Meena: Heroine of Afghanistan & Reading Lolita in Tehran

Off Our Backs, Jul/Aug 2004 by Douglas, Carol Anne

Meena: Heroine of Afghanistan & Reading Lolita in Tehran

By Melody Ermachild Chavis, St. Martin's Press, 2003, hardcover. By Azar Nasiri, Random House, 2004, paperback.

These books tell the stories of women who, in very different ways, have resisted Islamic fundamentalism and oppressive governments. Meena founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and led the group for a decade, until she was murdered in 1987. Hers is a tale of facing almost unimaginable difficulties with great courage and imagination. In a foreword to the book, Alice Walker writes "This is a story the world must learn by heart."

Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator from San Francisco, went to Afghanistan to interview women who had known Meena (she is always referred to by her first name) and tell her story. Given Meena's importance as a symbol of RAWA, the book is somewhat of a hagiography (the life of a saint). It is understandable that RAWA would want to present her as flawless.

Meena faced great obstacles, not least of which were epilepsy and weakness in her legs that were caused by typhoid fever, which she suffered as an adolescent. The bout of typhoid fever also inspired her to want to spend her life helping people.

The book says that she was always concerned about women, particularly poor women. The woman who cleaned her family's house was mistreated by the whole town because she was from a different ethnic group and was badly beaten by her husband, but she did not have the right to divorce him. Meena's father apparently was kind to her, but sometimes hit his two wives.

Meena was determined to live a different sort of life. She wanted to become a lawyer in the field of family law to support the rights of women. But even as she went to college, fundamentalists who believed that women didn't belong in the university were starting to take over the school of Islamic law. Fundamentalist students such as Gulbadin Hekmatyar, who later headed a faction supported by the United States, threw acid on women students who didn't wear veils and wore clothing that showed their legs. (He's still leading a paramilitary force.) Meena's family supported her goal of getting an education, but when she was in college, they wanted her to marry.

She married Faiz Ahmed, a 30-year-old physician who agreed to her conditions that he marry only one wife and that he allow her to study and to work.

Faiz (the book calls everyone by their first names) was also the head of a Maoist group. Chavis goes to great lengths to say that he didn't influence Meena's politics at all and that she was not a Maoist but a revolutionary concerned about women. A 30-year-old doctor marries a 19-year-old college student and doesn't try to influence her beliefs? OK. The leader of a Maoist group who says his wife can have whatever political beliefs she wants? That's not a Maoist; that's a liberal, and I doubt that he would have continued to be the group's leader for very long. That strained credulity for me.

I understand why it is important for RAWA to say that Meena wasn't influenced by her husband. Opponents have tried to dismiss the group as a Maoist group, though it clearly seems to be more revolutionary feminist than Maoist. No matter what she was, Meena was a great hero who cared deeply about the situation of the women of Afghanistan.

Meena's and RAWA's efforts to liberate Afghani women have been almost beyond measure. Meena left college to work among women and resist the occupation of Soviet troops. The Russians, like most occupying powers, were brutal; they arrested many people and treated prisoners badly (sound familiar?). The government said that if prisoners' relatives came to the prison, there would be a list of prisoners to be released. Instead, there was a list of prisoners who had just been executed.

The book says that people of many different political orientations, left and right, opposed the Soviet-backed government.

It was complicated for a woman like Meena, who cared so much about women, to oppose the Soviet-backed authorities, who tried to require that all girls go to school, but she believed they were doing it in a way that would guarantee opposition and failure.

Her organizing had to be clandestine. Women were not asked to join the group that was to become RAWA until she knew them and decided they were trustworthy. RAWA was organized in small groups, and in classic revolutionary fashion, the women in different groups did not know each other. Only Meena knew them all. She soon became known to the authorities and had to disguise herself.

The fundamentalists also hated RAWA. Fundamentalist groups, backed with U.S. funding, became the predominant force in the fight against the Soviets and the Sovietbacked government.

Because of the danger, Meena and many others had to establish bases in Pakistan and organize among the refugees there. Even though her supporters urged her not to risk going back to Afghanistan, she often did, of course in disguise. She had a baby daughter whom she felt she had to leave in Afghanistan. To prevent retaliation against the child, she was raised as another woman's daughter, a ruse that was painful for Meena. Meena and her husband, both doing revolutionary work, had little chance to be together.