Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Graphic Novel, 2003

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Graphic Novel, 2004

Both by Marjane Satrapi

Rating: 4 Coffee Cups

         

We find them more often in Europe and Canada than in the USA: the people who’ve made a career as “recovering Muslims” who’ve left the Deen.  Salman Rushdie may have been the first to find a large audience; but in recent years, they’re mostly women. There is, of course, Ayaan Hirsi ‘Ali, the Somali-born right-wing politician of the Netherlands, who wrote the script for the notorious anti-Islam film Submission. In Canada, Irshad Manji, the feminist-lesbian author of The Trouble with Islam, hints that she isn’t recovering from Islam just yet, but she threatens to cross that line if the Ummah doesn’t change its ways.

Their audiences are not really other Muslim women, who by and large have not heard of the professional ex-Muslimahs. Rather, their appeal is to European and American feminists, who find in their stories confirmation of their deepest conviction: our sisters in Islam are smothered with veils, silenced, robbed, oppressed, beaten and raped by their husbands and brothers, without exception (Astaghfirullah!). Their rage thus stoked, the advocates of what used to be called “women’s liberation” work themselves up to pick up “the white woman’s burden” and drag every unfortunate Muslimah by the hand away from the “darkness” of Islam and Muslim men—whether the Muslimahs want it or not.

But when the western elite decide that Muslims are under enough control, and when the “War on Terrorism” is replaced by The Next Big Fear, the books of professional ex-Muslimahs, God willing, will probably disappear, save perhaps a few.

Persepolis and Persepolis 2, written by the Iranian exile Marjane Satrapi and translated from the French, might be among the autobiographies that will last. Most admirers of the books see them as a heart-warming tale of a young girl’s struggle to grow up and stay true to self in the face of Islamic repression. They are charmed even more by the presentation of the entire story as two graphic novels. In other words, they are super-long comic books in black-and-white, drawn by the author herself. Her pictures remind us sometimes of the Shah-Namah. At other times, they resemble illustrations from the Ramona Quimby series, the same children’s books that charmed Satrapi’s American readers years ago. (Imagine the “little sparkler” in a hijab!) “Progressive” Muslims seem to like Persepolis too; it’s even for sale on one of their web-sites.

In spite of that, we believe that both volumes of Persepolis are worthwhile reading for concerned adults struggling to understand (and change) the world they now confront. For starters, the Ummah needs to know what is in the heads of people who don’t like Islam. Of course, these unsatisfied people have plenty of good reasons not to like what Muslims do; and we must take them seriously, be ready to straighten our own crookedness, and apply Islam properly in the future. Also, Satrapi’s book in itself is a sincere testimony, from one convinced that she is telling her truth about life and politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran; and it does shed considerable light on some of the choices that the Ummah soon must make for itself. That assumes, of course, that readers take the precautions usually necessary with autobiographers, who often indulge in justifying themselves or settling old scores.

However, let Muslim readers also beware: Persepolis might be comic books, but they aren’t for kids or the weak of stomach. In France, where the author Satrapi now lives, the bande déssinée (or B.D.) has pretty much replaced books among young adults, who can find classic novels, poetry, works of biography or history, even straight-out porno, in a comic-strip format. If Persepolis were a movie, it would rate a hard “R” for depictions of sexual situations, torture, violence, nudity, depictions of bathroom functions, and plenty of bad language.

Even so, many thousands of American and European fans today take Marjane Satrapi to their hearts, especially the little version. Again, we believe it’s a Ramona Quimby thing. In other words, Satrapi’s readers, mostly females between the ages of 18 and 40, convince themselves that she is just like them: young, smart, spunky and cute, with solid middle-class (though not middle-American) credentials, making lots of mistakes and learning from them while making her way in a crazy world.

                                  little Marji Satrapi                                             little Ramona Quimby

                                                        

But anybody who knows a little about the Middle East will instantly recognize that’s not exactly right: there are certain factors, below the radar of most North Americans, that critically affect how Satrapi’s story must be interpreted and understood.

First of all, we realize very quickly in the first volume of Persepolis that six-year-old little Marji and her family are not really modern middle-class types as we understand them in the USA. One clue is the family name, Satrapi, coming from “satrap,” the title of governors in the ancient Persian Empire of Cyrus and Darius. These people are stone-cold blue-bloods: the kind of people the Egyptians call pashas, and the Bostonians, brahmans.  Marji’s great grand-dad on her mother’s side was the last emperor of the dynasty toppled by the first Pahlevi ruler with British help; when her father tells her the story, he emphasizes, with some indignation, that Reza Shah was just an illiterate low-ranking officer.

