Three Women of Herat

It's probably trite by now to say that "the past is a foreign country", but if it's true anywhere in the world today, it must be most of all in Afghanistan. The Afghans managed to preserve their independence from colonial rule with only minimal interference from Great Britain (a country that lost two wars with Afghanistan). We might conclude that such freedom was a blessing, but it meant that the country sailed well into the treacherous waters of the 20th century without much social or economic change, with only a small educated class of people that could navigate the perils of the wars and competitions raging all around. By the 1970s, when most nations in the world had changed drastically from what they had been fifty years previously, Afghanistan still had not transformed itself. It was in this last moment of the Afghan past that Veronica Doubleday accompanied her husband to Herat, a large city in the west of Afghanistan, a historical capital and cultural center. While her husband studied traditional music, Doubleday studied first art, then women's lives, re-entering the musical world with a female music teacher. THREE WOMEN OF HERAT is a well-written, colorful memoir of that time, a picture of an Afghan city and women's lives, a picture that is now a shard of the Herati and Afghan past, covered over with the debris of 23 years of utter destruction and violence. Though the author came from an educated English background, she chose three simple women for her portraits---a proper wife of a large musical family, a strict Muslim's suppressed wife who took refuge in faith healing and trances, and a female musician whose status in Herati society was dubious as she appeared in public. Through the medium of describing her interactions with these three, Doubleday presents a picture of Afghan society in the mid-`70s, emphasizing womens' lives. She covers the whole marriage process, childbirth and family relations, holidays, purdah, the music world, spirit possession, healing, and the evil eye. Her relationship with the three women is always at the center. There are a number of excellent color photographs and many drawings by the author as well. A short epilogue underlines the disaster that befell the city and society she loved and we see the beginnings of fanaticism as a tool to fight foreign rule. I think that for people interested in studying women in the Islamic world, THREE WOMEN OF HERAT could be very useful. Friedl's "Women of Deh Koh" (Iran) is anthropologically more sophisticated and gives the women their own voice. Fernea's "A Street in Marrakech" (Morocco) brings out the contrast between Western and Moroccan cultures better. Perhaps the novels of Djebar and Fernissi are more of an inside view than can be offered by a European. But Doubleday's book combines well with all these others. It is a beautiful portrait of a lost world, all the more poignant for what has befallen the Afghan people most recently.