Working Class and Female in Iran
March 10, 2010 by Mandana
Filed under Featured, People on the Move
Read this article by Setareh Sabety, an Iranian-American writer and poet, who has been featured on touchIRAN in previous articles as well.
To mark International Women’s Day, I decided I should write about three Iranian women whom I came to know well when living in Iran just before Ahmadinejad’s first term. The three of them worked for me as housekeepers or babysitters and my knowledge of their lives is limited to our employer-employee relationship and class differences. But we spent a lot of time together and often our talks and interactions were more intimate than those I had with women I knew socially. For whatever it is worth I thought that I should expose the lives of three very ordinary Iranian women from different backgrounds and different sensibilities. This is for them.
Shahin khanoom was a portly and feisty woman in her 40s who loved to eat and talk. She lived in Karaj with her husband and two children. Her husband, who used to be employed in a factory, was now too old and sick to work. Shahin khanoom was a good cook and experienced housekeeper. She was literate and looked forward to her Koran classes. She wore a black chador which was always dirty, was an active member of her mosque and was devoted to the Mahdi whom she swore to every other sentence. Shahin khanoom was not overly devout, at least around us, never really proselytizing and more concerned about making a living than the nuances of Shiite Islam. She was very friendly and managed to charm any guest in our house into giving her a good tip. Shahin khanoom knew everyone in our neighborhood of high rise apartments and was the one everyone came to when looking for help. She found jobs for many of her friends and relatives. She feigned love for my children the way only Iranian nannies do with shameless conspicuousness that may be partially fake but is comforting nonetheless.
Shahin khanoom came to me in tears one day. Her daughter had just finished her high school and was taking English and a computer literacy course. She had found a good suitor, a rich boy from the neighborhood but did not have enough money for a dowry and could not possibly agree to the match for fear of losing face that the lack of a proper dowry would surely cause. So, I set out to collect money from friends and family to add to my own contribution and gave it to her. She told me she would buy a fridge and other household musts for her beloved daughter. I told her I would love to attend the ceremony. She promised to invite us all, to the delight of my own eight year old daughter.
When several weeks passed, I asked Shahin khanoom about her daughter’s wedding plans and was told that the suitor had reneged. I was very upset for the poor girl and assured Shahin khanoom that another prospective husband would soon surface. A few days later her daughter came to pick her up and I ran into her in the lobby and noticed that she had had a nose job! I soon realized that the dowry money was really meant to be used for a nose job. I was going to bring it up to let her know that I had discovered her lie but decided not to when the next day Shahin khanoom came to me crying. Her husband had become angry when she, coming home from work, had cooked a dish that he hated and her son loved. He had thrown the dish at her and hit their son before storming off. Whether or not the story was meant to deter my anger at her or not I decided to comfort her and forgive her the lie about the dowry. A nose job, after all, was fast becoming as important prerequisite for marriage as a dowry in Iran.
Shahin achieved her dream of opening a hairdressing salon after two years of working for us. Only to close the salon just six months later because she was losing money. When she left to open her salon Shahin khanoom introduced her sister-in-law to replace her.
Fatemeh was in her early thirties, illiterate with the accent of her native Kerman. Her husband, Shahin khanoom’s brother, was an opium addict who ate opium because it was cheaper than smoking it. He worked in a shoe store belonging to another relative but did not make enough to support his habit far less his four year old son and wife. So they had decided that he should stay home and take care of their four year old son who was still too young to attend public school. Fatemeh khanoom had no experience as a house keeper but was hard working and proud. She lived in the outskirts of Karaj further from the capital than Shahin khanoom in a rented house whose toilet was a shack at the bottom of the yard. She left her home early in the morning walking down an often muddy road and taking two buses to get to our house. She never missed a single day’s work and was, unlike Shahin khanoom, very honest with a work ethic that seemed to belong more to New England than Kerman.
One day she came to work with her young and incredibly precocious son. She told me that her husband had been unable to score opium the day before because she had refused to give him money. Going through withdrawal the addict husband, one of many thousands in Iran, had taken it out on the boy and beaten him. I told Fatemeh Khanoom she could bring the boy to work every day if she wanted. Once a month I would ask the husband, who was skinny and frail, to come and wash windows or do some other job so that I could pay him something too. Fatemeh khanoom never again refused to pay for his opium. He was not a bad man, we had come to agree, but he was an addict who like many could not quit. When I asked Fatemeh khanoom why she did not divorce him for he was useless and abusive to boot, she told me that she would lose face in her village if she went back for her yearly Nowrouz (Iranian New Year) visit without her husband. When I asked her was it better to have an addict for a husband than none at all she told me the men in her family all smoked opium (Kerman produces the best quality of opium in the world and Kermanis are known to have a penchant for smoking it). But even if her relatives where not opium smokers it was better to keep one’s husband even if he was a murderer than walk around with the stigma of divorce. When I told her then I should probably never visit her village she told me having money changed everything and I would quickly be forgiven and have many suitors! While in Iran I often saw how money could dissolve the most rigid of religious and traditional strictures.
