The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 15

  ‘In other cities, where there had been fighting between factions and lots of crime and insecurity, when the Taliban came they were greeted with relief. But we had not had those problems. So to us they were simply a bunch of illiterate religious fanatics who did not speak our language and had come to make life difficult for us. Barbarians who hung people from electricity poles and crossroads. One day I counted eighteen people hanging. Can you imagine seeing that?

  ‘It was particularly hard for our female members. They closed the girls’ schools and banned women from the university, initially saying this was temporary while they worked things out. But then they captured Kabul and started turning girls’ schools into mosques, banned our language and stopped paying women teachers, so we knew. For a while we waited, hoping they would be defeated but when it became clear that they were going to retain control of Herat we sat around discussing what we could do to stop the culture of our city dying and to help our girls. There was only one thing we could think of.’

  ‘What was that?’ I asked. Haghighi studied me for a moment as if trying to make his mind up about something. I shifted in my seat and found myself pulling forward my scarf which was always slipping off my hair, already feeling uncomfortable to be stared at so openly in a land where men usually do anything to avoid a woman’s gaze. He pushed his chair back from the table and got up.

  ‘Come with me.’

  His brusque tone brooked no possibility of asking where we were going and I found myself following meekly as he walked quickly along the road back past the hotel, across the Flower traffic island with the laughing traffic policeman, past Aziz barber’s shop which was busy with men shaving off their beards, and down a small mud-walled alleyway. Some way along by a doorway on the left was a blue sign. Golden Needle, Ladies’ Sewing Classes, Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays.

  ‘This is what we did,’ he said. I stared uncomprehendingly. ‘The one activity which women could do and involved lots of coming and going was making clothes,’ he explained. The innocuous plaque masked an underground network of writers and poets, who had become the focus of resistance in this ancient city, risking their lives for literature and to educate women.

  The entrance to the Golden Needle.

  Three times a week for the previous five years, young women, faces and bodies disguised by their Taliban-enforced uniforms of washed-out blue burqas and flat shoes, would knock at the yellow wrought-iron door. In their handbags, concealed under scissors, cottons, sequins and pieces of material, were notebooks and pens. Had the authorities investigated they would have discovered that the dressmaking students never made any clothes. The house belonged to Mohammed Nasir Rahiyab, a forty-seven-year-old literature professor from Herat University, and, once inside, the women would pull off their burqas, sit on cushions around a blackboard and listen to him teach forbidden subjects such as literary criticism, aesthetics and Persian poetry as well as be introduced to foreign classics by Shakespeare, James Joyce and Nabokov.

  Mr Haghighi banged on the door and it was opened by a small boy who showed us into a long windowless room with cushions on the floor, a board at one end, an oil painting of a man at a desk, and some glass wall-cases containing a few books including a Persian-English dictionary, some volumes of Persian poetry, and a book in English on Poisoning. Professor Rahiyab came and sat down with us beneath his own portrait, and a flask of green tea and a dish of pistachios were brought even though it was Ramadan. ‘I don’t go to the mosque,’ he explained with a shrug. He was a shy soft-spoken man who only became passionate when talking about his beloved Russian writers and he showed me his bust of Pushkin, which he used to keep hidden, only taking it out for the classes.

  While lessons were underway his children would be sent to play in the alleyway outside. If a Talib or any stranger approached, one of the children would slip in to warn him and he would then escape into his study with his books while his place running the class was quickly taken by his wife holding up a half-finished garment which they always kept ready.

  Literary Circle President Ahmed Said Haghighi in the classroom of the Golden Needle.

  Only once were they almost exposed when the professor’s daughter was ill in bed and his son had run to buy bread so there was no one to raise the alarm when a black turbaned Talib rapped at the door. ‘Suddenly he was in the courtyard outside. I just got out of the room in time and my wife ran in and the girls hid their books under the cushions. I realised that I had not cleaned the board or hidden Pushkin. I sat in the other room, drinking tea, my hand shaking so much my cup was rattling. Fortunately the Taliban were such ignorant people they did not know what they were seeing.’

