What Ben Affleck’s ‘Argo’ Misses About Iran
You have to watch Argo in the South as I did, in Burke County, N.C. to be exact, to feel that revisiting the hostage crisis between Iran and the United States still touches a raw nerve. Here, people came to let an old, still-nagging wound soak in cinematic brine. The film’s sharp and witty lines landed in this theatre […]
How Blaming the West Hides a War on Women
The targeting of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girl shot nearly two weeks ago by a Pakistani Taliban assassin, brought back memories of my teenage years in Tehran, where theocratic zealots were similarly in control. The words of the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, had a chillingly familiar echo in my ears. A bullet had Malala’s […]
A Friend’s Tribute to Ambassador Chris Stevens: The Diplomatic Indiana Jones
“Eating on the floor of a house under the ground! The food was an interesting barley paste, covered with very hot tomato soup. Another adventure in Libya. How are you? C” How aptly four short sentences capture the ethos of a man, as these do of the late Chris Stevens in a Sept. 4 email. Chris, or […]
What Two Enemies Share
“IF a war were to break out between Iran and Israel, whose side would you be on?” someone asked me on Facebook a few weeks ago, when an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was reportedly imminent. From early adolescence, at the start of Iran’s 1979 revolution, my loyalties have so often been questioned that I’ve […]
Christopher Hitchens Eulogized by Roya Hakakian
In 1984, the year that, for those of us in Tehran, had every Orwellian quality, I befriended a Marxist activist who was on the run from the regime. I knew none of his coordinates, not even his name—on cloudy days, I called him “Gray,” on stormy ones, “Rain.” What drove me to brave the dangers […]
A Revolution On The Page: Finding Identity In Poetry
An immigrant’s arrival in America has a distinct physical beginning marked by the landing of one’s plane. But there’s another arrival, the cultural one, that’s incremental, perpetual. Of these latter sort of arrivals, the most memorable for me occurred nearly 20 years ago. I was still a new refugee, my heart’s gaze fixed upon all […]
How Iran Kills Abroad
On the night of Sept. 17, 1992, at 10:45, two darkly clad men burst in on a private dinner at a Berlin restaurant and stood over a table around which eight of Iran’s leading opposition figures were seated. The taller of the two intruders shouted: “You sons of whores!” Then he thrust his gloved hand into […]
Behold This Cliché: The Truth Shall Set You Free
“Behold This Cliché: The Truth Shall Set You Free.””Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. in a letter from his Birmingham, Alabama jail cell in 1963. Back then, the jury was still out on the state of blacks in America and there were many who read King’s words as […]
Egypt Through the Lens of Iran’s 1979 Revolution
Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I’ve begun talking to the living-room television. “Drop that hand!” I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: “How come we didn’t do that?” We, as in the […]
Queen Esther and the Bad Mullah: Roya Hakakian on being both Jewish and Iranian
What is most astonishing about the Iran of 2009 is how much, despite 30 years and the doubling of the population, it remains the Iran I knew as a teenager. I’d not find my way around Tehran, where the streets have been renamed and new roads have sliced into the heart of the city. But […]