Roya was the first woman I employed when I returned to Iran after twenty some years in 2002. Roya khanoom was in her early twenties, a student in the last year of accounting at Tehran Azad University. Her father had been the driver of a friend’s dad before the revolution. A pretty, energetic and smart girl, she was the eldest of four sisters. She performed her prayers and fasted during Ramadan but did not believe in the hijab, which she took off the minute she got inside the house regardless of the presence of unrelated men. Her father who was a fast-talking north Tehrani from Gholhak was a kind of jack of all trades who broke his fast with a shot of iced vodka that I would give him when he came around sometimes for iftar (breaking of fast after sun down). Her sister was studying English at the University in Rasht and was in love with a boy that she was secretly dating but whom she could not marry, according to tradition, until her older sister, Roya, had married.
Roya and I became very close since I was going through a difficult second marriage and she was always having boyfriend problems. She was very open-minded and hated the mullahs in power. She was, like the rest of us, very disappointed with Khatami and watched satellite Iranian television broadcasts from Los Angeles and Dubai. Like most young people I met when I lived in Iran her biggest dream was to leave. She loved clothes and makeup and spent the part of her salary which she did not give to her father on grooming. She was hard working and dedicated, a veritable manager who was running my household the second week on the job. Roya was extremely articulate and a great debater making me joke that she should study Fegh (religious law) in Qom.
She had a fiancee whom she loved. They had been dating for two years. He was a college graduate and worked for the Ministry of Commerce. It was important for Roya that her husband be at least as well educated as her. She had turned down a rich bazaari suitor for that very reason. She argued with me that a husband who is not as educated as his wife would end up resenting her. A husband feeling intellectually inferior to a wife was fatal to a marriage according to the wise beyond her years Roya. The pragmatism of women that I met in Iran, young and old, never ceased to shock me.
Finally a date had been set for her wedding after much bickering between the two families regarding the number of guests and responsibility for costs. A wedding in Iran is a serious business transaction. The price of the Mehr (or bride price) is of utmost importance. As Roya’s dad explained to me, “I have to ask for a high Mehr because if the boy turns out to be rotten who do I go to get my daughter’s reputation back?” The Mehr, (which can be cashed any time after the wedding) which I initially abhorred as putting a price tag on the woman in a marriage, actually saved Roya from the fate of Fatemeh khanoom.
The morning of the wedding Roya and her family went to the notary to sign the wedding contract but her fiancé did not show up. A few days later a distraught Roya came to me in tears. The fiancee who had managed to hide his heroin addiction had had an overdose and had been taken to the hospital a few days before. The boy’s father, afraid that the marriage would not last long and that the high bride-price would be demanded once the bride and her family found out, forced him to leave Roya waiting. If it had not been for the Mehr she would have been married to an addict which was surely worse than the pain and humiliation she had to endure for being stood up.
When Ahmadinejad got elected I moved from Iran leaving behind my own bad marriage. I have tried to keep in touch with the three women. Fatemeh works for my mother now and her husband is still at home although her son goes to school and gets straight A’s. Since I have moved she has been forced out of her rented houses five times. With the high price of rent she still does not have a place with a bathe or shower. With the high price of goods she can only feed her family as much meat as my mom buys for her. Her husband still eats opium and sleeps most of the day. Shahin khanoom’s husband passed away, she married a rich Haji, and is an active supporter of Ahmadinejad at her mosque according to her sister in law. Roya went on to get a job at a company after she graduated. She makes half of what she made as a babysitter and housekeeper but it was better position to have for her reputation and for finding a husband. More than seven years on she is still not married. On the phone recently Roya told me that she had never recuperated from being stood up. In her neighborhood, amongst family and friends she had lost face. She asked me if I could get her a visa and help her to leave “this hell.”
Follow Setareh Sabety on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SetarehSabety
Setareh’s article was originally posted here.
Iranian Actress, Golshifteh Farahani, Talk About Art, Life & Fears of Returning Home
February 3, 2010 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
She has starred in films banned by the Iranian authorities, played in a rock band and made it to Hollywood. This year, she plays one of the leading roles in the new Iranian film “About Elly,” Iran’s official entry to the foreign category of the Academic Awards. At age 26, award-winning Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani is undoubtedly one of the Islamic Republic’s most famous cinematic exports, but the actress is afraid to return to her beloved homeland for fear of repercussions.
