A Mirror Into the Mystery that Is Iran

Cindy gave me a fascinating book for my birthday in October that I recently finished. It's called Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino. The author is a Newsweek and New York Times writer who has spent more than twenty years visiting Iran and has built up an impressive knowledge of this ancient place and of the Iranian psyche.

In the book we get a multilevel understanding of what makes the Persians tick, and why America has been enemy number one since 1979. She takes you into the private homes, where women and men sit together, sip alcohol, and even let their hair and arms (gasp!) show.

It's very difficult for an American to grasp the tight noose that is looped around the Iranian's necks. Stepping out in public showing a few wisps of hair, or a woman riding in a car with someone male who's not a relative, earns lashes and interrogation. Western music and anything alcoholic is cause for more lashes and grief.

One thing all Iranians love nearly as much as Allah is the poet Hafiz. "No other people I know takes its poetry so seriously," she writes, "...even the revolution and the creation of the Islamic republic could not eradicate that unique sense of Persianness that goes hand in hand with the poets who extolled the virtues of beauty, love and bravery."

She said everywhere she goes in Iran, she hears poetry. If there were a contest between reciting the Koran in Arabic and reading memorized poetry in Persian, the poetry would win out.