Answering Only to God : Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran

by Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons

• ISBN13: 9780805072990
• ISBN10: 0805072993
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2003-03-05
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Summary

Two seasoned scholar/journalists of the Islamic world focus on Iran--the modern age's first theocracy--to challenge the prevailing Western belief that the Islamic world is an undifferentiated mass of disaffected and dangerous fanatics. Photos.

Author Biography

Geneive Abdo is an author and commentator on Islamic affairs. Ms. Abdo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001-2002. From 1998-2001, she served as the correspondent in Iran for The Guardian newspaper of London and was a regular contributor to The Economist and The International Herald Tribune. She was also the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant for research on Iran.

She has reported from numerous Islamic countries over the course of a decade, from the Middle East to North Africa and Central Asia. As a correspondent based in Cairo, she covered the Middle East for The Dallas Morning News. Ms. Abdo reported the fall of the Soviet Union for Reuters news agency. She was a staff writer for Newsday and the Baltimore Evening Sun in the 1980s.

She is the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000). Her commentaries and essays on Islam have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washington Quarterly, The New Republic, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and Middle East Report. She has been a commentator on National Public Radio, PBS, the BBC, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, CNN and other radio and television services.

Jonathan Lyons is the Washington editor for general news for an international news agency. In 1998, he reopened the agency's bureau in Tehran, 14 years after it was closed by Iranian authorities. From 1994-1998, Mr. Lyons was bureau chief in Turkey. A Russian speaker, his first foreign post was in Moscow, from 1989-1992, where he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the independent republics.

Mr. Lyons began his journalism career in 1980 for a series of American newspapers. He was a mid-career Fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Jonathan Lyons and Geneive Abdo, the first American journalists based in Iran since the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, are husband and wife. They were forced to leave the country in February 2001 under threat of prosecution and have been banned from returning.

Table of Contents

Note to the Reader	ix
Islam versus Islam	1	(18)
The World of the Clerics	19	(37)
The Man from Yazd	56	(34)
The Shadow of God	90	(33)
Reinventing the Islamic Republic	123	(28)
The Press Revolution	151	(45)
The Next Generation	196	(35)
Every Day Is Ashura	231	(27)
Blood and Tulips	258	(19)
Notes	277	(6)
Principal Characters	283	(3)
Selected Glossary	286	(3)
Selected Bibliography	289	(5)
Acknowledgments	294	(3)
Index	297