Say What?
Leave it to the Seattle Post to pull this single quote from a book I would hope has way more to say about the Islamic Republic than “Hookin’ up sucks in Islamic society:
“I had imagined the Islamic Republic would be conducive to excellent love affairs,” she writes. “I thought nothing could be more romantic than love in a time of struggle. But like most of the conceptions I bore with me to Iran, it ended up being totally wrong. Confronting hardship together didn’t magically turn your relationship, or your life for that matter, into Casablanca. Struggle, it turned out, is about as romantic as leprosy. It makes you emotionally absent …
“It makes you live exclusively in the present. It makes emotions besides hate a luxury. Because in the end, life in the shadow of struggle is really just life in the shadows.”
I’m sure the Hijab may have had something to do with it.