Want a NOOK? Explore Now
In the first anthology of its kind, Lila Azam Zanganeh argues that although Iran looms large in the American imagination, it is grossly misunderstood-seen either as the third pillar of Bush's infamous "axis of evil" or as a nation teeming with youths clamoring for revolution.
This collection showcases the real scope and complexity of Iran through the work of a stellar group of contributors-including Azar Nafisi and with original art by Marjane Satrapi. Their collective goal is to counter the many existing cultural and political clichés about Iran. Some of the pieces concern feminism, sexuality, or eroticism under the Islamic Republic; others are unorthodox political testimonies or about race and religion. Almost all these contributors have broken artistic and cultural taboos in their work.
Journalist Reza Aslan, author of No God But God, explains why Iran is not a theocracy but, rather, a "mullahcracy." Mehrangiz Kar, a lawyer and human rights activist who was jailed in Iran and is currently a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argues that the Iranian Revolution actually engendered the birth of feminism in Iran. Journalist Azadeh Moaveni reveals the underground parties and sex culture in Tehran, while Gelareh Asayesh, author of Saffron Sky, writes poignantly on why Iranians are not considered white in America, even though they think they are. Poet and writer Naghmeh Zarbafian expounds on the surreal experience of reading censored books in Iran, while Roya Hakakian, author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, recalls the happy days of Iranian Jews. With a sharp, incisive introduction by Lila Azam Zanganeh, this diverse collection will alter what you thought you knew about Iran.
"My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes aims to corrode fixed ideas and turns cultural and political clichés on their heads . . . Iranians themselves live in a complex and schizophrenic reality, at a surreal crossroads between political Islam and satellite television, massive national oil revenues, and searing social inequalities."—From the Introduction by Lila Azam Zanganeh
Contributors include: Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, Shirin Neshat, internationally acclaimed visual artist, Abbas Kiarostami, award-winning filmmaker of Taste of Cherry, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Oscar nominee for House of Sand and Fog, Azadeh Moaveni, author of Lipstick Jihad
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8070-0463-4
Azar Nafisi
The story I want to tell begins at the Tehran airport, decades ago,
when at the age of thirteen I was sent away to England to pursue
my education. Most friends and relatives who were there on that
day will remember that I was very much the spoiled brat, running
around the Tehran airport, crying I didn't want to leave.
From the moment I was finally captured and placed on the airplane,
from the moment the doors were closed on me, the idea
of return, of home, of Iran became a constant obsession that colored
almost all my waking hours and my dreams. This was my
first concrete lesson in the transience and infidelities of life. The
only way I could retrieve my lost and elusive Tehran was through
my memories and a few books of poetry I had brought with me
from home. Throughout the forlorn nights in a damp and gray
town called Lancaster, I would creep under the bedcovers, with
a hot water bottle to keep me warm, while I opened at random
three books I kept by my bedside: Hafiz, Rumi, and a modern
female Persian poet, Forugh Farrokhzad. I would read well into
the night, a habit I have not given up, going to sleep asthe words
wrapped themselves around me like aromas from an old spice
shop, resurrecting my lost but unforgotten Tehran.
I did not know then that I was already creating a new home,
a portable world that no one would ever have the power to take
away from me. And I adapted to my new home through reading
and revisiting Dickens, Austen, Brontë, and Shakespeare, whom
I had met with a thrill of sheer delight on the very first day of
school. Later, of course, I would begin to discover America
through the same imaginative sorcery-the writing of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Mark Twain, Henry James, Philip Roth,
Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Ralph Ellison.
Yet for decades, whether in England or America, my existence
was defined by the idea of return. I imposed my lost Iran on all
the moments of my life-even transferring to New Mexico for
a semester mainly because its mountains and the shaded colors of
its star-filled nights reminded me of my Iran. Late in the summer
of 1979, two days after I completed the defense of my dissertation,
I was on a plane, first to Paris, then to Tehran.
