Flight from an Afghan Seraglio

by Jerry Gordon (January 2014)

 

Palgrave Macmillan (October 1, 2013)
ISBN: 978-0230342217

 

 

 

 

An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir.

Five decades ago as a naïve young scholarship student at an elite northeastern college Chesler succumbed to bohemian fantasies and enticements of traveling the world when she married the “debonair, dapper” scion of a wealthy Afghan family, Abdul Kareem. There could not have been an odder misalliance. Chesler, raised in Brooklyn, came from an Orthodox Jewish background. Abdul Kareem was allegedly a non-practicing Muslim from the exotic Central Asian country of Afghanistan who had been sent abroad by his wealthy family for a decade of education in private schools and colleges in the West.

here. Chesler suggests the Afghan experience described in her memoir triggered her career as a feminist and psychoanalyst. It is also evident in her recent activism as an expert witness in custody battles and honor shame episodes under sharia in US court proceedings involving Muslim women plaintiffs. She also believes that the Afghan episode as a young woman enabled her to understand the patriarchal clan structure that deprived Muslim women of basic freedoms and civil rights placing them in thralldom behind what she calls the “isolation and sensory deprivation chamber and mobile body bag environment” of the burqa. She now advocates the burqa should be banned.

Chesler noting one American intellectual saying the 19 jihadis were blameless for perpetrating the holocaust on 9/11 in lower Manhattan writing:

At the conclusion of a chapter on American concerns for the plight of Afghan women and discussion of honor killings, she poses two rhetorical questions about the hard lessons drawn from her memoir:

Is my unexpected captivity in Kabul something of a cautionary tale about what can happen to any Westerner who believes she can enjoy a Western or modern life in a Muslim country?

A partial answer comes in her final chapter, Hard Lessons, when she says:

We cannot rescue every woman in Afghanistan or stem the tide of Islamist violence against civilians everywhere, not only in Afghanistan, without defeating the Islamists, ideologically, economically and militarily.

The Abduction from a Seraglio, about the rescue of another damsel in distress, the Turkish Pasha Selim instead of sentencing the captives to death forgives and frees them to live.

The West Speaks.

 

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