By Rod Nordland
A riveting, real-life an identical of The Kite Runner—an astonishingly robust and profoundly relocating tale of a tender couple keen to possibility every thing for romance that places a human face at the ongoing debate approximately women’s rights within the Muslim world.
Zakia and Ali have been from varied tribes, yet they grew up on neighboring farms within the hinterlands of Afghanistan. by the point they have been younger young children, Zakia, strikingly attractive and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and smooth, had fallen in love. Defying their households, sectarian changes, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic legislations, they ran away jointly simply to dwell less than consistent chance from Zakia’s huge and vengeful relatives, who've vowed to kill her to revive the family’s honor. they're nonetheless in hiding.
Despite a decade of yankee sturdy intentions, ladies in Afghanistan are nonetheless subjected to a few of the worst human rights violations on the earth. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau leader of the New York Times, had watched those abuses spread for years whilst he came across Zakia and Ali, and has not just chronicled their plight, yet has additionally shepherded them from danger.
The Lovers will do for women’s rights typically what Malala’s tale did for women’s schooling. it truly is an outstanding tale approximately self-determination and the that means of affection that illustrates, as no coverage booklet may well, the boundaries of Western impression on fundamentalist Islamic tradition and, even as, the necessity for swap.