Laila Lalami

I became aware of Nasrin Alavi last summer, when I came across notices of her book, We Are Iran, a portrait of contemporary Iran through its (very dynamic) blog culture. The book was among a handful to be recommended by English PEN, and was also selected by Pankaj Mishra for the New Stateman Best Books of the Year list. We Are Iran was published this month in the United States by Soft Skull Press. Nasrin Alavi contributes a guest column on Moorishgirl today; she will also guest-blog on TEV this Thursday, December 8, so look for her there as well.

Iran: Then and Now
by
Nasrin Alavi

As Western leaders consider Iran’s referral to the UN Security Council over its nuclear activities, there is another, furtive Iran simmering behind the headlines.

Those who lived through the Iranian Revolution of 1979 are now a minority. Iran has one of the most youthful and educated populations in the Middle East. Her younger generation has been completely transformed through the Islamic Republic’s education policies of free education and national literacy campaigns. Seventy per cent are under thirty, with literacy rates of well over 90%, even in rural areas. Notably, last year, more than 65% of those entering university were women.

It is the voice of this educated youth that comes through loud and clear in the phenomenon that is the Iranian blogosphere. The internet has opened a new, virtual space for free speech in Iran, a country dubbed the “the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East”, by Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF). With an estimated 75,000 blogs, Farsi is now the fourth most popular language for keeping online journals. A blogger asks: “Has everyone noticed the spooky absence of graffiti in our public toilets since the arrival of weblogs?” Unlike the graffiti, Iran’s blogs are boundless and global. Only time will tell if Iranian blogs are merely a place for the beleaguered to blow off steam or a modern day Gutenberg press that would usher in the age of Democracy. But for now they offer a unique glimpse of the changing consciousness of Iran’s younger generation.

It is no secret that most of the rulers in the Middle East are out of sync with their youth, and Iran is no exception. Except that while Arab leaders have tried to crush the militants, in Iran’s case you have had a militant regime. Tahkim Vahdat, Iran’s largest national student union, was formed after a decree by Ayatollah Khomeini to reinforce his rule; yet nearly a quarter of a century later it became one of the most vocal critics of the regime.

In November 1979, at the dawn of the revolution, Khomeini had stated that “a country with 20 million youth must have 20 million riflemen or a military… such a country will never be destroyed,”. The intention was to create soldiers of the state, but now groups of young people who aspire to a more Western lifestyle have even turned events like St Valentine’s Day into a local festival. The regime’s attempt to shield Iranians from the West’s ‘cultural invasion’ has backfired magnificently. The country’s youth is now almost obsessed with the Western culture they have been deprived of for so long. Last year Iran’s former deputy-President Ali Abtahi, a mid-ranking Shia cleric, greeted the new cause for celebration for young lovers in Islamic Iran in his blog webneveshteha.com by writing that although there are many irritated by all this, “We cannot deny the reality. And anyway the Islam that I know encourages life and love.”

(more…)

“I spent a gray February morning in bed reading Darcey Steinke’s Milk. After the last page, I sobbed so long and hard my partner thought it had something to do with him. He pulled me out of bed, took me to the Sunday farmers’ market to feel the harvest of the world. Still I was changed, in whatever small way a really good read does. Steinke’s language is so gorgeously sensual and succinct. She illuminates the struggle of reconciling the sexual with the spiritual, as well as how they pull from the very same places.”

Lisa Teasley is the author of the award-winning story collection Glow in the Dark and the critically acclaimed novel Dive. Forthcoming spring 2006 is a story in Black Clock, and in the summer, her new novel Heat Signature. She lives in Los Angeles.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

A few years ago, when I was in grad school, I’d forcefully disagreed with someone during a seminar on linguistics. After the class, this woman walked up to me and said, “You’re so articulate!” I was about to say, “Thanks,” and move on, when she blurted out, “..for a Middle-Eastern woman.”

“Funny,” I thought. “You’re so ignorant…for a grad student. How did you get into the program?” But of course I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even point out that I’m not from the Middle-East. Gosh. Esprit d’escalier.

Everywhere one looks these days, there’s a book or an article about that subject du jour: Women and Islam. Newsweek‘s Lorraine Ali offers a different view:

Muslim women are feeling like pawns in a political game: jihadists portray them as ignorant lambs who need to be protected from outside forces, while the United States considers them helpless victims of a backward society to be saved through military intervention. “Our empowerment is being exploited by men,” says Palestinian Muslim Rima Barakat. “It’s a policy of hiding behind the skirts of women. It’s dishonorable no matter who’s doing it.” Scholars such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, an expert on Islamic law and author of “The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists,” says this is an age-old problem. “Historically the West has used the women’s issue as a spear against Islam,” he says. “It was raised in the time of the Crusades, used consistently in colonialism and is being used now. Muslim women have grown very, very sensitive about how they’re depicted on either side.”

