Mariam and Mullah Faizullah's relationship
Mariam and Mullah Faizullah's relationship is the most formative bond of Mariam's early life, providing her with literacy, spiritual grounding, and the only unconditional acceptance she knows before her marriage to Rasheed. The elderly Koran tutor serves as Mariam's teacher, confidant, and moral compass, and his influence echoes through her final acts of love and sacrifice.
Identity and Introduction
Mullah Faizullah is the elderly village Koran tutor, the akhund, who comes to the kolba once or twice a week from Gul Daman to teach Mariam the five daily namaz prayers and tutor her in Koran recitation, just as he had taught Nana when she was a little girl. He is a gaunt, stooping old man with a toothless smile and a white beard that drops to his navel. Usually he comes alone, though sometimes with his russet-haired son Hamza, who is a few years older than Mariam. When he arrives, Mariam kisses his hand—which feels like kissing a set of twigs covered with a thin layer of skin—and he kisses the top of her brow before they sit inside for the day's lesson. It is Mullah Faizullah who taught Mariam to read, who patiently looked over her shoulder as her lips worked the words soundlessly, her index finger lingering beneath each word, pressing until the nail bed went white, as though she could squeeze the meaning out of the symbols. It is Mullah Faizullah who held her hand and guided the pencil in it along the rise of each alef, the curve of each beh, the three dots of each seh.
Life and Plot Trajectory
After the day's lesson, the two of them sit outside the kolba, eat pine nuts and sip green tea, and watch the bulbul birds darting from tree to tree. Sometimes they go for walks among the bronze fallen leaves and alder bushes, along the stream and toward the mountains. Mullah Faizullah twirls the beads of his tasbeh rosary as they stroll, and, in his quivering voice, tells Mariam stories of all the things he has seen in his youth, like the two-headed snake he found in Iran on Isfahan's Thirty-three Arch Bridge, or the watermelon he split once outside the Blue Mosque in Mazar to find the seeds forming the word Allah on one half and Akbar on the other. Mullah Faizullah admits to Mariam that at times he does not understand the meaning of the Koran's words, but he says he likes the enchanting sounds the Arabic words make as they roll off his tongue, and that they comfort him and ease his heart. He tells her, "They'll comfort you too, Mariam jo. You can summon them in your time of need, and they won't fail you. God's words will never betray you, my girl." Mullah Faizullah listens to stories as well as he tells them; when Mariam speaks, his attention never wavers, and he nods slowly and smiles with a look of gratitude, as if he has been granted a coveted privilege. It is easy to tell Mullah Faizullah things that Mariam does not dare tell Nana.
Key Actions and Objectives
One day, as they are walking, Mariam tells him she wishes she could go to school—a real school, like in a classroom, like her father's other kids. Mullah Faizullah stops and asks if that is what she wants, and when she says yes, he agrees to ask her mother for permission, saying, "God, in His wisdom, has given us each weaknesses, and foremost among my many is that I am powerless to refuse you, Mariam jo." But when he broaches Nana, she drops the knife with which she is slicing onions and sharply refuses, saying there is only one skill a woman like her needs: tahamul—endure. Mullah Faizullah tries to reason with her, saying, "Be reasonable. Come now. If the girl wants—" but Nana cuts him off, telling him with all due respect that he should know better than to encourage these foolish ideas. After Nana's suicide, when Mariam is taken to Jalil's house, Mullah Faizullah comes to visit her. When she sees her friend at the door, his white beard and his amiable, toothless smile, Mariam feels tears stinging the corners of her eyes again. She kisses his hand as always and he her brow. He shows her the Koran he has brought and opens it, saying, "I figured no sense in skipping our routine, eh?" When Mariam says she knows every surah and ayat in the Koran, he smiles and raises his hands in a gesture of surrender, confessing he has been found out but that he can think of worse excuses to visit her. Mariam tells him she keeps thinking of what Nana said to her before she left, and Mullah Faizullah puts his hand on her knee and says, "Your mother, may Allah forgive her, was a troubled and unhappy woman, Mariam jo. She did a terrible thing to herself. To herself, to you, and also to Allah. He will forgive her, for He is all-forgiving, but Allah is saddened by what she did. He does not approve of the taking of life, be it another's or one's own, for He says that life is sacred. You see, I knew your mother before you were born, when she was a little girl, and I tell you that she was unhappy then. The seed for what she did was planted long ago, I'm afraid. What I mean to say is that this was not your fault. It wasn't your fault, my girl." When Mariam says she should not have left her, he insists, "You stop that. These thoughts are no good, Mariam jo. You hear me, child? No good. They will destroy you. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault. No." Mariam nods, but as desperately as she wants to, she cannot bring herself to believe him.
Relationships and Conflict
When Mariam is told she must marry Rasheed, she says she will live with Mullah Faizullah, that he will take her in, but Khadija says that is no good because he is old and weak, and what will she do when he is gone. Mariam is not even given the time to say good-bye to Mullah Faizullah before she is sent away to Kabul. Years later, during the drought and the Taliban era, when Mariam is forty and has lost two front teeth, she remembers something Mullah Faizullah used to say about hunger when Ramadan started: "Even the snakebitten man finds sleep, but not the hungry." When Laila tells Mariam about her plan to run away to Pakistan, Mariam says, "The Koran says Allah is the East and the West, therefore wherever you turn there is Allah's purpose." When Mariam decides to stay behind and face execution for killing Rasheed, she tells Laila, "For me, it ends here. There's nothing more I want. Everything I'd ever wished for as a little girl you've already given me. You and your children have made me so very happy. It's all right, Laila jo. This is all right. Don't be sad." As she walks her final twenty paces toward the goalpost at Ghazi Stadium, Mariam's final thoughts are a few words from the Koran, which she mutters under her breath: "He has created the heavens and the earth with the truth; He makes the night cover the day and makes the day overtake the night, and He has made the sun and the moon subservient; each one runs on to an assigned term; now surely He is the Mighty, the Great Forgiver." She then says, "O my Lord! Forgive and have mercy, for you are the best of the merciful ones." When the Talib tells her to kneel, she does as she is told.
Change and Ending
Mullah Faizullah's death is not depicted in the main narrative, but Hamza, his son, tells Laila years later that his father lived to be a very old man, outliving Jalil Khan, and that they buried him in the village cemetery, not far from where Mariam's mother is buried. Hamza says, "My father was a dear, dear man, surely heaven-bound." The relationship between Mariam and Mullah Faizullah ends not with a farewell but with a permanent separation imposed by Mariam's forced marriage and exile to Kabul. Yet his teachings—the Koranic verses, the lesson that God's words will never betray her, the comfort of prayer—remain with Mariam for the rest of her life, surfacing in her moments of greatest crisis and in her final act of love and sacrifice.
Narrative Role and Evaluation
Mullah Faizullah is the only figure in Mariam's early life who offers her unconditional acceptance and intellectual nourishment. He is the one who teaches her to read and write, who gives her access to the Koran's words as a source of comfort, and who tries to absolve her of guilt after Nana's suicide. His role is that of a spiritual father and moral anchor, standing in stark contrast to Jalil's neglect and Nana's bitterness. The relationship is structurally significant because it provides Mariam with the inner resources—faith, literacy, the capacity for selfless love—that she later draws upon to form a bond with Aziza and to make the ultimate sacrifice for Laila. Mullah Faizullah's influence is the seed of Mariam's transformation from a harami who believes she is nothing into a woman who dies knowing she has loved and been loved back, a person of consequence at last.