“Of course, it would be great to go back to Iran, but only if I knew I would be allowed to leave again. And if I knew I would be allowed to work. If I returned now, I think I wouldn’t be able to come out of Iran for at least two years. And I don’t think I’d be allowed to work,” Farahani said in a recent interview with the National, an English-language daily based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Having starred in tens of films since the late 1990s, Farahani now lives in Paris with her French-born husband, Amin Mahdavi, a film director. She sarcastically compares their life abroad to living like “gypsies,” a stay that began in 2009 after Farahani’s role in Ridley Scott’s 2008 action spy flick, “Body of Lies.”
In the movie, she plays the Jordanian nurse Aisha, who comes to be the love interest of an American spy on a mission in the Middle East, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The film marked the first time an Iranian actress starred in a Hollywood production since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
But the controversial plot and Farahani losing her veil in more than one scene in the film 
apparently brought her troubles with the Islamic Republic’s conservative film industry.
Around the release of the film, rumors surfaced about Farahani being banned from leaving Iran.
She confirmed those rumors in her interview with the National.
“The rumor was right, but the timing was wrong,” she said. When she came back to Iran after she had finished shooting the film, she got her passport confiscated. “For seven months I didn’t say anything,” she added.
In October last year, Iranian news reports said Deputy Culture Minister for Cinematic Affairs Javad Shamaqdari insisted that Farahani’s travel ban had been lifted and that she could continue her work in Iran.
“There is no problem preventing Farahani from continuing her career in the country,” said Amin Tarokh, the spokesman for Iran’s House of Cinema.
Judging from Farahani’s remarks to the National, however, it appears as if she doesn’t entirely believe those claims.
Farahani’s appearance in “Body of Lies” was not the first time the actress starred in a film that was given a thumbs down by censors.
In 2000, she appeared in the Iranian film “Haft Parde” (”Seven Acts”), which was banned. In 2007, she played the wife of a drug addict in “Santouri” (”The Music Man”), which also did not make it past the censorship authorities.
But when it comes to censorship, it’s all about finding a way around it, Farahani said. As an Iranian artist, you get used to living with it.
“That’s how we live. You just have to find a way. You are a director and they’ve banned your movie, but you still do it. You go to a party and you don’t know whether the police are going to come or not, but you still go. That’s why Iranians are good survivors,” she said.
In her most recent movie, Farahani plays the role of Sepideh in Asghar Farhadi’s film on middle-class life in Iran, “About Elly,” or “Darbareye Elly.” The film has proved a success in Iran and been nominated for several awards in the country’s annual film festival.
Farahani’s interview comes as Tehran’s biggest cultural event of the year, the Fajr Film Festival, is hit by a string of cancellations and pullouts by foreign as well as local filmmakers and artists. Several of the foreign film and theater directors have openly stated that they’ve chosen not to attend the event because of pleas from a group of Iranian artists to boycott the festival in light of government crackdowns on the opposition.
Swedish film director and professor Hilda Hellwig recently joined the legions of foreign artists who have chosen to boycott the event. Scheduled to be on one of the jury panels in the festival, Hellwig told the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter that it was a “painful dilemma” for her to take the decision, especially because she’s generally against boycotting art.
“It’s really a painful moral dilemma. A theater festival of this kind in a dictatorship is a window to the world. … I am in principle against boycotting art. Theater serves as a sanctuary and can play a crucial role in resistance movements … [but] I cannot ignore that a number of international cultural figures also chose to boycott on the appeal of the Iranian colleagues,” she told the paper.
– Alexandra Sandels in Beirut
Photos: Top, Golshifteh Farahani at the premiere of “Body of Lies.” Credit: Agence France-Press. Bottom, “About Elly” is Iran’s official to the Academy Awards this year. Credit: Dreamlab Films.
Source: LA Times blog
Iranian Women Gain Momentum & Become the Regime’s Biggest Threat
January 18, 2010 by Mandana
Filed under Featured, People on the Move
Iranian security forces recently beat and arrested some 30 “mourning mothers” holding a peaceful weekly vigil in a Tehran park to demand news of their sons and daughters who had been killed, disappeared or detained in the unrest following June’s disputed presidential election.
The shocking scene encapsulated an acute quandary for the regime. It has a tight grip on the levers of repression – but one of the most potent threats it faces comes from unarmed women protesting peacefully.
The authorities feared female activism long before the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, viewing women’s demands for equal rights as inseparable from a wider drive for greater democracy.
“If the regime accepts the principle that women have equal rights, it has to revise and re-think its entire ideology, which is based on the pre-modern interpretation of Islamic law,” Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a senior research associate and legal anthropologist at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said.
As a social movement, women’s groups have been the most organised and vibrant movement in Iran for at least five years. The regime fears their proven ability – as it does that of university student movements – to galvanise and appeal to the country’s youth with a nationwide network of activists.
“They [the authorities] are worried that mobilisation on the basis of gender issues … may generate political alliances that end up going beyond women’s rights and challenge the structure of the Islamic Republic in terms of unequal treatment of citizens in general,” said Farideh Farhi, a renowned Iran scholar at the University of Hawaii.
