A riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner—an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women’s rights in the Muslim world.
Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia’s large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family’s honor. They are still in hiding.
Despite a decade of American good intentions, women in Afghanistan are still subjected to some of the worst human rights violations in the world. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau chief of the New York Times, had watched these abuses unfold for years when he came upon Zakia and Ali, and has not only chronicled their plight, but has also shepherded them from danger.
The Lovers will do for women’s rights generally what Malala’s story did for women’s education. It is an astonishing story about self-determination and the meaning of love that illustrates, as no policy book could, the limits of Western influence on fundamentalist Islamic culture and, at the same time, the need for change.
In this brilliant, deeply reported account of two young people who risked their lives to be together, Pulitzer Prize winner Rod Nordland puts a face on the debate about women’s rights in the fundamentalist Muslim world.
Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. Separated by custom at puberty, they fell in love from afar. Defying family, cultural convention, and Islamic law, the two lovers eloped and, pursued by Zakia’s family, went into hiding. A harrowing, eye—opening story of one couple’s unshakable self—determination, The Lovers puts a face on the debate about women’s rights in the fundamentalist Muslim world.
"Rod Nordland develops a captivating and beautifully-written true story of an elopement into an analysis of Afghan misogyny and domestic violence which reveals more about conservative Afghan life and the struggle to change it than most other non-fiction books about the country."
