Fathers and daughters in Iran

Nafise Motlaq has explored stereotypes about men and women in Iran by photographing fathers and daughters from a range of social classes: “There are a lot of successful Iranian women in universities, business, art, science, and industry and we should understand most of them have very supporting fathers and male friends in their life.” Here …

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Intelligent women?

Here’s a 2-minute video of the last Shah pronouncing on the intelligence of women. He explained that: “there are cases .. some exceptions”. Since he had made his wife his Regent, he was asked by the female interviewer – perhaps one of those rare exceptions – whether he thought she was up to governing the country. …

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“We cried like rain”: the bomb at Cairo Islamic Art Museum

On 24 Jan 2014 at 6.30 am, a car bomb exploded outside the Cairo Islamic Art Museum – the largest such museum in the world. The museum holds 100,000 objects including the oldest known example of Kufic script, on a tombstone dated AH.31; a Quran dated AH.203; two of the 12 gold dinars which are …

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Yummy Persiana

The best cookbook of 2014 is .. Persiana, by Sabrina Ghayour. Sabrina was born in Tehran (check out the classic Tehran glasses on big hair in her Twitter pic), and she uses her Persian heritage to create some prize-winning – and not-as-difficult-and-time-consuming as you might think – recipes with a superscrumptious Persian twist. Her website …

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A diminutive motherboard of a Rubaiyat

This week, a diminutive motherboard of a Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, courtesy of Vanessa Hodkinson. “To a modern reader, the rubáiyát reeks of everything Edward Said couldn’t stand: languor, hedonism, a vaguely academically underwritten Orientalist rambling”. Really, it’s a selection of poems, chosen from over a thousand fragments, dealing with universal themes of life, death, love and religion, …

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Simin Behbahani: Driven by love

This week’s entrancing talk on Simin Behbahani by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak told of Behbahani’s poetic development as she matured from writing leftist ‘sketches’ and ‘vignettes’ of poverty, prostitutes and inequality – to an iconic breathing of new life into the ghazal form Karimi-Hakkak spoke of how Simin Behbahani has “outgrown the war between the old [forms …

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A salt tsunami?

I think it’s more likely to be a salt blizzard that’s going to blow off the dessicating remnants of Lake Urmia – year in, year out – even if it was a tsunami that was discussed at this week’s IHF showing of Lady Urmia. We saw how the 9 metre drop in water is converting …

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