Eschew Obfuscation

"Lipstick Jihad" by Azadeh Moaveni

Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:29:00 GMT

In Lipstick Jihad, Azadeh Moaveni provides a fascinating view of the complexities facing the new generation of Iranians living in modern Tehran. Americans are not often exposed to anything more from Iran than crazy ayatollahs shouting angry diatribes against the West, so this is an important book that provides a more realistic view of what life is really like in Iran and how people are attempting to live normal lives against the backdrop of a violent religious police, the continual repression of women, a corrupt and ineffectual government as well as all the splendors, culture, family ties and stumbles towards modernism that makes up the sum of Iran.

Yet while this book is autobiographical and subtitled “A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran”, Azadeh didn’t really open up and provide many intimate details that would really show who she really is. From the book cover I learned that she attended UC Santa Cruz and won a Fullbright Fellowship, but these fascinating details are not discussed in the book. She also spends a lot of time discussing the struggles her Iranians friends go through in trying to figure out their sexuality, and how the Iranian repression of women complicates that struggle, yet she refuses to release any but the tiniest details of her own. She also mentions that many people in Tehran suffer from depression, but only provides a small peek into her own struggle with depression when she mentions casually that she would sometimes stay in bed for days on end.

Writing this book took a lot of courage. Not only does she face the usual autobiographical problem of having her parents, relatives and friends learn things she would rather they not know, Azadeh also likely faced the additional danger of having everything she wrote in this book used against her by the terror police when she returns to Iran.

Yet Azadeh is a fascinating person and it was disappointing that she didn’t open up more so that we could get a better feel for who she really is as a person. She often talked about how she hated being forced to wear a veil in Iran, yet she veiled many details of her own person life so that it feels like we can only get surreptitious peeks at who she really is behind the veil.