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The Ministry Of Guidance Invites You To Not Stay
Hooman Majd
An American Family in Iran
Doubleday
November 2013
On Sale: November 5, 2013
272 pages
ISBN: 0385535325
EAN: 9780385535328
Kindle: B00CQZ65KQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
With U.S.–Iran relations at a thirty-year low,
Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd dared to take his young
family on a year-long sojourn in Tehran. The Ministry of
Guidance Invites You to Not Stay traces their domestic
adventures and closely tracks the political drama of a
terrible year for Iran's government.
It was an
annus horribilis for Iran's Supreme Leader. The Green
Movement had been crushed, but the regime was on edge,
anxious lest democratic protests resurge. International
sanctions were dragging down the economy while talk of war
with the West grew. Hooman Majd was there for all of it. A
new father at age fifty, he decided to take his blonde,
blue-eyed Midwestern yoga instructor wife Karri and his
adorable, only-eats-organic infant son Khash from their hip
Brooklyn neighborhood to spend a year in the land of his
birth. It was to be a year of discovery for Majd, too, who
had only lived in Iran as a child.
The book opens
ominously as Majd is stopped at the airport by intelligence
officers who show him a four-inch thick security file about
his books and journalism and warn him not to write about
Iran during his stay. Majd brushes it off—but doesn't tell
Karri—and the family soon settles in to the rituals of
middle class life in Tehran: finding an apartment (which
requires many thousands of dollars, all of which,
bafflingly, is returned to you when you leave), a secure
internet connection (one that persuades the local censors
you are in New York) and a bootlegger (self-explanatory).
Karri masters the head scarf, but not before being stopped
for mal-veiling, twice. They endure fasting at
Ramadan and keep up with Khash in a country weirdly
obsessed with children.
All the while, Majd fields
calls from security officers and he and Karri eye the
headlines—the arrest of an American "spy," the British
embassy riots, the Arab Spring—and wonder if they are
pushing their luck. The Ministry of Guidance Invites You
to Not Stay is a sparkling account of life under a
quixotic authoritarian regime that offers rare and intimate
insight into a country and its people, as well as a
personal story of exile and a search for the meaning of home
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