Lamb, as a new university graduate, 21 years old, found a place as a war correspondent in 1988 in Pakistan and Afghanistan as the CIA and the mujaheddin mobilised to evict the Russians from their country. From a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed woman she quickly became addicted to the thrill of battle, even if it meant, for example, being stuck for days in trenches below Russian tanks.
Though a woman is normally not acceptable as a journalist in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Christina Lamb’s persistence and charm, endeared her to many who otherwise would have simply rejected her. She made friends in the most unusual places and they helped her in the most amazing ways. She won confidences ranging from the exile king and his family, through to various leaders on both sides in Pakistan and Afghanistan with Taliban torturers and those opposing the Taliban. Above all she was able to meet women and girls in unusual circumstances.
As a woman (dressed as a man, or in a burqa, depending on the circumstances), Lamb had access to people and places that her male counterparts did not have. She eventually burned out with all the killing of innocent people, all the suffering and betrayal, the deaths of people she had been close to. She did not return to the beautiful inland mountains until immediately after September 11, 2001. Now the West was mobilizing to “free” Afghanistan from the Taliban, the very force they had helped put into power to remove the Russians, a decade earlier.
It is often said that when one first leaves home, that the first county one works in is the one that you will fall in love with. This was certainly true for Christina Lamb. This memoir, written in her mid-30s, is a moving testimony to that affection. When she began journalism she was quickly recognised as “Young Journalist of the Year”. Later she was awarded “Foreign Correspondent of the Year” by the British Press Awards.
“The Sewing Circles of Heart” is a strange title for this memoir. The sub-title is more appropriate, as this book truly is Lamb’s personal journey. It is enlivened by two things: first, a collection of 85 black and white photographs, many of them of the people she has interviewed, and whose lives she is introducing to you in her book, most of them taken by the author; and second, her sense of history, which gives a solid perspective to her writing about different events between 1988 and 2003. As most journalists tend to be ahistorical—they go for the jugular, and negate the past—their comprehension of dynamics in a situation is often limited. Lamb, because of her personal interests and style of work, never became the type of writer who accepted as “fact” the expatriate lore tossed about in bars and lounges by other journalists, and then filed reports that were part invention.
This memoir is also held together by a series of letters from Kabul that were sent to Lamb following the attack on the twin towers, by a young woman calling herself Marri. A series of these letters are interspersed before chapters. They give a good feeling of the suffering and longing of women living under the Taliban following the fundamentalist take over of Afghanistan in 1996, when women were confined to their homes, were forbidden to work or study, were not allowed out unless accompanied by a male relative, and must show no skin, only their eyes. After a long search in 2002 Lamb was able to find Marri in Kabul (she had moved about due to the bombing and used false addresses when she wrote).
A particularly fascinating chapter is “Inside the House of Knowledge” on the original Haqqania School at Quetta established in 1947, where most of the Taliban leaders were educated. The attraction is that these schools provide free room and board. Those who have excelled have learned to memorise the Koran in Arabic. Thousands of these schools now dot the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, with 80,000 students. In Pakistan as a whole they enrol one million. They are for males only, and they teach that men are superior to women plus the fundamentals of Islam. There are no foreign languages, no mathematics or any of the sciences taught. Lamb was able to arrange a visit to the school and interview Sami-ul Haq, “the man who taught the Taliban”. She was also able to tour the school and interview students. She learned that it was from this Haqqania the call went out in 1979 to commence a Jihad against the Russians. Today it has only 400 places and 5,000 apply to join. It was here that the name of their movement came from, as “taliban” means “religious students”. The Haq insisted that we “don’t teach fighting. Islam is a religion of peace. You will not find anyone carrying a gun at Haqqania”. But when a fight for freedom, a jihad, is called for, his alumnae are the first to respond.
Lamb’s chapter on her return to Herat, which had suffered along with Afghanistan 23 years of war and millions dead, is fascinating. It is there that she found the s, a front to allow women to come together for one of the few activities they were allowed under the Taliban.
They became secret schools for girls and women. Those who attended and those who taught risked beatings and being hung from lampposts at major intersections in the ancient city. Yet they persevered. This is an amazing tale well worth reading.
