The other battle in Middle East

When Azadeh Moaveni traveled to Iran as an adult in 1998, a policewoman stopped her and her relatives at the door of a movie theater and ordered the women to wipe off their lipstick. They obeyed, but immediately reapplied their lipstick inside. Moaveni learned that Iranian women were equally adept at arranging forbidden trysts with their boyfriends, watching “Ally McBeal” on forbidden satellite dishes, and engaging in the multiple daily acts of personal freedom that expressed their defiance of the myriad restrictions imposed on them by the Iranian government.

This is the struggle, or “jihad,” of “Lipstick Jihad,” the vivid memoir of the California-born Moaveni’s time as a journalist among the “lost generation” of young Iranians and their rebellion against the petty rules that symbolize the greater freedoms denied to them. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Moaveni moved to Tehran in 2000, donned a head scarf and reported as an insider among the women who attempt to outmaneuver the state-sponsored chauvinism that defines the boundaries of their lives.

“The veil is something women put on every day. They’re aware that under traditional Islamic law their status is confined,” Moaveni, 28, told a crowded roomful of Iranian American students at Cal State Northridge a few days ago. “For men, it’s a little more diffuse. There’s nothing attached to their bodies every day to remind them of their lack of rights.”

The Iranian women Moaveni got to know lived a curious paradox. When the shah was ousted in early 1979, female illiteracy was as high as 90% in some rural areas. Since then, public education has made literacy near-universal for girls between 15 and 24. Female university students now outnumber males. But cultural obstacles leave qualified women even less opportunity in Iran’s scarce job market than young men.

This is a generation that is all dressed up with nowhere to go.

“I think that to be a young woman in this day and age is challenging anywhere,” Moaveni said. “But a theocracy is particularly challenging: Women were supposed to be educated but subservient.”

“Lipstick Jihad” is the latest of a number of recent books that explore the lives of Middle Eastern women.

Charlotte Abbott, the book news editor at Publishers Weekly, said the demand for such books has been driven by a widespread curiosity about Middle Eastern countries in the news since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Publishers really woke up to the fact that there really weren’t a lot of books that could satisfy that kind of hunger,” Abbott said. “Publishers went out and pursued acquiring those books.”

Some have become surprise bestsellers. Few saw the potential for a blockbuster in Azar Nafisi’s 2003 “Reading Lolita in Tehran” -- a nonfiction account of a women’s book club that meets weekly to discuss literary classics as the rise of fundamentalism slowly eats away at their freedom. Another hit was Asne Seierstad’s “The Bookseller of Kabul,” an intimate look at an Afghan patriarch who braves jail and the Taliban to provide schoolbooks and censored literature, but heads a family that treats its female members as little more than servants and condones the “honor killing” of a flirtatious young female relative. The book has been translated into 31 languages.

Abbott said the success of such books is probably driven in part by book buyers in the United States, 68% of whom are women, according to industry estimates.

She adds that some of the more news-driven books on the war in Iraq have not fared as well commercially as books that provide a more intimate portrait of daily life, which “open up that world in a way that middle class Americans can easily relate to.”

That more personal view is just beginning to emerge from Iraq. Feminist Press has published a blogged memoir by the Iraq-based diarist of the popular war log “Baghdad Burning.” Her stories of Iraqis too afraid to attend Christmas parties and shocked by the grisly hostage videos they watch on television invite readers into the homes and psyches of war-fatigued Iraqis. “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war,” she told her readers in her first entry in August 2003. “That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.”

A raft of the new books are rooted in Iran. In “Journey From the Land of No,” Roya Hakakian chronicles how the hope and euphoria felt by many Iranians after the shah’s ouster was converted to dread and foreboding as it became clear that they had traded monarchy for a life dictated by religious fundamentalists and their brutal enforcers. In “Persepolis 2,” a comic strip memoir, Marjane Satrapi tells how she returned from a lonely exile in Austria to an Iran where state-sanctioned chauvinism makes her doubt she has much of a professional future. In “Even After All This Time,” Afschineh Latifi tells of her family’s struggle to reunite in America following the 1978 revolution and the subsequent summary execution of her colonel father.

In those early years of the Iranian revolution, morality police roamed the streets, seizing women for forced “virginity tests.” The marriage age for girls was lowered to 9, though it has since been raised to 13. Girls could not be on the street with men who were not related to them. Veiling for women was reimposed, and the sins of the flesh routinely decried by religious leaders -- though their dictates apparently did not discourage security forces from raping women in custody, judging from accounts in the recent books.

Moaveni’s “Lipstick Jihad” is about her journey into the heart of the restless, irreverent Iranian youthquake that erupted from this tightly wound society, where about 60% of the estimated 69 million people are now under the age of 30.