By the by, Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft just came out in October with HarperCollins.

Yesterday’s L.A. Times had a piece about the plight of North African and sub-Saharan immigrants trying to get to Europe via the Spanish enclaves in Morocco. It’s interesting enough, but not terribly precise.

The location of Melilla, and Spain’s similar North African enclave, Ceuta, makes it the gateway between a continent gutted by war, famine and disease, and the promises of an affluent Europe. Jumping a fence on dry land seems easier than braving the Mediterranean Sea in rickety boats.

Spain’s traditional leniency toward immigrants has meant that those who make it this far have a very good chance of reaching continental Europe and a new life. But here and elsewhere, tensions have flared as Europe staggers under the weight of new arrivals who have changed the complexion of the continent.

Leniency toward immigrants? They shot at people trying to cross the fence, for crying out loud. How’s that lenient?

Not having read any of the Narnia books, I really had no interest in the movie. Still, for the sake of marital harmony in the Moorishgirl household, I might have agreed to go. That is, until I saw this:

Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman – he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials – has called Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.

Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.

It sounds pretty awful, but I’ll have to reserve judgment until I’m dragged to it this weekend.

Link from Jessa at Bookslut.

A Q&A with me appears in USA Today‘s magazine supplement, USA Weekend. You can read it here.

Reviews of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits appear in this weekend’s Sun-Sentinel and Charlotte Observer.

The Observer‘s David Smith reports on Kenya’s use of camels as book mobiles to reach out to remote villages.

There was excitement when the library camels appeared on the horizon, refusing to be hurried from their patient progress. The animals set down their cargo, and the staff from the Garissa Provincial Library assembled the tent, laid down mats and unpacked the books.

For the children who have no television, music or computer, the sight of a book offers the promise of escape and self-improvement. Soon they were scrambling over each other to get the latest delivery of titles ranging from How Pig Got His Snout, The Orange Thieves and Shaka Zulu to the more prosaic Practical Primary English, Comprehensive Mathematics and Improve Your Science and Agriculture

You can help the program by donating through the Observer’s Book Aid page.

Related: You can also read about Africa’s tradition of camel book mobiles in an MG post last year.

(Observer link cribbed from the Lit Saloon.)

Novelist Ahdaf Soueif has a long piece in the Guardian about the latest round of parliamentary elections in Egypt, which have been marked by such democractic practices as the beating of voters, closing down poll stations, and molesting of opposition figures. The situation there sounds rather catastrophic, judging from the diary Soueif kept. Here’s a snippet:

Earlier today Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for the last 24 years, was sworn in for a further six. Cairo traffic came to a standstill for two hours as all routes to the People’s Assembly were closed off to the people. Now the protesters are gathering with their banners and a pair of kettledrums: “Dumdu-du-dumdum, Batel, Dum du-du-dum-dum, Batel, Hosni M’barak, Batel …” Batel means not valid, without legitimacy. Fortuitously, it rhymes with atel, unemployed, and so serves the protesters’ preferencefor chanting in rhyme: “In the name of 12 million atel, Hosni Mubarak’s rule is batel.” A new poster showing the president’s face with the word batel in flowing calligraphy across it has become overnight as iconic as the black on yellow Kefaya logo. “Dum du-dudum- dum …” They clap and drum and the posters bob up and down. And because the police – tonight – are keeping their presence light, they march.

More here.

Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, a tale of a child soldier in an unnamed West African country, received a largely positive review by Simon Baker in this Sunday’s New York Times. Here’s a snippet

The acute characterization, the adroit mixture of color and restraint, and the horrific emotional force of the narrative are impressive. Still more impressive is Iweala’s ability to maintain not only our sympathy but our affection for his central character.

In addition, my friend Chimamanda mentioned his novel when she was asked by the Guardian which books she liked in 2005. There’s a Q&A in Time, a nice review in the Plain Dealer, and an interview in the Pittsburgh Tribune. And, well, there’s also that little recommendation by Salman Rushdie. Lots of buzz, to be sure, but I’m really interested in the subject and look forward to reading it (just got a copy this week).