Daughter of Persia: A Woman's Journey from her Father's Harem through the Islamic Revolution, Sattareh Farman Farmaian with Dona Munker, Doubleday, 1992, 404 pages, $12.95.

DAUGHTER of Persia tells the story of Sattareh Farman Farmaian's upbringing in her father's harem, her career as the founder of the first school of social work in Iran, and her eventual flight from the Khomeini regime in 1979. My Persian father often says that my grandfather, who passed away recently at the age of 95, had lived 10,000 years: he had seen the ancient way of life that has existed in Persia for thousands of years, and he had seen computers and "men on the moon". For Sattareh Farman Farmaian, it was the same—two different eras converged in her life. One was the world of Islamic tradition, feudalism, and ancient culture, with its entrenched, time-honored classifications for women, the elite, the educated and the impoverished. The second was the world of secularism, of relaxed social norms, Westernization, and the independent investigation of truth—"truth" in all its cultural, gender and political forms.

Farman Farmaian does not suggest that either of these spheres is better or worse than the other; she states in the introduction that her purpose is "neither to pass judgment nor to escape it." She chooses instead to describe the struggle of these embedded social influences within herself, addressing at once intercultural interpretations of feminism, women's education, and women's role in social change.

The account of her life as a girl growing up in a well-to-do Tehran harem is fascinating indeed, if a little jarring to one's assumptions. Initially, we read what we expect: Sattareh Farman Farmaian was 15th in a family of 36 children and eight wives. She grew up in 1920s and 1930s Persia, as the daughter of Shazdeh, who was one of the most famous and influential men in Iran. Her childhood home revolved around her father, who had been an extremely influential statesman, governor, general and premier of Persia. Shazdeh's household included 1,000 people who were wives, children, servants, craftsmen, laborers, teachers, governesses, and elderly dependents, all of whom worshipped and completely obeyed their aged patriarch.

There were several of his wives living together in the same compound, some of whom were very young, and they would rotate nights with Shazdeh. Females were separated from males, and brides saw their husbands for the first time on their wedding night. The biruni, or the "outside" world, was the realm of males. The andarun, or "inside", walled-in living quarters, was the realm of females. Farman Farmaian says of women at that time that "a woman by herself was nothing, a nonentity, a creature who, without a father, brother, husband or son to guide her was incapable of making important decisions, looking after herself properly, or even leading a moral life."

However—and here is where the assumptions start to melt—although she was brought up in the strict and gender-segregated environs of her father's harem, she nevertheless went on to become the first person to introduce birth control to the country of Iran. Having been raised with the values of her mother's traditional Islam (which dictated that an advanced education was wasted on women), she nevertheless travelled alone to America, becoming the first Iranian to attend the University of Southern California. The shy, sheltered girl who felt ashamed even to look on a male who was not related to her nevertheless became an unflinching advocate for the unconscionable circumstances in which Iran's orphans and prostitutes lived. The most fascinating aspect of this memoir, then, is the spectacular extremes which have characterized Farman Farmaian's life.

Young Sattareh often did not fit in with the expectations for women. She was born at a volatile point in the history of her country. Calling herself a "part-time boy" because there were no other females her age in the compound, she explains that playing with her brothers made her far more assertive than her older sisters, and troublingly so: "my willfulness was [my mother's] despair, for Persian daughters are supposed to meek and self-effacing, and I was an obstinate, contradictory square peg in her smooth round notions of what a real girl should be." During her childhood, the Shah had required—on pain of serious punishment—that women leave aside the garb of the "old" Persia, forcing them to wear Western-style dresses and French clôche hats instead of the body-covering chádor veils.

Farman Farmaian writes of these measures to make Persian women more like Western women, saying that the Shah had opened up public spaces to the presence of women. However, "as he did not give women the right to vote, run for political office, divorce their husbands, have custody of their own children, or even get a passport without their husbands' permission, and as women found it extremely difficult to get admitted to the few areas of study open to them at the University, these improvements, while significant, were less meaningful than they appeared to foreign observers." While the Shah's changes proved impermanent, they nevertheless set a new tone about "modernity" and Western elements in Iran, one that provoked the thought of both women and men.

Her father Shazdeh was not a typical patriarch, particularly for a man of his age, religious upbringing and social standing. Shazdeh's primary duty to his children was to see that they were all educated. He, having suffered from several political upheavals, had decided that his children must have something more solid to depend on than politics. All his children were instructed in many subjects. Farman Farmaian tells us that her father taught his daughters to "ride, swim, and face down tempests." Shazdeh's wives also had unconventional, though not optimal, ways of expressing themselves and being heard. There were many examples of women who outwardly obeyed the norms of Islam—and Shazdeh—but inwardly found ways of subverting, changing, or coping with those norms. Farman Farmaian built on the achievements and strides of the female relatives before her.

Farman Farmaian introduced the field of social work to Iran. As there was no word for "social worker" in Iran, she coined one. As there were no schools teaching social work, she founded one. As there was no money to run the school, she gave away her own money. Her career was her way of getting Persians to think for themselves, speak for themselves, and see with their own eyes. She writes, "young Persians learned that unthinking obedience to authority was a virtue, that critical discussion was both rude and dangerous, and that to prosper they must not show initiative but, on the contrary, must attach themselves to an influential mentor." A major theme of the book is what Farman Farmaian calls the "party of the wind"—whichever way the ideological wind blew, most of the Persians followed. One day, without warning, her own graduate students, whom she had taught for more than fifteen years, arrested her for Ayatollah Khomeini's firing squad: she says her "loyal" students looked at her, looked at the guns—and then started to chant vigorously for her death.

Historically, Daughter of Persia is rich in detail, and her life as one of the most effective women of Iran makes it interesting throughout. The book, though it is not of the highest literary or scholarly merit, is perhaps not intended to be: it serves Farman Farmaian's purpose, which is to loosen her tongue in calling it as she's seen it. She clearly prefers action to words, however—obfuscation is presented as a national Iranian pastime that developed in response to countless invasions and foreign wars.

In Iran, "cleverness and disguising one's true feelings," she says, "seemed to be the only way of surviving against a stronger force." Her children and grandchildren were dispossessed of their Persian heritage by the Islamic Revolution, and she wants them to know her opinions on where her generation failed. She quotes an anonymous Persian poet from 1989 who turns her gaze on Iranians themselves:

The black smoke that rose from the roof—
that was our black smoke. It came from us.
that burning fire that swayed left and right—
that was our fire. It came from us.
Do not denounce the foreigner, or lament anyone but us.
This is the heart of the matter—our affliction came from us.

Copyright © 1994 by Leili Towfigh

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