Sultan’s first candidate was sixteen-year-old Sonya. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped and her hair shining black. She was shapely, voluptuous, and it was said of her that she was a good worker. Her family was poor and they were reasonably closely related. Her mother’s grandmother and Sultan’s mother’s grandmother were sisters.
While Sultan ruminated over how to ask for the hand of the chosen one without the help of family women, his first wife was blissfully ignorant that a mere chit of a girl, born the same year she and Sultan were married, was Sultan’s constant preoccupation. Sharifa was getting old. Like Sultan, she was a few years over fifty. She had borne him three sons and a daughter. The time had come for a man of Sultan’s standing to find a new wife.
‘Do it yourself,’ his brother said finally.
After some thought, Sultan realised that this was his only solution, and early one morning he made his way to the house of the sixteen-year-old. Her parents greeted him with open arms. Sultan was considered a generous man and a visit from him was always welcome. Sonya’s mother boiled water and made tea. They reclined on flat cushions in the mud cottage and exchanged pleasantries until Sultan thought the time had come to make his proposal.
‘A friend of mine would like to marry Sonya,’ he told the parents.
It was not the first time someone had asked for their daughter’s hand. She was beautiful and diligent, but they thought she was still a bit young. Sonya’s father was no longer able to work. During a brawl a knife had severed some of the nerves in his back. His beautiful daughter could be used as a bargaining chip in the marriage stakes, and he and his wife were always expecting the next bid to be even higher.
‘He is rich,’ said Sultan. ‘He’s in the same business as I am. He is well educated and has three sons. But his wife is starting to grow old.’
‘What’s the state of his teeth,’ the parents asked immediately, alluding to the friend’s age.
‘About like mine,’ said Sultan. ‘You be the judge.’
Old, the parents thought. But that was not necessarily a disadvantage. The older the man, the higher the price for their daughter. A bride’s price is calculated according to age, beauty and skill and according to the status of the family.
When Sultan Khan had delivered his message, the parents said, as could be expected: ‘She is too young.’
Anything else would be to sell short to this rich, unknown suitor whom Sultan recommended so warmly. It would not do to appear too keen. But they knew Sultan would return; Sonya was young and beautiful.
He returned the next day and repeated the proposal. The same conversation, the same answers. But this time he got to meet Sonya whom he had not seen since she was a young girl.
She kissed his hand, in the custom of showing respect for an elder relative, and he blessed the top of her head with a kiss. Sonya was aware of the charged atmosphere and flinched under Uncle Sultan’s searching look.
‘I have found you a rich man, what do you think of that?’ he asked. Sonya looked down at the floor. A young girl has no right to have an opinion about a suitor.
Sultan returned the third day and this time he made known the suitor’s proposition: a ring, a necklace, earrings and bracelet, all in red gold; as many clothes as she wanted; 300 kilos of rice, 150 kilos of cooking-oil, a cow, a few sheep and 15 million Afghani, approximately £300.
Sonya’s father was more than satisfied with the price and asked to meet this mysterious man who was prepared to pay so much for his daughter. According to Sultan he even belonged to their tribe, in spite of their not being able to place him or remember that they had ever met him.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Sultan, ‘I will show you a picture of him.’
The next day, fortified by a sweetener, Sultan’s aunt agreed to reveal to Sonya’s parents the identity of the suitor. She took a photograph with her - a picture of Sultan Khan himself - and with it the uncompromising message that they had no more than an hour to make up their minds. If the answer was yes, he would be very grateful, and if it was no there would be no bad blood between them. What he wanted to avoid at all costs was everlasting bargaining about maybe, maybe not.
The parents agreed within the hour. They were keen on Sultan Khan, his money and his position. Sonya sat in the attic and waited. When the mystery surrounding the suitor had been solved and the parents had decided to accept, her father’s brother came up to the attic. ‘Uncle Sultan is your wooer,’ he said. ‘Do you consent?’
Not a sound escaped Sonya’s lips. With tearful eyes and bowed head, she hid behind her long shawl.
