Christina Lamb, author of The Sewing Circles of Herat (2002), was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year by British Press Awards, What the Papers Say Awards, and the Foreign Press Association for her reporting on Afghanistan and Pakistan. She is also author of the bestselling Africa House and Waiting for Allah. The Sewing Circles of Herat is an outcome of her correspondent travels to get first-hand interviews and to search out the core meaning for the wars and conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Meaning of the book title
The inspiration behind the book title is from a secret study and discussion society for educating women in the Taliban-controlled city of Herat, Afghanistan. Herat was once a great city famed for its culture
— architecture, calligraphy, poetry, all in the romantic language of Persian. Women in war-controlled Afghanistan were forbidden education, forbidden a job, forbidden to walk alone or be seen in public unless with a male family member and unless also they were completely concealed from the eye under a black robe. But the women with small baskets of scissors and thread disguised books for studying underneath, and the Golden Needle was not where they were to sew but instead where they were to study. These women, though forbidden personal expression in public, defiantly kept their spirit and educated their minds in secret. They were suppressed, but they still retain some control.
One meaning of the Taliban
In Pakistan, Christina asked a silver-haired lawyer-politician what he thought of the Taliban and why they preached such an extreme form of Islam. "Talibs used to be figures of fun," he said. "Pashtun is a very egalitarian society with no caste or class system. It's not like Sindh with its waderas or Punjab with its feudal lords. In my 61st year of life, the only class that I can say we have always looked down on in Pashtun society is the Talib. When I was a child the Talibs were used for begging. 'I'm a Talib,' and we'd say 'poor darling' and give them bread."
"Referring to the Taliban as 'poor darling' was not just a recognition of their straitened circumstances. There was a more sinister side. The madrassa boys were not only separated from their mothers and all females at an early age but were taught to stigmatize women and that the mere sight of an ankle or a varnished fingernail would lead to damnation. In Pashto, women are referred to as tor sari which means black-heads until their hair turns grey and they become spin sari or white-heads, and they are seen as something to be covered, locked away and beaten."
"We're talking about a society where in my village a boy and a girl kissing is an unpardonable crime seen as worse than murder. The inevitable result is sodomy. It's the done thing in Pashtun society because of women being shut away in houses. A good-looking boy would have dozens of attempts made on him. I was a very handsome youth and had lots of problems but fortunately our family name and standing protected me. These Talibs have no such protection and it starts with the kind of people who run these seminaries. We used to say 'Oh God, he's a Talib,' and that meant he's a sissy or he's available."
"Over a period of time they must become very angry people. And very frustrated, mostly against women, coupled with the hurt of a childhood trauma you can never get rid of and never, never talk about. It must leave a permanent scar." (p 104-105)
Saving paintings in the National Gallery, Kabul, Afghanistan
While Christina was in Kabul interviewing Afghanis after the Taliban had left Kabul, she received a message to go the National Gallery of Kabul. There, she met the doctor who was also 'the painter'. When the Taliban had come to Kabul, they began systemically destroying all cultural items that contained images of humans and animals. Dr. Mohammed Yusuf Assefi heard that 8 of his paintings with humans and animals and which had been hanging in the Presidential Palace had been destroyed, so he knew the paintings in the museum and other national treasures would likewise be destroyed. Bravely, he decided to do his part in saving them.
He walked boldly into the museum and said that he had been commissioned to restore the paintings. In actuality, over the oil paintings he used water color to paint images or obscure images - for example, he transformed a swan into a shadow on a pond, and a boat with a rower into simply a boat floating with a cargo of sacks. His transformations were risky and he would have been killed if he had been discovered, but his strategy was to move paintings continually around so no one would notice the horse that was there no longer, or the birds that had suddenly flown from the painting.
In total he repainted 80 in the gallery and 42 in the Foreign Ministry. It took him 3-4 days per painting and a year to disguise all the ones in question. It only took a few moments to wipe the watercolor paints away and bring back to vision the real story underneath, he said, as he wiped a pot of flowers by a canal transforming them into a peasant woman carrying a burden on her back.
