Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman's Story of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison [Paperback]

Marina Nemat (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 6, 2008

What would you give up to protect your loved ones? Your life?

In her heartbreaking, triumphant, and elegantly written memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat tells the heart-pounding story of her life as a young girl in Iran during the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini's brutal Islamic Revolution.

In January 1982, Marina Nemat, then just sixteen years old, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for political crimes. Until then, her life in Tehran had centered around school, summer parties at the lake, and her crush on Andre, the young man she had met at church. But when math and history were subordinated to the study of the Koran and political propaganda, Marina protested. Her teacher replied, "If you don't like it, leave." She did, and, to her surprise, other students followed.

Soon she was arrested with hundreds of other youths who had dared to speak out, and they were taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Two guards interrogated her. One beat her into unconsciousness; the other, Ali, fell in love with her.

Sentenced to death for refusing to give up the names of her friends, she was minutes from being executed when Ali, using his family connections to Ayatollah Khomeini, plucked her from the firing squad and had her sentence reduced to life in prison. But he exacted a shocking price for saving her life -- with a dizzying combination of terror and tenderness, he asked her to marry him and abandon her Christian faith for Islam. If she didn't, he would see to it that her family was harmed. She spent the next two years as a prisoner of the state, and of the man who held her life, and her family's lives, in his hands.

Lyrical, passionate, and suffused throughout with grace and sensitivity, Marina Nemat's memoir is like no other. Her search for emotional redemption envelops her jailers, her husband and his family, and the country of her birth -- each of whom she grants the greatest gift of all: forgiveness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Nemat tells of her harrowing experience as a young Iranian girl at the start of the Islamic revolution. In January 1982, the 16-year-old student activist was arrested, jailed in Tehran's infamous Evin prison, tortured and sentenced to death. Ali, one of her interrogators, intervened moments before her execution, having used family connections with Ayatollah Khomeini himself to reduce her sentence to life in prison. The price: she would convert to Islam (she was Christian) and marry him, or he would see to it that her family and her boyfriend, Andre, were jailed or even killed. She remained a political prisoner for two years. Nemat's engaging memoir is rich with complex characters—loved ones lost on both sides of this bloody conflict. Ali, the man who rapes and subjugates her, also saves her life several times—he is assassinated by his own subordinates. His family embraces Nemat with more affection and acceptance than her own, even fighting for her release after his death. Nemat returns home to feel a stranger: "They were terrified of the pain and horror of my past," she writes. She buries her memories for years, eventually escaping to Canada to begin a new life with Andre. Nemat offers her arresting, heartbreaking story of forgiveness, hope and enduring love—a voice for the untold scores silenced by Iran's revolution. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In Tehran in the early 1980s, after she leads a strike in high school to get her math teacher to teach calculus not politics, Marina, 16, a practicing Catholic, is locked up for two years and tortured with her school friends in the Ayatollah Khomeini's notorious Evin political prison. She is saved from execution by an interrogator, Ali, who wants to marry her and threatens to hurt her family and Catholic boyfriend, Andre, if she refuses. Forced to convert to Islam, she becomes Ali's wife; then he is assassinated by political rivals, and she rejoins her family and marries Andre. They immigrate to Canada in 1991. For more than 20 years, secure in her middle-class life, she keeps silent, until she writes this unforgettable memoir. Haunted by her lost friends and by her betrayal of them, Nemat tells her story without messages and with no sense of heroism. The quiet, direct narrative moves back and forth from Toronto to Nemat's childhood under the shah's brutal regime and, later, during the terror under Khomeini. Despite the rabid politics and terrifying drama, the most memorable aspect of the story is the portrait of Ali, Nemat's savior, in love with her, so kind to her--Does he kill people when he goes off to work in the prison each day? Her comment that she wishes "the world were a simple place where people were either good or evil" is as haunting as her guilt and love. When she asks Andre to forgive her long silence, he asks her to forgive his not asking. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; Reprint edition (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416537430
• ISBN-13: 978-1416537434
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Women in Islam
  • #17 in Books > History > Middle East > Iran

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

90 of 98 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't base your decision entirely on the other review. May 5, 2007

By Jessica Zimmerman

Format:Hardcover

You know, I read the other review of this book and it angered me a little. This book is a memoir written by a woman who was subjected to torture and treatment that nearly all reading this will never have to endure. Look at the title of the book, of course it is going to be depressing. She was the victim and this is HER memior, she never claimed to be a writer. It took her twenty years to write this book because of how difficult the whole ordeal was. In writing this book she became physically ill with all the same ailments that she suffered while imprisoned. Please do not let that review make your decision. I had the opportunity to hear her on NPR and I was very impressed with her.