But as soon as I landed in the Tehran airport, I knew, irrevocably,
that home was no longer home. And it is apt, I presume,
that home should never feel too much like home-that is, too
comfortable or too smug. I always remember Adorno's claim that
the "Highest form of morality is to not feel at home in one's own
home." So for spurring me to pose myself as a question mark, for
altering my sense of home, as for so many other things, I should
be grateful to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
There was also another sense in which home was no longer
home, not so much because it destabilized and impelled me to
search for new definitions, but mainly because it forced its own
definitions upon me, thus turning me into an alien entity. A new
regime had established itself in the name of my country, my religion,
and my traditions, claiming that the way I looked and
acted, what I believed in and desired as a human being, a woman,
a writer, and a teacher were essentially alien and did not belong
to this home.
In the fall of 1979, I was teaching Huckleberry Finn and The
Great Gatsby in spacious classrooms on the second floor of the
University of Tehran, without actually realizing the extraordinary
irony of our situation: in the yard below, Islamist and leftist
students were shouting "Death to America," and a few streets
away, the U.S. embassy was under siege by a group of students
claiming to "follow the path of the imam." Their imam was
Khomeini, and he had waged a war on behalf of Islam against the
heathen West and its myriad internal agents. This was not purely
a religious war. The fundamentalism he preached was based on
the radical Western ideologies of communism and fascism as
much as it was on religion. Nor were his targets merely political;
with the support of leftist radicals he led a bloody crusade against
Western "imperialism": women's and minorities' rights, cultural
and individual freedoms. This time, I realized, I had lost my connection
to that other home, the America I had learned about in
Henry James, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Eudora
Welty.
In Tehran, the first step the new regime took before implementing
a new constitution was to repeal the Family Protection
Law which, since 1967, had helped women work outside the
home and provided them with substantial rights in their marriage.
In its place, the traditional Islamic law, the Sharia, would
apply. In one swoop the new rulers had set Iran back nearly a century.
Under the new system, the age of marital consent for girls
was altered from eighteen to nine. Polygamy was made legal as
well as temporary marriages, in which one man could marry as
many women as he desired by contract, renting them from five
minutes to ninety-nine years. What they named adultery and
prostitution became punishable by stoning.
Ayatollah Khomeini justified these actions by claiming that
he was in fact restoring women's dignity and rescuing them from
the degrading and diabolical ideas that had been thrust upon
them by Western imperialists and their agents, who had conspired
for decades to destroy Iranian culture and traditions.
In formulating this claim, the Islamic regime not only robbed
the Iranian people of their rights, it robbed them of their history.
For the true story of modernization in Iran is not that of an outside
force imposing alien ideas or-as some opponents of the
Islamic regime contend-that of a benevolent shah bestowing
rights upon his citizens. From the middle of the nineteenth century,
Iran had begun a process of self-questioning and transformation
that shook the foundations of both political and religious
despotism. In this movement for change, many sectors of the
population-intellectuals, minorities, clerics, ordinary people,
and enlightened women-actively participated, leading to what
is known as the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the effective
implementation of a new constitution based on the Belgian
model. Women's courageous struggles for their rights in Iran
became the most obvious manifestation of this transformation.
Morgan Shuster, an American who had lived in Iran, even stated
in his 1912 book, The Strangling of Persia: "The Persian women
since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive,
not to say the most radical, in the world. That this statement upsets
the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact."
By 1979, at the time of the revolution, women were active in
all areas of life in Iran. The number of girls attending schools was
on the rise. The number of female candidates for universities had
increased sevenfold during the first half of the 1970s. Women
were encouraged to participate in areas previously closed to them
through a quota system that offered preferential treatment to
eligible girls. Women were scholars, police officers, judges, pilots,
and engineers-present in every field except the clergy. In
1978, 333 out of 1,660 candidates for local councils were women.
Twenty-two were elected to the Parliament, two to the Senate.
There was one female Cabinet minister, three sub-Cabinet undersecretaries
(including the second-highest ranking officials in
both the Ministry of Labor and Mines and the Ministry of Industries),
one governor, one ambassador, and five mayors.
