Posted on 09/22/2013 2:52:22 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan.
I did not enter the kingdom as a diplomat, soldier, teacher, journalist or foreign aid worker. I came as a young Jewish bride of the son of one of the countrys wealthiest men. I was held in a type of captivity but its not as if I had been kidnapped.
I walked into it of my own free will.
It is 1959. I am only 18 when my prince a dark, older, handsome, westernized foreigner who had traveled abroad from his native home in Afghanistan bedazzles me.
We meet at Bard College, where he is studying economics and politics and I am studying literature on scholarship.
Abdul-Kareem is the son of one of the founders of the modern banking system in Afghanistan. He wears designers sunglasses and bespoke suits and when he visits New York City, he stays at the Plaza.
He is also Muslim.
I am Jewish, raised in an Orthodox home in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the daughter of Polish immigrants. My dad worked door-to-door selling soda and seltzer.
But none of this matters. We dont talk about religion. Instead, we stay up all night discussing film, opera and theater. We are bohemians.
We date for two years. Then, when I express my desire to travel, he asks me to marry him.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
What a shock. Why, I thought this was just about the coolest thing a woman could do.
I hate to say it but there is a reason for the phrase “live and learn”. Its not the whole world doesn’t know how barbaric these countries are.
American women who marry muslim men get zero sympathy from me.
Today’s teenage girls live their lives in harems of their own choice - rampant fornication in commitment-free “relationships” based on pre-marital sex (widely accepted and normalized in American society). When life runs its course on them, they end up as SWUGs - single, washed-up girls. Look it up.
This is the biggest societal tragedy of our times and it just keeps getting worse, thanks to our popularity-based culture.
Just damn...
“Young American women of 1959 were a heck of a lot different than the group out there now”
Boston Marathon terrorist, front cover Rolling Stones magazine, stars in their eyes American girls, those?
A long time friend of many years moved to Boston from upstate NY where we grew up. We both moved around a little, me more than her. She changed apartments, I changed zip codes. (: But, we always kept in touch through the years.
In about 2000, she told me she married a Muslim man from Morocco. He was supposedly a student. This was pre-9.11, so I did not think too much of it. At most, I had some suspicion that maybe it was a marriage to stay in the country.
He had approached her at a coffee shop. Not to sound mean but she was never much of a looker. Always over weight, not a ton of confidence. So, the idea of a foreign stranger approaching her in a coffee shop seemed weird.
Fast forward a year or two and it began to get weirder. For one, whenever I called her--he was the MEANEST SOB to ever answer a phone and HE never once gave her the message that I called.
Then there was never a straight story about what he did. A student, a tech guy, a cook...I forget the other vocations but there were a few.
Soon, his family was living with them.
Next, they were taking a vacation to Syria. I thought that odd because I knew enough to know Syria was not a vacation hot spot.
At the time I lived in Germany, and she told me had had lived in Hamburg. (after 9.11 that really seemed dubious)
Long story short, the last time I spoke with her, she said she was trying to move to the UK and didn't want to be married anymore.
I have never heard from her again. It's been about 12 years now. I have looked through Facebook with a fine tooth comb to find her--no sign and she is definitely the type to have a Facebook account and keep old ties.
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Agreed, but this story is about an 18 year old girl in 1959. I would hope that a woman in our country today would be more knowledgeable and less naive than the author of this article was.
A special kind of stupid with a Jewish whine!
She was 18. Sheesh.
Yep.
After 9/11 I spent some time in the middle east. A year in Saudi, a year in the UAE, a few months in Afghanistan. I can honestly say that everything I need to know about islam, I learned on 9/11.
Wow...that poor thing is probably dead or just ended up a slave like the rest of the women. I read that book, “Not Without My Daughter,” many years ago and that was hair-raising. Was a good movie, too, with Sally Field. Yes, our girls needs to be informed, but girls do dumb things...look at all the worship of the Boston bomber. Weird.
Fun movie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBsMVt8Zd4
“Rings on their fingers, bells on their toes
They make music wherever they go
Pound that little drum now, tap on it with your thumb
Shake, shake the little tambourine
Shake a-ring a-jing-a-ling-a-ling
Shake,shake my little dancin’ queen
That tambourine, that tambourine”
Stupid liberal white college girl marries dark, exotic third-world student. Where have I heard this story before?
Yes, this story reminded me of Not Without My Daughter. I remember in that movie, the wife thought they were just going to visit Iran, but then learned too late that the husband never intended to leave.
Exactly. The book is far better than the movie. In “Not Without My Daughter,” the girl meets and marries in the states, and her western seeming, Iranian husband starts to get a bit more religious after the ayatollah revolution. They have a precious three year old girl. They take a trip to Iran to see his parents. Daddy takes all passports on the plane, seemingly just for convenience of the moment.
Of course she never sees them again. Her adventures are harrowing. It’s really quite the page turner. She eventually finds a legal way to leave through the us embassy, but she would have to leave her daughter in Iran. Hence the title.
She will not leave without her daughter. Her adventures are wild and true. By the time the happy ending occurs, she learns to understand the good as well as the evil in the country and people.
Me, I was reading it while wanting to escape my foreign husband with my toddler! That made it so scary I rehid our two American passports daily! No way do young people understand how hard and scary international marriage can be. Mine was nothing like those marrying Muslims. But custody internationally is impossible. Each person wins in their own land.
I have a story with a different outcome altogether. I worked with a woman who married a Muslim man, they had a son, and she did all the Ramadan things, no pork, etc. This woman was a total B+++h to all who worked with her, no one could stand her. No one was going to tell her what to do, and apparently she made life miserable for her husband too, because he went back to the Middle East for some family thing without her or the boy, and he never came back!! After all the other stories we all heard about child kidnapping, etc., we figured her personality saved her a lot of heartache!!
That is so surprising. An exotic romance worked out so well between Barbara Streisand and Omar Sharif.
It's also possible that the guy couldn't have cared less. I know a couple of Sunni Muslim men married to Christians. Pork in the home, no Ramadan fasting or celebrations, etc. But these are ordinary joes. The wealthier they are, the more pious, and perhaps terror-sponsoring they are, since they may feel they owe Allah for their good fortune.
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