Engrossing… Chesler adroitly blends her personal narrative with a riveting account of Afghanistan’’s troubled history, the ongoing Islamic/Islamist terrorism against Muslim civilians and the West, and the continuing struggle and courage of Afghan feminists." - Publishers Weekly “Engrossing… Chesler adroitly blends her personal narrative with a riveting account of Afghanistan’’s troubled history, the ongoing Islamic/Islamist terrorism against Muslim civilians and the West, and the continuing struggle and courage of Afghan feminists.” - Publishers Weekly “No human culture compromises the rights of women more than Islam. Today over 700 million women are directly or indirectly affected by the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed. Phyllis Chesler is by far the bravest and most outspoken American feminist to address the plight of Muslim women. In this book she shares with the reader her first encounter with Islam in Afghanistan. It is a moving account of the harrowing experience of one woman who almost meets her death in a culture that could not be more alien to her American upbringing. Yet every page is laden with compassion and love for the ex-husband and his family she unwittingly joined. I recommend this book be put on the reading list of every American school.” - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Author of Infidel and Nomad “Boom. Suddenly Phyllis Chesler is a prisoner in Afghanistan. Without a passport. As a wife without rights of any kind. Her bridegroom, once her equal when they met in New York, now in his own land, is a stranger… she is in an utterly male society where women and children are a man’’s property - “his to protect or abuse. They are his to kill. It is the way things are.” This is disconcerting to say the least… She escapes. This is how it all started. This is a bold book; intimate and rich in detail; as revealing a story about class, gender and religious differences as one will find. Chesler is a voice crying out for women. She had the right training. She will never stop.” - Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics and Going to Iran “This is a wondrous, invaluable memoir and meditation on women, culture, history, and the meaning of freedom. Phyllis Chesler tells a moving story in a direct, unaffected style and is able to draw conclusions of a wider import: reflections on the complex interplay of culture, more complex than the cliche of “a clash of cultures.” Chesler is remarkably generous to her husband. In trying to understand him, she is able to tease out valuable historical and cultural lessons. After fifty years of reflection, Chesler is able to distil mature and wise judgments from her dramatic experience, on the persecution and suffering of Muslim women. Chesler’’s own feminism really began with these experiences in Afghanistan. One of the other merits of the book is her introduction to the reader of a whole host of writers, travelers, and diplomats who have written perceptively about Islamic countries in general but on Afghanistan in particular, especially the treatment of women and slaves.” - Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am Not Muslim and Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’’s Orientalism “With a deft pen and a half-century of experience, Chesler revisits her brief, unpleasant, but life-changing and ultimately precious time in an Afghan harem. Although hardly the only feisty Western woman to despair at finding, on their visiting his home country, her debonair Muslim husband turned into an unrecognizably primitive tyrant, she drew unique benefits from the experience. These included finding her career focus (feminism), her field of study (psychology), her world outlook (principled liberalism) -and this marvelous book.” - Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum, author of In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power. “In her fascinating new memoir, Phyllis Chesler offers a vivid account of landing in Afghanistan in 1961 as a young bride - and finding herself a victim and virtual prisoner of that country’’s cruel anti-women customs and habits. Ms. Chesler was only 20, the product of a sheltered Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn, when she married a fellow student, a Muslim who came from a prominent Kabul family. Her companion was seductive, exotic, alluring, and seemed to promise her the world. But Ms.Chesler, who would go on to become a famous feminist leader and the author of the classic Women and Madness , attributes some of her later accomplishments, including her passionate stance on behalf of women, to insights she gained in that period. She finds herself trapped in a household replete with madness, including a mother-in-law who is sadistic and punitive and a husband who emerges as mean and uncaring. Despite her in-laws’’ wealth, she is often hungry, denied the foods that she can eat, and she can’’t even go out on her own to see a country she had longed to explore. Stripped of her U.S. passport when she landed, she finds her movements severely restricted. Many of the book
