40 years. which was part of building that momentum. i think we now need to look to the other pharmacy chains, wall walgreens has more stores than cvs, and we need to go after the high fat, high salt, high sugar foods that cvs sells. they said they believed they were a healthcare institution and was incompatable with their business strategy. well, that's true, then promoting diabetes is also imcompatible and we ought to be doing that, and i think it speaks to good scientific evidence that the ubiquity of unhealthy products contributes to overconsumption, and if you have fewer alcohol outlets are fewer tobacco outlets or few are food outlets that people consume less, and it shows what a movement can do and it's a good sign. with that i think we need to end and maybe people can could back and consume a little more wine and cheese and we can maybe talk for a few more minutes. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] discussion >> you're watching booktv on croons 2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> you're watching booktv. next, phyllis scheffler talks about her marriage to an afghan man and her experiences living in afghanistan during the early 1960s. once in afghanistan, miss chesler, a jew, became part of the hardem and learned what it was like to live as an afghan woman under fundamental lists. this is a little over an hour. >> okay so i have to -- for the reasons of the camera i can't look directly at you. i have to look this way. >> you can look -- >> okay. >> i once lived in a harem in afghanistan, and i love my opening sentence. it reminds me of -- i had a farm in africa from the book "out of africa." and we had romances with whole continentses, entire cultures. we had grand adventures that transcended any single relationship, and such adventures can be costly or sometimes fatal. yes, i once lived in a harem in afghanistan. but i nearly died there, too. a harem simply means the women's quarters. it's forbidding to all men who are not relatives. if you can't leave without permission, or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purda. why did i write this book now? afghan and its people seem to have followed me right into the future and into the west. headscarves, which i don't oppose, and face masks, and burqas, body bags, which i do oppose, but here in america, on the streets, and in the headlines, afghanistan has also landed in the west and the west is still deployed in afghanistan, and, no, i don't think we should be there. afghanistan is the country where i was once held hostage, eerily it is the same country that sheltered bin laden, where he hatched his 9/11 diabolical plot, and after saudi arabia and sudan compiled, exiled him and now thele world is held hostage to this al qaeda style. this was an eerie coincidence to me. mid a vaccine temperature has lasted for -- adventure lasted for more than 50 years when my afghan husband fled just before the soviets invaded he fled and came to america and knocked on my door, and i have been criticized for ever speaking to him again. but americans and jews have a long tradition of hospitality to those in exile, to immigrants who come tower shores. so i didn't turn away from him and from his second wife and his then-young children, and i recount some of our conversations that took place between 1980 and 2012 in the book, and they serve as a conversation between east and west. perhaps like so many other jewish dreamers, i yearned for mystical union between ihshak and ishmael, and i kept company with him for two and a half years. i was 18 but i wasn't a complete fool and i thought i knew him and we never once discussed religion or afghanistan and prided ourselves on being bohemian and free thinkers, beat knicks, artistes. he never, ever prepared me for what my life or his life would be like in kabul, and he never told me that his father had three wives and 21 children, and that i would be expected to live with my mother-in-law, and that women still were wearing burqas, even though there was reform underway. real reform, or i would bed to convert to islam. he never mentioned this. never came up. when we landed in kabul, indeed they -- an official smoothly took away my president -- passport. i said, wait a minute. that's my passport. i was told, don't worry. i never saw the passport again and that becomes the interchapter in the book, because at that moment i became a citizen of no country, with no rights, and the property of a very long and powerful polygamist muslim family, and i thought that this adventure would be romantic, we would travel throughout all of central asia. i found myself instead transported back to the tenth century with no passport back to the future. i lived gender -- long before the taliban dime -- tame to power, and i understand that may have turned me into who i became. was it all bad? oh, no. but such adventure does not come cheaply. a westerner does not travel to the wild east without risking disintend tear, malaria, parasites, hepatitis. i had two of those. without risking being kidnapped and held for ransom or sold at auction. many western, women adventurers, -- adventureers flourish, for example in 1846. harriet martin, the british born author visit the arab middle east and writes about the harems of cairo. they pitied us that we had to go about traveling and appearing in the streets without being properly taken care of. that is watched. they think us strangely neglected and being left so free, and both of their spy system and imprisonment as tokens of the standing they're held. cannot be a woman of them all who is not dwarfed and withered in mind and soul. ironically, the 19th century harem dwellers in cairo and istanbul could not believe how confined the western visitors were in all their hoops and coresets and bustles. they