Not Without My Daughter: Scary, very scary (#14)

When I was in elementary school, an unremarkable woman named Betty Mahmoody was married to a crazy person. He also happened to be Muslim, originally hailing from Iran. For reasons that aren't explained until nearly the end, this man convinces Betty that he, she and their young daughter should take a trip to Iran to see the family, and when they get there, he goes through a complete personality shift and tries to keep them there, as his chattel, forever. This is the basic premise of Not Without My Daughter, the bestseller published in 1987.

It's a pretty scary book -- and not one to read right before you get married, as I did. Betty goes on what she thinks is a two-week holiday to Tehran, only to learn once the two weeks are up that her husband plans to keep them there. Since women have absolutely no rights there, there's nothing she can do about it -- she doesn't have the right to travel without her husband, she doesn't have any rights to her daughter, and her husband has the right to do whatever he pleases with the both of them, including beating them in the street if he so chooses. As she says early on, "I tried to deal with the realization that I was married to a madman and trapped in a country where the laws decreed that he was my absolute master" (68). Betty decides that she will get herself out of Iran, somehow -- but only if she can take her daughter, too, providing the title of the book.

It was a quick, enjoyable read, though more than once I found myself looking at my fiance, thinking, Do I really know this man? Because that's the real issue in Not Without My Daughter. My impression was that Mahmoody primarily blamed Iran and Islam for what happened to her and while I understand it, given what she went through and how personal it felt, I thought this blame was a little heavy-handed in the book. Because let's face it, there are people being held against their will in America per directives from so-called religions -- just last week, there was the Vanity Fair teaser about Scientology auditioning wives for Tom Cruise and the punishment Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi suffered when she failed to please him. Then there are the FLDS people. My point is, these things can actually happen to you in America, too; Mahmoody's problem wasn't that she was married to a Muslim, it was that she was married to a crazy person. And she knew he was crazy long before she ever agreed to go to Iran with him. It's just that the problem spiraled way out of control when she went to a country where he was legally and culturally allowed to be that crazy, and hopping a fence in the middle of the night wouldn't cut it as an escape. But I often felt that in the novel, Mahmoody wrongfully blamed the religion and the country more than she blamed the individual, her husband, who had been severely depressed and acting strange when they were living in the US.

I haven't seen the movie version of Not Without My Daughter -- released in 1991 and starring Sally Field (who, incidentally, I once saw in a drugstore in Vancouver). And I probably won't -- the trailer looks horribly dated, and according to Wikipedia, the film got mixed reviews and was criticized for its racist characterization of Iranians and their culture. There's apparently also a 2002 documentary called Without My Daughter, telling the husband's side of the story.