Who Is Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns?

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is breaking-taking, realistic and outstanding. The story focuses on the struggle of Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women from a different path of life. Mariam is an illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, Jali, and his former servant. After her mom commits suicide Mariam is forced into marrying Rasheed a forty-five-year-old shoemaker. At first, thing seem to be lovely with the newly-wed couple, but after an agonizing miscarriage, Rasheed becomes physically and verbally abusive toward Mariam. In the same community as Mariam and Rasheed is Laila, a young and smart girl from a stable household, where education is the number one priority and marriage can wait. However, she lives in the shadow of
Once Laila found out she was pregnant, Laila agrees to marry Rasheed in order to protect her baby. Throughout the book, Mariam is not the only one who experiencing abuse. Laila is also being abused after attempting to run away. While reading the pages of A Thousand Splendid Suns, I comprehend that when the Taliban came into power, men knew they would not be punished for their behavior toward their wives. Fortunately, I was not the only reader that felt this way. I was able to expand my perspective of the novel through book club debates. By engaging in a “community of readers,” my peers and I came to the same conclusion that religious groups such as the Taliban made some men more powerful while women were discriminated against. Eventually I came to understand that religion can be used to control
When she refuses, he grasped her jaw and pushed the pebbles into her mouth forcing her to chew it. Rasheed quote “Now you know what your rice taste like. Now you know what you’ve given me in this marriage. Bad food, and nothing else” (Hosseini 104) before walking away, leaving Mariam to spit out the bloody pebbles. Rasheed is an example of how the Taliban influence some men in the Afghan society when they came into power. Rasheed knows that the Taliban would not punish him for his mistreatment of his wives. He knows he can say or do anything to his wives and the authorities would be okay with it. For example, in chapter 39 Rasheed says, “Let me explain,” he said. “If the fancy should strike me-and- I’m not saying it will, but it could, it could -I would be within my right to give Aziza away. How would you like that? Or I could go to the Taliban one day, just walk in and say that I have my suspicions about you. That’s all it would take. Whose word do you think they would believe? What do you think they’ do to you?” (Hosseini 282). In this passage Rasheed has no problem with the Taliban. He tells Laila about civilians that were punished for their crimes.