1. Sattareh's original title for DAUGHTER OF PERSIA was Shazdeh's Daughter—a reminder that the distant but beloved figure to whom Satti refers simply as Shazdeh, "the Prince," had a lifelong influence on her. What features of Satti's relationship with her father did you find most powerful, whether in her childhood or her adult life? With her mother?
2. I was astonished to discover what a complex community Shazdeh's compound was. When you began the book, what did you think a "harem" was like? Did the image you had correspond in any way to what Sattareh says? Did reading the book change any of your ideas? Confirm any?
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3. Having a protector has been part of Persian life for centuries. As a Westerner, I found it difficult to grasp at first why this was so important. Was the need for a protector something you found easy to relate to, or was it alien? Who or what offers "protection" in Western societies? In your own life as an individual? What might happen if the mechanisms of protection Westerners enjoy suddenly disappeared?
4. For Satti, the incident in which her mother refused to go to the police after being cheated by a beggar was a crucial lesson in the Persian axiom "never to trust anyone outside the family."
Even some Western societies discourage too much independence from "the family." Did your cultural upbringing emphasize independence, or family closeness? Would you find it strange to live in a society in which outsiders are viewed with suspicion, and could you adapt to living that way? Do you think that Western society would benefit from the strong identification with family that Satti grew up with?
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5. Did Satti's descriptions of individual Persian women in childhood and adolescence—her mother, her stepmothers Batul and Fatimeh, Princess Ezzatdoleh, Neggar-Saltaneh (the wedding party hostess), or Shazdeh's strong-willed sister, Najmeh-Saltaneh, the mother of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh—contradict preconceptions you yourself may have had of Muslim women as confined and helpless? Did it reinforce them?
6. If Shazdeh had lived a year or two longer, he would have found Satti a husband. How do you think her life would have turned out if she had been married off by her father? Would she still have been able to fight for social reforms? Do you think she could have found happiness in a conventional marriage?
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7. A priceless lesson of Satti's student years in "the land at the end of the earth" was the freedom to speak openly and criticize anyone, even teachers and the government. She believed that if Iranians could learn to speak freely, "we could solve our problems." For this reason, she decided that one day she would return to Iran and teach Persians the value of "constructive criticism." Do you observe as much "constructive criticism" in American life today as she did then? On what issues?
8. Another of Satti's observations as a student was that "America was a wasteful nation." She felt that her American friends, instead of realizing the luxury they lived in, threw away clothes and even food they did not want. Is "Americans are wasteful" a statement you can agree with, or do you think that it is an oversimplification? Should Satti have been more sympathetic to friends whose circumstances were obviously very different than those of Iranians, or was she right to condemn this feature of life in the West?
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9. One of the (to me) startling facts about Iran's modern history I learned from my co-author was that the after the 1953 overthrow of its democratically elected premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, the CIA's involvement was known all over the country within days. Yet it took half a century for Americans, who enjoy freedom of the press, to learn that their government had been involved in the overthrow of a legitimately elected political leader.
What was your reaction to the overthrow? Were you shocked? Unsurprised? Do you think a democracy must never become involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected government? Or is it politically naïve to insist that we uphold a principle of democracy even when doing so doesn't seem to be in our national interest?
10.
One of the things about Satti's story that I personally found especially inspiring was the training of the "Bulldozers"—the young men and women she recruited and trained to go into South Teheran to clean up its orphanages, mental hospitals, workhouses, and prisons—in the first few years of her School. I was unfamiliar with this kind of social work, which is very different from the way social work in Western countries has developed. Could the country you live in learn anything from "Bulldozer"-style social work?
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11.
Satti taught the Bulldozers that "social worker" in Persian translated into
madadkar, "helping person," in order to make the point that social workers must care not only about themselves and their families but about people who were strangers to them, or who did not share their faith or ethnic group. Do you believe that in (fill in your own country), people are more likely to be taught to care about others outside their own group than in Satti's Iran, or less likely?
12.
