The Lovers
-
- €3.99
-
- €3.99
Publisher Description
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.
"She is his Juliet and he is her Romeo, and her family has threatened to kill them both..."
This is the heartrending account of Zakia and Mohammad Ali, a couple from opposing Islamic sects, who defying their society's norms have left behind everything they know and are quite literally risking their lives for their love.
She is a Sunni, he is a Shia, but as friends from childhood Zakia and Mohammad Ali could never have predicted that their love would anger their families so much that they would be forced to leave their homes finding refuge in the harsh terrain of the Afghani mountains. Without money or passports they rely on the kindness of strangers to house them for a couple of days at a time as they remain on the run, never deterred.
New York Times journalist, Rod Nordland, has chronicled the plight of the young lovers telling their extraordinary story of courage, perseverance and love in one of the world's most troubled countries. This moving love story is told against the bigger backdrop of the horrific but widespread practices that women are subjected to in Afghanistan.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Norland, a New York Times correspondent, meticulously relates the tale of Ali and Zakia, who became Afghanistan's most famous couple after marrying in 2013 without parental permission and thereby endangering their lives. In so doing, he opens a window onto their country's fierce resistance to change, particularly regarding the status of women. Mohammad Ali and Zakia, whose fathers owned adjoining fields outside Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan, first met as children. They fell in love as teenagers, but his heritage as a Shiite and ethnic Hazara and hers as a Sunni and ethnic Tajik posed seemingly insurmountable barriers. In Nordland's telling, the pair emerge as fully rounded characters even while serving as symbols of Afghan culture's stifling restraints. From the couple's initial elopement to their unexpected elevation to media prominence in 2014 due to the author's reporting and a media-savvy New Jersey rabbi with connections to the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs Nordland's storytelling remains gripping, with more than a hint of Shakespearean drama. The couple's survival, in the face of familial and societal condemnation, provides a happy if incomplete resolution. Far less uplifting is Nordland's reporting on the overall situation for women in Afghanistan, a country that Massouda Jalal, former Afghan minister for women's affairs, calls "the worst place in the world to be a woman."
