Afghanistan’s first lady, in U.S. visit, walks line between reform and caution

By Pamela Constable

With her soft French accent, self-deprecating laugh and modest Western attire, Afghanistan’s first lady easily charmed a Washington audience Wednesday evening, at her first public appearance here in the nearly five tumultuous months since her husband, Ghani, was inaugurated as president in September.

The warm reception contrasted sharply with the one that Rula Ghani, a Lebanese-born Christian, has received at home. Her religious background and modern views have provoked a barrage of criticism and hostility in the traditional, male-dominated Muslim society, where many women do not leave their homes unveiled.

Ghani’s message here, echoed in her recent interviews and speeches, was carefully modulated to dispel her image as a crusading feminist intruder among older, conservative Afghans — but without alienating a rising generation of young, educated Afghan women to whom she is a natural role model.

The event came during a two-week visit by Ghani to the United States, where she spent much of her adult life and where her two children live. Last week, she flew to Texas for a visit with former first lady Laura Bush, who has long supported the cause of Afghan women. This week in Washington, she has attended charitable board meetings and met with Afghan and American friends. On Wednesday, she spoke before about 200 people at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Ghani, 66, was educated in Paris and the United States and met her husband at the American University of Beirut. She confirmed that she is Christian but did not elaborate on her religious beliefs. Instead, she stressed the similarities between Lebanese and Afghan cultures, noted that she learned to pray in Arabic and strategically framed her comments about women within references to the Koran and Islam.

“In Islam the place of women is an important place,” Ghani said, adding that Afghan history is full of “formidable” female leaders. She noted that the wife of the prophet Muhammad was a powerful businesswoman, and that Queen Soraya Tarzi— the stylish wife of a reformist Afghan king in the 1920s — helped launch the country’s modern education system.

Yet she played down her own aspirations for power, saying she sees her new role mostly as a “listener and facilitator” for Afghans who seek her personal help. She pointedly defended her immediate predecessor, Zeenat Karzai, a physician who was kept hidden from public view for years during President Hamid Karzai’s rule, saying she should “not be blamed” for choosing to stay home and raise her children in seclusion.

Ghani also skirted the volatile issue of women’s rights, declaring that the widely documented plight of Afghan women --- including domestic abuse, forced early marriage, bride barter and imprisonment for eloping — has been unfairly exaggerated by the foreign press and aid organizations.

“They say Afghanistan is the worst country for a girl to be born. Hogwash!” Ghani exclaimed to laughter.

Ghani’s balancing act, though carried off with grace and wit, was a direct result of the condemnation she has encountered at home, simply by virtue of her Christian faith and foreign birth, and the potential damage the new government fears such controversy can do to her Muslim husband’s efforts to modernize the economically struggling, conflict-ridden nation.

Afghanistan is 99 percent Muslim, and it is a capital crime there to convert to Christianity. Moreover, the defeat of Soviet forces by Afghan religious militias and the subsequent years of Taliban rule in the 1990s made Afghan society much more conservative than in the early 1970s, when Ghani first came to live there as a bride.

The president, a cerebral former World Bank official, is in a hurry to revolutionize the country’s languid, corrupt and hidebound official culture, and he has already made many enemies. During his candidacy, a smear campaign began against his wife. Critics warned that she would seek to convert Afghan women, and doctored photos showed her husband praying in a church. There were even suggestions that he should divorce her.

But on inauguration day, the new president publicly saluted Rula as his life partner, an unprecedented gesture. In subsequent interviews, she drew criticism for saying women should take up roles in business, professions and public life. In November, she aroused further controversy by saying she supported a French government ban on Muslim women wearing the niqab, a full-face veil, and adding that she would never wear one. Later government aides said she had been misquoted.

Now, after a period of relative seclusion, the first lady has re-emerged with a new, less provocative persona, and she is officially referred to as Bibi Gul, a traditional Afghan name that means Flower Lady. In recent statements, she has insisted she has no intention of using her position to challenge Afghan mores. “My aim is not to revolutionize,” Ghani told one interviewer. “I’m here to help women establish their own importance within the family.”

In her appearance Wednesday, she tried to draw a distinction between the moderate version of Islam she encountered in Afghan society during the 1970s and the more fanatical version being promulgated by the Taliban and other extremist groups today, which she said have “distorted” the true Islam. “We have to go back to the basics,” she said.

For most of the discussion, she remained cheerfully on message and boosterish about Afghanistan, insisting that “the sky is not falling” and urging Afghan students in the United States to return home to help rebuild their country. Only in few bursts of candor did she reveal her frustrations. At one point she blurted that at the two main Afghan security ministries — long controlled by her husband’s ethnic rivals — “respect for women does not exist.”

The audience included Afghan professional women, students, and American colleagues from various charities and women’s groups. Several expressed excitement about Ghani’s potential to change Afghan society, though others suggested she would remain constrained by the prevailing conservative political and religious climate.

Ghani’s efforts to portray herself as a non-threatening, grandmotherly figure may help counter her critics’ efforts to tar her as a subversive foreign influence. But merely by traveling alone to the West and appearing in public without her head covered, she is defying Afghan history.

In the 1920s, when Queen Soraya toured Europe bare-headed, the reaction from conservative Afghan society was so negative that her husband’s government soon fell.