Before reading “Lipstick Jihad” by Azadeh Moaveni, I had only a vague idea of what Iran really was. From reading the news reports in middle school right after 9/11, it sounded terrifying — another “axis of evil” country full of people who were supposed to hate Americans because of “The Simpsons” and our sex-obsessed culture.
I knew what Persia (the ancient name of Iran) was — a magical, exotic land where genies, ogres, princesses and hidden treasures abounded. I just had no way to reconcile the Persia from my bedtime stories with the threatening presence of modern Iran.
“Lipstick Jihad” changed all that. In this autobiography, Moaveni, an Iranian-American who grew up in northern California, describes moving back to Iran in her 20s. She longs for the Iran of her childhood stories, too, and heads back to Tehran to cover Iran’s capitol as a correspondent for Time magazine. In the Tehran of 2000, she finds neither the dreamy vista of Persia, nor the backward wasteland her expatriated relatives have convinced her exists.
Instead, she finds a city. The Iranians who didn’t flee after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 aren’t the soulless caricatures her Californian family members have depicted, nor are they the religious zealots American newspapers seemed to think populate the country. They’re just people.
Moaveni’s parents had left Iran around the time of the Revolution, and hadn’t been back since. When she told them she wanted to go back to Tehran, they were convinced that “torture and certain death” awaited her. They thought that most of the people who had stayed behind were complicit in the Islamic takeover of the country.
Some of her relatives’ warnings were true. Moaveni describes how a friend was once punished because Moaveni had inadvertently left a bottle of wine in his car. Another time, Moaveni was beaten when the regime-sanctioned police started to disperse a crowd celebrating a national soccer team victory. Public whippings for offenses such as playing Western music or drinking alcohol were common.
Still, life went on. The Iranians whom Moaveni met in Tehran weren’t exactly anti-Western. The toy of choice for little girls? Barbie. One of the biggest draws for Iranian-American tourists? Relatively cheap plastic surgery. One of the most popular stores in Tehran? A homemade Victoria’s Secret (American companies are banned from doing business in Iran; someone had bought an entire store’s worth of Victoria’s Secret merchandise and set up shop on their own).
More than anything, “Lipstick Jihad” is the story of how young Iranians started to take back their country.
In the book, Moaveni describes how during her tenure in Tehran, things got better. When she first arrived in Iran, women were required to wear dark, “banal and anonymous folds of cloth” whenever they went out in public. By the time she left, girls were venturing out in public in bright clothing with bared toes.
“The laws never changed,” Moaveni writes. “Parliament never officially pardoned color, sanctioned the exposure of toes and waistlines. Young women did it themselves, en masse, a slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance.”
Moaveni’s book is also an act of defiance. In it, she dares to criticize the hypocrisy of the ruling clerics (one of whom asked her for a “temporary marriage” — basically, a one-night stand). She also criticizes her handlers from the Ministry of Information — the people who interrogate her repeatedly try to make sure she doesn’t report anything too critical of Iran’s rulers.
Moaveni’s story showed me what it’s like to be the Other. In America, she’s seen as Iranian, and sometimes treated as an “axis of evil” crony. In Iran, she’s seen as American, and often treated as a decadent, godless Westerner. Her book cuts through each country’s stereotypes to present a better view of the real people who inhabit them.
Now, in a time when Iran might be on the verge of gaining nuclear capabilities, it’s more important than ever to go beyond those stereotypes. Moaveni’s book reveals that the “axis” country of Iran isn’t just a land of mullahs and mosques — it’s a land of people just like us.