My Life as a Traitor

Great reading recommendation Jesse! I found it well worth my time and I enjoyed the information I learned. I had to go online several times to learn about the historical events and religions and ethnicities I never had heard about before. I wish I knew exactly what Zarah's contributions to this book are versus what Robert Hillman's influence must be.

I felt sympathy for Zarah's imprisonment and torture and great joy in her release. I was grateful she was not raped. I admired the humor and relationship she had with Sohrab in spite of the circumstances. At times I was annoyed by her "I'm a princess"-attitude. A few times I was disappointed for her weakness and willingness to cave in to the interogators. Just like her, I imagine myself strong and unbreakable in the face of torture, but perhaps it is all a fantasy in my mind and I would succumb too.

A couple of recurring themes brought her complex story to simple terms, for example the issue of her desire for pink shoes and feeling the sun on her hair. I sense her desire was far far deeper, perhaps to the point of complete sexual liberation. Although the book led me to love her and want to protect her, I still wonder if she would be one of the girls in the LDS church who mock, in attitude and in practice, the old-fogey church leaders and the standards in the "For the Strength of Youth" pamphlet. Here is what she said:

"...in the Iran I grew up in, respect for Islam, admiration of its philosophical and spiritual core, was not quite enough. One was asked to practice superpiety. If I had grown up in a Calvinist state, in an orthodox Jewish state, in a fundamentalist Protestant state, (insert LDS state here) in any state that insisted on a severe expression of belief, I would have faced the same problems. ...I couldn't make myself believe that my salvation depended on following an ironclad set of rules that had the effect of placing the thrill and wonder of being alive at such a remote distance from my natural appetites."

That yearning to fulfill her "natural appetites" is what bothers me as I have been indoctrinated from my youth and I have a spiritual conviction that overcoming the natural man is godliness...yet thankfully our true religion also teaches that many "natural appetites" are God-given and are to be used in the right place and the right time, not completely avoided. She explains why she preferred the Zoroastrianism of her mother of the Islamic religion of her father: "There was nothing hard-line about them, nothing dogmatic. Zoroastrianism is not a proselyting religion." She simply wanted a religion that is easy to live that didn't make her feel guilty.

I disagree with the moral relativism I find in some of her statements. For example,
"The stories I read to my children will not by stories of martyrs. The rules I lay down for them will have nothing to do with sacrifices, nothing to do with an afterlife; the rules will only insist on courtesy, tolerance. Their obligations will be to find happiness, and preserve it."

Perhaps her perspective is to be expected when she has been "forced" to believe in certain ways and to do certain things. My gratitude is renewed for a free country and a religion that recognizes the eternal principle of agency.

Her admiration of Western welfare systems turns my stomach.

This book satisfied my curiosity about the inner workings of Iranian leaders. They are what I expected them to be. The torture I expected. The hypocrisy I knew existed.
"Hypocrisy became a special hatred of ours - the hypocrisy of a government that awarded all sorts of treats to the people who endorsed its ideology, whether or not the endorsement was sincere, and withheld favors from those who voiced even the mildest criticism of those in power."

Over the last several years I had given up hope that liberty and democracy in the middle east would spring from the hearts of the people just as in the American Revolution. Zarah renewed some hope that there are people in the middle east that have some vision of liberty...maybe, just maybe there will be a Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, or Madison among them.

Interested at the conflict of being raised in a political environment opposed to her families beliefs. I wonder if my kids will grow up forced to embrace socialism at school and in public while at home I teach them about true liberty from the writings of the founding fathers, Bastiat, Ayn Rand, Ezra T Benson and J. Rueben Clark.

"I knew that all was not right when liberties I enjoyed at home vanished the moment I walked out our front door. A habit of questioning took root in me." "...the danger is that you will become what you do; that your silent sympathies will wither for lack of expression."

On the Culture of Grief

"Iranians feel grief very deeply, regardless of religion. Grief has its roots deep in our Persian past. The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture. ...And a death in the family was a catastrophe."

At first I asked myself, "What about their religious beliefs in the afterlife? Doesn't that give them comfort?" I quickly recalled that grief really is a cultural thing. In Argentina people really know how to grieve - long, hard, and passionately. I remember when one teenage kid in the ward got shot by other kids who stole his shoes. He was shot in the mouth with a .22 caliber and it blew out some teeth and exited his cheek. He was fortunate that the bullet didn't have a deadly aim. The ward testimony meeting the week this happened turned out to be a three hour funeral-like service with every member of the ward getting up and trying to out-do each others demonstration of grief. I saw more grief then than I ever saw related to 9-11. We Westerners just have a completely different grief culture. Admittedly ethno-centric, I like western grief better...it is far more productive. Perhaps our lack of western grief is a reflection of our lack of deeper love.

Interesting Quotes:

When discussing courtship in Iran, Zarah makes the statement "the essence of romance is often better preserved by constraints than by license."

"...the real theme of good poetry is liberty. I have never read a fine poem or story that condoned repression and rejoiced in the unfettered power of the mullahs."

"...as with almost all nations in time of war, those in power defined and redefined patriotic behavior."