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Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran
Random House
February 2009
On Sale: February 3, 2009
352 pages
ISBN: 140006645X
EAN: 9781400066452
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Both a love story and a reporter’s first draft of history,
Honeymoon in Tehran is a stirring, trenchant, and deeply
personal chronicle of two years in the maelstrom of Iranian
life. In 2005, Azadeh Moaveni, longtime Middle East correspondent
for Time magazine, returns to Iran to cover the rise of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As she documents the
firebrand leader’s troublesome entry onto the world stage,
Moaveni richly portrays a society too often caricatured as
the heartland of militant Islam. Living and working in
Tehran, she finds a nation that openly yearns for freedom
and contact with the West, but whose economic grievances
and nationalist spirit find a temporary outlet in
Ahmadinejad’s strident pronouncements. Mingling with
underground musicians, race car drivers, young radicals,
and scholars, she explores the cultural identity crisis and
class frustration that pits Iran’s next generation against
the Islamic system. And then the unexpected happens: Azadeh falls in love with
a young Iranian man and decides to get married and start a
family in Tehran. Suddenly, she finds herself navigating an
altogether different side of Iranian life. Preparing to be
wed by a mullah, she sits in on a government marriage prep
class where young couples are instructed to enjoy sex. She
visits Tehran’s bridal bazaar and finds that the Iranian
wedding has become an outrageously lavish–though often
still gender-segregated–production. When she becomes
pregnant, she must prepare to give birth in an Iranian
hospital, at the same time observing her friends’ struggles
with their young children, who must learn to say one thing
at home and another at school. Despite her busy schedule as a wife and mother, Azadeh
continues to report for Time on Iran’s nuclear standoff
with the West and Iranians’ dissatisfaction with
Ahmadinejad’s heavy-handed rule. But as women are arrested
on the street for “immodest dress” and the authorities
unleash a campaign of intimidation against journalists, the
country’s dark side reemerges. This fundamentalist turn,
along with the chilling presence of “Mr. X,” the government
agent assigned to mind her every step, forces Azadeh to
make the hard decision that her family’s future lies
outside Iran. Powerful and poignant, fascinating and humorous Honeymoon
in Tehran is the harrowing story of a young woman’s tenuous
life in a country she thought she could change.
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