The Iranian Features
October 4-8, 1999 / Mehr 12-16, 1378
Today
* Culture: I love hate
you
Recent
* Life:
My life's joy
* Play:
Time to reappear
* Poetry:
- Take all you want
- Orange County
- The rain
* Opinion: Catching
up
* Cover
story: Her eyes
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| Thursday | Friday
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Friday
October 8, 1999
Culture
I love hate you
America's success has resulted in admiration, jealousy, and
resentment
By Yahya R. Kamalipour
October 8, 1999
The Iranian
Today, America's global images are largely based on the very cultural
products (TV programs, recorded music, books, magazines, and movies) that
are produced here and exported to the rest of the world. Although, in terms
of dollars, culture is the second leading American export topped only by
aerospace technology, the impact of culture goes far beyond money in influencing
global life.
On the eve of the dawn of the third millennium, the United States not
only dominates practically all aspects of global communication and entertainment,
but continues to fascinate the rest of the world. In fact, America's cultural
influence, coupled with its political and economic power, has inevitably
resulted in admiration, jealousy, and resentment. A popular resentment
throughout the world, even in such traditional friends of America, as France
and Canada, is that the U.S., through its media conglomerates and cultural
products, is threatening traditional or indigenous cultures ... GO
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Thursday
Octoebr 7, 1999
Life
My life's joy
I have stopped dreaming about my childhood
By Babak Mohammadi
October 7, 1999
The Iranian
You may be asking what is all this mumbo-jumbo Babak is giving us. To
answer this question I have to go back 48 hours to Friday, November 27,
1998. As I just finished my first pint of lager, it occurred to me that
it had been almost a year since I had dreamt of my childhood.
I remember vividly what I dreamed last time. I was playing outside of
our house in Torbat-Heidarieh. I was full of childhood joy. My joy was
immediately shattered as I heard my mother's voice crying my name: "Babak...
Babak... biyaa tu khuneh... biyaa tu khuneh." (Babak, come inside
the house.) ... GO
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Play
Time to reappear
The play that angered religious leaders
October 7, 1999
The Iranian
The following email, containing the translation of a controversial
play that appeared in a student publication in Iran, has been circulating
the Internet. It is being reproduced to keep our readers informed of current
events in Iran. The translator(s) is unknown. The Persian original has
been posted on a number of web sites: ... GO
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Wednesday
Octoebr 6, 1999
Poetry
Take all you want
Poem
By Siamak Kiarostami
October 6, 1999
The Iranian
have we found a solace and an insecure peace?
or are we just thrust as close together
as these heavy glass shields of ours will permit --
all the while averting our eyes away from each other´s nakedness
... GO
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Orange County
Poem
By Leyla Momeny
October 6, 1999
The Iranian
here behind the orange groves,
old men eat golf balls, carry sacks of sugar
prepared for early desperation.
then drive down freeways
dipped in sand ... GO
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The rain
Poem
By Shah Zendegi
October 6, 1999
The Iranian
I hear the drizzle on the road
Like memory they fall
Soft and warm, tapping on my roof and walls...
I gaze beyond the rain drencehd streets
To Iran, where my heart lies ... GO
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Tuesday
October 5, 1999
Opinion
Catching up
The Muslim world at the threshold of the third millennium
By Fereydoun Hoveyda
October 5, 1999
The Iranian
Many economic, political, social and cultural reasons have been advanced
for this interruption. But they had one common denominator: the triumph
of ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran, around the 12th 13th
centuries ...
Ghazali condemned thinkers such as Abu Ali Sina (Avicenna) while in
Andalusia half a century later, the fundamentalist clerics branded philosophers
such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes) heretics and burned their books. Fortunately,
many of their books were carefully gathered by European universities whose
scholars pursued the work of now condemned Muslim thinkers and scientists.
The famous Italian historian Geoffredo Quadri goes as far as to assert
that the Renaissance would not have been possible without Averroes's ideas!
In other words, if not for the rising influence of fundamentalists, the
scientific and industrial revolutions could have developed in the Muslim
world, not in the West ... GO TO FEATURE
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Monday
October 4, 1999
Cover story
Her eyes
"Her eyes were so black they seemed to drain the room of
all its light"
October 4, 1999
The Iranian
Excerpt from James Buchan's A Good Place to Die, published
by The Harvill Press, London. This is the first major British novel to
engage with contemporary Iranian society for a generation. It is an epic
love story that opens in Isfahan in 1974 and closes in the same city twenty-three
years, a revolution and a bloody war later.
One afternon, 19 April, 1974, 23 Farvardin 1353, I fell asleep and woke
to a shop full of angels. Their voices had the character of light in the
dingy shop. I staggered up and saw, leaning against the high doorpost that
separated the two rooms, a girl in a black prayer-chador. I thought: She
thinks she's too tall, but she's not. Behind her, the bright voices of
girls wheeled and swooped like the pigeons in the courtyard of the Shah's
Mosque, but the person in the door was still. She had pulled her chador
up across her face and where the hem had risen up I saw the edge of a light
blue skirt, the uniform of the girls' secondary schools in Isfahan, and
white ankle socks. Her eyes when I looked at them were black, so black
they seemed to drain the room of all its light: their blackness was not
an absence of light, but was itself a light, of a kind I had not up to
that moment experienced or known to exist, beneath which the objects of
the solar world took on a melancholy futility ...
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