You are required to write book reports for this course on (“Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni.”)
Your paper should be from 5-6 pages, double-spaced using a 12-point font with one-inch margins. Make sure you allow plenty of time to read the novel, Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni in order to complete the report by the due date.
Make sure that your report includes your name and the title of the book along with proper citation of all the sources. (Please use any citation style of your choice, just make sure to cite your sources)
Develop a thesis and support it with evidence from the book, reading assignments, and lectures. This thesis statement should be rooted in one or two of the questions posed below.
Write a book review that ties issues in the book to general course content. The review needs to explain the book’s content in sufficient detail that the review reader understands the central argument, or else the main story (this should be no more than one-half of the review). The second part of the review should be a discussion of the argument or the themes of the book in the context of other things that you read this semester: connections, comparisons, contradictions. Ultimately, you are trying to explain what the reader is saying about women in a particular Islamic society, whether the author sees women as equal to men or as subordinate to men, why, and whether and how the author calls for change.
You might also want to reference some of the below questions/themes when deciding on an argument/theme for your paper: Different interpretations of Islam, namely patriarchal interpretation of Islam (hadiths), Shi’a/Sunni divide, the influence of tribal and kin-based customs on gender in the Middle East, Western perceptive on Islam; women in Muslim societies, Orientalism, imperialism, colonialism, Westernization/globalization of the Muslim world, everyday life of women in the Muslim world, etc.
In the introduction to the book, the word jihad is translated as “struggle.” Why do you think the title of the book is “Lipstick Jihad”?
Most of Azadeh Moaveni’s family arrived in America just before or with the 1979 revolution. They view themselves as exiles rather than immigrations (p. 28). What effect does this sensibility have on their sense of identity and their need to assimilate?
At the beginning of the book, Azadeh is in many ways a typical teenager, trying desperately to fit in with her peers. She is embarrassed by her Iranianness, especially in the wake of the hostage crisis. She feels caught between two irreconcilable cultures—those of her Persian home and her American school. By college, however, she sheds her efforts to cultivate a certain “ethnic ambiguity” (p. 10) and instead embraces “the joys of my own private Iranianness” (p. 28). How does her sense of her own identity change once she moves to Iran?
Upon arriving in Iran, Azadeh realizes that growing up on the “outside” came with many complications: “You grew up assuming everything about you was related to that place, but you never got to test that out…You spent a lot of time…feeling sad for your poor country. Most of that time, you were actually feeling sorry for yourself, but since your country was legitimately in serious trouble, you didn’t realize it.” (p. 32). To what extent do hyphenated Americans use questions about cultural origins as a cloak to conceal deeper uncertainties about themselves and their values?
The Iranian diaspora in America is enamored with an Iran that is no more. As Siamak tells Azadeh: “If you are a nostalgic lover of Iran, you love your own remembrance of the past, how the passions in your own life are intertwined with Iran.” (p. 45) How does this nostalgia and sense of personal grievance affect what Iranian-Americans teach Americans about their changing country?
After September 11, Reza tells Azadeh, “There is no outrage in the West when we die, no one talks about civilian deaths, because by now our loss of life is ordinary.” (p. 224) Even though Iranians are described throughout the book as markedly pro-American, do the reactions Azadeh describes to September 11 suggest a deeper ambivalence about America’s intentions and presence in the Middle East?
Young people are described as changing Iran from below, when “at some historic moment impossible to pinpoint, about the turn of the millennium, Iranians’ threshold for dissimulation and constriction sank, and people simply began acting differently.” (p. 61-62) At the same time, Azadeh chronicles young people’s apathy at the failure of the reform movement. How important can young people be to Iran’s future once apathy has set in? Can society truly be changed through how people live daily life, from the bottom up?
I think that one of the most important themes to come out of Moaveni’s work is the idea that the experience of women in many fundamentalist settings is different than that of men. The entire notion of “lipstick jihad” is that their mere act of applying makeup and embracing it as a part of one’s femininity has political implications in a place like the Ayatollah’s Iran. The basic tension between what the mullahs were preaching and how women were acting and in what they believed forms the thematic development of how women appropriate the role of “the other” in dissent from the norm. The theme of women seeking to find a voice that exists outside of what fundamentalist culture dictates is part of the narrative.
I think that another theme is the modern predicament of displacement. Moaveni’s narrative reveals how individuals are in search of their home. Her own story depicts this. As she was Iranian, she leaves when the revolution takes place, only to come back as a journalist and leave again when the repression becomes too great to bear. Her own experience brings light to the idea that the modern predicament is one in which a sense of rootlessness is evident. The modern immigrant is one in which there is a desire to connect to the home, only to realize that its hopeful vision may only live in the subjective. Contrary to a more traditional read of immigration, in which those who leave remain in the new world and almost deny that an old one exists, this modern vision of immigration is a more fluid one, where the individual is constantly in search of happiness both “there” and “here.” In Moaveni’s own narrative, this theme is evident.
Persepolis, the King:
Summery of Persepolis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2URwpN1v-MM
Divorce Iranian Style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6MOaF_ah4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXWVUm4RgOY