were cool. we were all straight-layingsed and sweating, and the harem women examined the dressing, the dresses and the corsets, and there i was a first generation an american kid, living in a city 6,000 feet above sea level, which had one crossroads of the known world in a pa lay shall home, spokesperson -- surrounded by awesome snow-capped mountains and where paganism, hinduism, judaism, had once flourished. yet buddhism, before the arab invasion resulted in the fourth conversion of the afghan people to islam, like so many others around the globe, afghans were once buddhists. pagans, hindus, and jews lived among them, certainly from the ninth century on, possibly much earlier than that. i will never forget the swarm kindness of my young brothers in law and who understood how unhappy i was and the female servants were shy and sweet and entirely without malice and they were also sleeping on the floor with no heat and their wages was were pitiful and they walked 24-7. and i found this as shacking as nearly everything else and the afghan people -- the men, because most male adventurers only get to meet male afghans. only people. they have a great ceremonial genius and a wild sense of humor. they're really very funny. i have been told that may father-in-law helped found the modern banking system of the country, and it's true, and all the major import-export companies, these enterprises and equivalent banking functions had been totally in the hands of the hindus and the jews of the country who overnight were impoverished bay royal edict in the late 1920s, early 1930s, and i only discovered that shocking fact as i was researching this book. and my husband is as much a dream as i. he brought a jewish american infidel bride intellectual bride, back to a country that had made alliances with german nazis and given nazis a safe haven after the second world war in retrospect, i am irrationallyes stranged i once thought such a country was exotic and beautiful, which alas it is. then there was the matter of the burqa. i was terrified when i first saw women literally huddled at the back of a bus, i thought they were laundry that was moving. i had run away. i wanted to see the city and i got on a bus, very gayly colored bus, very whimsical design, and indeed they were women in burqas, and they had a handbag, baby, shopping bag underneath. all the men on the bus looked at me because i was naked faced. they really stared at me. so i got off the bus very quickly and i began to understand why my afghan family were so afraid of my wild western ways so that what we would take for granted, getting up in the morning, going out, taking a walk on the street, totally forbidden. dangerous. the public space is not meant for women. and my afghan family thought that my reaction to the burqa was an overreaction because they viewed it as a normal thing. they viewed my reaction against it as abnormal. as inappropriate. and i now know that the koran mandates modesty for both men and wimp it does not mandate women wear clause very phone pick, isolation chamber body bags. that's not the koran, and activists and concerned with health this is a very terrifying garment to be -- to find yourself in or to be on the street with someone who is in one and there's nothing you can do to rescue her. and i'm not talking about -- not talk -- because it's not a problem. you can see somebody's face, their features, you can converse with them. they can go about their business in the west. and in the 20th century, women were naked-faced in twice in afghanistan by royal edict, and in egypt and in lebanon and turkey and iran, persia, north africa, and to varying degrees in many arab middle east countries, lebanon,. >> iraq, syria, and certainly egypt. now they're covered in darkness. now the pendulum has swung back to the seventh century, and it may be coming our way if we don't know what to recognize about it. in my lifetime, afghanistan hag turned into a -- margaret attwood novel. given the increasing persecution and subordination of muslim women and dissidentses i decided to connect my own five months in purda to the afghan women today and i hope my story will serve to bring muslim feminists and dissidents closer to what is presumably an american feminism. now, the -- of 9/11 changed the direction that this book would take. how could i write about afghanistan and about muslim women and muslim women intellectuals and muslim homosexuals, without also writing about ihaweddist terrorism and the war against muslim civilians. the perpetual religious war between sunni and shia, and then thereafter, against infidels, and against both israel and the west. now, my views are shared by the muslim and ex-muslim dissidents and feminists with whom i work. we are all antiislamists. or antisharia-istsle. we re pose totalitarianism, terrorism, gender and religious apartheid, and support individual gay and women's rights, freedom of speech, and above all, freedom of religion, which means separation of religion and state. i have now published three studies and i'm working on a fourth one, and they were published in middle east quarterly, and also submitted affidavits based on my research for those in flight from being -- who have come looking for asylum in america. so really why did i go to afghanistan? what could possibly have been going on? well, why else? to be able to tell you about it now, at this moment in history. it was kismet. written in the stars america destiny. i'd like to end this minilecture with a brief reading from the book. this is a fabulous book store. i love it. what if anything do i owe afghanistan? a country where i once lived and where i nearly died. i was there. it remains a part of me. i am now a tiny part of the country's history. i will never forget my time there. but natural splendor that