After the demise of the shah, many women, in denouncing
the previous regime, did so demanding more rights, not less.
They were advanced enough to seek a more democratic form of
governance with rights to political participation. From the very
start, when the Islamists attempted to impose their laws against
women, there were massive demonstrations, with hundreds of
thousands of women pouring into the streets of Tehran protesting
against the new laws. When Khomeini announced the imposition
of the veil, there were protests in which women took to
the streets with the slogans: "Freedom is neither Eastern nor
Western; it is global" and "Down with the reactionaries! Tyranny
in any form is condemned!" Soon the protests spread, leading to
a memorable demonstration in front of the Ministry of Justice,
in which an eight-point manifesto was issued. Among other
things, the manifesto called for gender equality in all domains of
public and private life as well as for the guarantee of fundamental
freedoms for both men and women. It also demanded that
"the decision over women's clothing, which is determined by
custom and the exigencies of geographical location, be left to
women."
Women were attacked by the Islamic vigilantes with knives
and scissors, and acid was thrown in their faces. Yet they did not
surrender, and it was the regime that retreated for a short while.
Later, of course, it made the veil mandatory, first in workplaces,
then in shops, and finally in the entire public sphere. In order to
implement its new laws, the regime devised special vice squads,
called the Blood of God, which patrolled the streets of Tehran
and other cities on the lookout for any citizen guilty of "moral
offense." The guards could raid shopping malls, various public
spaces, and even private homes in search of music or videos, alcoholic
drinks, sexually mixed parties, and unveiled or improperly
veiled women.
The mandatory veil was an attempt to force social uniformity
through an assault on individual and religious freedoms, not an
act of respect for traditions and culture. By imposing one interpretation
of religion upon all its citizens, the Islamic regime deprived
them of the freedom to worship their God in the manner
they deemed appropriate. Many women who wore the veil, like
my own grandmother, had done so because of their religious beliefs;
many who had chosen not to wear the veil but considered
themselves Muslims, like my mother, were now branded as infidels.
The veil no longer represented religion but the state: not
only were atheists, Christians, Jews, Baha'is, and peoples of other
faiths deprived of their rights, so were the Muslims, who now
viewed the veil more as a political symbol than a religious expression
of faith. Other freedoms were gradually curtailed: the
assault on the freedom of the press was accompanied by censorship
of books-including the works of some of the most popular
classical and modern Iranian poets and writers-a ban on
dancing, female singers, most genres of music, films, and other
artistic forms, and systematic attacks against the intellectuals and
academics who protested the new means of oppression.
In a Russian adaptation of Hamlet distributed in Iran, Ophelia
was cut out from most of her scenes; in Sir Laurence Olivier's
Othello, Desdemona was censored from the greater part of the
film and Othello's suicide was also deleted because, the censors
reasoned, suicide would depress and demoralize the masses. Apparently,
the masses in Iran were quite a strange lot, since they
might be far more demoralized by witnessing the death of an
imaginary character onscreen than being themselves flogged and
stoned to death ... Female students were reprimanded in schools
for laughing out loud or running on the school grounds, for
wearing colored shoelaces or friendship bracelets; in the cartoon
Popeye, Olive Oyl was edited out of nearly every scene because
the relationship between the two characters was illicit.
The result was that ordinary Iranian citizens, both men and
women, inevitably began to feel the presence and intervention of
the state in their most private daily affairs. The state did not
merely punish criminals who threatened the lives and safety of
the populace; it was there to control the people, to flog and jail
them for wearing nail polish, Reebok shoes, or lipstick; it was
there to watch over young girls and boys appearing in public. In
short, what was attacked and confiscated were the individual and
civil rights of the Iranian people.
Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie years
later did not represent a divide between Islam and the West, as
some claimed. It was a reaction to the dangers posed by a thriving
individual imagination on totalitarian mindsets, which cannot
tolerate any form of irony, ambiguity, and irreverence. As
Carlos Fuentes stated, the ayatollah had issued a fatwa not just
against a writer but also against the democratic form of the novel,
which frames a multiplicity of voices-from different and at
times opposing perspectives-in a critical exchange where one
voice does not destroy and eliminate another. What more dangerous
subversion than this democracy of voices? And in that
sense, America's extraordinary literary heritage kept reminding
me, throughout those years, how heavily genuine democracy depends
on what we might call a democratic imagination.