37 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars could not put it down - May 15, 2007

By Berta Thomas

Format:Hardcover

Marina Nemat's book is riveting - absolutely! Could not put it down - finished in one night. Her story is a tale of spiritual triumph -love over hate, freedom over opression.Marina's beautiful spirit emanates from pages of the book, instilling hope despite immesurable suffering.

Prisoner of Tehran is a vivid reminder to the world about how cruel and bigoted is Aytolla's regime in Iran.It is an alarming testimony, a wake up call to all.While reading, I wondered if Marina's book will ever be published in her birth country.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If you read this book you will not forget them. June 11, 2007

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

Tied tightly to a pole, Marina Nemat, age 17, watched the firing squad level their rifles and prepare to end her life.

But they never fired at her.

Several fellow prisoners in Tehran's brutal Evin prison were executed that night, but Marina was spared, literally at the last minute. A pardon from Ayatollah Khomeini himself had commuted her sentence to life imprisonment. One of her prison guards had fallen in love with her and interceded on her behalf. But her salvation came at a heartwrenching price: Ali, her protector, wanted to marry her --- with the stipulation that if she refused him, her own family would be subject to arrest, torture, perhaps even execution.

Marina Nemat has no previous track record as a writer beyond articles in her high school newspaper in Tehran, but she tells this incredible story with grace and eloquence in this engrossing memoir. She offers no outright acknowledgement of ghostwriting help, so take her at her word --- this is her own account, subject to the usual reservations about fading memory and the need to protect the identities of others.

Marina, a member of Iran's tiny Christian minority, comes across in her own words as a spunky teenage political activist, but also as somewhat naďve. Born in 1965, she was dismayed by the excesses of the radical Islamist regime that had taken over Iran when the Shah was driven out. She attended anti-regime street demonstrations and wrote protest articles in her school newspaper, but seemed oblivious to the consequences of such actions. Like any teenager, she was more preoccupied with adolescent crushes and summer vacations on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

Her dream world collapsed in 1982 when she almost accidentally fomented a student strike against teachers who ignored classroom subjects in favor of nonstop Islamist and political indoctrination. She was sent to Evin, brutalized and hounded for the names of other student collaborators. Then came the night when she faced the firing squad. As she was being driven away she heard the gunfire that killed her fellow prisoners.

As dramatic as that episode becomes in her narrative, the extraordinary emotional tangle of her relations with Ali, with his family, and with her own boyfriend and parents is just as gripping a story. Almost against his will, the reader actually finds implacable Ali in many ways an attractive person, sincerely concerned for the welfare of the girl on whom he has visited such misery and fully understanding of her trauma. His family too welcomed her with evident good will, in sharp contrast to the coldness of her own parents, especially her unaffectionate and distant mother.

Marina told Ali plainly that she did not love him, but she went through a conversion ceremony and an Islamic wedding out of dread for what might happen to her own family. In an unskilled writer's hands all this could degenerate into macabre soap opera, but Marina Nemat writes with such conviction that the reader agonizes with her. I kept wishing she would rebel and denounce her tormentors to their faces. She seemed oddly complaisant to her smiling enemies --- until you remembered what rebellion surely would have meant for her and her family.

The layers of irony only get deeper as events unfold. Ali is suddenly assassinated by Islamic hardliners for his dalliance with an "infidel." Marina is finally freed from Evin after two years there, but only through the intervention of Ali's father, a seemingly decent man who risked his own life to restore Marina to her family in accordance with his dying son's last wish. Her savior was the same man who had insisted that Marina convert to Islam before he would allow the marriage.

Marina Nemat eventually married her faithful sweetheart Andre --- a risky move but one she took unflinchingly --- and was allowed to emigrate to Canada where she now lives.

This book is obviously a form of catharsis for her. That is a worthy aim, of course, but beyond that she has drawn for us some complex characters --- her unsympathetic parents, Ali's genuinely human family --- with a sure literary hand. If you read this book you will not forget them. What more could an author desire?

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn