For a society that prides itself especially on openness to ideas and freedom of speech, this episode is postively perverse. It was described originally in the Christian Science Monitor by Farzaneh Milani, a native of Iranian who is director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia.
Shirin Ebadi - a human rights lawyer and one of Iran's first women judges - is however, forbidden to publish her memoirs in the United States because of a trade embargo against three countries: Sudan, Cuba and Iran. Coming from a land that has no exact equivalent for the term "to sue," the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate is suing the American government. Challenging the regulations imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ebadi calls the ban "a critical missed opportunity both for Americans to learn more about my country and its people from a variety of Iranian voices, and for a better understanding to be achieved between our two countries."
Ebadi has a point. Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of new titles made available to the American reading public every year are translated works. Furthermore, with no official relations with the Iranian government, with new prohibitions on direct access to the people, with travel and tourism virtually stopped, it is hard for Americans to see Iran beyond the headlines. Misunderstandings and misperceptions are rampant.
In spite of its long history of cooperation and friendship with the U.S., which was interrupted by the 1979 revolution, especially the hostage crisis, Iran is represented as an intractable enemy. Its dominant image now is that of a country-turned-jailer; a country taking Americans, no less diplomats and emissaries, hostage.
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For well over a century, women have been a moderating, modernizing force in Iran with Shirin Ebadi as one of its most articulate and successful representatives. Her voice, like Sheherazade's, is a beacon of hope and temperance. It should not be silenced. It ought to be heard.
Our friend the Brooding Persian would agree with the importance of women to Iran's ancient past and future, with a somewhat different take in his recent post "Warrior Woman." And the past generally helps put present in perspective. I mean, who can really be surprised by the existence of warrior women knowing what woman in Iran have done and continue to do every day. It must be in the genes!The Persian's post is full of great links to materials about Iranian women both past and present. I was especially taken by his recommendation of the author of a forthcoming book dealing with gender and modernity in Iran, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards : Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, by Afsaneh Najmabadi.
As I have said before,... Iranian women are poised to take the helm of this nation in a dazzling sort of way. They are the one consistently belligerent group incessantly challenging boundaries and refusing to be cowered.
The issue of identity and modernity, and the gender dimension of identity , is a recurring theme in a number of publications about Iran. Another book to be published early in 2005 is reviewed in Beirut's Daily Star. Portrait Photographs from Isfahan : Faces in Transition, 1920-1950 is a collection of several hundred photographs from the period, assembled by Iranian artist, academic and activist Parisa Damandan.
[The book] focuses on a tight but tumultuous time frame, when Iran was undergoing rapid social, political and economic transformation. Damandan, who was born in Isfahan and remembers her own early experiments with having her picture taken by a professional photographer, returned to her hometown to find evidence of the old studios and commercial practices that once flourished in the ancient city.As an interesting aside, the Persian has also been concerned about the problem of Iranian writings being blocked from publication in the US. In this case, the focus was on poetry.
The book resulting from her research reveals as much about how photographers worked in the first half of the 20th century as it does about how people in those times saw themselves, how they constructed their identities before the camera and, in turn, how the identity of a nation took shape, fell apart and reformed against a backdrop of industrialization, modernity, political change and looming revolution and upheaval.
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[In addition to telling the story of individual photographers] Damandan adds the story of a city, a country and a people. The book is full of surprises - cross-dressing women, Isfahan's community of Russian prostitutes and the flood of Polish refugees who took up temporary residence in Iran during World War II. And it captures telling evidence of changing times - women casting off and taking up the veil, the significance of gymnasiums as a social space in men's lives, family configurations, gender roles at social events and the growth of industry (textile factories, workers on strike) that is evident both on the landscape and in the photographs themselves.
In addition to Damandan's narrative, "Portrait Photographs from Isfahan" includes essays by Iranian writer Reza Sheikh (who looks at the relationship between portraiture and democracy) and Dutch writer Josephine van Bennekom (who explores the differences between and encounters among Iranian and European portraiture).
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