That is precisely what happened after Mr Ahmadinejad’s election. The women’s movement and the opposition are now inextricably enmeshed.
Anti-regime solidarity on the gender issue dealt the Iranian government an embarrassing setback last month. State-media claimed that a prominent student activist, Majid Tavakoli, had dressed as a woman to escape arrest after delivering a diatribe against the regime during demonstrations on National Student Day.
The regime derided the activist, who had previously been jailed for 15 months, as a coward denying his manhood. But male opposition supporters wittily subverted the regime’s gender prejudices by posting photographs on Facebook of themselves sporting Islamic headscarves.
Their “be a man campaign” was designed to show both solidarity with a hero of the student movement and with Iran’s women, who are obliged by the authorities to wear the hijab in public.
The wives of prominent political prisoners have, meanwhile, posted loving open letters on the internet to their menfolk, while urging the regime to release them.
Vindictively, in a bid to silence prominent dissidents, the regime has arrested female members of reformist families, who often are uninvolved in politics. The authorities recently detained the sister of Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s Nobel peace laureate who has been abroad since the June election, speaking out against the regime’s human rights abuses.
The regime’s clampdown on female protesters has generated highly damaging publicity. The harrowing, on-camera dying moments of Neda Afgha Soltan, 26, a philosophy student shot dead by a basij militiaman during a peaceful demonstration, made her a worldwide symbol of the opposition movement.
“Their very visible crackdown against women has been immensely counter-productive. As one activist said to me, ‘even when we demonstrated against the Shah we never saw women being beaten in the face’,” said Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at St Andrews University in Scotland.
The violent repression of women protesters is further de-legitimising the regime and straining the loyalty of security forces. It leaves the authorities “open to questioning on the part of the supporters of the government who have traditionally seen themselves and the Islamic Republic as the ‘protectors’ of women and their ‘motherly virtues’,” Ms Farhi said in an interview.
Hadi Ghaemi, the Iranian-born director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York and Netherlands-based NGO, said the regime believes that “by detaining and prosecuting the women’s rights activists it will prevent a larger number of women coming to the streets – which is the [government’s] real nightmare”.
He added: “I’ve seen what are claimed to be tough memos from within the intelligence services talking about one of their priorities being keeping women out of the demonstrations.”
Haleh Esfandiari has personal experience of the regime’s paranoia about Iran’s women activists. The Iranian-born US academic and grandmother spent 105 days in solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in 2007.
Her interrogators were “alarmed and “befuddled” by Iran’s wome
n’s rights movement. But, she wrote, they also “told me they feared a backlash if they used excessive force to disperse female demonstrators”.
That was three years ago. “Now the gloves are off,” said Ms Esfandiari.
The clampdown, however, is failing. Women have been on the front-line of recent protests, braving beatings, injury, arrest and worse.
The regime has not learnt from experience. Repression failed to crush the most prominent women’s organisation, the “One Million Signatures Campaign”, a four-year-old grassroots movement that is collecting a million signatures for a petition pressing for legal reforms that would end discrimination against women.
While the 1979 Islamic revolution curbed their legal rights, it encouraged their education.
Women now outnumber men at universities, and are highly visible in the workforce as well in social and cultural circles.
Ironically, many women activists in jail come from pro-regime and conservative families, Mr Ghaemi said. “These young women are very much in opposition to their own parents’ way of thinking.”
mtheodoulou@thenational.ae
by Michael Theodoulou, Foreign Correspondent
Source: The National
Top 10 Heroes of 2009: Neda Agha-Soltan
December 9, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
Time Magazine released it’s Top 10 Everything list for 2009– on the Top 10 Heroes, none other than Neda Agha-Soltan was named the #2 Hero of 2009. Seeing Neda recognized for her boldness and fight for freedom makes me proud as an Iranian to know that the whole world has been able to see the beautiful people Iran struggle to be free from oppression. Neda is a beautiful example of the millions of other Iranians who want nothing more than basic Human Rights and Freedom for Iran. May we never forget to stop fighting and praying for the people of Iran.
Neda Agha-Soltan was an unintentional hero. On June 20, the 26-year-old Iranian had just stepped out of her car on a quiet side street near a clash between pro- and anti-government forces when a shot rang out, piercing her chest. Agha-Soltan’s bloody, panicked last moments, captured by a mobile-phone camera and uploaded to the Internet, turned into probably the most widely witnessed death in human history. Almost immediately, the philosophy student with little interest in politics became a symbol of the opposition movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s widely disputed re-election. In the days and weeks that followed, Agha-Soltan’s name became a battle cry for Iranian protesters, her face a symbol for the thousands of people who suffered under the government’s heavy-handed crackdown.
See The 2009 Top 10 Of Everything Here.