id a least was -- this is an accounting of sorts, a young jewish american woman once came to this wonderous is aatic country and fled hairem life and finally uncovered the history of what happened to the jews of afghanistan and of islam, and she has told this story in order to redeem her soul. a young jewish american woman once loved a young muslim afghan man, and although it could not work out, they continued talking to each other down through the decades of their lives. abdul -- not his real name -- a misogyny, deceiver, dreamer, now man living out his days in exile, turned out to be one of my muses, as did afghanistan itself. i have turned my brief sojourn and my scent live-long interest in the islamic world in a writer's treasure. i experience what it was like to live with people who were permanently afraid of what other people might think, even more so than in small mind town u.s.a. writing this book has also put me in touch with the long buried tenderness i still feel for abdul. especially now that he has become the character in these pages. we remain connected in our own unspoken ways. thank you. [applause] >> i'm ready for questions or answers. >> you said that you were antisharia. i think one of the thing is wonder is, there is any reconciliation between sharia and -- i don't know how to phrase the question -- western world or more moderate views? >> there are two answers. one answer is that islam has not yet had reform. it's not yet diversified into protestantism or many branches of belief, and that may never happen and may be underway now. so, the islam of the seventh century and those who wish to live with cross-amputation, caning, flogging if you're showing a wisp of hair, that interpretation of sharia is -- we cannot live with that in the modern west, where we have individual rights and a belief in universal human rights, which i have. it's not possible. luckily we live in a country where we have american law, and i know that there is some concern that maybe there will be creeping sharia law, making its way, snake-like, into american law. i'm not sure that is possible. i don't see american courts saying, okay, take that woman out and her family can absolutely kill her because she doesn't want to mary her first cousin. i don't see that happening here. there are many terrible things happening here but it's not happening through the american court system. i don't see -- by the way though, -- the koa ran does not man mandate tribal killings the behind dozen only do it in america. when they dom america or europe they don't bring that custom with them, but muslims do. but we don't believe in female genital utilize, which is an african practice, but many muslim does that, especially in egypt. they tight in america. it's under the radar. it's happening here as o'log my now here -- polygamy here even though we outlawed. so to answer your very important question is, if we're vigilant, if we educate ourselves, make it our business to know what is happening, then we have american remedies, western remedies, to deal with barbarism. what was your question? >> i wanted to know what the role of your parents were when you took off to afghanistan. >> oh. >> what they were thinking, their 18-year-old daughter -- >> i don't know. i was in two years in college. married him when i was 18 and a half, and my mother knew i was a rebel child. i was -- i had joined a very left zionist group in youth, and went totally against the orthodox judaism of my family. i -- when the rabbi thundered at me you can't join that godless communist outfit, i joined one which was to the left and i was only ten or 11. my mother knew she had a wild child on her hands, from early on. and they were very quiet. very -- my mother knew i would be back. she didn't -- she didn't understand i could be trapped and get sick and nobody would care and i could have been buried in a muslim seminary some far-flung locale on planet earth, which could happen very easily, and i began hearing about honor killings when i was there. that was nose the word used. and to this day if you bring -- when i would bring this up to my afghan husband in america, in the 1990s in the early 21st 21st century, he would say, never heard of it. and then i'd say, well, have you heard about this case, very high profile case in canada, where a father, a mother, biological mother, and a biological son, conspired to kill the first wife who was not the biological mother of anyone, and three biological daughters that are all afghan. it happened in canada. the highlights of my research, my moment, was when i met the prosecutor, and he told me that they had relied on my research in their prosecution, but abdul kareem had never heard of this or heard of any of the other high-profile honor killing cases that go on in america. that is because it would be shameful to admit this. so, when something is shameful or when you think an infidel would be critical and would get one up on you, over on your, against you, mock you, look down on you, you say i never heard of it and it doesn't exist. it's like the way we handle insist. didn't happen. he didn't do it. we didn't know about it. it was her fault. it was long time ago. doesn't matter now. so people cover their shame. denial and also victimizing the truth-tellers. yes? >> as result of your experience, what has happened to your relationship with judaism? >> well, initially she is asking how is this experience affecting my relationship to judaism. for a very long time there was no connection. i began to note antisemitism, which became the subject of a book of mine in three 2003. i noted in america and europe and i did jewish feminist ritual through the 1970s, through the 1980s. it was only in 1988, when i was in jerusalem for a conference on women's empowerment, when my tourist