Outspoken
My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan
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- €8.99
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
Sima Samar has spent her life challenging power in Afghanistan. A pioneering doctor, she provided healthcare to women in some of the country's most remote regions, often at significant personal risk. She went on to become Minister of Women's Affairs, becoming one of the Taliban's most determined critics.
Born into a Hazara family and raised in a polygamous household, Samar grew up understanding the consequences of gender and ethnic inequality in Afghanistan. Forced into an arranged marriage, she was still a young doctor when her husband was disappeared by the pro-Soviet regime. In the aftermath, she faced a stark choice: retreat into safety or dedicate herself to resisting injustice in all its forms.
Over decades of war, displacement, threats and exile, she has remained unwavering in her commitment to women's rights and human dignity, building institutions, delivering care and refusing to be silenced. This memoir is her account of a life lived at the centre of Afghanistan's most turbulent history – an intimate and unflinching testimony of courage, loss and enduring resistance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirs don't come much more inspirational than this dispatch from medical doctor and activist Simar detailing her women's rights advocacy in Afghanistan. Born in 1957 to a Hazara family—an often-persecuted Afghan ethnic minority—in the Jaghori district, Samar learned via childhood exposure to novels like Les Misérables that "other people didn't live by the same strict rules that the people in Afghanistan adhered to," and that her country "needed change." After graduating from medical school in 1982, she founded a hospital in the Jaghori region that specifically served women and children. Over the following decades, Samar created a clinic that helped educate women health workers, and visited patients in remote areas by foot, donkey, and horse, even when her efforts angered Taliban forces who threatened to kidnap and kill her unless she stopped "promoting the rights of women every chance I got." In 2002, Samar began serving as Afghanistan's Minister of Women's Affairs, and her achievements included helping to found Kabul's Gawharshad University. Acknowledging that "most of the world sees us as a people at war," Samar carefully balances a steely indictment of her country's repressive tendencies with an affection for her heritage. It's a crucial complement to American narratives about Afghanistan, like Elliott Ackerman's The Fifth Act.