Moaveni grew up in San Jose. But she did not entirely evade the fallout from the revolution; her family and friends avoided identifying themselves as Iranians, instead calling themselves “Persians.”

“Being Iranian in this country was not very easy in the 1980s. Being Iranian was associated with the hostage crisis,” Moaveni told the students at Cal State Northridge. “It was awkward. We were like, ‘We’re secular. We don’t believe in hostage-taking.’ ”

When Moaveni returned to live in Iran, she found a country in which the years of official scolding in the name of religion had backfired.

She discovered that the state-sanctioned sexual puritanism had unwittingly eroticized the society, keeping sex as much on people’s minds as it was in the rhetoric of religious leaders and morality police.

State religious leaders had turned some people off to Islam so much that they took refuge in New Age spiritualism, swamis and yoga.

The demonization of the “Great Satan” -- the United States -- made young Iranians eager to adopt superficial symbols of American culture as a way to flout their own government. Madonna, “Baywatch” and “Ally McBeal” parties became a staple of their gravitation toward a global youth culture.

They were anything but ascetic: Young people wanted Armani, ski trips, nose jobs.

“The revolution created its own opposition,” Moaveni said. “This generation grew up with education and some access to the outside world and the Internet. It’s politically engaged, savvy and capable of really smart opposition.”

Faced with a society with limited opportunities, her alienated young contemporaries also took refuge in forbidden sexual affairs, smoking, drinking and drugs.

In just a few years, Iran seemed to have changed with or without the consent of the government. Young people began to openly defy dress and behavior codes en masse in an effort to expand the boundaries of their circumscribed lives. Today, Moaveni said, wearing lipstick is no longer verboten, couples walking hand-in-hand are no longer rare, and so many people have satellite television the government has stopped cracking down. In chapters with titles like “I’m Too Sexy for My Veil” and “Not Without My Mimosa” she captures the irreverent spirit that drives these subtle shifts.

“I think the ugliness of the regime has convinced people that religion and sexuality is private,” Moaveni said. “It has bred a greater acceptance of difference. It has taught people that it’s divisive and hurtful to a community and a society.”

There is still, of course, a dark, thuggy underworld where some Iranians pay dearly for dissent, and self-styled revolutionary morality enforcers called Basiji sweep up unlucky Iranians. Moaveni leads us into this world in “Lipstick Jihad,” describing the day she was picked up by the Basiji, who threatened to take her to intelligence officers with a reputation for raping women and beating people to death. But Moaveni was safely released.

She was lucky: In 2003, an Iranian-born Canadian journalist, Zahra Kazemi, 54, was beaten to death in custody after being arrested for taking photographs of students protesting theocracy outside a prison in Tehran. An Iranian doctor who subsequently fled to Canada said he examined Kazemi and found injuries that could only have resulted from torture and rape.

Numerous young Iranian activists have been jailed and brutalized since the 1999 student protests.

“In the wrong place at the wrong time,” Moaveni said, “punishment can still be very severe.”

In the end, Moaveni concluded, most Iranians are fed up with politics that “follow them into the bathroom and the bedroom” and would like to have a secular government.

But that doesn’t mean they’re interested in another revolution or a U.S. intervention like the one they see on television from Iraq.

“People are exhausted,” she said. “The attitude is: How can we transform what we have now from within, in a peaceful way, without devastating the country?”

Some of the accounts, such as “Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia” by Carmen Bin Ladin, provide an insider’s glimpse of a closed man’s world.

One upcoming book from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is “Between Two Worlds -- Escaping From Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam,” written by Zainab Salbi with Los Angeles journalist Laurie Becklund.

As the daughter of Hussein’s pilot, Salbi grew up under the gaze of the Iraqi dictator. As Salbi grew up, that gaze turned lustful and Salbi’s mother became worried: Hussein had a reputation of lusting with impunity.

In “The Kite Runner,” a bestselling work of fiction set in Afghanistan, an Afghan-born man, Khaled Hosseini, tells an intimate tale of two motherless boys in Kabul who are divided by a brutal cult of masculinity.

Some male authors are turning to female characters whose lives are a microcosm of the conflicts unfolding in their societies.

In “The Swallows of Kabul,” a former Algerian army officer, Mohamed Moulessehoul, adopted a female nom de plume, Yasmina Khadra, to tell the story of how the rise of the Taliban divides an Afghan husband and wife. A man demoralized by the crumbling of his middle-class life under Taliban rule impulsively vents his feelings of humiliation by taking part in the stoning of a woman imprisoned. His beautiful, liberal wife is appalled, and their confrontation sets off her imprisonment and an inescapable spiral of events.

“Male authors from that region recognize that one of the ways to tell that story of fundamentalism is to focus on the women question,” said literary agent Sandra Dijkstra. “That metaphor for what they do to women is the most powerful way to tell the story of what fundamentalism does to all of us.”