The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran

It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls.

All business in Iran is like first time sex: first there are the promises, then a little foreplay, followed by more promises and perhaps a little petting...at that stage things get complicated - you're not sure who's the boy and who's the girl, but what you do know is that if you continue, you might get fucked...so you decide to proceed cautiously, touching here and touching there, showering the other party with compliments, and whispering an undying commitment, and then maybe, just maybe, it will all end in coitus, but it is rarely as satisfying for one party as it is for the other.

If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with the world.

The last Shah's father, Reza Shah, made the chador for women and the turban for men illegal in the mid 1930's...In the 1930's women had their chadors forcibly removed from their heads if they dared wear them and were sometimes beaten as well if they resisted.

He had undoubtedly not availed himself of the ministry archives, archives that might have revealed to him that Iranian diplomats in Paris, from this, his own Foreign Ministry, had taken it upon themselves to issue Iranian passports to Jews escaping the very Holocaust they were aware of, but that he now denied.

Some people he said, think that freedom means men being able to wear shorts or women to go about without the hijab. Others think that freedom means having a full belly.