‘Your parents have accepted the suitor,’ her uncle said. ‘Now is your only chance to express an opinion.’
She was petrified, paralysed by fear. She did not want the man but she knew she had to obey her parents. As Sultan’s wife her standing in Afghan society would go up considerably. The bride money would solve many of her family’s problems. The money would help her parents buy good wives for their sons.
Sonya held her tongue, and with that her fate was sealed. To say nothing means to give one’s consent. The agreement was drawn up, the date fixed.
Sultan went home to inform his family of the news. His wife Sharifa, his mother and sisters were seated around a dish of rice and spinach. Sharifa thought he was joking and laughed and cracked some jokes in return. His mother too laughed at Sultan’s joke. She could not believe that he had entered into a proposal of marriage without her blessing. The sisters were dumbfounded.
No one believed him, not until he showed them the kerchief and sweetmeats the parents of a bride give the suitor as proof of the engagement.
Sharifa cried for twenty days. ‘What have I done? What a disgrace. Why are you dissatisfied with me?’
Sultan told her to pull herself together. No one in the family backed him up, not even his own sons. Nevertheless, no one dared speak out against him - he always got his own way.
Sharifa was inconsolable. What really rankled was the fact that the man had picked an illiterate, someone who had not even completed nursery school. She, Sharifa, was a qualified Persian language teacher. ‘What has she got that I haven’t got?’ she sobbed.
Sultan rose above his wife’s tears.
No one wanted to attend the engagement party. But Sharifa had to bite the bullet and dress up for the celebrations.
‘I want everyone to see that you agree and support me. In the future we will all be living under the same roof and you must show that Sonya is welcome,’ he demanded. Sharifa had always humoured her husband, and now too, in this worst circumstance, giving him to someone else, she knuckled under. He even demanded that Sharifa should put the rings on his and Sonya’s fingers.
Twenty days after the proposal of marriage the solemn engagement ritual took place. Sharifa pulled herself together and put on a brave face. Her female relatives did their best to unsettle her. ‘How awful for you,’ they said. ‘How badly he has treated you. You must be suffering.’
The wedding took place two months after the engagement, on the day of the Muslim New Year’s Eve. This time Sharifa refused to attend.
‘I can’t,’ she told her husband.
The female family members backed her up. No one bought new dresses or applied the normal amount of make-up required at wedding ceremonies. They wore simple coiffures and stiff smiles - in deference to the superannuated wife who would no longer share Sultan Khan’s bed. It was now reserved for the young, terrified bride - but they would all be under the same roof, until death did them part.
Burning Books
On a freezing cold afternoon in November 1999, a bonfire blazed on the roundabout at Charhai-e-Sadarat in Kabul. Street children gathered round the flames that cast dancing shadows across their dirty faces. They played a game of dare - who could get closest to the flames? Grown-ups stole a glance at the fire and hastened by. It was safer that way; it was obvious to all that this fire had not been lit by street watchmen to warm their hands. It was a fire in the service of God.
r />
Queen Soraya’s sleeveless dress curled and twisted and turned to ash, as did her shapely white arms and serious face. King Amanullah, her husband, burnt too, and all his medals with him. The whole line of kings spluttered on the fire, together with little girls in Afghan dress, Mujahedeen soldiers on horseback and farmers at a Kandahar bazaar.
The religious police went conscientiously to work in Sultan Khan’s bookshop that November afternoon. Any books portraying living things, be they human or animal, were torn from the shelves and tossed on the fire. Yellowed pages, innocent postcards, and dried-out covers from old reference books were sacrificed to the flames.
Amidst the children round the bonfire stood the foot soldiers of the religious police, carrying whips, long sticks and Kalashnikovs. These men considered anyone who loved pictures or books, sculptures or music, dance, film or free thought enemies of society.
Today they were interested only in pictures. Heretical texts, even those on the shelves right in front of their eyes, were overlooked. The soldiers were illiterate and could not distinguish orthodox Taliban doctrine from heresy. But they could distinguish pictures from letters and animate creatures from inanimate things.
