Azadeh Moaveni

Stunning. Long, but rather beautifully crafted and just as charming as the novel. The credit must go in part to Adel Imam, who plays the part of the dissolute, aging Pasha masterfully. Downtown Cairo is almost a characterful itself, and the aerial, loving shots of its faded, elegant streets and maidans are striking. I have only two reservations. First, the tacked-on, Halloween costume beards of the Islamic radicals were quite silly, and out of place in such an otherwise slick production. Next, why didn’t I notice properly in the novel what the problematic and disappointing characterization of Hatem Rashid, the gay editor of Le Caire, the city’s French newspaper?

It struck me only as I watched the story unfold on screen how Alaa Al-Aswany turns his story’s main gay character into a sad morality tale about homosexuality. We are told that Hatem becomes gay because his parents neglected him as a child, leaving him ‘for the servants to play with.’ He is molested or raped, it’s not quite clear which, by a member of the household staff, and this shapes his lifelong preference, the story goes, for men. Al-Aswany seeminly encourages our sympathy for Hatem, suggesting we should excuse his gayness because of his childhood trauma. Initially I thought it was quite ground-breaking for the novel to center around a gay character, given the taboo against homosexuality in mainstream Egytpian culture, but Hatem only plays on the worst stereotypes, rather than challenging them. How disappointing — a story, both the book and film, with such huge reach across the Arab world could have served up a very different message, but instead it recycled the narrow thinking that the rest of the story challenges.

Welcome to a new section of my blog, Sheekamou, dedicated to food, cooking, and the sensibility of the glutton, which in Farsi is more gently and approvingly referred to as the Sheekamou.

I was inspired to add this section earlier today, after a particularly fraught and unsatisfying experience with the dish known as Baghali Polo, a pilaf of fluffy Persian rice with dill and lima beans. Now extricating the lima bean from its thick, extra-terrestial skin, and then de-podding the bean itself from its outer skin, is an enormously time consuming process that should only be undertaken by women with obscene amounts of free time or household staff. My baghali polo was tahmeeli, or imposed, by my bi-weekly organic produce box, which often arrives with such random and unexpected items. If you present an Iranian woman with a bunch of lima beans, she will have no choice, indeed no other impulse, but to turn them into baghali polo, which is what I proceeded to do at my own peril.

Disappointingly, my rice ended up all broken and nubby, not like those elegant, long grains of basmati that proper Iranian women manage to cook. I obediently made a little mountain of my polo, so the steam would circulate, but this resulted in the beans on top not cooking all the way through. The only thing that saved the meal was the potato tahdig, the layer at the bottom, which was crisp and perfect: a tahdig that would make any mother-in-law proud.

Conclusion: Iranian cooking is truly the haute cuisine of the andaruni, a product of a society in which women were sequestered, and enjoyed vast hours of leisure time, during which they devised recipes of incalculable complexity…multiple types of painstakingly dried herbs, myriad of finely chopped, subtle ingredients that are then cooked in challening and involved phases. This is of course not an original reflection, scholars who do food anthropology have published all about the haute cusine of the andaruni. I would have done well to recall all this, and to have boiled my lima beans into the everyone-pods-their-own street food that vendors sell on the streets of Tehran in the winter.

Tags: Food

I always considered Ahmad Bourghani one of the very few gentlemen produced by the Islamic Republic. The former reformist MP died this past Saturday, February 5, of a heart attack in Tehran, a fact I only learned moments ago and relate with great sadness. Back when there was such thing as a reform movement, Bourghani was one of its most distinguished, talented, and dedicated members. Now that he has passed away, there seems no harm in revealing that he is the unnamed ‘reformist legislator’ in my book Lipstick Jihad (pp. 76-78, if you feel like looking). He taught me a great deal about Iran, especially about how the government’s gender segregation policies had only served to hypersexualize young people. He managed to share such thoughts with the detachment and poise of a Western gender studies scholar, which for an Iranian man of traditional background is no small thing. I write in my book about how both of us were trying to quit smoking, and I wonder now if he ever did. Farsi Readers may be interested in Mohammad Ali Abtahi’s account of his funeral proceedings. Apparently most of the country’s leading press and reformist figures attended.

