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Book Review: Rage Against the Veil
A small book, easily read in an evening, but in no way a simple story for readers desiring lightweight entertainment, Rage Against the Veil by Parvin Darabi offers a deeply moving portrait of her only sister Homa’s outstanding life and achievements as well as the continuous oppression that led to her self-immolation in a public square in Iran in 1994. Homa shouted “Death to tyranny! Long live freedom! and Long live Iran!” as the flames consumed her body, then said shortly before she died that she would no longer “have to watch the brutality of mankind toward one another and especially to women and children.”
Parvin traces Homa’s story from their births, only 18 months apart, to a mother married at thirteen, without her consent, to a much older man. Their mother’s story was typical in 1939 and still is for many Muslim girls living in countries where fundamentalist Islamic leadership rules. The two sisters grew up under the reign of the last Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who attempted to westernize Iran by, among other things, forcing women to give up the veil, and abolishing polygamy. Thus, during the 50’s and 60’s, their parents encouraged them to pursue an education before marriage. Unfortunately the shah’s government depended on the vicious Savak (secret police) and the covert support of American money funneled through the CIA to keep him in power, a fact that created continual political unrest.
Homa began to take an interest in politics from a very young age and became a lifelong member of the Pan-Iranist party which strove for democracy and equality in Iran. She fought for her convictions from her high school days until her death, never doubting that autocratic, male-only rule was damaging to equal rights, in fact dropping out of the party in the early 90's after its leader took a second wife without divorcing or considering the feelings of his first. Homa understood that ousting the Shah in favor of the Islamic Republic was only substituting one form of oppression for another, yet she chose to stay in her country and in her traditional marriage, rather than become part of the educated Iranian diaspora like her sister and thousands of others who fled after the revolution that installed the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Homa was a woman with incredible drive, becoming the first Iranian of either sex to sit on the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1978. She was a top pediatrician specializing in children’s psychiatric disorders. Returning to Iran shortly after passing the Board’s exam because she then believed that the new government of Khomeini would bring democracy to her country, Homa established a clinic where children suffering from mental disorders could be treated. “Children were brought from all over the country to be treated by her. These were children that were destined to be nothing more than inmates in state hospitals. She was changing their lives for the better.”
Over the next fifteen years Homa adjusted to, but never accepted, the gradual repressive restrictions put into law by the Iranian government. Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq affected her tremendously. She was “treating many of the soldiers who were returning from the front line with severe physical and psychological problems. She empathized with them dearly and refused to abandon them....[and] She was upset by the fact that no one wanted to focus any attention on the domestic problems caused by the strict new religious guidelines.”
Homa saw the negative effects of the Islamic Revolution on her country’s people,particularly women, especially when she was removed from her position as a professor at the university because she refused to wear the chador, the familiar, head-to-toe black shroud now required by law for any female over six years of age. The author was well aware of her sister’s ensuing depression and attempted to secure legal permission to bring her to the United States for treatment. Her concern was in no way relieved by Homa’s husband, a psychiatrist, who insisted that she was his personal responsibility, although their relationship was purely formal by that time. Homa felt increasingly isolated, finally giving up her private practice as well, after being harassed by the Revolutionary Guards-- her dream of equality faded farther and farther away. She saw no other way to make a statement of the oppression she felt except by destroying herself, soaking her clothing with gasoline and turning into a human torch.
Any time I feel complacent about the progress of women’s rights, any time I start to relax and forget my vigilance against oppression of those rights, a book such as Rage Against the Veil quickly re-focuses my resolve and opens my heart a little wider. Feeling the mental and physical anguish suffered by this principled, intelligent woman - a woman who had devoted her life to healing others and to the struggle for equal treatment for all - gives me yet another reason to carry on the vision, to insist on the revelation of truth about women’s lives.
Reviewed by Diane Rae Schulz
Rage Against the Veil, Parvin Darabi & Romin P. Thomson. 1999, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY. ISBN: 1-57392-682-5Buy the book!