  In a society where even teaching one’s own daughter to read was a crime, the Sewing Circle was a venture that could easily have ended in more bodies swinging above Gul Crossroads and I asked the professor why he had taken such a risk.

  ‘If the authorities had known that we were not only teaching women but teaching them high levels of literature we would have been killed,’ he replied. ‘But a lot of fighters sacrificed their lives over the years for the freedom of this city. Shouldn’t a person of letters make that sacrifice too?

  ‘We were poor in everyday life,’ he added. ‘Why should we be poor in culture too? If we had not done what we did to keep up the literary spirit of the city, the depth of our tragedy would have been even greater.’

  To lessen suspicion, Professor Rahiyab never openly criticised the regime and carried on quietly teaching his male students at the university, even though the Taliban had decimated his syllabus, forcing him to replace most of his literature classes with lectures on Islamic culture and Shariat and insisting the only books he use were those which he said were ‘brought from the mosque’. Literary Theory was reduced from ten hours to two hours a week, European Literature scrapped altogether, and Islamic Culture increased from four hours to fourteen hours. ‘I had an extremely long beard,’ he added, rubbing his close-shaven chin with a wry smile.

  Inspired by the Golden Needle, hundreds of similar courses were held all over the city, mostly in central places where there were lots of comings and goings so a few more would not draw too much attention. Some of the Literary Circle’s writers even disguised themselves in burqas to go to women’s houses to teach. A Unicef official later told me that an estimated 29,000 girls and women in Herat province received some form of secret education while the city was under Taliban control.

  ‘A society needs poets and storytellers to reflect its pain – and joy,’ said Professor Rahiyab as we got up to leave. ‘A society without literature is a society that is not rich and does not have a strong core. If there wasn’t so much illiteracy and lack of culture in Afghanistan then terrorism would never have found its cradle here.’

  One of the professor’s students at the Golden Needle was a feisty twenty-three-year-old called Zena Karamzade, and Mr Haghighi arranged for me to meet her in the public library, next door to the Literary Circle. She arrived with her friend Leyla Razeghi, two shapeless figures in burqas who could have been anyone until they disrobed to reveal attractive young women with strong faces and fair complexions, and I wondered how women in burqas ever identified each other. The library was even bleaker and colder than the Literary Circle, again no heater, a long white room furnished with just a table and chairs, its tall green-painted windows looking out onto the bare branches of winter trees. ‘How do you like our library?’ laughed Zena, gesturing around. ‘We call this the book graveyard.’

  Almost all the shelves were empty except for a bookcase at one end of heavy religious volumes with gold engraved titles like the ones I had seen in Haqqania, and another with a few tattered foreign paperbacks including Moby Dick, a 1965 World Almanac, a book entitled Book of the Eskimo and one called The Road to Huddersfield.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘It was the Taliban,’ replied a white-bearded old man who came over and introduced himself as Zare Husseini, the librarian. ‘I am sixty and I have worked here forty
-one years,’ he said. ‘This was a good library. We had twenty-five thousand books and magazines and many people came here. But then last year the Taliban came and took the books. They came one afternoon in pick-ups and big trucks. It was the Governor of Herat, the head of censorship, and thirty Taliban soldiers. They told me all books ‘contrary to the tastes and beliefs of Sunnis must be confiscated as well as any books containing pictures, any books published in Iran or in the West, and any political books, particularly from the Communist era. That didn’t really leave anything so they began packing them all up. I was the guardian of these books but there was nothing I could do.

  ‘I even helped them pack because they hit me with their Kalashnikovs.’ His rheumy old eyes began to water and he shook his head. ‘Later we heard they had burned them on an enormous pyre outside the city.