Finally only ashes remained, caught by the wind and swirled with the dust and dirt in the streets and sewers of Kabul. The bookseller, bereft of his beloved books, was bundled into a car, a Taliban soldier on either side. The soldiers closed and sealed the shop and Sultan was sent to jail for anti-Islamic behaviour.
Lucky the armed half-wits did not look behind the shelves, Sultan thought on his way to detention. The most prohibited books he had stashed away ingeniously. He only brought them out if someone asked specially for them and if he thought he could trust the person who asked.
Sultan had expected this. He had been selling illegal books, pictures and writings for many years. The soldiers had often menaced him, seized a few books and then left. Threats had been issued from the Taliban’s highest authority and he had even been called in to the Minister for Culture, in the Government’s attempts to try and convert the enterprising bookseller and recruit him to the Taliban cause.
Sultan Khan willingly sold some Taliban publications. He was a freethinker and of the opinion that everyone had the right to be heard. But along with their gloomy doctrines he also wanted to sell history books, scientific publications, ideological works on Islam, and not least, novels and poetry. The Taliban regarded debate as heresy and doubt as sin. Anything other than Koran-swotting was unnecessary, even dangerous. When the Taliban came to power in Kabul in the autumn of 1996 the ministries were emptied of professionals and replaced by mullahs. From the central bank to the university - the mullahs controlled everything. Their goal was to re-create a society like the one the Prophet Muhammad had lived in on the Arab peninsula in the seventh century. Even when the Taliban negotiated with foreign oil companies, ignorant mullahs sat around the negotiating table, lacking any technical expertise.
Sultan was convinced that under the Taliban the country grew increasingly poor, dismal and insular. The authorities resisted all modernisation; they had no wish to either understand or adopt ideas of progress or economic development. They shunned scientific debate, whether conducted in the West or in the Muslim world. Their manifesto was above all a few pathetic arguments about how people should dress or cover themselves, how men should respect the hour of prayer, and women be separated from the rest of society. They were not conversant with the history of Islam or of Afghanistan, and had no interest in either.
Sultan Khan sat in the car squashed between the illiterate Taliban soldiers, cursing his country for being ruled by either warriors or mullahs. He was a believer, but a moderate Muslim. He prayed to Allah every morning, but usually ignored the following four calls to prayer unless the religious police pulled him in to the nearest mosque with other men they had snatched up from the streets. He reluctantly respected the fast during Ramadan and did not eat between sunup and sundown, at least not when anyone was looking. He was faithful to his two wives, brought up his children with a firm hand and taught them to be good God-fearing Muslims. He had nothing but contempt for the Taliban whom he considered illiterate peasant priests; they originated from the poorest and most conservative part of the country, where literacy was low.
The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin, better known as the Ministry of Morality, was behind his arrest. During the interrogation in the prison Sultan Khan stroked his beard. He wore it according to Taliban requirements, the length of a clenched fist. He straightened his shalwar kameez; it too conformed to Taliban standards - tunic below the knees, trousers below the ankle. He answered proudly: ‘You can burn my books, you can embitter my life, you can even kill me, but you cannot wipe out Afghanistan’s history.’
Books were Sultan’s life. Ever since he was given his first book at school, books and stories had captivated him. He was born to a poor family, and grew up during the fifties in the village of Deh Khudaidad outside Kabul. Neither his mother nor his father could read, but they scraped together enough money to send him to school. As the oldest son any savings were spent on him. His sister, who was born before him, never set foot inside a school and never learnt to read or write. Today she can barely tell the right time. After all, her only future was to be married off.
But Sultan, he was destined for greatness. The first hurdle was the road to school. Little Sultan refused to walk it because he had no shoes. His mother sent him packing.
‘Oh yes, you can, you just see,’ she said and gave him a blow over the head. Soon he had earned enough money to buy shoes. He worked throughout his schooling. In the mornings before class and every afternoon until dark, he fired bricks to make money for the family. Later he got a job in a shop. He told his parents that the salary was half of what it actually was. He saved the rest and bought books.
