Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World - Softcover

Award-winning journalist Jan Goodwin lived in the Middle East for four years, interviewing women under Islamic rule and spending time with freedom fighters in war-torn Afghanistan. In 2001, she returned to Afghanistan to document the changes that took place when the Taliban was removed from power. She was the executive editor of Ladies’ Home Journal for ten years and currently writes for The New York Times, the Daily News, Mirabella, New Woman, Cosmopolitan, and other national publications. She lives in New York City.

Chilling account of oppressive policies instituted against women in the Islamic world. Though select women in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Egypt, and Pakistan ``lift the veil of silence'' here to speak out against Islamic law, Goodwin focuses on the vast majority of Muslim women, who--willingly or not--are lowering the veil over their faces and lives. In much of the Middle East, egalitarian strides made between the 50s' and 70's have been reversed in the past 20 years of surging conservative Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and in this atmosphere women are singled out as potential sources of corruption. In Pakistan, for example, nurses are frequently accused of being immoral because they must work at night and care for male patients. All female government employees are ordered to wear Islamic dress, including chadors, which cover the head and most of the body. And while ``rapists are allowed to go free...women victims are prosecuted.'' Most Muslim women, contends Goodwin, are given fewer rights than the Koran is designed to give them. While women must be virgins when married, men are encouraged to be polygamous: ``Hefty financial inducements are offered, and women themselves are encouraged personally to select another wife for their husbands.'' The few who speak out against such policies risk unemployment, isolation, or even death. With disturbingly graphic detail, Goodwin documents cruelties visited on Muslim women--using skills similar to those she employed in covering Russian atrocities against Afghans in Caught in the Crossfire (1987). Despite shrill polemics in an anti-Israel chapter: a significant book that gives a voice to millions of silent and silenced Muslim women. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.