partner had the idea to go and pray for the first time ever, just women in the women's section at the western wall, and that was a grand enough moment, and i was asked to open the torah for the women to read from the old testament. and i thought, oh, what i want to do is study torah. so i have been doing that. since 1989. with much joy and i've published interpretations of torah. but that took an enormous feminist ferment, great coincidence, such a grand moment and we struggle, it is 26 years later and we have not yet quite won that right, and things are happening, which is the women of the world story. -- women of the wall story so if you grow up in brooklyn, in the early 1940s, girls did not have a future in religion at that time, so i left. i didn't see a future for myself, even though i was known as the smartest, quote, boy in the hebrew class. it's interesting. i believed very strongly in working with religious muslims and i persuaded other muslims they have to -- if we are going to make a resistance movement, then we need all of us, and that the right to practice a religion is as important as the right not to be coerced into practicing that religion. right? so, i don't know if it is a direct -- i would say when i discovered the shameful history of the jews of islam, when we thought that only european holocaust era or programs in the west is what troubled the jews, when i began to look into the history of the ceaseless movement against infidels, certainly against christians big-time, but the muslim middle east -- all the jews had been chased out, and the question of whether a jewish presence well be allowed in the state of israel at all hangs in the balance every day and every night. i -- i didn't know that then. i never met a jew in afghanistan. they may all have left by the time i was there. my mother-in-law, who is life was not easy and she was so mean to me and feared me and followed me around and made terrible accusations and cursed me, and mothers -- mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, a research literature on how bad of a relationship this is in certain cultures and countries, as in -- think of india, where they're burning the bride in the kitchen to get a new bride for a dowry, and there's a special prison -- always the mother-in-laws. who killed their daughter-in-laws. so, think of co-wives. people say, it's great, you have company, help with child care. uh-oh. oh, no. the bitter rivalries between the women paled in comparison to the rivalries between the half siblings, especially the sons, who watched and looked for the most affection and attention from the very important father. so, polygamy is not such a good idea psychologically, and i don't accept the feminist arguments in favor of it. yes. >> an honor to meet you. i -- [inaudible] to write about it -- i couldn't put the become down. i felt on so many levels, always -- in your 20s, in hindsight now, all this -- we have held this truth until later. i want to ask you, you brought three things back with, the passport, water pipe, and the -- >> no, no. i'll give you a little -- ♪ ♪ ♪ sunset ♪ >> there's more and there's words. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. >> she wanted to know what were the three things i brought back with me from afghanistan. and i brought a hubble bubble, a temperature -- temperature ," and my orange afghan passport and allowed me to return to america. i killed the ground at idlewild, now kennedy airport, literally. the land of liberty and libraries. i was back but i had to fight to stay here because the state department started hounding me when my visa was up. so nat was dish said i will chain myself to the statue of liberty. i'm not leaving. and -- but it took three and a half years. he wouldn't get divorced. he wanted me to come back. unbelievable stuff. so, a song i had probably one of the servantses, who i wanted to take out with me -- so interesting. she and her young girl -- she is tightly enmeshed in a network of tribal network that is clan and family, and where would she be but lost in america. she may have taught me this song. could have been a young brother-in-law who did but i thought it was very important to have it. yes? >> i, too, grew up in that area, and i recently went back to the area a couple months ago, and the similarities between your afghanistan and the separation of men and women was so incredible, i could not walk down the street because there were groups of men and they about-faced and it is really incredible what happened to a neighborhood in 50 years. it's been ghettoized and certainly not feminized. and -- >> muslim women have too pray at the back of the mosque behind thick curtains and they can barely see or head and there are ultra ore dough docks women -- similar positions and there are feminists fighting against this in all religions. it's the -- i'd say the symbol of the fight in judaism, i don't understand what happened. the jews got so scared that they retreated into the past, thinking that extreme traditionalism will save them, or will save judaism. it's horrifying. i don't like the heavy shapeless unflattering garments the women have to wear in certain sects but in modern orthodox sects they wear shands chandeliers. everybody is dressed up. i went back there -- i went to try on some pants, and i thought i would nearly lose my life because the women in the dressing room were very tough women, and so you see all religious women, under foot -- they're not meek. they're aggressive and toward others women, and when it comes to purchasing items they want, but i'll share with you a sorrow that even as you have feminist interpretations of torah and of the koran and the new testament and women are assuming serious religious authorities in these relations, that we have a backward drift