He started selling books when he was a teenager. He had been accepted as an engineering student but could not find the appropriate textbooks. During a journey with his uncle to Teheran he happened upon all the required titles in one of the town’s many book markets. He bought several sets, which he sold on to fellow students in Kabul for double the price. And so the bookseller was born; he was thrown a lifeline.
Sultan participated in the construction of only two buildings in Kabul before book mania tore him away from the world of engineering. Once again it was the book markets in Teheran that seduced him. The boy from the country wandered around among books in the Persian metropolis, surrounded by old and new, antique and modern, and came across books he had never dreamt even existed. He bought crate upon crate of Persian poetry, art books, history books, and - for the sake of his business - textbooks for engineers.
Back home in Kabul he opened his first little bookshop, amongst the spice merchants and kebab stalls in the centre of town. This was the seventies and society teetered between the modern and the traditional. Zahir Shah, the liberal and rather lazy king, ruled, and his half-hearted attempts at modernising the country provoked sharp censure from religious quarters. When a number of mullahs protested against women of the royal family exposing themselves in public without the veil, they were thrown into prison.
The number of universities and establishments of learning increased, followed closely by student demonstrations. These were brutally put down by the authorities and many students were killed. A profusion of parties and political groups mushroomed - although free elections were never held - from radical left wing to religious fundamentalism. The groups fought amongst themselves and the unstable atmosphere in the country spread. The economy stagnated following three years of drought, and during a catastrophic famine in 1973, while Zahir Shah was consulting a doctor in Italy, his cousin Daoud seized power in a coup and abolished the monarchy.
President Daoud’s regime was more oppressive than that of his cousin. But Sultan’s bookshop flourished. He sold books and periodicals published by the various political groups, from Marxist to fundamentalist. He live
d at home in the village with his parents and cycled in to the stall in Kabul every morning and back every evening. His only problem was his mother’s constant nagging about finding a wife. She constantly introduced new candidates - a cousin or the girl next door. Sultan was not ready to start a family. He had several irons in the fire and was in no hurry. He wanted freedom to travel and often visited Teheran, Tashkent and Moscow. In Moscow he had a Russian sweetheart - Ludmila.
A few months before the Soviet Union invaded the country in December 1979, he made his first mistake. The unyielding Communist Nur Mohammad Taraki ruled the country. The entire presidential family, from Daoud down to the youngest baby, had been killed in a coup. The prisons were overflowing, and tens of thousands of political opponents were arrested, tortured and executed.
The Communists wanted to consolidate their control of the whole country and tried to suppress Islamic groups. The holy warriors, the Mujahedeen, took up arms against the regime, a conflict that later turned into a merciless guerrilla war against the Soviet Union.
The Mujahedeen represented a profusion of ideologies and trends. The various groups published periodicals supporting jihad - the fight against the heathen regime - and the Islamification of the country. For its part the regime tightened its grip on everyone who was suspected of being in league with the Mujahedeen, and it was strictly forbidden to print or distribute their ideological publications.
Sultan sold periodicals published by Mujahedeen and Communist alike. Moreover, he suffered from collecting mania and could not resist buying a few copies of each and every book or periodical he came across, in order to sell them on for a profit. Sultan was of the opinion that he was obliged to procure whatever anyone wanted. The banned publications he hid under the counter.
It did not take long for someone to inform on him. A customer was arrested in possession of books he had bought from Sultan. During a raid the police uncovered several illegal publications. The first book pyre was lit. Sultan was taken in, beaten up and condemned to a year in prison. He spent the time in the political prisoners’ section, where writing materials and books were forbidden. Months on end Sultan stared at the wall. But he managed to bribe one of the guards with his mother’s food parcels and books were smuggled in every week. Within the damp stone walls Sultan’s interest in Afghan culture and literature grew. He lost himself in Persian poetry and the dramatic past of his country. When he was let out he was absolutely sure of his ground: he would fight to promote knowledge of Afghan culture and history. He continued to sell illegal publications, by the Islamic guerrillas and the pro-China Communist opposition, but he was more cautious than before.