The Mohammedan Controversy and Other Indian Articles - Biographies of Mohammed; Sprenger on Tradition and the Psalter Book

The subtitle for this books is "a memoir" - a memoir written by someone who is 27 is likely to flow less well than that of someone twice that age (or more - or so it seems to me).

The first part covers Masuda's childhood and her arranged marriage at a very young age which ended in divorce - this takes 44 pages. The next section is about as long and is a slightly random collection of her thinking about being a Muslim and an Afghan American. Partway through this I got bogged down and put this book aside for several months.

The next time I picked the book up, I read several pages and moved into Masuda's trip to visit her family roots in Afghanistan in July 2001. This is by far the most interesting part of the book and best written.

About 145 pages into the book, she gets to September 11 2001 and her reaction to this, living as an Afghan in New York. This segues to her agreeing to go with a camera crew to Afghanistan in December 2001 to help with making a documentary which turns out to focus on an American attack on innocent villagers that included her relatives. It becomes a bit too much of a recitation of what happened and less compelling reading. She talks about the aftermath and the efforts to get the U.S. military or government to take responsibility for this event.

From here on the book went downhill for me and I can't say that I read every word. She describes her work in several different organizations, particularly a women's conference she organized in Afghanistan that resulted in a "bill of rights" for women that she and others presented to President Karzai personally - the book starts to read like the transcript for her going through a job interview. The most interesting moments in this final section are when she compares the way women live their lives and their attitudes in the post-Taliban world compared to the situation she described and experienced before 9/11 when she visited her family - but there isn't much of that, unfortunately.

I'm glad I read it, but isn't an easy or even read.