DAUGHTER OF PERSIA: A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem through the Islamic Revolution, is the product of an unusual collaboration between its Persian-born subject,
Sattareh Farman Farmaian, and its American writer,
Dona Munker.
A memoir told with the suspense of a novel, this is an imaginative yet authentic account of the life and times of one of the most remarkable women the modern Middle East has produced. It also allows Western readers a first-hand look at America's involvement in the six tumultuous decades that culminated in the Islamic Revolution and laid the foundations of the crisis facing the United States and the West today.
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Born into the harem of a once-powerful and wealthy
shazdeh, or prince,
"Satti," his fifteenth child and the second daughter of his senior wife, grew up in the 1920s and '30s inside a walled harem compound in Teheran, in an extended family of five mothers, more than thirty brothers and sisters, and a thousand servants.
A WOMAN DETERMINED TO BE "NOT NOTHING."
Denied a university education because "a woman would come to nothing," in 1944 Satti, determined to show that "women were
not nothing," defied aristocratic Persian custom and Moslem religious tradition and traveled alone across wartime Iran, India, and the Pacific to America, where she became the first Iranian to study at the University of Southern California and which fired in her a vision of lifting her own people out of poverty and backwardness.
Upon her return to Iran, she founded the Teheran School of Social Work and launched a nationwide network of private community centers and health clinics through which she also introduced her fellow Iranians to the concept of modern family planning.
For more than twenty years, she and her students waged a courageous war on poverty, disease and overcrowding—until, soon after the onset of the Islamic Revolution, she was arrested, held under threat of death at Ayatollah Khomeini's headquarters, and finally forced to flee the country.
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A DAUNTLESS HEROINE'S ACCOUNT OF HER LIFE IN PAHLAVI IRAN
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA, an absorbing, novel-like account of this inspiring woman's life and work, was the first book for an American audience about the life of a modern Middle Eastern woman and the first written in English to tell Western readers the story of five and a half decades of Pahlavi rule.
That era, which in the years around World War II was marked by educated young Iranians' admiration for American democracy and their deep belief in the sincerity and good will of "the land at the end of the earth," ended instead in the cataclysm of the Islamic Revolution and the tragedy of the 1979 Teheran hostage crisis.
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The unusual literary collaboration that produced
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA began when the book's subject asked
Dona Munker, then a freelance editor in New York, to read an account she herself had written of her life and work.
Fascinated by the story and stirred to curiosity about her baffling nation and its seeming hatred of America, Dona proposed that the two of them work together to describe her upbringing and education, her extraordinary career in international social work, and her country's modern history until her flight from her homeland.
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Their work together eventually resulted in an "oral history" of more than a thousand pages of transcript.
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA itself took four and a half years to write (see
"Finding Our Voice").
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA has been warmly received by
READERS AND REVIEWERS for its absorbing tale of the life and work of
SATTAREH FARMAN FARMAIAN and for its vivid yet balanced portrayal of Iran's first half-century as a modern nation.
Continuously in print since its original publication in 1992,
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA has been translated into five foreign languages, adopted by college courses and book groups in the United States and abroad, and read by more than a quarter of a million people around the world.
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Picture Credits:
• Center column:
Caravanserai, southern Iran, courtesy Marco Prins and Jona Lendering, www.livius.org
• Isfahan: Family photo
• Sidebar: Author photo by
Hiroko Yoshimoto • Reading man, Book of Kings (detail) courtesy UNESCO
•: M. A. Taraghijeh,
Women (detail), reproduced by permission of
M.A. Taraghijeh.
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Notice of Copyright:
• All material on this website
Copyright © 2005-2010 by Dona Munker except where expressly stated or contributed by others. Copying, altering, or reproducing this material in any form without written permission is prohibited by law and may be prosecuted regardless of the venue or purpose of the copying.
