In the novel, Noor’s ardent desire (and that of her father) is to obtain a scholarship to a university in either Europe or the United States. When we first meet her it’s clear that it’s been a fruitless task. As Aamir Khan, her father, tells Charlie, she has applied to 31 universities, been rejected by 14, and received no word back from another 17. Yet still she continues to persevere.

In the book, she writes an application essay for the University of Amsterdam and I thought I would share it since, in many ways, it sums up both her world view and her hopes for both herself, Afghanistan and the world. They are the hopes I believe of so many women like her.

On my twelfth birthday my father gave me Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. This may strike you as a peculiar gift from a father to a daughter, especially to a daughter so young, but you must understand my father is a peculiar man, peculiar in all the best possible ways.

To say the book had an impact on me would be a gross understatement. I suspect this was because the subjects that preoccupied it were so prominent in my part of the world. There’s no better example than Afghanistan of Three Guineas’ central message regarding the interconnectedness between male patriarchy, education and war.

I’m an Afghan refugee from a war that’s claimed over a million lives, a war that’s been raging for a decade now and, despite the imminent fall of the Communist regime, looks likely to continue on in some new and reconstituted form.

I’m also a woman from a society that’s never placed any value in women’s work, where young girls can be bartered for the misdeeds of their male family members, and which every day finds new ways to restrict what women can do. Here men rule supreme with women unable to make decisions of even the slightest import. Most of us are forced into burqas when we venture outside, and inside we must labor for our menfolk without reward. The greatest insult of all is that our men tell us they do this out of concern for our honor, but there is no honor to be had in this world unless you have freedom and are treated as an equal.

Despite our history, martial qualities are still celebrated by my people as if they’re the essence of what it means to be a man. It’s ironic that Afghanistan is known for its opium fields, for if anyone is a ruinous addict it’s my country that bemoans this war yet continues to instill in our boys a reverence for fighting.

At present the United Nations ranks Afghanistan as the poorest nation on the planet. When you exclude half your population from productive life and only teach the other half how to fight and recite (rather than understand) the Holy Quran how could that not be the case? Given this situation it is understandable that I was seduced by the words of the outsider in Three Guineas who says “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” And yet as Virginia Woolf predicted I’m unable to abandon my country, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I quote her further with a little artistic license.

“And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of Afghanistan dropped into a child’s ear by the cawing of rooks in a mulberry tree, by the hum of a kite overhead, or by Pashtun voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to Afghanistan first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”

You see despite the indignities I’ve experienced and the tragedies I’ve endured I still love my country and hope to craft a better future for it one day. I fervently believe that if we can promote the education of women we might slowly but surely break our ruinous obsession with war. It should be an education that stresses compassion and non violence to our children because one day that will turn into advice given to imams and tribal leaders, governors and presidents, and aggression and wars over property (or may I be so bold to say human souls) will lessen, and a more peaceful coexistence of humans as equals will result.

This may seem like some fanciful dream but isn’t Germany a country that celebrates such values? If the society that gave birth to the holocaust and the blitzkrieg can achieve this, can’t we Afghans do so too?

To do my part I need further education, an education in educating so to speak, and that’s something I’ll never be able to obtain living here in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the most fundamentalist city in Pakistan.

In Virginia Woolf’s other great treatise In A Room Of One’s Own, she contended that an equally talented sister of Shakespeare’s would never have written a word, let alone a play, for all people need a living wage and a private place or else their potential will never be realized. What I humbly ask you to provide me with is just that – an opportunity to broaden my mind at your inspiring university with just enough money that I might live. I might not write Hamlet or Twelfth Night, in fact I can guarantee you I won’t, but I know if you are kind enough to afford me this opportunity that I will flourish and maybe, just maybe, I can be part of a wave that will turn my beloved country into a more equitable and peaceful place for all Afghans, and by extension for everyone in the world.

Yours truly, Noor Jehan Khan