2009 Women of the Year: The Women Of Iran’s One Million Signatures Campaign
November 17, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under Featured, People on the Move
Glamour Magazine named The Women of Iran’s One Million Signatures Campaign as the 2009 Women of The Year.
The following article was published by Glamour & written by Carla Power, upon acknowledging this powerful group of Iranian women who have made an impact throughout the world!
Photographed by Raha Askarizadeh during a secret meeting in Tehran with the powerful group of female activists.
Watching the thousands of women who joined their peers to defy bullets and police batons in the streets of Iran this June, you’d never guess that each one’s life was, legally speaking, worth only half a man’s. Via shaky cell phone images on TV, viewers around the world saw slender arms raised in the air and green scarves slipping back on the heads of female marchers as they stood alongside men to demand a recount of what they insist was a rigged presidential election. They risked their lives—and some made the ultimate sacrifice, like 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, whose shooting rocked the Internet.
Yet few outside Iran realized that these brave women are denied the most basic rights. Examples abound: Their husbands can divorce them on a whim, demand that they live in polygamy or marry off their daughters at age 13. And if a girl as young as nine commits a capital crime—for example, killing a man who tries to rape her—she can be put to death.
June’s postelection fervor was called a women’s revolt by many, but Iranian women may have first found the courage to speak out thanks to an earlier movement: the One Million Signatures Campaign. For the past three years, members of the One Million Signatures initiative have pressed for women’s rights and have endured the constant threat of jailings and beatings as a result.
This quest for equality was born on June 12, 2006, when hundreds of protesters gathered in Tehran’s Haft-e-Tir Square to peacefully demonstrate against the legal restrictions they face. The police attacked them with pepper spray and billy clubs; by the end of the day, 70 people had been arrested. “We never imagined we’d be met with so much resistance,” recalls Sussaan Tahmasebi, a Tehran-based campaign member. “Our demands were so basic.”
But the demonstrators pressed on and devised a plan: They would gather a million signatures on a petition asking parliament to grant equal rights to women. The sheer number of names would prove that equality was the will of all Iranians. Geographic and security obstacles have prevented a complete tally of the signatures, but some estimates put the total so far in the hundreds of thousands.
Iran’s religious, conservative government sees the campaign as a real threat. Authorities have arrested more than 50 campaign members, who have been punished with everything from lashings to solitary confinement in prison. The group’s website has been shut down by the government 21 times. Members hold clandestine meetings in living rooms and basements, and activists say they are under constant surveillance and subject to phone taps. Nonetheless “some say that the campaign is a struggle, but I found the campaign is a chance,” Azadeh, a 30-year-old artist and activist from Tehran, e-mailed to Glamour. “It’s a chance for us to care about ourselves and change our situation.”
So members work below government radar, knocking on neighbors’ doors, or chatting to fellow passengers in shared taxis. Welcoming both men and women into its ranks, One Million Signatures draws support from blue-jeaned secular leftists and black-chadored religious conservatives alike. “Sometimes,” muses a 25-year-old male campaigner, “it will be an unlettered, religious old man who quickly agrees to sign.”
The eyes of the Muslim world especially are upon them, which represents both risks and opportunity. Azadeh sees only the latter. “It is a matter of living,” she says. “I would like to live in a free, equal and healthy society. To make such a society, we should take this responsibility. So I said to myself, ‘Come on! The stage is ready. Go and be in the spotlight!’”
Read the Original Article Here.
Show Your Solidarity With Iranian Students!
November 11, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
November 17, 2009 has been declared International Day of Solidarity with Iranian Students. Move4Iran.org and United4Iran.org have partnered together to give the global community a CALL TO ACTION.
Iranian students have been the voicing the views of an entire generation ever since this summer. Coming together and showing the rest of the world’s solidarity with these passionate students will let them know they are NOT ALONE.
Here’s what Move4Iran had to say about their vision and purpose for November 17th:
On November 17th, International Students’ Day, events will take place at universities across the world to demonstrate solidarity with Iranian students, academics and scholars. We will honor their bravery and struggles for basic human and civil rights.
Global solidarity continues to pressure the government of Iran and other governments in their relations 
with the government of Iran, in order to hold accountable those who have jailed, raped, tortured, and murdered the Iranians demanding their civil and human rights.
And although the mainstream media has failed to cover the ongoing struggle, it continues to exist in Iran.
Since the universities have opened in late September, Iranian students have again assumed a brave and active voice. Chants in dormitories and outcries in lecture halls, and on campuses throughout the country, occur regularly. One brave honor student voiced his grave concerns about the Supreme Leader while being broadcast nationally. On November 4th, Iranian High School Day, thousands were in the streets again in Iran knowing full well they were jeopardizing their lives and safety.
Join The Movement and Support The Students of Iran By Leaving a Video or Written Message That Will Be Collected, Organized and Published in a Book of Solidarity for Iranian Students to View.
