I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.

In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women’s rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and...

È l’esperienza sensoriale di un altro mondo. Se non entrate in quel mondo, se non trattenete il respiro insieme ai personaggi, se non vi lasciate coinvolgere nel loro destino, non arriverete mai a indentificarvi con...

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran’s...

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the...

I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture – as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they...

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain...

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their...

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union....

are different from us. They don’t care about books and such things.

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These...

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to....

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in...

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

The stories from Iran’s present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal.