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Iran: Daughter of Persia

Updated: Jun 29, 2022

This week I read Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem Through the Islamic Revolution by Sattareh Farman Farmaian. This book is the Persian author’s autobiography and was published in 1992. It showcases her childhood and life in Iran.


Iran is located in Western Asia and is bordered by Iraq, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Iran is the second largest country in the Middle East. Its capital city, Tehran, is its most populous city and where Farmaian grew up.


Sattareh was born into Qajar nobility due to her father, Abdol Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma, who she calls Shazdeh, who was a Qajar prince. The Qajar dynasty existed from 1789-1825. Sattareh was born in 1921 and was the fifteenth of her father’s thirty-six children. Her mother, Massumeh, was her father’s third wife.


She begins her story with a letter to the reader. She hopes that this recollection of memories can “contribute to greater understanding between [her] Western and Iranian friends and add something to their awareness of the rich diversity of human cultures” and that her American friends will “find in these pages cause to reflect on the consequences of their own well-meaning efforts to remake the world in their image”.


The real story begins with her childhood where she grew up in her father’s harem. Shazdeh was a man of great importance with many connections. He believed, above all, in education. Sattareh and her siblings had tutors and some went to schools run by foreign missionaries. He believed that his children should use their education to help Iran. There was no one that Sattareh admired more than her father, she wanted to be exactly like him when she grew up and this meant that she was going to do something useful and important for their home country.


Even though Shazdeh had a great passion for educating his children, many of Sattareh’s brothers had been sent abroad to study. When she convinced her mother to ask if she could be sent away to school as well he denied her, saying “it would be a waste of money. She is a woman. A woman will be nothing”. Sattareh understood that in the eyes of society her purpose was to marry.


While Sattareh had great ambition as a child, her time of birth was not during Iran’s prime. She explains the state of her country as “harj-o-marj”, a Persian word with no English equivalent. Harj-o-marj suggests “the worst thing that can happen to a nation. It expresses the condition of a country that falls into anarchy because its leaders cannot unite and no strong hand holds it together, or because foreign conquerors have come; the time when it slides into the abyss of lawlessness and rapine”.


At this time Reza Shah is the current leader of Iran. He came to power in 1925 and wanted to transform Iran into a country like the West and he was “prepared to send Iranians to drink from the well of Western-style progress at gunpoint, if necessary”. In order to do this he launched a campaign against religion. In 1935 he outlawed the religious veil. His rule was brutal, hypocritical, and controversial. While he was a very violent man who demanded complete obedience from the citizens he also wanted to enact policies that would give more freedom to women or at least to “create the appearance of emancipation” that the Western countries boasted. He opened higher education institutions and occupations like nursing and teaching for women and forced public spaces to become co-ed. This was hypocritical as married women were still under the control of their husbands and could not vote or get a divorce. Overall his improvements meant more to foreign countries like the United States than it did to Iranians.


Reza Shah was heavily influenced by the British and the Americans. He had strived to remain outwardly neutral during WWII, but was failing to conceal his support for Hitler. To show that he was not favoring Germany, in 1934 he closed all foreign schools in Iran, German or otherwise. This included the Missionary school that Sattareh was attending. This gesture didn’t convince Winston Churchill and in 1941 the Allies invaded Iran.


Despite the fact that Reza Shah was a leader imposed on Iran by the English, he had now lost their favor. To replace him they instated his son, Mohammed Reza Shah.


Since it became impossible for Sattareh to get her education in Iran, she applied to schools in the United States. In 1944 she set off for the U.S. after having been accepted to Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio. Since she was trying to travel during WWII she had a long journey ahead of her.


She arrived in Los Angeles, CA with no idea how to get to Ohio. Before she left she had made a list of contacts from her Missionary school and luckily there was one who lived in California. He made the drive to pick her up from the airport and helped her enroll in USC so she could remain in California.


Sattareh was the first Iranian to attend and to graduate from USC. She experienced a lot of culture shock and had to adapt to fast spoken English, sharing classes and clubs with men, and the different lifestyles of American students.


When she arrived she didn’t know what she wanted to study and that that she wanted to help her people in Iran.


An advisor pointed her in the direction of sociology. She graduated in 1946 after only two years with her Bachelors. She continued on at USC for graduate school and got her Masters in Sociology in 1948.


At the same time that Sattareh was entering her post-grad life, Iran was deep in the fight to take back ownership of its oil from the British.


The battle waged against the British was headed by Mohammed Mosaddegh, an Iranian politician and also Sattareh’s cousin. Sattareh was working in New York at the time and sent him many letters.


One thing I admired about this book is Sattareh’s ability to link historical events with her own life and not make it sound like a paragraph out of a history book. The topic of oil and of Mosaddegh and the subsequent U.S. coup against him, is a very deep, complicated, and unknown story in the United States. While I cannot give a just summary here, this betrayal by America against Iran changed the two nations relationship forever.


Sattareh returned to Iran in 1958. After being introduced to the occupation of social work in the U.S. she took a job with the United Nation to help run social work programs in Iraq and spend her summers with her family in Iran. Eventually she was authorized to start a social work training school in Iran. It was named the Tehran School of Social Work. There is no Persian word for social worker, so Sattareh made up the term “madadkar”, which means the “one who helps”.


In order to save her school from the unstable nature of politics and Iran’s so called “party of the wind”, Sattareh encouraged her students to change the system from within. Her goal was to work patiently to help raise people's living standard by publishing research, educating officials, and of course by working on the ground and helping Iran’s most vulnerable.


As Sattareh’s school becomes more and more successful, she is also met with more challenges. Since the school is larger, they are able to enroll more students, but Sattareh is no longer able to teach every single student. The close and personal connections she used to be able to cultivate with each student are gone. At the same time Iran’s political climate is in turmoil. Mohammad Reza Shah has implemented secret police who are arresting citizens who they perceive to be against the Shah, it was no longer “possible to stay out of jail just by refraining from open criticism. Writers, poets, teachers, intellectuals, and artists who failed to glorify the regime sufficiently were beaten or jailed, tortured for being "Marxists" and forced to "confess" their errors in public”.


This harsh regime resulted in intense anti-American sentiment. Since the U.S. government spearheaded the overthrow of Mossadegh, the Iranians saw them as controlling the Iranian monarchy for their own purposes. This was especially popular among the younger Iranians, they saw the U.S. as “a harsh, militaristic power that was intervening in Vietnam, a small, weak nation like their own. America was also the chief supporter of Israel, a state that most Iranians held responsible for the suffering of their fellow Moslems, the Palestinians”. This was exacerbated by the exile of Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious leader, by the Shah. Khomeini’s followers despised anything that they thought symbolized the monarchy or the West.


When Khomeini returns to Iran his followers take over the streets. Some of Sattareh’s students try to kill her in the name of Khomeini. In their eyes since she was educated in the West she has done harm to their movement. Sattareh believed that “these students weren't religious zealots or even committed radicals. They were what the oil boom years and the disappointments that followed had produced: immature, bitter, resentful young men who felt that society had failed to give them what it had promised, and whose version of Marxist theory was that if somebody owned what they wanted, he should give it to them instead of keeping it for himself”.


They believed that Sattareh was corrupt and was embezzling money from the school. They were also resentful that simply by being enrolled in her program that they weren’t richer or more successful. As she was held at gunpoint and taken away to be judged by Khomeini himself, not a single student or faculty member stood up for her.


After being made to wait outside Khomeini’s headquarters for over 10 hours with no food or water (she had the honor of being their first woman prisoner and no one knew what exactly to do with her) she was finally told of the charges against her, each one more outrageous than the last. One example was a charge for raising the living standard of Iranian people and therefore making them content to live under a monarchy.


While she was eventually released, the betrayal that she felt against her fellow coworkers, students, and country instilled fear and distrust into her heart. Her close family and friends encouraged her to leave Iran like so many others had. Sattareh was distraught, choosing to leave Iran went against the ideals she had held since childhood, since her father instilled in her the importance of helping their country. Her whole being cried out in protest at this suggestion. “Why did I have to quit my country?” she asked herself, “How did I deserve to leave my land, my home, my people”?


She makes the difficult decision to leave Iran as it was no longer possible for her to live there without fear. She felt that “every pillar of her existence…had fallen. Iran did not want her. Her family in prison, in hiding, or dispersed. She no longer had a home, only the vague, lonely, insubstantial future of an exile”.


She arrived in America in 1979. Two years later she received a letter from a former student in Iran telling her that although her school closed in 1981, they would never forget her teachings. This letter gave her some hope that her school’s existence was not in vain. If she could do it all over again, she would.


In her epilogue Sattareh ends her autobiography with a description of the 1979 hostage crisis, where 52 U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Iran at the American Embassy. This occurred on the fifteenth anniversary of Khomeini's exile by the Shah.


She recounts her thoughts as she watched the news, “I had to ask myself again and again how relations between our two countries, which had begun in this century with such warmth and goodwill, had come to this tragic pass. All that these young students knew of America was that the United States had been the Shah's backer for twenty-six years. All that Americans could see on their television sets was a country which seemed to be populated exclusively by black-clad, screaming mobs obsessed with reviling and humiliating innocent Americans”.


I found it interesting that she ends her story where many Americans’ knowledge of Iran begins. Young people in both countries weren’t alive to see the rise and fall of relations between the two countries and this missing context creates animosity and a lack of understanding between human beings.


In the afterward Dona Munker, who collaborated with Sattareh on her account, says they wanted Americans to better understand the Iranian people, they wanted them to wonder, “how did they think and feel, and what would they say if asked about all that had happened in their country”? It was the hope of both Dona and Sattareh that this first-person account of the life of not only a person, but of a country, could help remind Western readers that “such knowledge is in their own interest” and to help them understand the political policies between the countries that were made, “in the words of American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., on the ignorance of our own ignorance”.

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