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Zia Ashraf Nasr The oldest of my interviewees was compelled to leave Iran in her seventies to follow her children to the United States. Her son Hossein was forced into exile because he had been part of the inner circles of the Pahlavi court. Because she considers herself one who believes in the values of Islamic philosophy and practice, it pained her, she said, to speak of her response to the Islamic Revolution. This revolution is not Islamic. This “Islamic” idea of women you quote to me from Khomeini—his “Islam” has been contaminated with many things that didn’t exist at the beginnings of Islam. One of them is the disparity between men and women. This should not be labeled “Islam.” I believe, based on the life of the Prophet and the first leaders of Islam, that Muhammad himself did not discriminate against women. He considered his daughter Fatima superior to men. He made her the beginning; he made it so that all the Imam family histories originated from her. Why? The Prophet had sons from other wives. He had daughters and sons. But he didn’t give any of them as much power as he gave this girl so that she would be the ancestor of all the Imams.16 After Fatima, her daughter was privileged—Hazrat Zainab who supervised the caravans, who took care of the family in the desert of Karbala, who brought the family in its imprisonment from Karbala to Medina. There were other men after Imam Hosein’s martyrdom—Imam Zeinul Abedin, for instance. But it was a woman, Hazrat Zainab, who supervised the family, who took charge. Even in Yazid’s court, it was she who lectured at him, and what a sermon she delivered. She was a woman, yet she was at the head of Islam. Then why should a woman, later on, stay home and the man go out? They changed Islam. The Islam of today has been so badly interpreted that it has put young people to flight. Now the veil enslaves women. Now women have been packaged and bundled so that one has to guess from the shape that this is a woman. When you see the Iranian Majlis [Parliament] on TV, you see something black in the corner and you don’t know what or who this is. Is it a human being or a black bundle? It shouldn’t be like this. ...

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