Marriage And Resistance:a Study Of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

In his novels, Hosseini manages to pull his western audience's attention towards a war stricken Afghanistan. To the world, Afghanistan is nothing but a sandbox for the Soviets, Mujahedeen, Taliban, and later the Americans and the rest of the world to play soldier in. With all the political backdrop, Afghanistan is now a misunderstood place at best. It is a world that incorporates pain upon the West, or so the western eye believes. So, Hosseini does not speak to the Afghans. His voice carries over to the West instead.He was brought up in mostly western countries, but he never gave up his roots. He kept with him his Afghan identity, and immersed himself into the first world. In his works, he strives to give a face to the Afghan man and woman. While safely tucked away in a climate of freedom, he illustrates all that is unjust and painful to the Afghan individual under a conservative umbrella. Because of this, the target readers of A Thousand Splendid Suns are not the Afghans, but those who see the Afghans through first world goggles. He humanizes the people of Afghanistan to his western readers all the while delving into hot topics such as extremism, fundamentalism, the formation and administration of Taliban, and women's rights in Afghanistan.Through Mariam and Laila, he teaches us the true plight of the Afghan woman. Her constant struggle is not the Afghan man alone, but what the wars bring into the societal practices that cause her everyday struggle. He proves that, even under all the destruction, there is yet hope for the Afghan woman. Although society has marginalized her, resistance is not too far an endeavor.This, together with the practices and even violations of a 9th century written Islamic jurisprudence, brings in a form of marginalization and subjugation of the Afghan woman rarely if ever practiced in any other part of the world, including other conservative Muslim countries. Through the Afghan woman's struggle in Hosseini's.A Thousand Splendid Suns, we can see the revival of an old form of postcolonial feminism, Islamic Feminism. Still subtle, it is considered unchartered territory in American Literature, it is the most discussed topic in today's Middle Eastern politics, the most controversial, and the most misunderstood by Western scholars.