A Few Simple Words Could Have A Lasting Impact For These Passionate Iranian Youth Who Are Risking Their Safety Everyday Just Because The Desire Freedom and Basic Human Rights.
Go Here Now and Leave a Message For The Youth of Iran!
HAMED HADDADI: 1st & Only Persian in the NBA!
November 10, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
Hamed Haddadi, born in Ahvaz on May 19, 1985, is the first and only Persian in the NBA. Haddadi started his basketball career in Iran, playing for the Iranian Basketball Super League with Paykan and Saba Battery.
Hamed now plays for the Grizzlies. Slam Online sat down with Hamed Haddadi and wrote an an informative article on Hamed, Basketball and Iran. Read it below…
Thirty years — almost to the day — after the hostage crisis made Iran a hated enemy in the eyes of most Americans, I saw a promotion at an NBA game that was a long time in the making: Iranian Heritage Night. Participants arrived early and in large numbers. About 800 people wore green t-shirts that were sponsored by the teams, the Warriors and the visiting Grizzlies.
Green has had a special significance to Iranians since this summer, when it became the symbolic color of pro-democracy demonstrations against a government that intimidated protesters with tactics such as shooting young women in the head. In an apolitical league – one that does business with plenty of fascist regimes – here was the unusual sight of two teams taking part in an overt political statement.
There was a troupe of brace-faced teens in traditional garb dancing before the lineups were announced. A Farsi-language pop star (wearing a green armband) sang the national anthem.
All of this occurred because of one man, and he was sitting at the end of the Grizzlies bench wearing street clothes. Hamed Haddadi is a 24-year-old second-year center who doesn’t get much playing time. He also happens to be the first and only Iranian national in the NBA.
I had lunch with Haddadi the afternoon of the game. Cramming his 7-2, 265-pound frame into a small San Francisco taxi – sharing the backseat with his manager and one of his buddies while I sat shotgun – we rode from the team’s hotel near the Museum of Modern Art to a meticulous Persian restaurant in Pacific Heights.
There we met an older man who was identified to me as a former Iranian basketball star, but who preferred not to give his name or to be quoted. In Iran, paranoia has a long tradition. He had an elegant manner that reminded me of a Southern gentleman.
Haddadi split last season, his first in the United States, between Memphis and its D-League associate in North Dakota. He understands English, but prefers to respond through a translator.
“A lot of places I would go to last year, people would approach me and say ‘where are you from?’ I would say, ‘Iran,’ and they wouldn’t know where it was, they hadn’t even heard of it,” he told me. “Now, they ask the same question but because of the elections and its ramifications being in the news, I don’t have to say where Iran is. I don’t have to repeat myself or explain.”
That’s the closest we came to discussing the situation in Iran. His manager (and translator for the day), Mayar Zokaei, had me on strict instructions not to discuss politics. Haddadi showed up for the team’s media day photo sessions wearing green wristbands and has been wearing them ever since, and together with Zokaei put together the Warriors event, but doesn’t want to be quoted talking about it.
To gain some perspective on this, I called up Reza Aslan. Aslan is an internationally known religious scholar, 
and when the major news networks need someone to analyze events in Iran, he’s the go-to guy. Aslan was born in Iran but came of age in the Bay Area. He understands Haddadi’s caution, but also thinks he’s crossed the Rubicon.
“Just think back to what happened in June to the veteran players of the Iranian national soccer team, including the team captain, who is arguably much more famous in Iran (than Haddadi),” Aslan said. “They wore green armbands during a match, and when they returned (to Iran), they were forced to retire. By no means is Hamed safe. When he goes back to Iran, associating himself so explicitly with the green movement could not only be dangerous to his career, it could quite possibly be dangerous to his life.”
Haddadi answered my questions thoughtfully, but he also has a funny side – he’s the type of guy who doesn’t care who the joke is on as long as everyone is laughing. At one point (with the older gentleman not there), Haddadi and his friends started speaking in louder and louder voices to each other, and burst out laughing every half minute or so.
Zokaei, a faithful translator, turned to me and explained with a straight face, “We’re talking about each other’s mothers’ cooking.”
When the food arrived it seemed good to my palate, but I haven’t eaten much Persian food. There was lots of rice and large helpings of meat, cooked in sauces that were flavorful without being spicy. Haddadi seemed to like it just fine, working his way through the family-style meal in between copious swigs of Coca-Cola.
Haddadi didn’t know yet that he would be deactivated for the game – he was told when the team arrived at the arena. His legion of fans didn’t seem to mind.
“He’s the first Iranian in the game, so it opens doors for us,” said Nima Jamnani, 17, who I met in the stands before the game. “It’s not about being a soccer fan or a basketball fan, it’s about backing up a fellow Iranian.”
After the game, the fans in green poured down toward the court for autographs and photos with Haddadi, who stayed with them until his team had to board its bus.
