Book Recommendation

I’ve just finished reading a book called My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban by a 22 year old Afghan woman called Latifa. She was 16 and from an educated muslim family, her mother’s a doctor and father’s a businessman, and living in Kabul when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan. The family wore western clothes, the women didn’t cover their heads and enjoyed doing normal things like listening to music and going to the movies. This all stopped when the Taliban took over.

The book tells how after the Soviet troops left in 1989 there was constant fighting among different factions until the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, took control. They then used their interpretation of the koran to bring in a whole draft crazy laws the crippled the country and forced people like Latifa to not step outside their homes for months on end.

They banned women from working, from talking to men outside, made them wear full length burqas, banned photos and music and carried out whippings, rapes and a lot of sadistic torture of anyone who stepped out of line. Taliban logic ‘Only men can be doctors. Male doctors can only treat male patients’
It’s a very easy read, I read it in a couple of days, and is a great insight into the lives of ordinary Afghans. There are some gory details of what the Taliban got up to but also some lighter moments, talking about her brother’s circumcision she says ‘Circumcision is usually carried out by a barber, but mother chose a doctor’. Worth a look.

Check it out on Amazon.co.uk

By BootsnAll | Permalink

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