Suffering In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Religion’s positive and negative effects on human’s lives have been present throughout history. They can cause people to experience pain, and obstacles throughout their lives; examples are Puritan and Muslim women. The troubling challenges that women face in the religion of Islam affect their everyday lives, and when the men around them misinterpret the Koran they can be thrown into terrible situations. Khaled Hosseini is able to convey a theme of endurance through pain and suffering in his book, A Thousand Splendid Suns. The book describes the lives of two Muslim women living in Afghanistan. The beginning is about Mariam and how her life is shaped by the standards of living for Muslim women. At the young age of fifteen, her mother takes her own life. This event causes Mariam to be signed into marriage with a much older man named Rasheed. Hosseini then introduces a new character named Laila. She is born twenty years after Mariam, and experiences life through the tough times of Soviet Afghanistan. Laila lives through the Civil War that destroyed her home town of Kabul, and killed her

In the first opening chapters, he writes: “It’s our lot in life, Mariam. Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have” (Hosseini 19). Here he shows the first example of the theme in character dialogue between Mariam and her mother. This line foreshadows the rest of the story as it directs the reader’s attention toward the treatment of women and what women have to go through. Later in the story, Rasheed is describing his stance on the treatment of women to Mariam: “It embarrasses me, frankly, to see a man who’s lost control of his wife” (Hosseini 70). Here a very important character trait about Rasheed is revealed, which shows that he is a very traditional Muslim man. The traditional beliefs that Rasheed holds are yet another point made by Hosseini to connect to his