Short Film

NC found the following short film and passed it along.  It's worth sticking with it through the end.  Watch and respond.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVE2T8eiwCA&feature=youtu.be

Censoring an Iranian Love Story

The New Yorker published a critical review of Censoring an Iranian Love Story, from which you read an excerpt.  Read the review and analyze.

What parts of the argument do you agree with?  With which do you disagree?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/06/29/090629crbo_books_wood?currentPage=1

Esmail Khoi

Compare and contrast the following poem to his other poem Outlandia.

The Great Synthesis

Your socialism
-Comrade East!-
goes for social equality,
leaving out individual Freedom.
That is the problem.

And your individualism
-Brother West!-
goes for individual Freedom,
leaving out social Equality.
that is the problem.

And the solution?
NO!!
Let us not argue
about the "true" kind of freedom
or "false" versions of equality.
That will not lead
to more freedom
or more of equality.

The solution is Justice
Equality freely shared
And Freedom shared equally-
Yes,
justice is the solution.

Thank you, Comrade East!
You have produced the Hydrogen of
 equality.

Thank you, Brother West!
You have produced the Oxygen of
freedom.

But now, Humanity thirsts
For the pure and purifying water of
Justice!

You have both of you,
prepared the ground
for the Great Synthesis.
You have, both of you,
paved the highway
for Humankind to reach
the non-metaphorical, non-metaphysical
 Heaven
of the Humanity beyond you
on this Earth.

Thank you both.
You have done well.
And it is time,
therefore,
For both of you
to go to Hell.

Having acquainted myself with your ideas, I have come to realize that my recipe for future humanity lacks a most vital ingredient:

LOVE

I have spoken of freedom as oxygen and of justice as the hydrogen necessary for the vital water of human happiness to come to be. I agree with you now:

Love is the electrical charge that makes the fusion possible. Therefore, please count me as one of your comrades.

YES, sir: I agree LOVE is the Solution!

Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghoti placed on his website his attitude toward writing.  Apply any part of this statement to your reading of I Saw Ramallah (the chapter was entitled  The Bridge).  Do you agree or disagree with him?  Defend your answers.

MY WRITING WORLD

Life will not be simplified. Oversimplification is my enemy as a poet. In the last 50 years life in my part of the world has been a braid of the normal and the abnormal. People pursue their everyday life amidst historical extremities of war, emigration, oppression and uncertainty. In my work, I attempt to defy the conventional language by which this unconventional world is described; I try to see the astonishing in the usual, and the usual in the extreme; the main paradox of Palestine being that bombardment is less news than a family reunion! Formally too I am fascinated by this braid of the usual and the unusual, just as war and peace express themselves in the number of family members present at the breakfast table, I attempt to express the strangeness of my world in words that are not strange at all. I want my language to be physical, precise, visual, concrete, daily and normal, just to reveal how abnormal the condition it describes is. In doing this, I attempt to suggest a new language that defies the fake and flamboyant governmental grandeur, aimed at belittling complex reality by a flat two dimensional metaphor. No theory terrorizes me, life is richer than all our ways of writing it and a beautiful poem can turn all literary theories upside down.

Marina Nemat

Marina Nemat, author of Prisoner of Tehran, also wrote political commentary.  Read her editorial below and respond.  What are her strongest points, in your opinion, and how does she manipulate language in creating them?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marina-nemat/prisoners-in-tehran_b_527146.html

Simin Behbahani

Compare and contrast this poem with one of the other two she wrote in your Iranian packet.

Not one, not two ...they were five

By Simin Behbahani (translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz)

Not one, not two ...they were five and yet I don't know why

In my mind, they were more like fifty.

And, how is it possible that gallows [on which they were hanged]

Were, someday, trees that did not surrender to axes?

Tell me how to write about the treehood days of the gallows:

Standing firm for freedom, they dug their heels in the meadow.

When the breeze found them in the orchard and wrapped itself around their branches

Their message reached everyone in soft playful dances.

Now, heads have grown on them, heads hanging from broken necks,

Heads of full-bodied figures, perhaps champions in their own way.   

Left waiting, feet-dangling-in-the-air, utterly robbed of their words,

These heads whose stories could have filled many books!

Only clouds could now rain tears on their broken bodies,

For mothers were not united with them even after their death.

Don't waste a complaint on the faithless judge, who

Was the enemy, not of darkness and tyranny, but of the Giver of life.

Zoya's Story

Read the following critique of Zoya's Story.  Do you agree or disagree with the criticism?  Be specific in your response.

http://www.rawa.org/zoya-news.htm

Art

Find the red button that links to Iranian art.  "Flip" through the pictures.  Which of the artworks appealed to you the most and why?  Explain and describe your response.

Saparmurat Niyazov

The following article describes the fascination that people had with Saparmurat Niyazov.  Compare and contrast this view with that of the readings you completed.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12316714

Aziz Nesin

The following is a brief bio on Aziz Nesin, author of House on the Border.  After reading it, make connections to the short story.  Do you see evidence of this?  Defend your answer!

http://www.turkishculture.org/pages.php?SearchID=650

Tahir Shah in Casablanca

In this BBC interview, Tahir Shah speaks about his love for Casablanca (which the interviewer does not seem to share).

Watch the video and respond.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4KL0ZRUh8g

Tahir Shah

The following is an excerpt from author Tahir Shah's blog.  Can you create a similar list with his visit to Marrakesh?  From both accounts, what can you deduce about the author himself?  How does his writing reflect his worldview?

10 of the Best Things of Our US Trip

If you’ve been following me onFacebook, you’ve seen a few random updates of our month-long road trip from West to East across the US. Here are the top 10 best things about our trip:

1. The extraordinary swathes of empty space (especially between Arizona and Utah), which so reminded me of eastern Africa.

