I'm counting books I complete in 2011 as going towards my list, so even if I start a book in 2011 but don't finish it until 2012, it doesn't count.
"Honeymoon in Tehran" by Azadeh Moaveni is the followup to her first memoir "Lipstick Jihad", a memoir about Iran and a young female journalists search for her culture, faith and a place to call home. In the first memoir she was forced from Iran due to the Bush administration grouping Iran into the "axis of evil", it made it impossible for an American journalist to do her job properly.
At the beginning of "Honeymoon" she's living in Cairo, and flies occasionally into Iran to investigate stories for "Time" magazine. She's asked to cover the election in which Ahmadinejad was elected. She describes the shock of everyone on his election, the supreme underdog that no one knew anything about.
Prior to the election, the women were still required to wear chador, but women were allowed vibrant colors and designer scarves. The government "tolerated a grassroots women's movement of considerable vigor..a society with 90% female literacy, whose women received 60% of the college degrees awarded each year."
Surprising when we view Iran as one of the countries that are so oppressive to women; not that I'm saying they're perfect, especially now.
Post Ahmadinejad, most of the "freedoms" that the more moderate presidents of years past allowed or turned a blind eye toward have been taken away. Over the course of a few days in 2007, 150,000 women were arrested for improper dress. From 2006 through the present authorities will randomly kick down peoples satellite dishes, and round up their pet dogs because they are "unclean". These are just a few of the things that Ms. Moaveni discusses in her book.
It's a lot like her first book in the sense that she exposes some misconceptions about the Iranian people as a whole; mainly that the majority are not fundamentalist Muslims that want to kill all Americans but instead people that are not that different from you and me. They try to provide better lives for their children than the ones they have had, they want to get married, have children, successful careers, access to the arts, to trashy TV. If you wonder why these people stay, the answers range from the inability to afford moving, to the frustration that they shouldn't have to leave the country to make good lives for themselves. Believe it or not, people love this place, they've built lives here and it's heartbreaking for them that their government makes it so difficult to live in a place they love.
It's this that Moaveni shows with such candor and sensitivity. She loves her family and friends in Iran, she loves Iran even; the country of haunting Persian poetry, citrus scented orchards, beautiful mountain ranges, people of humor and charm who love and accept her. You can feel her sadness as she has to realize that all these things can't overcome the daily humiliation and restrictions of the theocracy of Iran.
As the title implies, she marries a man whom she meets in Iran who, like her, was raised outside of Iran after the revolution of 1979. He shares much of her frustration but none of her romanticized acceptance of Islam, which she learned at the knee of her grandmother in the sunny suburbs of Southern California.
I learned much about the society of Iran through her troubles acquiring a simple marriage license after she and her soon to be husband found themselves expecting a baby. She was terrified the morality police would find out she was unwed and beat her until she either died or miscarried or both. Once they were married and the baby was born a whole new set of problems showed themselves, such as proper vaccines, not being able to take her son out for a walk due to the pollution, parks that were over run with "hoodlums" and the nagging question of how to raise a free thinking young man in a country that more than frowned upon it.
This book was an eye opener, just as much as the first one and I recommend everyone read it. The information is sound, much more than you'd find almost any media outlet (especially Fox news). In this day and age, where the Middle East is so important and yet only partial truths are offered in our media, I believe the point of view of someone who's lived there among it's people, had contact with politicians, mullahs, scholars, musicians and reformers is invaluable to us.
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