Escape Artist: Author to share life story at area library

Tuesday, March 6, 2001 | 9:56 a.m.

When Sattareh Farman Farmaian first came to the United States to attend school in 1944, she discovered that Americans knew little, if anything, about her home country, Iran.

When she returned to the United States nearly 40 years later, barely escaping Iran at the hands of executioners, she said that Americans knew a little more about her country, "but not much more."

So in the 1980s, in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis, Farmaian began to piece together her stories of living in Iran and the patriarchal society she experienced throughout three vastly different political regimes.

What resulted was her autobiography, "Daughter of Persia" (Anchor Books, $14.95), a detailed account of her life growing up in a harem, and the story behind the Tehran School of Social Work, a private school she founded in Iran at a time when there was no real concept of social work. Personal accounts of Islamic Revolution of the 1970s and the events leading to it are also included.

Farmaian will share her story in person Wednesday at the West Charleston Library. Her appearance is part of the library's "Wednesday's Woman" program in honor of Women's History Month.

Farmaian's story, rich in detail of a country in fluctuating political turmoil, is unlike any other.

She was the 15th of 36 children born to a prince of the Qajar dynasty in the 1920s, just before the it fell to the Pahlavi dynasty.

While living a seemingly privileged life behind walls with her mother and sisters, her family anxiously lived under the threat of the Reza Shah.

But in "Daughter of Persia," Farmaian refers fondly to the primitive compound in Tehran, where she lived with her father's eight wives, his children and thousands of servants, as a "bustling, almost completely self-contained world inside the encircling wall."

Unlike most of the women in the country who were to remain illiterate, Farmaian's father taught his wives to read and write.

"In those days, about 95 percent of Persian adults, and nearly all women, were still illiterate," Farmaian wrote in her book. "But my father, who always did exactly what he wanted to do, and did it with total and magnificent indifference to everyone else's opinion, had long entertained the highly unorthodox notion that education made women better wives."

This applied to her mother, who married at age 12.

Education was also encouraged among her father's daughters. Farmaian attended private elementary school in Tehran, and later an American school run by Presbyterian missionaries where she was introduced to Western ideas.

Farmaian's education, combined with the world she observed outside the compound -- the impoverished beggers she would see in the streets and the poor living in rural Iran -- would set the course for the rest of her life.

During a two-week school trip through the country while in high school, Farmaian said she realized that helping to lift Iranians out of poverty and illiteracy was her destiny.

After persuading her family to let her go, Farmaian in 1944 embarked alone on a more than three-month journey from Iran to India to Los Angeles, where she enrolled at USC as the first-ever Iranian to attend the school.

While in California, she received a master's degree in social work, married and had a daughter.

In 1957 she returned to Iran. With government backing she opened the Tehran School of Social Work one year later, and trained young Iranians in the field. At the time social work was a concept so unusual in Iran that there was no word for it.

"It was difficult," Farmaian said recently in a telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles. "I had to really tell them, 'This was a new profession. We never had it before. We need it.'

"It wasn't overnight. I had to show them what social work does."

Convincing those in need that she and her students could provide assistance in the racially and ethnically mixed country of political suspicion was also a challenge.

"They were very skeptical of us because they thought we represented the police," Farmaian said.

"At first they didn't want us to interfere," she said. "(But) it didn't take them long until they saw our purpose wasn't policing them but helping them overcome their problems."

For nearly 20 years her students worked with the poor in rural villages and hospitals, made dramatic improvements at a decrepit mental asylum and orphanage where humans had essentially been thrown away, and opened community welfare centers with family planning clinics.

Then came the Islamic Revolution. One morning Farmaian arrived at her office and was abducted by her armed students, who accused her of being an imperialist ("trained in the imperialist country of America"). She was taken to the Ayatollah Khomeini to be executed.

After 24 hours waiting to be tried for her life and hearing gunshots of others being executed, the second in command under Khomeini (who recognized Farmaian from the outreach work she had once done in a prison) released her under the belief that executing her would go against the cause of the revolution.

Farmaian fled Iran and was later united with her daughter, who had been attending school out of the country. She has not returned to Iran.

In the United States Farmaian continued working as a social worker. Now retired she speaks regularly about her experiences and women's issues in developing countries.

Although she said she no longer studies current politics in Iran, Farmaian said she has heard that graduates from her school are trying to establish courses on social work in the universities.

"In my country we are still struggling with poverty, ill health, unemployment problems and education problems," she said. "Basic problems.

"I think it is important for people to know what they can do. I think that young people need to know that they're not limited to what their environment tells them to do."

Farmaian said her book was translated nearly three years ago into Farsi and is a best seller in Iran. The book also reaches out to Iranian-Americans.

"There are many people who ran away, several million in the 1970s who came with young children," Farmaian said. "The young people need to know what went on.

"People should know what happened in the Islamic Revolution."

Firouzeh Taghdir, a performing arts center coordinator for the West Charleston Library who arranged Farmaian's appearance, was born in Tehran.

She was sent by her parents to the United States in 1973, at age 11, to join her brother and sister who were already studying here. The plan was to return to Iran. She made frequent visits to the country while studying here, but she has not been back since 1978.

Taghdir said Farmaian's story is important in the sense that culturally and socially, people still don't have an understanding of Iran.

Iranians who lived through Iran's political and religious upheavals of 20th century are rare, Taghdir said.

"Not many people from (Farmaian's) age group are still around," she said. "As a result of the revolution, many of the great minds fled the country and are still living in exile, (have) passed on or were executed.

"There are very few books that are biographies but none of them are similar to this because none of them are from the Qajar dynasty."

Farmaian, Taghdir said, "has seen (Iran) develop and go backward again."

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