But according to the "guardians of morality" in the Islamic
Republic, books such as Lolita or Madame Bovary were morally
corrupt; they set wretched examples for the readers, motivating
them to commit immoral acts. Like all totalitarians, they could
not differentiate between reality and imagination, so they attempted
to impose their own version of truth upon both life and
fiction. Yet we do not read Lolita to learn more about pedophilia,
in the same way that we do not immediately decide to live up in
the trees after reading Calvino's Baron in the Tree. We do not read
in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of
our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated
pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery
of the many hidden layers within these works that do not
merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically
going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.
Quite to the contrary, the ruling elite in Iran imposed the
figments of its own imagination upon our lives, our reality. My
students could never taste the ordinary pleasures of life-what
one of them, Yassi, called the blacklisted details that are so readily
available to others-such as the caress of the sun on their skin
or the wind in their hair. The simple act of leaving the house
every day became a tortuous and guilty lie, because we had to
dress ourselves in the mandatory veil and be transformed into the
alien image the state had carved for us.
In order to escape and negate the alien image-this mandatory
lie that began with our appearances and permeated all aspects
of our lives-we needed to re-create ourselves and rescue
our confiscated identities. To restore our identities, we had to
resist the oppressor through our own creative resources. And we
had to do this by refusing to choose the same language as our oppressors.
Resistance in Iran had come to mean nonviolent confrontation,
both through political demands and through a refusal
to comply, an insistence upon the individual's own sense of integrity:
demanding respect and recognition whoever we were
and refusing to become the figments the regime wished to turn
us into.
Inexorably, the same rules that had been fashioned to keep the
citizens leashed became, over the course of time, weapons with
which Iranians demonstrated their dissent. Because the revolution
had turned the streets of Tehran and other cities into cultural
war zones, in which agents of the state were searching and
punishing citizens not for guns and grenades but for other, far
more deadly weapons-a strand of hair, a colored ribbon, trendy
sunglasses-the regime had politicized not only a dissident elite
but every Iranian individual as well. We were energized, not so
much because we were innately political but, rather, in order to
preserve our sense of individual integrity as women, writers, and
academics-in a word, as ordinary citizens who wished to live
their lives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes
Copyright © 2006 by Lila Azam Zanganeh.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
| The stuff that dreams are made of | 1 | |
| I grew up thinking I was white | 12 | |
| How can one be Persian? | 20 | |
| From here to mullahcracy | 24 | |
| Death of a mannequin | 30 | |
| The last chapter in the book of Exodus | 38 | |
| Women without men | 44 | |
| Sex in the time of mullahs | 55 | |
| Misreading Kundera in Tehran | 62 | |
| Receding worlds | 74 | |
| A taste of my cinema | 81 | |
| An alley greener than the dream of God | 96 | |
| Don't cry for me, America | 104 | |
| Why acting set me free | 112 | |
| Tehran underground | 119 |
Anonymous
Posted June 5, 2006
Lila Azam Zanganeh has produced a grem. I loved this book! From the introduction to the interviews to the stories...it's seamless!! The writing is excellent throughout and the book has a great flow. The variety of personal experiences, voices & stories aroused & satisfied my curiosity about Iran. I learned a lot and now feel inspired to read more work from some of these writers- and more about Iran. Thank you!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Overview
In the first anthology of its kind, Lila Azam Zanganeh argues that although Iran looms large in the American imagination, it is grossly misunderstood-seen either as the third pillar of Bush's infamous "axis of evil" or as a nation teeming with youths clamoring for revolution.
This collection showcases the real scope and complexity of Iran through the work of a stellar group of contributors-including Azar Nafisi and with original art by Marjane Satrapi. Their collective goal is ...