AL MONITOR
BY BARBARA SLAVIN
Journalism in Iran has never been for the fainthearted. But the challenges of covering the country as a local hire for the foreign press are especially complex, as former New York Times correspondent Nazila Fathi recounts in a moving new memoir, “The Lonely War.”
In April 2009, before the disputed presidential elections that consumed the country and sent Fathi and many other Iranians into exile, she asked the director of the office for foreign press to send local and special security police to her home in Tehran to protect her against a third force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who were monitoring her movements. Fathi had just fired a long-time maid who had been coerced by the IRGC to spy on her; the Guards evidently did not trust the other security services to keep Fathi in line.
Such are the layers of complexity that characterize post-revolutionary Iran that Fathi eloquently describes.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Fathi said that she was not “emotionally ready” to write the book after first leaving Iran. But literary agents approached her in early 2010 after she published a piece in The New York Times about the circumstances of her exile and she realized she had an important story to tell.
Her intention, she said, was “to present the human face of Iran — whether pro- or anti-regime and also the demographic changes” that have transformed the country from one with a huge rural population to one that is largely urban and middle class.
The Arab uprisings of 2011 gave her another incentive, she said. While “there are many similarities, the biggest difference was that Iranians had already had a revolution” whose destabilizing impact was “still very much remembered.” Iranians, while unhappy with the status quo, want change without an “institutional breakdown or insecurity,” she said.
In the book, Fathi recounts her own sense of shock at the sudden loss of personal freedom after the revolution and the exhilaration of small victories against the theocratic state.
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