Culture of shame

I really thought I had made it when I went to give a talk at my old Oxford college. But when I got there I discovered that there had been an attempt to have me banned. I was accosted by a dusky beauty in the quad who, practically incoherent with indignation, told me that this was because I produced ‘the worst kind of neo-colonial travel writing’. In other words, I had once described an arranged Afghan marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man as ‘legitimised rape’. I thought I had rather understated the horror of it.

My thought-crime was ‘Orientalism’, the depiction of eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad. In future I will give any cultural relativist this book. It explains what it is like to be an Afghan woman. The answer is that it is even more ghastly than I had supposed.