From No Freedom to Freedom

Born and raised in Iran, a sixty-one year old woman lived with barely any freedoms for twenty-six years. Until the age of thirty-five, she lived the wonderful life of going to the beach and celebrating fun times with her male friends and family. But after the occurring of the revolution in 1971 her life completely changed from being a free young lady living the life, to a young lady that wasn’t allowed to do what many of the ladies these day are interested  in doing. Thus she recently moved to America and is doing what she was able to do thirty-five years ago.

I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. While living there, many changes happened. When I lived in Iran, the first person that was in charge or Iran was King Shah. There was freedom. Everyone had the freedom of speech or freedom of press. Just the way that we are living in America right, it was that way when King Shah was ruling. Also you could have worn anything you wanted, you could have gone to the beach and swam with a two piece bathing suit and no one would say anything. But then revolution happened and free country Iran turned into the Islamic Republic of Iran. The leader at that time was Khomeini. When he started ruling, we lost all our freedoms. Now we had a dress standard, no lady was allowed to show themselves to the men. This meant that they couldn’t go to beach together. Iran had a complete 180 spin.

Now there is no free press there. You are not allowed to write anything against the government. If you do write anything against the government they will shut the newspaper down. You are free to write about anything else but against the government. If they do write anything against the government the newspaper will be cancelled or shut down and then they will call the writer of the newspaper and ask them for what reason they wrote what they wrote and if it is there fault then there would be a trial..

Also there is no freedom of speech. You are not allowed to talk against the government either but if it is not against it then it is okay. If you do say something against the government they will call you and then catch you and bother you. Also they will like ask the person why they talked bad about there government

When it came to marriage, there was a difference of beliefs in religion. If a Christian wanted to marry a Muslim, the Muslim will happily accept then into their religion. But if a Muslim wanted to marry an Armenian, the Muslim will not be accepted.

The police in Iran don’t hurt people for no reason, if one person: attempts burglary and wants to run away, is a murderer and wants to run away, or hits a person with a car and wants to run away, the police will shoot at the persons leg. But they don’t shoot the person so that they die; the police shoot them so they will no be able to run. If you are by any chance accused of something, you have a right of trial. You are allowed to go and stand up for yourself and ask ‘Why am I accused?’ Then they will know if you are guilty or not. If you are guilty they decide something for you and if you are not then nothing really happens.

There are many different jails. A person is at jail because they said something against the government then they count that as being a politician. Those people get a big punishment. They get bothered a lot they also hit them numerous times. We have different jails, for example: a person gives another person a check, when the check goes to the bank and they see that there is no money, they get sent to a different jail than those who get sent to jail for talking or writing bad against the government.

The economy was very bad. Towards there income, it was very bad. Like since there income is so little, the economy is very hard. Things are too expensive. The house rents, the clothes the food. People suffered constantly from everything.

If you want to work, one thing that is required besides diploma is military completion paper. At one point when the king was in rule the girls had to do this too but now it’s the guys. If you are a guy, you had to attend the military service which started at the age of 18 and it was for about two years, twenty-four months, that could change on how the country is doing. You had to do that because if you want to for example apply for jobs or get married the paper that states that you have completed the military service if needed.

While walking around town, one thing that hit my eye constantly was the pictures of the president. There are different places where they post picture of the president. And they pick out the places randomly, it’s not like ‘oh this is a poor place don’t put any here and put many here because it is a rich place’. It was all randomly.  They put the pictures all next to each other lined up. Most of the pictures had to do with religion and people praying to one guy which was the king.

Interviewed by Estella Baghdasaryan