Lipstick Jihad

LIPSTICK JIHAD: A MEMOIR OF GROWING UP IRANIAN IN AMERICA AND AMERICAN IN IRAN: Azadeh Moaveni: Public Affairs: Biography: 246 pages

We’re so used to seeing the word jihad in the same sentence with terrorist that this title seems to be an oxymoron. But imagine millions of Iranian women simultaneously appearing on the streets of Tehran wearing lipstick. This is a struggle in the classic sense of the word jihad. What would the religious police and the mullahs do? Arrest every woman in Iran? Moavani takes us inside Iran before 9/11 where “Iran’s young generation – the generation born just before the revolution…is transforming Iran from below. From the religious student activist to the ecstasy-trippers, from the bloggers to the bed-hopping college students, they will decide Iran’s future.” (page xi)

Moaveni is a member of the young generation of Iranians, but born in the US to Iranian parents, part of the Iranian “diaspora” that occurred because of the revolution in 1979. She went to Iran as a journalist reporting for Time magazine. In her quest to report the news she also encounters the many ways Iranians use their ingenuity to circumvent the system. Women’s yoga and exercise groups meet in back rooms, teenagers use martyr’s holidays to throng the streets and meet members of the opposite sex, bright covered robes replace the somber, formless black that was mandatory women’s dress after the revolution.

This memoir is impassioned and personal. At once nostalgic and pragmatic, the author seeks to find herself in the two worlds that are her heritage. She is one of a number of authors, fluent in English and conversant in Farsi, whose experiences illuminate the struggles of immigrants to the Unites States as they open the curtain on a hidden world. This book is beautifully written. Just as well written, and perhaps more poetic, is the book Journey from the Land of No by Roya Hakakian which chronicles the changes in a Jewish family’s life during the years of the Iranian revolution. These books deserve recognition for their excellent writing and intimate views of women’s lives in Iran along with the very popular Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

SH