Persian Letters

Three personal accounts of modern Iran.

Michael Young from the February 2006 issue

Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran, by Azadeh Moaveni, New York: Public Affairs, 249 pages, $25

Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran, by Afschineh Latifi, New York: Regan Books, 320 pages, $24.95

In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, by Christopher de Bellaigue, New York: HarperCollins, 283 pages, $26.95

The international community groaned when Tehran's hard-line mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won Iran's presidential election last June. The sight of a former Revolutionary Guards official being swept into office, mainly by Iran's poor, sent shudders through Americans and Europeans already worried about Iran's nuclear ambitions, its interference in Iraq, and its support for Lebanon's Hezbollah.

The new reality cries out for informed interpretation, and thanks to the post-9/11 proliferation of Middle East�related titles there are three Iran-related books, each finished before the election, to choose from: Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad, Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time, and Christopher de Bellaigue's In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Unfortunately, publishers apparently have decided that the best way for American readers to grapple with Iran is through personal accounts, preferably by Westernized authors. In two of the three books, what we gain in empathy we lose in context.

Moaveni is Time's correspondent in Iran, has covered the Iraq war for the Los Angeles Times, and worked with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi on her autobiography. She has worn her soles thin on Iran's pavements and can burrow when needed, so more's the pity that her book often comes across as an exercise in indulgent self-analysis, a sort of Taffy Does Tehran.

Not that the navel gazing can't be interesting. Moaveni, like Latifi--and to a lesser extent De Bellaigue--embodies the collision of Iranian and Western culture. Her recollections of growing up in San Jose, California, underscore how difficult it is for a young Iranian to deal with American perceptions of her country of origin. It's a predictable approach, but it merits being revisited at a time when fear of terrorism has made integration all the trickier. Though her adaptation was relatively smooth, she observes that "the [Iranian] hostage crisis had forever stained our image in the American psyche, and slowly I saw how this shaped so much of what we did and strove for as immigrants."

In Moaveni's case at least, Americans gracefully moved beyond the hostages. Her bigger problem seemed to come from accepting her Iranian side--especially in dealing with her paradoxical mother, a product of Iran's pre-revolution elite who later adopted left-wing causes and adhered for a time to Hinduism, all the while remaining deeply Iranian (or perhaps just Californian). "The high volume of Maman's emotional politics," she writes, "made me feel even more estranged from my friends at school, at an age when nothing is more painful." That's a reasonable sentiment, but it's also worth suggesting that the weight of assimilation fell more on the mother than the daughter; hence her compensatory excess.

After Moaveni describes accepting her "Iranian-ness" and the pleasure of "finding power in your otherness"--the obligatory metamorphosis is mercifully dispatched in 28 pages--comes the real point of the book: Moaveni's move to Iran in 2000, after a short stint in Egypt. Her first instinct is sound, namely to assume she knows nothing. Reporting on the Tehran student riots of 1999, before she moved to the country full time, Moaveni found that the events "breathed life into my conception of Iran." Her expatriate view of "Iran as a static failed state in unchanging decline," she writes, "had little to do with the country itself and everything to do with the psychology of exile." With that realization came another: While Iran's hard-liners were scoundrels, the reformers were ineffective and divided, particularly on whether or how to engage with the United States.

The person who came to personify that diffidence was Iran's former president, Mohammed Khatami. Twice elected with large majorities, Khatami was for a long time Iran's great liberal hope. Though hardly at one with the obdurate clergy, the president was nonetheless a product of the clerical order, and never considered overthrowing it. Instead he sought, and achieved, looser restrictions in some domains of Iranian life, such as the way females dress. But his efforts to expand an independent press met with a withering hard-line backlash that Khatami did little to challenge. It would have taken a revolutionary figure--one willing, perhaps unwisely, to carry the battle into the streets--to break the stranglehold on the Iranian state by a bevy of unelected conservative-controlled institutions, at the top of which sits supreme guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By the end of his mandate, Khatami was more an object of disappointment than longing, though his legacy continues to be debated.

Moaveni gives us many fragments of this confrontation between Iran's contending impulses of emancipation and repression, in particular a chilling account of how the regime's goons savagely beat demonstrators gathered after a soccer match. When the crowds began shouting "Death to Khamenei," police reacted by attacking the unarmed civilians, including women and children, with batons. Moaveni, who was injured in the fight, makes it clear this brutality was but one of countless humiliations suffered daily by Iranians, especially youths.

Moaveni has a sharp eye for the popular culture of middle-class Iranians. She describes how Iranian women routinely combat the ambient grayness imposed by the regime by wearing colorful chador designs revealing far more than they are supposed to. Moaveni also shows how Iranians are reworking their appearances and identities in other ways (nose jobs are a favorite of Iranian women and men), so that sensuality itself has become an act of resistance. That may seem trite, but it is in precisely these personal recesses over which the regime has tenuous control that the battle between hard-liners and those demanding individual liberties is most intense.

Where will this resistance lead, particularly under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Moaveni writes that while the reformers may have been ineffectual, she has concluded, much to her disappointment, that there is no alternative. When Iranians whom Moaveni spent time with asked her when the Americans would liberate Iran, they also made it clear they wanted to avoid becoming a new Iraq. Iran's salvation, she implies, must come from within.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad's victory has turned the camera on another, more deprived Iran, one no less dissatisfied with its own status than liberals are with the scarcity of freedom. If the regime fails the poor, their angry reaction may be far more destructive than anything the hard-line clerics face from the liberals.

Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time is cut from a similar cloth. Latifi, a lawyer in New York City, has produced (with Pablo F. Fenjves as co-author) a log of mostly irrelevant personal detail. This material would have been better suited for a midday talk show interview, between the segments on breast implants and the delights of shiatsu.