On my last night in Tehran, an unusually humid summer evening, my uncle and I were on our way to a friend's house. Driving through

S.K. and his wife are at the party. It is late in the evening and as the last of the host's supply of homemade araq

Underground and without paper to write on, the Iranian intellectual community has been forced into a new oral tradition. Private gatherings — parties, dinners, and

As Sheikh Ishraq would have it, the community of arts and letters, for one, has transformed itself into a zoo of sorts in Iran. Were

And yet siyahi is a ploy. A long-standing National Front member — blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, in solitary confinement for eight months

The entire country is pervaded with the color black. This is not the solitary and sorrowful black we are accustomed to see worn in mourning

Taba is the Arabic root for “to repent.” Tavvab, in the Persian pronunciation, is “the repentant one.” In the vocabulary of the prisons of the

Payam-e Shahid (Message of the Martyr) is an everyday tribunal for the rhetoric and politics of the Islamic Republic. A clever propaganda device, it reiterates

Behesht-e Zahra (Paradise of Zahra) is the name of a huge cemetery outside of Tehran, on the highway to Qom. Conceived and partially constructed before

As to living in the west, where is one to search for the source of this new sense of alienation? That the popular media thrive