  ‘That’s what they brought in their place.’ He pointed to the case of religious volumes. ‘Nobody reads them,’ he said. ‘They are all written in Arabic which no one here speaks and on subjects like the jurisprudence of Islam which are far too theoretical.’

  Herat Museum was also raided, removing statues, vases and jars said to date from Alexander’s time, and ancient manuscripts. The only non-religious books saved by the library were a few boxes that Mr Haghighi’s Literary Circle had managed to remove earlier when they were tipped off that the Taliban were coming. They buried them in the ruins of an old theatre in the garden next door as well as under the lavatories of an abandoned youth centre. It was these, including Moby Dick, that had been returned to the shelves.

  While many of the historic handwritten books from Herat Museum were taken out of the country and sold in Pakistan, a representative from the Taliban Ministry of Culture was stationed on the border to stop new books coming into the country. ‘They weren’t very clever though,’ said Haghighi. ‘We managed to bring some in hidden among car parts.’

  Zena had been a second-year medical student at Herat University when the Taliban came and abolished female education. ‘I had always dreamed of being a doctor. If the Taliban hadn’t come I would be practising by now. Instead … well, if I was to tell you the whole story it would take many days but what I can tell you is we didn’t live under the Taliban, we just stayed in our rooms doing nothing like cows in their sheds.

  ‘We had no communication with the rest of the world or even outside our home, we couldn’t listen to television or radio or see our friends. Even to go to a doctor we had to be accompanied by our husband or father who would speak for us or we would be whipped. There was just one dentist here in Herat who still treated women and when the Taliban found out they arrested him and beat all the patients.

  ‘We could not have come to this library as the Taliban would have said what business do you girls have with these books? Even the shopping was done by men. Women were treated like parasites in this society.’

  As Zena spoke her eyes burnt with injustice and her breath made clouds of steam in the cold air. Outside sparrows chattered in the trees, the last few autumn leaves floated to the ground, and rickshaw horns clamoured in the street. I wondered what it was really like to live a life where all this was reduced to small pieces seen through a mesh grille, and I asked their feelings about the burqa.

  ‘The burqa existed before the Taliban but few women here wore it and in the first year of Taliban they did not make us,’ replied Zena. ‘But later they insisted and that was awful.’

  ‘It was like being in a cage,’ interjected her friend Leyla, who was smaller and rounder but with expressive dark eyes and who had, until then, been listening, nodding occasionally.

  ‘No, it was worse than that,’ argued Zena. ‘We would breathe out carbon dioxide and not get enough oxygen in because it was a closed space with restricted fresh air coming through so after a while your lungs would feel like exploding and you thought you would suffocate. Also if you were walking with the sun in front it blinded you and you could totter and fall.

  ‘We survived only in the hope that the schools would reopen or somehow the Taliban would go. I tried to keep my brain alive by doing mathematical formulae and would often stay up till 3 a.m. doing them secretly. It became an obsession as if the moment I stopped doing calculus I would die and I was terrified of running out of equations to solve. The only time we felt human was in the sewing classes. If I’d known at the beginning that the Taliban would be here seven years I would have committed suicide.’

  It was Leyla, herself an aspiring writer, who had first heard about the Golden Needle. ‘I knew Professor Rahiyab through the Literary Circle and we arranged that he would come to my house to give lessons to five of us. If anyone came we were to say he was my uncle. He told us about great writers like Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, James Joyce and Alexander Dumas and taught us things like philosophy of aesthetics. For those few hours it was like being in another world. Of course if we had been found out we would have been killed.’

  With his encouragement the twenty-four-year-old had already completed two novels, one about forced marriage called Mirage and another called Beyond Our Vision, the story of a girl whose father dies in the fighting, leaving her to support the family. Both had been painstakingly written out in Persian script, the manuscripts worn thin and almost damp from being worked over and over as it was not easy to obtain large amounts of paper without raising suspicion. She had also written some thirty short stories of which seven had been published in the Literary Circle’s journal. Published under male pseudonyms to protect her identity and based on one theme – life for women under the Taliban – her stories used metaphors to criticise the regime.