2. The politeness between total strangers.

3. The fact that there’s an abundance of free ice in all hotels and motels.

4. The chance it gave me to chit-chat to each and the kids.

5. Seeing the landscape change, mile by mile, from one ocean to the next.

6. The fact that you can get a simple egg cooked in a thousand ways and as the customer, you’re always right.

7. The cost of gasoline. Ohhhh, how that’s a wonder in itself.

8. The way there’s a sign ready to warn you of anything from a bend in the road to the chance of falling rocks.

9. Reaching the Atlantic and seeing it gleaming in the moonlight.

10. The sight of corn, corn and much more corn, in Nebraska and Iowa.

Shirin Ebadi

The following is an excerpt describing some of Ebadi's accomplishments prior to being awarded the Nobel Prize.  Additionally, she has been imprisoned many times for her actions and statements.

Read the following and consider the following questions.  To what extent is her work impacting international affairs? Which of the following quotes has the most significance for you and why?

Iranian rights activist wins Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO÷The Iranian human-rights activist and feminist lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo Friday, becoming the first Muslim woman to win the honor in the prize's 102-year history.

Ebadi, 56, was given the prize "for her efforts for democracy and human rights," particularly for women and children in her country, which has been under Islamic rule since its 1979 revolution, the Nobel Committee said.

In a reaction broadcast on Norwegian radio, Ebadi said her win was "very good for me, very good for human rights and very good for democracy in Iran."  She added that she was "very glad and proud" and hoped the fame the prize brought would help her work in her country.

The profile released by the Nobel Committee following Friday's announcement said, Ebadi represents "Reformed Islam, and argues for a new interpretation of Islamic law which is in harmony with vital human rights such as democracy, equality before the law, religious freedom and freedom of speech.

"As for religious freedom, it should be noted that Ebadi also includes the rights of members of the Bahai community, which has had problems in Iran ever since its foundation.

With Islam as her starting point, Ebadi campaigns for peaceful solutions to social problems and promotes new thinking on Islamic terms. She has displayed great personal courage as a lawyer defending individuals and groups who have fallen victim to a powerful political and legal system that is legitimized through an inhumane interpretation of Islam.  "Ebadi has shown her willingness and ability to cooperate with representatives of secular as well as religious views."

In 1974 Ebadi became Iran's first woman judge, but lost that post in the revolution five years later when Islamic clerics took over and decreed that women could not preside over courts.

Rather than retire to a life of obscurity, Ebadi continued to lecture in law at Tehran University and emerged as a vocal activist and lawyer dedicated to women's and children's rights.

She was a major driving force between the reform of Iran's family laws, notably on divorce and inheritance÷and also against a system where the "blood money"÷compensation for an injury÷for women is half that for a man.

Ebadi also emerged as something of an unofficial spokesperson for Iranian women, who demonstrated their political clout in 1997 by rallying around the mild-mannered reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami and electing him president.

But it was involvement in investigating one of Islamic Iran's most controversial cases÷the 1999 serial murders of writers, intellectuals and dissidents÷that put her on a collision course with Iran's hardliners.

She served as lawyer for Dariush and Parvaneh Foruhar, a couple who were among several dissidents who died in a spate of grisly murders that were eventually pinned on "rogue" agents from Iran's intelligence ministry.  In June 2000, she was arrested along with another reformist lawyer, for allegedly distributing a taped confession of a hard-line vigilante militia member involved in antireformist violence.

"My problem is not with Islam, it's with the culture of patriarchy," Ebadi told Britain's Guardian newspaper in June. "Practices such as stoning have no foundation in the Koran."

Ebadi spent time in jail for attending a 2001 conference on Iranian form in Berlin. She has maintained a high profile in her feminist struggle, also by writing many books and articles.  "Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth to death, but I have learned to overcome my fear," she told the Christian Science Monitor newspaper in 1999.

Her work has won her accolades from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and in 2001 she was awarded the human rights Rafto prize. She is married and has two daughters, aged 20 and 23.

Ebadi was selected from a field of 165 candidates for the prize, among them Pope John Paul II and former Czech president Vaclav Havel.
--Agence France-Presse

Shirin Ebadi

The following gives you a brief look into Shirin Ebadi's international importance.  (You read two excerpts from her book Iran Awakening.)

http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/meet-the-laureates/shirin-ebadi/

Read the quick overview and apply that information to the excerpts.

Nuclear Blasts?

In the following article, the authors present the possibility of sabotage in recent international events.  Do they convince you this has occurred?  Why or why not?  BE SPECIFIC in your response!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-scientist-says-blasts-targeted-nuclear-sites.html

Israeli Fear of Nuclear War

Read the following excerpt describing growing tension and fear of Iranian nuclear capabilities.  Does the author present compelling reasons to support the claims or is the author attempting an objective reporting of facts?  Which details does the author include?  What additional information could have strengthened the argument?

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/religion/20120916_ap_onjewishnewyearisraelisfeariranstrike.html 

Khamenei's Argument

Read the following argument presented by Khamenei.  What fallacies are inherent in his argument?  Explain and defend your answer.

Ok, since the old link died ...

This link paraphrases the argument, but you'll get the idea.

http://voices.yahoo.com/ayatollah-khamenei-has-point-arguing-ban-on-11777140.html?cat=9

Amir Hamza

Read the following account of one person's interaction with the Amar Haza text (you read an excerpt of this text for your Iranian readings).

http://archives.dawn.com/archives/19522

How were your experiences with the text different from (or similar to) the author's?

How does the author make his/her main point?  Does he/she utilize any rhetorical elements?

Click on the tabs for media and discussions