Editor’s note: On October 6th 2023 Narges Mohammadi, the author of “White Torture”, a book recommended below, received the Nobel peace prize.
FILE - Iranian Narges Mohammadi, delegate of the Center for Human Rights Defenders, listens to a question during a press conference on the Assessment of the Human Rights Situation in Iran, at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 9, 2008. The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Narges Mohammadi for fighting oppression of women in Iran. The chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the prize Friday, Oct. 6, 2023 in Oslo. (Magali Girardin/Keystone via AP, File) (AP)
LAST YEAR the rage of Iranian women boiled over. In September the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police for wearing her hijab incorrectly, provoked massive protests by both women and men. Hijab-burning protesters demanded not just equality for women but the removal of Iran’s Islamist regime. In trying to suppress the demonstrations, the regime has killed more than 400 people. Although Iran’s theocratic government discriminates against women, in some ways they are better off than those in other conservative Muslim countries. The share of women in higher education has risen 20-fold since the regime took power in 1979. Educated but thwarted, many Iranian women are in a good position to describe their plight and demand change. These books portray the stunting of women’s lives in the country, as well as their variety.
The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons: Selected Stories. By Goli Taraghi. Translated by Sara Khalili. W. W. Norton Company; 320 pages; $15.95 and £11.99
“The Flowers of Shiraz”, a story in this collection, is about a company of eighth-graders who dance. They are “fat, thin, lanky, short, frizzy-haired, and olive-skinned”. The year is 1953; a coup backed by America and Britain has toppled the prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had sought to nationalise the country’s oil resources. In the evenings the dancers meet at Tajrish Bridge and take part in bike and running races with other children. They get caught up in a pandemonium. Groups shout slogans in support of Mossadegh. Supporters of the shah, who backed the coup, spit at the children. Goli Taraghi’s collection of short stories blends everyday life with political commentary. She writes from France, to which she moved in 1979. Some of her stories examine the paradoxes of exile: relief and the longing for home. Others depict how characters cope with living in Iran; some defy restrictions, and one man wanders about the country aimlessly for months. No one, not even the exiles, escapes Iran’s explosive politics.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. By Azar Nafisi. Random House; 356 pages; $18. Penguin; £9.99
Education became an ideological battleground after the Islamic revolution. Government-appointed administrators banned several books from Tehran University. Agents of the regime infiltrated student groups. Azar Nafisi, a professor of English at the time, was sacked. Her response was to set up her own informal English department, meeting with seven of her best female students weekly in her living room to study the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen and Henry James. The young women are children of the Islamic Republic. Some accept its ideology, others do not. To one student Daisy Miller, the unconventional protagonist of a novella by James, is “obviously a bad girl; she is reactionary and decadent”. Another envies Daisy’s courage. The tensions that play out violently on Tehran’s streets do not disappear in Ms Nafisi’s living room, but they become subjects of reflection and debate. This memoir ends with Ms Nafisi’s departure from Iran in 1997. The women she left behind, it is safe to say, were permanently changed by her makeshift school.
Iran Awakening. By Shirin Ebadi and Azadeh Moaveni. Penguin Random House; 256 pages; $18. Ebury Publishing; £13.99
In late 2000 Shirin Ebadi, a titan of human-rights law in Iran, took on a high-profile case: the trial of intelligence agents who had killed dissident intellectuals in the late 1990s. Ms Ebadi was representing the family of two victims. While looking through evidence from the investigation, she came across the transcript of a conversation between a government minister and a member of the death squad. In it, she found her own name: The “next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi”, she read. “Iran Awakening” is a memoir of a life that spans the rule of the shah to that of ayatollahs by someone who is at once a witness, a protagonist and an astute commentator. Menaced by the regime, in 2003 she was awarded the Nobel peace prize. Ms Ebadi, in exile in London since 2009, remains a nationalist, arguing that Iran must solve its own problems without foreign interference. Islam, she thinks, is perfectly compatible with women’s rights. “It is not religion that binds women,” she writes in her memoir, “but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered.”
White Torture. By Narges Mohammadi. Translated by Amir Rezanezhad. Oneworld Publications; 272 pages; $30 and £20
After a summer of unrest in 1999, the regime frequently made use of “white torture”, or extreme sensory deprivation, to extract information from prisoners or force confessions. Those prisoners are held alone in soundproof, four-square-metre cells, some lit unceasingly by a single bulb. Once in a while, they are allowed 20 minutes of fresh air. “White Torture” is a collection of interviews conducted by Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian activist. Incarcerated in Ward 209 of Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison on charges of attempting to undermine the Islamic Republic, Ms Mohammadi recorded the testimonies of 13 other women held on similar charges (some conversations took place outside prison). Marzieh Amiri, a journalist and activist, was sentenced to ten years behind bars, though she was released in 2019 after seven months. During her incarceration she beat her head against a wall, hoping the pain would dull her thoughts. Prison worsened her epileptic seizures, she says. But the regime’s brutal tactics do not break wills, these interviews show. None of the women expresses regret for her resistance; most had been arrested and tortured before their latest detention.
Sin. By Forugh Farrokhzad. Translated by Sholeh Wolpe. University of Arkansas Press; 166 pages; $16.95.
Forugh Farrokhzad’s frankness and playfulness about sex would not shock Western readers today. But the literary elite of 1950s Iran was scandalised by her poetry. Many refused to believe that a woman had written it. Farrokhzad published four poetry collections in her short life (she died aged 32 in a car crash in 1967). Respect eventually came to her, first because of her work as a filmmaker. “The House is Black”, a documentary about a leprosarium in the city of Tabriz, was released in 1962 to critical acclaim. “Reborn”, published in 1964, is widely considered to be the best collection of poetry in the short history of Persian modernism. (Several of its poems are included in “Sin”.) After the revolution, the state banned Farrokhzad’s poetry rather than merely deprecating it. Her publisher refused to stop printing; he was jailed, and the building housing his printing presses was burned to the ground.
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To learn more about the plight of women in Iran and whether their discontent poses a threat to the regime, read our analysis of last year’s protests and our forecast of how they might play out this year. Here you can read more about Iran’s morality police. Our recent film asks whether Iran is on the verge of a revolution.
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