Among the points the book makes repeatedly is that compassion toward others is basic to Islam. For example, for Satti's mother, as for most people Satti knew, helping and even caring for the needy was a natural part of life; giving alms was taken for granted even if one risked being cheated once in a while. How does the Muslim attitude portrayed in the book stack up against what you thought before you read it? How does it stack up against the everyday exercise of compassion—religious or otherwise—in your own community?
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13.
In introducing international family planning and birth control to Iran, Satti emphasized that the birth control pill enabled couples to postpone having children until women had recovered from previous childbearing and until families could afford to take care of the children financially. To persuade traditional Persians that family planning was in harmony with Islamic law, she enlisted the support of a prominent ayatollah, who issued a favorable ruling. Her mother, however, was never able to accept the idea of family planning. What did you think of Satti's approach? Did you find her mother's traditional views comparable to conservative views in other faiths and cultures?
14. Satti criticized the Shah's social and educational policies, yet in retrospect she realized that she had never fully understood what impact those policies were having on the students of her own school. Why do you think she remained unaware of this? Did you think that she should have been more aware, or not?
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15. One of the things that especially impressed me in the story of the Shah's downfall was how difficult it is to maintain a healthy skepticism when we urgently want to believe that everything will come out all right. For example, many if not most well-educated, democratic, religiously tolerant Iranians like Satti came to believe that the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a beneficial and democratizing influence on Iran, not a religious fanatic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but as you read the book, did you feel that she and others like her might have been able to predict how things would turn out? Or would you, too, have found doing that impossible under the circumstances?
16. Satti's arrest by her own students was all the more devastating because no one on her faculty or staff—besides the janitor Zabi—tried to prevent it. While she later learned that the students were motivated by ignorance and a false sense of entitlement, she felt shattered by the behavior of others who refused to get involved. Why do you think no one stepped forward to help? Have you ever witnessed or been the target of a similar betrayal at a critical moment? How did you make sense of it?
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17. Social work has always taught that it is only by solving society's problems through slow, long-term changes—through legislation, behavior, and social policy—that positive, permanent change can come about. However, by definition this approach means co-operating with the existing system. After her release from detention, Satti wondered in anguish whether she had, after all, supported oppression by keeping the school apolitical instead of speaking out against the government's human rights abuses. Was she right or wrong to feel guilty? Is avoiding a stand always the wrong moral choice? On what does rightness or wrongness depend—on adhering to a principle, or on the outcome of the choice? In Satti's position, what would you have done?
18. At first, I wondered briefly if it would be better to write
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA as a traditional biography. Would reading the story this way have changed what you got out of it? What would have been lost, or gained, if we had written it from a third-person ("she") instead of a first-person ("I") point of view?
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Below is a purely personal selection of books about the Shah's Iran — that is, about the Iran Satti knew, which is about all I have room for here — and about growing up Persian.
History and Memoir:
•
James Bill,
The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations. Yale, 1989.
•
Ryszard Kapuscinski,
Shah of Shahs. Tr. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1985.
•
Stephen Kinzer,
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Wiley, 2003.
•
Terence O'Donnell,
The Garden of the Brave in War: Recollections of Iran. Mage Publishers, 2003 (orig. 1980).
•
Taj Al-Saltana,
Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity. Ed. Abbas Amanat. Mage Publishers, 1993.
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Fiction:
•
Iraj Pezeshkzad,
My Uncle Napoleon. Tr. Dick Davis. Mage Publishers, 2000.
•
Nahid Rachlin,
Foreigner. Norton, 1999 (orig. 1978).
•
Donné Raffat,
The Folly of Speaking. Blind Owl Press, 2000.
Growing Up Persian:
• Nahid Rachlin,
Jumping Over Fire (novel). Penguin, 2006.
• Persian Girls (memoir). Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.
• Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Disapora.
Persis M. Karim, ed. University of Arkansas Press, 2006.
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"FINDING OUR VOICE." Unlocking the story of a remarkable Middle Eastern woman and the modern history of Iran. © (Word File) (54.2KB)