that is upsetting. >> i wonder if you learn -- i guess it's pashtu was the local language. >> did you learn enough tv the local language to be able to converse with other women without an intermediary to learn how women in afghanistan felt about your status, their life, they're -- >> i have since then but at the time i was 20 and i was trapped and isolated and watched, and if i wanted to go out, even though i escaped a number of times, they understood that i would need a chauffeur, driver, male escort, and a female relative to help me, and indeed i could easily get lost, so i spoke to the women in my family in english and french, in yiddish, german. i begged every day, every day, for a teacher in pashtu, and i wrote all the words down phonetically, i pointed to things, what is this? but it did not get the tutor. orbits when i has hepatitis that killed every other foreigner that season in kabul, and i begged for a doctor, it took very long time for know get one. so cheaply is female life held. there's no way we can conceive of it. we don't believe it. i thought my jew wish mother, if i had a fever -- a slight fever, we would be off to the pediatrician or at the emergency room. here i had 106. she's going to live or die. finally a doctor came, with no expertise, and said, she is nervous like the foreigners. so, did i go -- i saw incredible things i write about in the become. i wanted to start visiting hospitals which are in terrible shape now, were it not for western intervention and international humanitarianism, which i said before that i don't think we should be there, the moment boots on the ground depart, every shelter for battered women, every rape crisis center, every school for girls, will be bombed to the seventh century. the question is, do we want to expand more blood and more treasure going up against tribalisms and bash barrisms where we can't prevail with good works and good examples. do we pull out knowing full well what will happen to the children and to the women? this is a question i want america to grapple with. >> by the way, pakistan gave us the taliban, and if we want to get rid of the taliban we have to deal with pakistan, nuclear ally. not so easy. and now we have terrible news. they're about to pass a new law in afghanistan which will mean no family member can testify against another family member because that will be very bad for the family. what is that telling us? if a girl finally says they've cut off my nose, my ears, they've torched me, tried to prostitute me. my mother-in-law beads me every day. my brother-in-law beats me every day, she will not have any possibility of access for redress or for hearing. that would be bad for the family life. it was actually in all the papers this past weekend. we leave, it's over. >> how do you resolve this crisis short of perpetual war with another side of the world, another culture? i mean, the question you raise is, what you want america to grapple with, is an incredibly interesting and probing question, and i wonder if we're really at a stage where we can write about these things but we have no resolution for them. >> well, laurie stewart, wrote an extraordinary book about he walks on foot in dead of winter in the footstops of the great. british people can do adventure like nobody else can and he is now in the british parliament, and he said we're not morally obligated. one is not mobile morally only gailed to do that which is not possible. so we whoa would like to think that every opportunity is around the next corner, that we can fix it, we can make it better, heal the world, we can cure things, we can sit down and use reason, are up against a truth we don't want to accept. that that approach that, humanitarian approach, may not work. didn't work with hitler. didn't work with hitler's allies in japan. may not work, alas, and the muslims who are trapped and who are escaping, want support for their embrace of human rights and gay rights and women's rights and freedom of conscious and freedom of religion, and that is what we need to offer to those who are here as opposed to saying, well, you know, it's their custom to drape their women in a bed sheet, and we can't say different because it's their religion and it's their choice and it's a religious choice. oh, they're beating her because she doesn't want to mary the first cousin and she is 12. well, we can't pry into private family matters. and indeed, every honor killing in canada and in america has had social workers who were re miss and didn't believe a family would kill a daughter, and honor killing is not like western domestic violence. it's very, very different. it involves a conspiracy of the family against usually a young girl. for the smallest infraction of obedience, and when i mean conspiracy, i'm talking about a mother, a father, sisters, brother, cousin, aunt, uncle, all of them, and they increasingly have been tried and convicted in europe. not exactly yet here. and so what we can do here is apply our concept of what is good, what is right, what is lawful, what is legal, here to whoever is here. that will keep us very busy. yes? >> what kind of reception did you get by your family when you finally made it back to the states? >> well, i weighed 90 pounds. i was very sick. i was very jaundiced and very pregnant. and i was ready to walk out of afghanistan. i was ready to just follow the know mads, although i had rejected that. it happened to be the seem that james mitcher in deals with in caravan, but i rejected that because the nomads were just kidnap me and keep me. i had nothing of value. ... we went through europe and the high life you know and as i say in the book is very much like an italian film i thought. he wasn't you will browner. he was omar sharif. so when i came back i couldn't tell anybody what really