Aslan told me this level of loyalty is typical of the Iranian community. “I experience it all the time,” he said. “I do readings of my books sometimes, and my views on Iran are not exactly in alignment with a lot of Iranian-Americans, particularly the older generation. Yet my readings are filled with Iranians who will tell me to my face they disagree with everything I say, and then proceed to buy 10 books for their families. There’s something innate about the Iranian identity. It’s a 2,500-year-old national identity that Iranians take very seriously.”
Over lunch, I asked Haddadi if he felt the pressure of the entire Iranian-American community turning its eyes to him. The first word of his answer came back in clear English.
“Yes,” he said, before continuing in Farsi. “One-hundred percent I do. It’s kind of my civic duty to make these people who come support me happy, my countrymen. I do feel a pressure to play well because they’re there supporting me.”
I asked his closest friend on the team, point guard Mike Conley, what kind of potential Haddadi has. “He’s a very crafty big man with a lot of talent,” said Conley, who played college ball with Greg Oden. “You don’t see too many seven footers who can handle the ball the way that he does, and who can shoot and pass. He’s developing into a good player.”
When Haddadi first arrived in the States, it was Conley who drove him to practice and helped teach him English. Haddadi also took time to teach Conley. “He’s taught me some of his language,” Conley said, adding, “I know some bad words, too.”
Haddadi seemed conscious of his potential on the court and otherwise, but not arrogant about it. He said an 
infamous interview with an Iranian news agency, in which he was quoted as saying he was a star player, was a “misunderstanding.” Zokaei told me the agency asked Haddadi what it was like to be a star, and he self-effacingly replied, “Yeah, I’m the all-star who sits on the bench.” What was printed was very different.
As our lunch ended, Haddadi ordered some Persian tea. It was a black tea mixed with saffron and other spices I couldn’t name, and had a sweet, yet sophisticated smell. Haddadi lowered his head just over his glass, closed his eyes, and slowly filled his lungs with the aroma. He paused for a moment afterward and the rest of the table became quiet. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking of at that moment, but it seemed like too personal a question to ask.
I was left to imagine life in a faraway place with rich, ancient traditions, but where nothing can be taken for granted.
Read the Original Article By Irv Soonachan Here.
Iranian Fashion Designer, Miriam Heydari, Debuts Her Line @ DC Fashion Week
October 19, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
Iranians yet again are showing the world they are trend-setters! Fashionista and Designer, Miriam Heydari, debuted her new line at DC’s Fashion Week!
On her website, Miriam says this when sharing her vision and a little about herself, “When a woman repeatedly purchases a brand of clothing with a person’s name behind it , there is a degree of mystique, curiosity, and even assumption about the personality behind the name. Mariam Heydari has garnered a loyal following for more than 25 years. It is the personal touch, the attention to detail, and the unique styling that has led to Mariam success. Being in retail for 28 years I learned that clothing has to be comfortable, in motion and at rest. I like both for myself and my customers that each piece works together to produce a piece of art that provides long-lasting pleasure – a statement of individual style that will be worn with pride.
There is no mass production involved in Heydari. We like to provide our customer with clothes that set them apart from the crowd, but not in a shocking way. Through a process of layering fabric, manipulation, adding appropriate elements, discarding pieces that don’t work – or whatever it takes – the final vision is achieved. The result is satisfying for both myself and my customers.”
Check out an interview with her and see some of her chic designs here…
Visit Miriam Heydari on the web @ www.heydarishop.com!
Narges Kalhor, Daughter of Ahmadinejad’s Top Aide, Makes a Revolutionary Documentary
October 15, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
After Public Debut of Her Controversial Film, Narges Kalhor Fears Return to Iran
The daughter of one of Iran
ian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top advisers is seeking political asylum in Germany.
After attending the German film festival Perspective, which showcases documentaries and features with a human rights focus, 25-year-old Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor has applied for political asylum in Germany. Her father is Mahdi Kalhor, who is Ahmadinejad’s adviser on cultural affairs and a media spokesperson for the Iranian regime.
Narges Kalhor studied film and graphics in Tehran and had been working for an advertising firm in the city. She has made seven short films, one of which was shown as part of a special section on Iran during the Perspective film festival which took place in Nuremberg last week. Her film “Darkhish,” or “The Rake,” is an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story about torture in prison, “In The Penal Colony.”
Narges Kalhor was supposed to fly back to Iran on Tuesday. However on Monday afternoon she applied for political asylum in Germany instead.
She told SPIEGEL ONLINE in a telephone interview Wednesday that she had received several phone calls from Iran two days after the festival. “I was told that people in Iran knew about the film and that reports about it had appeared on the Internet in Farsi,” says Kalhor, who admitted she had not expected news of her appearance at the film festival to travel so far and so quickly.
