Watching 9/11 taught me, a refugee, the visceral lessons of Americanness
On Sept. 11, 2001, I watched through tears as ash fell over the city that had so unceremoniously taken me in as a refugee 15 years earlier. Like all Americans, I was mourning the dead, the pierced skyline, the bereft mood of a people whom I had never seen bereft. But I was also mourning […]
Iran’s Killers in Our Midst
The two people who knocked on our door in late August 2019 stuck out in the neighborhood like sore thumbs. In rural Connecticut, where tank tops and flip-flops are the vogue, no one shows up at someone’s door on a summer afternoon dressed in the gray suit and black leather shoes of a federal employee. […]
A U.N. farce has tragic implications for feminist activists in Iran
Last week, the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women. The commission defines itself as “the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.” Beginning next year, for four years, this entity will include one of the […]
What does community mean in the 21st century?
Community certainly doesn’t mean what is used to mean. As our world becomes more globalized, communities that define themselves based on geographical, tribal or racial kinship will run the risk of falling prey to dangerous ideologies. As democracies lose momentum, these same communities may resort to authoritarian forces in the interest of “survival,” which means that […]
Unveiling Iran
On December 27, 2017, a thirty-two-year-old woman climbed atop a utility box on a busy Tehran block called the Revolution Street. People usually do not clamber on street furniture in Tehran, but this particular sight was odder still for its being a woman with a stick in her hand. Perfectly focused on her task, once she found […]
Why Iran’s execution of Ruhollah Zam should be seen as a warning in the West
On 12 December 2020 an execution took place in Iran that was like no other, even for a country that has the second highest known number of state-sponsored executions in the world. Everything about it – who the victim was and how and why he was apprehended, tried and hanged – holds critical insights for foreign policymakers in the US, […]
Iranian women are staging an offensive against sexual abuse. It’s long over-due
For the past 42 years, Iran’s clerical leadership has defended the regime’s harsh Islamic dress code by claiming that mandatory wearing of the hijab is women’s best defense against men’s sexual advances. Yet over the past few weeks, Iranian women have offered up a devastating rebuttal of that claim — by coming forward to accuse […]
We immigrants owe a great debt to the African American struggle for equality
A few days after I arrived as a refugee in America in 1985, when I was 18, relatives already living here came to take me sightseeing. My mother and I had resettled in New York, and naturally my relatives wanted to show me the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Instead, I wanted […]
He chose jail over disowning his sister – set an example for all his countrymen
Last fall, Iranian authorities arrested Alireza Alinejad, a 45-year-old father of two, who has not broken any laws, not even according to the officials who jailed him. There would be nothing newsworthy about yet another unwarranted arrest in Iran, except that this one involves an unusual story of familial love, with a brother making a […]
There are two types of hijabs. The difference is huge
In an interview for the April issue of Vogue Arabia, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said, “To me, the hijab means power, liberation, beauty and resistance.” As two women who once lived with the mandatory hijab in Iran, we hope to bring another perspective to this complex matter by describing our experiences.There are two vastly different kinds of […]