My Beautiful Sisters: A Story of Courage, Hope and the Afghan Women’s Football Team

"I wish this book had been eight times longer! It’s quite a short book, and it really should be longer. Khalida is a remarkable woman. She’s living in a society where women’s rights are virtually non-existent. She’s obviously very intelligent and has quite a progressive family. That seems to give her the bravery to be quite bolshy. She says in the book that she’s stubborn. She is very stubborn and when she gets it in her head that women should be playing football, she doesn’t give it up—even though everyone tells her it’s a terrible idea. Her family suffers, because she’s bringing them shame in the view of the society and the authorities around her, but she perseveres. If you want to read a book about battling against the odds, this is the book for you. Critics would say, ‘Why create a football team? How does that help Afghanistan women?’ For those who live outside that community and find it hard to compute just how appalling conditions are for women in Afghanistan, it allows us a point of comparison—through the vehicle of the football team that she helps to create. Women across the world, at various points in history, have found it difficult to play organized sport. We’re still only catching up in the UK. We’ve made great strides in promoting women’s football, but only in the last 15 years. Organized football was banned by the Football Association until 1971. It’s taken a long time to recover from that and for people to accept that women can play football seriously in the UK, and we’ve looked jealously across at the United States, where the women’s football teams get more attention than the men’s. Then you look across at Afghanistan, and you think, ‘Okay, you can times the problems we’ve had by a million.’ In a strict society where women are expected to do nothing at all except serve men, it’s almost unbelievable that she achieved her goal of creating a football team—although it transpires that the people who allowed that to happen were doing it to get money for grants and to look good to the outside world. There was no actual belief that women should play football. Then, when the Taliban regained power, she had to find a way to extract the women in the team from Afghanistan, because they were at high risk of being arrested. Again, that brings up moral questions: Why would you place extracting a female football player above extracting a wife and mother? Why is being a football player more important? But she got some women out and that was a great thing. Throughout it all, there is the pain she suffered, the losses she saw. Within a few sentences, you hear about her finding a goalkeeper. She tells her, ‘I think you’re really good, I’d like you to be my number one goalkeeper.’ This woman is utterly delighted but her family calls her a whore, and she sets herself on fire and dies. It’s hard to compute that life. This is why My Beautiful Sisters is a really important book. Through the vehicle of sport, you get an insight into a society that we can barely imagine. Each chapter starts with a little phrase about how beautiful football is, a mini poem reminding you of the joy of completing a pass or scoring a goal. The book never loses sight of the beauty of team sport. That’s quite an achievement, I think, against the backdrop of the societal pressures that they all suffered."