, and “Raising my Voice” in other English-speaking countries.