happened because when i tried they didn't understand and they didn't believe me. i would say things like slavery. i saw slavery. i saw servants treated like slaves. i would say the women, they had no value. we went to a maternity hospital and there was a woman screaming and it turned out that her husband who had, was fighting with the doctor in charge because the wife died, the baby was bound to die. the father didn't want to have to pay for nothing. he said he would have to take a lot of money to get a new wife and all this other kid so why was the doctor demanding payment? i had my afghan husband translate all of this for me. there wasn't a single word, she has dyed? this is terrible. i'm so sorry. what happened? i could have killed her. it was the purchase price of the new bride. so i understood where i had been and i tried to tell a philosophy professor. i said i'm glad to be back. i have been through hell and back and i told him a little bit, the very great famous man and he said did you have an affair? so i said he's an idiot. the kind of conversation that i needed to have has only become possible in the 21st century. the kind of understanding, the comprehension, the give and take so i now work as i have said with muslim and ex-muslim dissidents and they get what i'm saying. i don't have to persuade them of anything. they asked me why more academics and feminists, especially don't understand and instead of understanding say well, everything is relative. everything is multicultural a relativistic. the very same critics who know full well that america is a bad country and we had slavery here. we had -- have races, we are sinful sinful, we are colonialists and capitalists. the history of muslim is a long history of anti-black racism and slavery, gender and religious apartheid and yet nobody here is saying oh my gosh so we have all the blood on our hands and maybe islam is not pure and maybe it could need the tradition has been dangerous first to muslims and then to all others. maybe it should dangerous tradition and instead we say we are so guilty and we are so persuaded by the works of edmund sayeed that we are guilty but not women's rights, not universal human rights and i believe that is what we have to focus on. another, yes. >> we keep hearing about sunni and sufi and shia and i haven't heard you mention in afghanistan >> they are sunni, they are sunni. they are saudi arabian. she are in persia, iran. and i said there was a perpetual endless civil religious war between shia and sunni. that is everywhere. iran is shiite and it now is trying to dominate the gulf states including saudi arabia partly as a religious war partly as an economic matter. and saudi arabia is sunni and those in afghanistan are sunni as well. i didn't know that at the time either. i do know that my afghan husband was a push to which is the largest and historic lee the most dominant tribe. there are many tribes in afghanistan. it's basically, the country is mountainous. it's inhospitable. it's treacherous. it is dangerous. from every point of view. people lived in small villages isolated one from the other. they have no interest in a centralized government. up until this moment the change is tomorrow and afghanistan now is the largest opium producer and the warlords are making a lot of money from it. forcing the farmers to do that ,-com,-com ma to cultivate the poppies and it finds its way to the west. we buy it. we are hooked on it. it killed a wonderful actor. it killed seymour hoffman. well, he killed himself with it. so it is a very, it's a complicated history. again it's not one that i ever discussed during the courtship and romance with my afghan husband. i have learned it by reading many many many books and by talking to people so that is the sunni-shia disaster. i wish they could resolve that but it's not up to me. yes. >> how does a child deal with those two worlds? >> i think most of the children can't and don't. i had a miscarriage. i was too ill to carry a child so i didn't even have a choice. but your question, if both parties are living in modern western worlds there is maybe less of an issue. there are some women and i write about them, who had married muslim men because they wanted to have a life that was made, ready-made, always female company, always for something to do, no loneliness, no decisions that you have to make in the west when you are sort of free and independent. everything is done together. every rule. everything is laid out, a set table, rules that you follow. you are sad and indeed one of the women whose book i write about she had a wonderful time in saudi arabia married to a member of the royal family. she was very happy. she had five children and then one day that man said to her i divorce you, i divorce you ,-com,-com ma i divorce you and i'm taking the kids away from you ,-com,-com ma go away. she did a very smart things through the last 20 pages of her vote, was shot. i was going to use her as an example of somebody who really made out happily. she said with the help of friends i kidnapped my kids back and they grew up in america. she was from california but she did this marriage in the 1940s. there is somebody even more famous in 1918 from scotland who married a tribal chief's son who became a diplomat and she, sarah shah is the her gemunder of the it's very shah sera shot the contemporary writer so she went there and she wore a burqa and his father said to her louisa elizabeth was her scottish name, he said if you will convert to islam and she knows how to hold the floor with a gun you can marry her. if she is happy to convert to islam in 1918 and she was a scottish highlanders daughter and she knew how to hold a fork. wonderful writing, the best adventure writing as rosie forbes which probably no one has heard of. she is out of