Smash hit

(Written in direct response to the previous post) Dear Mr Baakereh,

The day we don’t have to wear the veil, Iranian women will shed five kilos of excess gear. These Korean factories that annually produce millions of metres of black fabric for export to Iran (and that sell nowhere else in the world) will go bankrupt . . . We will live in a more colourful land . . . Women will pay more attention to their figures . . . If we get hot, we’ll wear short sleeves, and a coat if we get cold. We’ll go out as we dress at home . . . If a person cannot trust his wife or girlfriend to go out without the veil, freedom will not be the problem: they have serious trust issues . . .

We are no different from the free men and women of the world . . . if we were free we would not be so culturally obsessed with the lower parts of our bodies.

We know how to think, how to educate ourselves, how to work hard and improve ourselves. If we had free choice, people who still believed in the veil could wear it and those who don’t wouldn’t. As a society we would learn to respect other people’s viewpoints and not ridicule them for being backward for wearing the veil and we would learn how to avert our eyes. It comes back to reforming ourselves and not restricting others.

Email golku81@yahoo.com

http://golku.blogspot.com

Although they are discriminated against, Iranian women continue to play a considerable role in everyday life. However, this cannot be explained through recourse to a much-used Western media paradigm of brave, heroic women subjugated by a post-9/11 caricature of a brutal Muslim male . . . Reading the intimate online commentaries of Iranians, we are sometimes granted a rare glimpse of life beyond the crude stereotypes.

January 1, 2003

To my wife on our 16th wedding anniversary: we have struggled yet we have survived . . . we have been humiliated, but we have not lost our dignity . . . Do you remember when we were first married? We rented this room in south Tehran and had to share a toilet with the landlord .

Do you remember the time our son was born . . . through all that bombing and war . . . in that climate of death we built a new life . And the evening our daughter was born . . . With two kids and work, you still went to university and you were top of your class . . . I said all this stuff so you know that I haven’t forgotten . . . our mutual troubles, growth and love can never be destroyed.

shabah@shabah.org

http://www.shabah.org

© Nasrin Alavi 2005. Extracted from We Are Iran, to be published by Portobello Books on Monday, £12.99.

Available from The Times Books First for £11.69 with free p&p; 0870 1608080