Nevertheless, Engineer Ebi Satrapi manages to make himself and his family very comfortable under both the Pahlevis and the “Islamic Republic.” He can afford a place in North Tehran, the “chic” part of town, and drive an expensive car. There is also enough money for the family to take trips regularly to Europe and Turkey. When he is caught by the Revolutionary Guards with alcohol on his breath, he has the bribes handy to get out of trouble; and if his only daughter smacks down her principal, he can pull the strings needed to get her into another school. In fact, that is why he and his wife Taji won’t leave Iran to seek the “freedom” of the West; he’d rather keep what he has now than become a cabbie in the USA.

Marji’s family are the descendants of princes, and they are also three generations of committed Marxists. This is a small detail that most American readers overlook, unless they pay attention to book jacket blurbs. For the Satrapis, there is no contradiction: “Only a prince (in Iran) can allow himself to have a conscience.” Marji’s beloved Uncle Anoosh was once an official in the Soviet-backed puppet state in South Azerbaijan, before fleeing for his life to Russia. Marji’s parents do not believe in Allah or the afterlife, but buy her books and comics explaining basic communist theory, including “dialectic materialism.” Indeed, when the little girl talks to her personal “God” at night, she imagines him as Marx with straighter hair. (It is interesting how labels shift: forty years ago, Washington would have branded Marji and her family as dangerous reds or at best, “useful idiots for the Russkies.” Today, George W. will declare them “advocates of freedom.”)   

If we stay alert as we read, it becomes obvious that Marjane Satrapi really isn’t a recovering Muslimah at all; she was never taught to be one in the first place. Even in her late teens, as we learn in the second volume, she does not know salah. For her, Islam will always be that foreign religion that the Arab invaders imposed upon her gentle Zoroastrian ancestors.

In Persepolis, Satrapi carefully records her life in North Tehran under the Islamic Republic of Iran and its servants. But the things that get her attention and make her angry are not always the same stuff that moves serious Muslims and Muslimahs. The problem is, “Islam” does not interest Satrapi; therefore, she does not really care whether Khumayni’s government by ayutullah “philosopher-kings” makes Islam work, or makes the lives of people she doesn’t know better. Instead, she judges the Islamic Republic by what it does to her family, its friends, and to her. Towards the end of Volume 1, 14-year-old Marji has the courage to rebuke a teacher who claims that the Islamic Republic of Iran, that had executed her Uncle Anoosh as a Russian spy, did not hold political prisoners. Later on in the narrative, she slips from this height, and starts despising the Khumayni régime mainly for making it harder for her to have make-up, Nikes, Kim Wilde tapes, and much later on, booze and a boyfriend.

Of course, most of Satrapi’s western admirers think this is courageously standing up to the narcs of Islamic repression. However, a more critical reading of Marjane Satrapi’s young life raises some nagging questions: do her collisions with Muslim and non-Muslim authority figures throughout betray a love for liberty and the Rights of Man, as her parents and grandmother seem to think? Or do they represent the whims of a spoiled young princess, the only daughter of a rich family used to getting her way?

In Marjane Satrapi’s story, the “clash of perceptions and cultures” never stops in North Tehran, the author’s old neighborhood in the 1980’s. To dismiss it simply as Islamic dictatorship picking on nice middle-class Iranians is too easy. It might be better to think in terms of two gangs who hate each other (The same thing is going on now all over the Middle East, as societies become increasingly polarized between Islam and anti-Islam). One side, including the Satrapis, their relatives, and their friends, tends to be well-to-do, even though somewhat Marxist in its thinking. They are shocked, shocked to see their social inferiors, those despicable “backward” mullahs “stealing” their revolution away from them. (It reveals much that one of Satrapi’s aunts, scrambling to get her ailing husband medical treatment in England, complains bitterly that the official from whom she must get the exit visa was once the “creepy window washer” who worked for her.)

The Islamists on the Other Side, often poor people from the provinces, willingly send their young men to the Great Dhabihah (bloodletting) of the 1980’s with Iraq. At the same time, they know about the rich getting drunk at their filthy little parties and packing their boys off to Europe and America to avoid military service. Satrapi doesn’t hide the Revolutionary Guardsmen’s anger and loathing for the natives of North Tehran where they patrol. In this context, the flagrant violations of privacy, the intrusive searches, the ignoring of due process, and the countless little harassments that Satrapi and her circle must undergo from the Guardsmen are easier to understand, though not justify. It also explains the compulsion of the Satrapis to act out with more and more booze parties, among other things.

Like the Bloods and Crips of old, neither side wants mutual understanding or reconciliation. As Satrapi shows it, the two camps are mainly interested in protecting “their” turf and making life as difficult as possible for the other side. The main difference, though, is that the Guardsmen and their mullah bosses have all the guns!