It is a rare movie that puts me to sleep twice. I first went to see The Day I Became a Woman in Tehran when it debuted, and promptly snoozed off during the interminable, irritating first segment of the triptych. I attempted the film once again last week, having forgotten in the intervening years just how disappointing and soporific it was. I’ve been perpetually meaning to write a long piece about how such films — produced with the naked and sole objective of getting attention at internatinal film festivals — are viewed in Iran, but all the wars and political turmoil conspire to get in my way. Visually, this film is gorgeous, and I think Ms. Meshkini would have done well to have produced some sort of photography exhibit of stills rather than a feature film. The Tehran cinema where I saw it the first time around was nearly empty, and the group of Iranians I watched it with last week uniformly suggested we watch a Bollywood film instead. Composed with the icy precision of an interior decorator, The Day I Became a Woman captures scarcely anything of contemporary Iranian reality, and is a jumble of exotic scenes designed for the European palate. Snore. One should stick to Kiarostami, va salam.

At a recent grand fete thrown by the ambassador of a prominent European nation, Iranian guests mingled with foreigners and both munched on tartlets and sipped fruit juice. A crowd began to gather around one particular Iranian male, who reluctantly began signing autographs. The Europeans did not recognize him and began whispering amongst themselves as to who he might be. A footballist? A pop star? They dispatched a Lebanese friend (wily Europeans sending an Oriental emissary) to discern the cause of his celebrity. ‘So just who are you, and why is everyone taking your picture?’ she asked him. The mystery man adjusted his lapels, and tried not to look offended at this astonishing display of ignorance. ‘Perhaps it is because I am an ACTOR,’ he said, turning to his devoted crowd. So who was he? My friends, he was no less than Mohammed Reza Golzar, the famous Iranian ACTOR. The Europeans concluded his features were too perfect and thus made him too classically beautiful to be actually attractive. The Iranians did not share this view and thronged him throughout the evening.

Anyone who’s interested in knowing more about contemporary Shiism and especially its role in Middle Eastern politics should stop what they’re doing and immediately buy this book. Vali Nasr has written a truly superb account of the split between Islam’s two sects, and how this ancient divide manifests itself in the political rivalries and religious identity politics we’re witnessing in the region today. To be honest, I expected this to be an insightful and important book, but not necessarily an enjoyable one. Happily, I was wrong: it’s a pleasurable read as well. Mr. Nasr has enviable contacts in the Muslim world, and the book is peppered with all sorts of fascinating anecdotes and asides. We learn that Saddam offered the Shah to kill off Khomeini during his Najaf exile, and that he, the Baathist leader, later regretted not having ignored the Shah’s refusal. And who knew that Ayatollah Khoi so disliked Khomeini’s activist style of politics that he sent the Shah a special prayer and a ring on the eve of the Islamic revolution? We should be grateful to Vali Nasr for this riveting, timely, and splendid book.

I’ve been following the Benazir Bhutto coverage in the Western press with some dismay, and the piece by William Dalrymple finally irked me enough to say something. What I find objectionable in these rather predictable Benazir-as-Westernized-princess analyses is two things. First, the unattractive anti-female strain in the writing that masquerades as blunt talk about her privileged background. What Mr. Dalrymple seems to dislike most about the assassinated leader is not what her legacy says about the ailing state of Pakistani politics, but her very feminine qualities; he lists with distaste her love for romance novels, her fondness for window shopping, and worst of all, in his eyes, her taste for ice cream. He sniffily says it would be hard to imagine another Eastern head of state mentioning the ’sin’ of eating ice cream. Perhaps not. But since when have we faulted male heads of taste for their indulgence in luxury whiskey, cigars, or other more masculine (read appropriate) habits?

