Afghanistan's Romeo and Juliet, defying religion and culture for love
Zakia and Ali knew theirs
was a forbidden love.
She was Sunni and ethnically
Tajik; he was Shiite and ethnically Hazara -- the Montagues and Capulets.
"From forth
the fatal loins of these two foes
"A pair of
star-cross'd lovers take their life"
So begins, with gloomy
prophecy, one of the most famous stories in English literature. Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet would take their own lives out of despair.
Rod Nordland, a journalist
who found Afghanistan's Romeo and Juliet, says that in that country, the
despair all too often comes to an end in a so-called honor killing.
"I expected that the next and final article would be about how the girl's family came one night and dragged her from the shelter," he writes in his new book, "The Lovers."
"We would all be
outraged and then turn the page. That's how such stories usually end, but I was
wrong, and theirs was just the beginning."
Fleeing home with nothing
but their faith in each other, they survived.
"They're illiterate," Nordland told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "They haven't gone to school; they have one or two years between the two of them."
"What the most
surprising thing was what a big role poetry played in their lives. They
couldn't read it, but they could get it from popular music."
In the book, Nordland writes
of Ali's ringtone -- a contemporary Pashto love song.
"Come here,
my little flower, come!
"Let me
tear open my breast
"And show
you my own heart, naked!"
"Ali courted Zakia with poetry that he recited
to her, the words from songs that he recited, and stories, old Persian love
stories, that go back to the Bible and even before the Bible."
"It's a very big part of their emotional life.
And it was kind of heartening to see that, even in these unlettered people from
a very remote corner of Afghanistan."
Zakia was cagey at first about accepting Ali's
proposal -- she knew the taboo, and danger, in such a marriage.
She would be offending her family's
"honor," as they would put it, for running away with a Shiite, Hazara
man.
"One hundred percent, they would kill me,"
Zakia told Nordland.
"There's even a law in Afghanistan,"
Nordland told Amanpour, "that if you're a man and you kill a woman in your
family because she offended your honor, the maximum penalty is two years."
"In Afghanistan, there are cases of families
waiting six and eight years before they killed the girl. And sometimes they'll
pretend to reconcile, and then when everybody kind of forgets about the case,
then turn around and kill the person. It happens over and over again."
They left their homes just after their parents found
out about their relationship.
Her father was outraged, Nordland writes.
"I swear to God that even if it costs me
everything, I will try to bring my daughter back home," Nordland quotes
him as saying. "She is a part of my body like one of my limbs -- how can I
let her go with that boy?"
Ali's tenderness won her over, defying the near
certain death she faced.
"It was very hard," Zakia told Nordland.
"Everyone in my family was against me."
In 2011, a Thompson-Reuters foundation poll listed
Afghanistan as the most dangerous country in the world for women.
According to Amnesty International, "any form of
immorality, whether adultery or rape, is considered a way of dishonoring the
family and may lead to 'honor' related violence."
As Zakia lay on the roof of
her house, Nordland writes, Ali recited an Afghan song.
"Your two dark eyes are those of an Afghan,
"But the
mercy of Islam is not in your heart.
"Outside
your walls I spent nights that became daylights;
"What kind
of sleep is this that you never wake up?"
"That poem moved me, it
increased my courage," she told Nordland. "Those days were so cold,
and he was coming to meet me anyway, even though I told him not to come,
because the weather was very cold, and he came anyway, and then he recited this
poem."
Nordland, who has long reported from Afghanistan, was
no stranger to the story of honor killings.
"The issue of women's rights has just come up
over and over again because there were such great expectations for it," he
told Amanpour. "And there has been a lot of improvement, it's true. But
it's a pretty low bar."
"It is kind of shocking to think that you can be
killed for something as small as deciding who you want to fall in love with,
and that the predominant view, at least among the patriarchy, among the mullahs
and so on, is that love is wrong and people should marry who their fathers tell
them to and be satisfied with that."
Afghan President Ashraf
Ghani, speaking with Amanpour in Davos, Switzerland, last month, said the
government stood "for the constitutional rights, and particularly for
women's rights."
"This is one of the most fundamental challenges
that Afghan society faces. It's because 40 years of violence have destroyed the
historical role of women," he said.
Nordland says Ghani deserves some credit in this
regard; his predecessor, Hamid
Karzai, kept his wife hidden from public view.
"In a very important symbolic sense," he
said, "he's brought his wife out in public. He's given her jobs to
do."
"But on the other hand, the negotiations now
going on (with the Taliban) --
the sort of stage two, tier two negotiations -- there are no women involved,
and women are very upset about that."
By their own tenacity, Zakia and Ali have survived,
hidden from their families. But in Afghanistan, Nordland said, their future is
bleak.
"They have a young daughter now who's just over a year."
"They haven't been willing to risk her life by
swimming across the Aegean on the way to Europe and where, if they applied for
asylum, they would be shoo-ins. They qualify on four out of the five
international grounds for asylum. "
"The law does not allow them to do that from
their home country. They have to first risk their lives and get somewhere where
they can."
"And they actually saw the picture of Alan
Kurdi, the little boy who was washed up on the beach in Turkey, and a friend
showed it to them on his cell phone, and that just sort of got them where they
lived and they just thought they're not going to do that to their own
daughter."
"And they don't understand, either, why it
shouldn't be possible, if they have such a good case for asylum, to make some
sort of arrangement for them, you know, where they could just get a visa and
leave from their own country in a civilized way."
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