“I was told that it would be better not to come home and that if I went back now I would be met at the airport by the secret police,” she said. “There were a lot of people at the festival who are against the Iranian regime. I did not have permission to make my film in Iran either.”
The film, which is critical of torture and was partially inspired by the protesters who were arrested after Iranian national elections in June, was filmed in a Turkish bathhouse that was made to look like a torture chamber. Kalhor, who also took to the streets in June to protest with friends, some of whom were arrested, has said she hopes that viewers see parallels between the film and the situation in Iran.
“If I went back it would be very dangerous for me. At least here I have security,” says Kalhor, who is currently sharing a room with a Kurdish woman in a refugee center near Nuremberg.
Kalhor told SPIEGEL ONLINE that she had left Iran without declaring her intention to attend the film festival. Even her mother, with whom she lived, had not known. As for her father, Kalhor says she has not been in touch with him for years. Mahdi Kalhor divorced Narges’ mother a year ago due to differences of opinion, some of which were political.
During her time in Germany, Kalhor was also interviewed by fellow Iranian film maker, Hana Makhmalbaf. The interview was conducted in Farsi and then posted on the Web site YouTube on Monday (see video above). According to a translation by writers at the Associated Press, Kalhor, wearing a green scarf — green being the color of the Iranian protest movement — says in the interview that she supports the opposition. She also says that she was certain her father had not seen her film nor knew where she was. “I came from my own desire, for cinema, and I have to continue,” she added.
Kalhor senior, who has been a close ally of Ahmadinejad for almost a decade, told the official Iranian news agency IRNA that he had been completely unaware of his daughter’s plans.
“This issue is one of the symbols of a media and soft war that the opposition has launched,” Mahdi Kalhor told IRNA. His daughter was being used by enemies of the regime for propaganda purposes, he said. Mahdi Kalhor, himself a former filmmaker, has in the past criticized films such as the Oscar-nominated animated feature “Persepolis,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007, for being anti-Iranian.
Asked whether she is worried about becoming a political cause celebre because of her father’s influential position in Iran, Narges Kalhor said: “I can’t do anything about that. Maybe I will have particular problems because of my father and his work for the regime. But I myself work privately.”
For the next three weeks, Kalhor will be staying in the refugee center. During that time, she will have three interviews with the German authorities to ascertain her status as an asylum seeker, the first of which is next week.
Should everything go well and she get permission to stay in Germany, Kalhor, who speaks German better than English, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that she would like to be able to tell her own story somehow, whether in film or words. “I would love to make more films and to be able to work in my chosen career. If I go back to Iran, I know I will never get to make any more films.”
“Anyway,” she concludes, “I have no options. I cannot go back to Iran.”
Here’s a video of Narges Kalhor, speaking in Farsi, talking about her recent film and situation…
October 15, 2009
Iranian Women’s Rights Activists Recognized With Courage Award
October 6, 2009 by Mandana
Filed under People on the Move
LONDON (Reuters) – A group of women who are risking imprisonment to collect one million signatures on a petition demanding greater women’s rights in Iran were presented on Tuesday with the Anna Politkovskaya award for courage.
The annual prize, presented in memory of the campaigning Russian journalist who was murdered three years ago in Moscow, is awarded by Reach All Women (RAW) in War, a human rights group which focuses on stopping violence against women in conflict situations.
“We gave them the award because they are an extremely brave and courageous group of women and they are really changing the society in Iran, which is extremely difficult,” RAW in War founder Mariana Katzarova told Reuters.
“They live a life of courage in the face of grave danger, just as Anna did,” added Katzarova, a Bulgarian who created the award after spending 15 years working in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya.
The One Million Signatures campaign, launched in 2006, aims to petition the Iranian parliament asking for the revision and reform of current laws which discriminate against women in Iran.
RAW in War says some campaign members have been imprisoned for acting against national security in Iran and disrupting public order, while others have been given suspended prison sentences.
Activists say women in Iran, while able to vote, drive cars and hold most jobs, are subject to discrimination that makes them second-class citizens in divorce, inheritance, child custody, legal matters and other areas of life.
ELECTION ISSUE
Leila Alikarami, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who has defended many cases involving campaign members, was accepting the award in London on Tuesday on behalf of the group.
“Iranian women have demanded equality for more than 100 years,” she said. “This prize will support those Iranians who are striving for equality of rights between men and women.”
Women’s rights became an issue during campaigning in Iran’s presidential election earlier this year. Two pro-reform candidates said they would seek to enhance the role of women in the Islamic state, but were beaten by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a contest they denounced as rigged.
Natalia Estemirova, the award’s first recipient and a close friend of Politkovskaya, was abducted in Chechnya and killed in July this year.
On the eve of the third anniversary of Politkovskaya’s murder, her family on Tuesday voiced doubts about the guilt of two men facing a retrial and about the Kremlin’s will to catch the main suspects.
By Kylie MacLellan
(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Original Article HERE.