The second point that is being exhaustively harped upon is her privileged background, how growing up in a wealthy aristocratic family made her inexorably different from the passes she governed. Is this not true of leaders across the Middle East and Asia? If they were not born to such families, than once in office they began behaving as if they were anyway. We have the king of Jordan, who essentially behaves like a tan European monarch, the corrupt leaders of Egypt with their palaces on the Sinai, the royal family of Saudi Arabia….really, one could go on and on, were it not so boring. I think this is more of the shoddy treatment Benazir is receiving posthumously for being female and Pakistani, because there are far more important matters to dwell on. Ahmed Rashid writing in the Washington Post did not resort to this, and I recommend his insightful piece for rising above the facile Antoinette analysis so rife in the Western papers.

I’ve just finished the Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al-Aswany, and I’m desolate that it’s over. I loved it for its storytelling, its scathing indictment of Egyptian dictatorship, its sumptuous descriptions of downtown Cairo in all its shabby splendor. It took less than a week to read, which, given that I have a small baby, should tell you something about the novel’s irresistability. Al-Aswany has a deft, gentle touch, bringing the reader face to face with the brutality of Egypt’s poverty and its vile state security apparatus, without ever lapsing into academic lecture or the tone of a human rights report.

My dear friend Kim Ghattas (Beirut correspondent for the BBC, just recently made State Department correspondent — hooray Kim!) informs me that the book has been made into a movie that is equally spectacular. She’s seen it three times already, which, given that she covers a country torn by internal strife and Islamist hullaballoo, says something about how great it must be. I can’t wait to see it.

Tags: Alaa al-Aswany, Novels, Yacoubian Building

All sorts of things have me thinking about US-Iran relations lately. The other week I was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing Ahmadinejad, and I realized (or perhaps a caller helped me realize), that because the Iranian president makes such spectacle of thumbing his nose at the US, it has become very easy to forget that as recently as 2003, it was Iran that was reaching out to the US, and it was Washington doing the nose thumbing. My friend Trita Parsi discusses all this and more in his new book called “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.” In particular, he explores how Iran reached out to the US in 2003, offering to talk about all the issues that irk Washington, and was rebuffed by the Bush administration, which was feeling ascendent (we’ve liberated Iraq!) and disinclined to talk to the Iranians, of all people. I’m not usually one to spend much time thinking about all the wonky antipathy shared by these two nations, but I attended a talk by Gary Sick in London that I thought captured the dynamic well. Gary noted that both sides only consider talking when they’re down (when they feel all is well, they enjoy nothing so much as telling the other to get lost), and that very rarely does it come to pass that they simultaneously are in a position, both domestically and internationally, where they feel dialogue would be of benefit. There we go. Those are my serious policy thoughts for the year.

The chatter surrounding Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United States simply won’t stop, so at risk of ignoring the gigantic fil in the room, here are my immediate thoughts. Firstly, the president should pay heed to Hugo Chavez’s PR tactics. That particular populist manages to capture international headlines and warm the hearts of anti-globalization college students with far more flair. The notion that there are no gay people in Iran is untellably absurd, and worst of all, is offensive without a point.

Also distressing was the insulting opening address of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. This may not be the most original point to make, but I think his nastiness carried an undercurrent of racism. Were Bollinger introducing a European official, however controversial or despotic (say a Le Pen or his ilk), I hardly believe he would have spoken in the terms he reserved for President Ahmadinejad. That degree of insolence, which is also offensive without a point, is reserved for figures from the Arab and Islamic world. It brings to mind the needlessly uncivil way in which Mike Wallace dealt with Ahmadinejad. If I were an armchair psychologist, I would surmise that people like Bollinger are subconsciously pleased to be dealing with someone like Ahmadinjead, as it gives them an opportunity to say unspeakable things to an Iranian and disguise it as frankness in the face of evil, or someother such bollocks.