In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the “Islamic Republic” of Iran never bridges this abyss. Only once do we see an ‘Aalim (Mullah) quietly attempt to give da’wah to Marji in her late teens, because he is impressed by her passionate honesty. By then, it is far too late. This is perhaps the great tragedy of the book; for if Satrapi (and her North Tehrani neighbors too) had been given a grounding in Islam, she could have well grown up to be a useful Muslimah unafraid to question Authority, and keep it “straight” Islamically. The Islamic State of the future, God willing, will want millions of such people—quickly. It is not surprising that the “Islamic Republic” of Iran, managed by people unused to criticism from their “inferiors,” doesn’t feel such a need. Even so, it is useless, even sinful, to dwell on the might-have-beens and what-ifs: whether she wants to or not, Marjane Satrapi now serves the Islamic cause in her own special way—as a warning to others.

Twice before the story ends, things get too hot for Marji in her neighborhood; and her parents send her away to Europe. Perhaps they are getting her out of the way because her big mouth and out-of-control behavior threaten to mess up their lives—we’re not being mean; the issue raises its scaly head, briefly, in the second volume.

Anyway, we have to wonder what Marji’s parents must have been thinking in sending a fourteen-year old daughter by herself for the first time to study at the French School in Vienna, without a reliable support system. In Austria, she indulges in complete freedom of thought, exposing herself to a wide variety of Marxist and anarchist viewpoints tossed about by her middle-class poseur classmates. But she finds it just about impossible to find a sense of belonging, of being rooted, of feeling at home among her fellow students. They are transients too, the children of broken or breaking families whose parents are too busy with their own lives to give them any kind of guidance or control. Poor Marji has to deal with the shallowness and cruelty of modern-day western adolescent life with no help whatsoever. In the time that Satrapi spends on her first stay in Europe, she has to move from place to place frequently because of trouble with her landlords, who twice accuse her of petty theft (charges the author denies). She starts consuming large amounts of marijuana, eventually becoming the dealer for her school (though she claims she did not profit much from it). After a disastrous break-up with a zero of a boyfriend, she actually becomes homeless, living on the trams, diving in dumpsters, slipping into a physical breakdown, followed by a mental breakdown, culminated by a suicide attempt back in Iran.

At the end of the second volume, Satrapi returns to Europe where she lives now. We won’t know what she does with her new “freedom.” But we wonder: has she finally dealt with her depression, which has a funny way of biting one’s backside again and again? Has she managed her substance abuse? Recent interviews indicate that she still likes to booze with friends. If we were her parents, her self-portrait on the book-jacket would worry us. Look how tight and hemmed-in she looks, a nicotine-stick in her hand, her nafs plainly ill at ease with itself!

A lot of powerful people in the West (even a lot of Muslims who should know better) think that our sisters and daughters in Islam should be a lot more like Marjane Satrapi, even though she has suffered many things that they could never possibly want for their own sisters and daughters! From their positions of authority, they offer the Ummah of Muhammad (SAAW) two (and only two) bad choices: either Muslim women start resembling Satrapi, or else they must stay illiterate, ignorant, beaten down, and all the other stereotypes that circulate about them today.

Believers who care about the revival of Islam as a complete system, however, must say a loud “No” to each of these alternatives, and present a third model based upon the roles that Muslimahs like Aishah (who told off even her husband), Fatimah, and Umm Sulaym (RAAHun) played in their societies. With its policies, the coming Khilafah must pay attention to what has been the most neglected half of its citizenry. For its own survival, it will need women with the knowledge, guts, and good health to become the guardians of Islamic Civilization at home, and contribute to public life. The Islamic State will need women, as well as men, to keep government straight, whether in the Shurah or elsewhere. It will need them as intelligent, nurturing mothers, teachers, business-people and physical scientists.

In the here and now, Muslimahs are anxious that they’ll get third-class citizenship under the Shari`ah. We male Islamic activists had better prove that they have nothing to fear. Where women are illiterate, teach them to read and understand Arabic and local languages. When they speak out, treat them with the same respect you give your brothers. If our sisters and daughters are beaten like slaves, help protect them and their rights. And lastly, resist the reflex of treating Muslimahs in general like radioactive waste. In spite of what many of us have been led to believe, they do not give off deadly sex-rays that melt the tiny minds of men and lead them to sin. Moreover, Muslimahs—at least not yet—are not the natural enemies of Muslims; women do not have to be controlled and humiliated to protect the manhood and property of men. Be sure, it will take both genders’ sacrifice to bring Islam back.

Read Satrapi’s books if you dare, learn what’s at stake, and see what will happen if we don’t do our duty.