  ‘I wrote one called Habari Bosh which means The Good News and was a monologue of a woman called Rusa writing of her frustration at not being able to study because of a sick relative and watching her brothers all go off to school and university while she is stuck in this dark closed-in sickroom.’

  Yet it wasn’t just the restrictions on their own lives that both of the girls were angry about: ‘Herat was always known as the city of mysticism and knowledge, you might have heard of our great Queen Gowhar Shad, and we felt we had a duty to continue that tradition,’ said Zena. ‘But the Taliban managed to damage our culture so much.

  ‘To give you an example, because women were at home all day with nothing to do, cosmetics became very popular even though they were banned by the Taliban. My friends or sisters would spend all day putting on make-up and get their husbands or fathers to bring materials to make clothes. They became obsessed by getting the latest lipsticks smuggled in from Iran or Pakistan. Girls also started getting married younger again, at thirteen because there was nothing else for them to do.

  ‘Also, as any kind of games and get-togethers were all banned and local television was abandoned, many people bought satellite dishes or VCRs to watch foreign programmes. In our neighbourhood I think for every five houses, two would have satellite dishes even if they were very poor. People would not eat in order to afford a dish or video because there was nothing out there. Of course it was prohibited and when Taliban caught them they would be arrested, beaten black and blue and paraded round the city with the television around their neck but people carried on.

  ‘The videos had to be smuggled in secretly and there were just a few which were passed around. Sometimes there were American movies, like I remember Titanic coming and everyone wanted Titanic hairstyles and clothes and there were secret tapes of the music and all the girls fell in love with Leonardo di Caprio. Even the men wanted the same floppy hair as him with their Taliban beards. But mostly people preferred the Hindi movies because the American ones were often violent and as they saw beating here on the streets every day they were fed up with it, while the Indian ones always had good endings where the oppressed person finally wins out so it gave us a good feeling. You can imagine the effect of people being indoors all the time and watching these films over and over again. Our young speak Hindi and know all the names of the Indian actors and actresses yet know nothing of hi
story or of the great figures of our past. They probably have never heard of Bihzad or Gowhar Shad.’

  I was surprised that so many people had got away with breaking Taliban laws in Herat but Leyla had an explanation. ‘In some ways it was easier than in other places as here they were so hated no one cooperated with them so our secrets were not revealed. And the Taliban were so obvious here. They dressed differently and spoke differently to us.’

  Zena and Leyla risked imprisonment and beatings to study literature.

  The new Governor Ismael Khan was said to be anxious to restart female education and I asked Zena if she intended to go back to medical school once the university reopened for women. She shook her head. ‘I cannot go through all those years of study now. The Taliban destroyed all our university records so we would have to start all over again and I am already twenty-four. Besides how can I be a doctor and treat people? I am too traumatised myself.’

  I was sorry to say goodbye to these brave young women. They invited me to a dinner in a nearby hotel to celebrate the first open meeting of the Literary Circle with women and apologised that they could not stay longer or invite me to their homes. ‘The Taliban have changed our customs so much,’ said Zena, shaking her head sadly. ‘Once we would have been proud to have had a foreigner to our home. But now my father would be very unhappy if he knew I was here. It is still early days after the Taliban. Who knows what will happen?’

  They gathered up their burqas and slid the heavy folds of cotton draping from embroidered caps over their heads so that the grilles of tiny holes were over their faces, and left the library, their voices muffled as they bid me goodbye. Whereas the women in Iran had looked chic, almost sexy, in their fitted long coats and headscarves, this seemed to me a garment that could only have been designed by a man who really despised women. I stood at the door, watching Zena and Leyla walk away. Their shoulders had stooped and whole personalities seemed to have been subsumed into the blue shrouds and soon they were invisible among the other burqas shuffling along the pavement.