Just quickly...

"I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women." Azar Nafisi


You can't escape Iran at the moment and I have always been more than mildly fascinated since a student gave me a book called Imam Khomeini, which I didn't really understand. It wasn't the writing that baffled me so much, but Mehdi's devotion to a figure which to me had always seemed, at best, incomprehensible and, if I am to be more honest, quite scary. It was a book that unearthed far more questions than it answered and I never had the chance to ask my student, who had left it with a beautifully kind note on my desk and skipped back to Shiraz without giving me the chance to ask and ask, (not fair, Mehdi, not fair!)

From the unfinished business of that rather difficult read, I went on to the brilliant Ryszard Kapuscinksi and his Shah of Shahs, and finally to Azar Nafisi where I found myself utterly locked into Reading Lolita in Tehran.

So I had more than a passing interest in this interview I happened upon on Al Jazeera (if you can ever "happen upon" Al Jazeera?) which I think has more clarity than much that has been in the British Press on the subject of late.

Now R is kicking the meningitis, I am finding thought-space to return to my housewifely musing and two of her comments have diverted me especially. The first is quoted above, on how women are the true gauge of the freedom of society. And the second is her suggestion that the Iranian ruling elite is suddenly realising it doesn't have the handle on their people the way it once did, and how the once-repressive-but-now-reformist Mousavi has adjusted to go with it.

How much time does it take to go from "harsh" to "kind", in a political sense? Doesn't it usually happen the other way round? Does that change depend on circumstance, interpretation, hindsight or merely an ability not to be too precious about what you want to be seen as your beliefs?

Anyway, the interview. A great one-coffee read with time left over for pondering. Brief pondering, that's true, but it has been so very hot today.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/2009613181040285185.html