Azadeh Moaveni, left, and Afschineh Latifi, right: unveiling Iran.
Photo: Stephen Osman/Los Angeles Times

Writing behind the veil
May 22, 2005

There is a growing number of books about the lives of women in the Middle East, says Anne-Marie O'Connor.

When Azadeh Moaveni travelled to Iran as an adult in 1998, a policewoman stopped her and her relatives at the door of a cinema and ordered the women to wipe off their lipstick. They obeyed, but immediately reapplied their lipstick inside. Moaveni learned that Iranian women were equally adept at arranging forbidden trysts with their boyfriends, watching Ally McBeal on forbidden satellite dishes, and engaging in the multiple daily acts of personal freedom that expressed their defiance of the myriad restrictions imposed on them by the Iranian Government.

This is the struggle, or "jihad", of Lipstick Jihad (Public Affairs, $42), the vivid memoir of the California-born Moaveni's time as a journalist among the so-called "lost generation" of young Iranians and their rebellion against the petty rules that symbolise the greater freedoms denied to them. The daughter of Iranian immigrants to the US, Moaveni moved to Tehran in 2000, donned a head scarf and reported as an insider among the women who attempt to outmanoeuvre the state-sponsored chauvinism that defines the boundaries of their lives.

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"The veil is something women put on every day. They're aware that under traditional Islamic law their status is confined," Moaveni, 28, said. "For men, it's a little more diffuse. There's nothing attached to their bodies every day to remind them of their lack of rights."

The Iranian women Moaveni got to know lived a curious paradox. When the shah was ousted in early 1979, female illiteracy was as high as 90 per cent in some rural areas. Since then, public education has made literacy near-universal for girls between 15 and 24. Female university students now outnumber males. But cultural obstacles leave qualified women even less opportunity in Iran's scarce job market than young men.

This is a generation that is all dressed up with nowhere to go. "I think that to be a young woman in this day and age is challenging anywhere," Moaveni said. "But a theocracy is particularly challenging: Women were supposed to be educated but subservient."

Lipstick Jihad is the latest of a number of recent books that explore the lives of Middle Eastern women, a trend that arguably started with Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Transworld, $22.95).

Some have become surprise bestsellers. Few saw the potential for a blockbuster in Azar Nafisi's 2003 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Hodder, $32.95) - an account of a women's book club that meets weekly to discuss literary classics as the rise of fundamentalism slowly eats away at their freedom. Another hit was Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, an intimate look at an Afghan patriarch who braves jail and the Taliban to provide schoolbooks and censored literature, but heads a family that treats its female members as little more than servants and condones the "honour killing" of a flirtatious young female relative. The book has been translated into 31 languages.

There is a raft of new books about Iran. In Journey From the Land of No (Crown, $22.95), Roya Hakakian chronicles how the hope and euphoria felt by many Iranians after the shah's ousting was converted to dread and foreboding as it became clear that they had traded monarchy for a life dictated by religious fundamentalists and their brutal enforcers. In Persepolis 2 (Jonathan Cape, $39.95), a comic-strip memoir, Marjane Satrapi tells how she returned from a lonely exile in Austria to an Iran where state-sanctioned chauvinism makes her doubt she has much of a professional future. In Even After All This Time (Regan Books, $39.95), Afschineh Latifi tells of her family's struggle to reunite in America following the 1978 revolution and the subsequent summary execution of her colonel father.

Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad is about her journey into the heart of the restless, irreverent Iranian "youthquake" that erupted from the tightly wound Iranian society, where about 60 per cent of the estimated 69 million people are now under the age of 30. When she returned to live in Iran, she found a country in which the years of official scolding in the name of religion had backfired. She discovered that the state-sanctioned sexual puritanism unwittingly had eroticised the society, keeping sex as much on people's minds as it was in the rhetoric of religious leaders and morality police.

State religious leaders had turned some people off Islam so much that they took refuge in New Age spiritualism, swamis and yoga. The demonisation of the "Great Satan"- the United States - made young Iranians eager to adopt superficial symbols of American culture as a way to flout their own government.

They were anything but ascetic: young people wanted Armani, ski trips, nose jobs. "The revolution created its own opposition," Moaveni said. "This generation grew up with education and some access to the outside world and the internet. It's politically engaged, savvy and capable of really smart opposition."

There is still, of course, a dark, thuggy underworld where some Iranians pay dearly for dissent and self-styled revolutionary morality enforcers called "Basiji" sweep up unlucky Iranians. Moaveni leads us into this world in Lipstick Jihad, describing the day she was picked up by the Basiji, who threatened to take her to intelligence officers with a reputation for raping women and beating people to death. But Moaveni was released safely.

She was lucky: In 2003, an Iranian-born Canadian journalist, Zahra Kazemi, 54, was beaten to death in custody after being arrested for taking photographs of students protesting against theocracy outside a prison in Tehran. Most Iranians, Moaveni concluded, are fed up with politics that "follow them into the bathroom and the bedroom", and would like to have a secular government.

"People are exhausted," she said. "The attitude is: how can we transform what we have now from within, in a peaceful way, without devastating the country?"

Some of the accounts, such as The Veiled Kingdom: Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia (Virago, $29.95) by Carmen bin Ladin, provide an insider's glimpse of a closed man's world. In The Kite Runner (Bloomsbury, $21.95), a best-selling work of fiction set in Afghanistan, an Afghan-born man, Khaled Hosseini, tells an intimate tale of two motherless boys in Kabul who are divided by a brutal cult of masculinity.

And some male authors are turning to female characters whose lives are a microcosm of the conflicts unfolding in their societies. In The Swallows of Kabul (Vintage, $23.95), a former Algerian army officer, Mohamed Moulessehoul - who is a guest at this month's Sydney Writers' Festival - adopted a female nom de plume, Yasmina Khadra, to tell the story of how the rise of the Taliban divides an Afghan husband and wife.

A man demoralised by the crumbling of his middle-class life under Taliban rule impulsively vents his feelings of humiliation by taking part in the stoning of a woman imprisoned.

His beautiful, liberal wife is appalled, and their confrontation sets off her imprisonment and an inescapable spiral of events.

- Los Angeles Times