"Journey from the Land of No": A Story of Rebellion and Optimism in 1970s Revolutionary Iran

Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran by Roya Hakakian
Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Crown
Price: $23.00
Published: 2004


A portion of this book review was originally published in The Bolton Commoner in February 2008.








In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter toasted Mohammad Reza Shah Pavlavi, the king of Iran, at a royal dinner in Tehran with the following words: “Iran, because of the leadership of the shah, is an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.”

. . . But there was another Iran, too, where individual and civil liberties lagged behind health and economic growth, where political parties, except that of the shah, were banned, and where freedom of expression did not exist. The shah wanted to restore the glory of ancient Persia to twentieth-century Iran, yet contrary to his grand aspiration, his intelligence service . . . hounded writers, intellectuals, and political activists and tortured them in prisons.

. . . In the global cold war, the majority of secular, educated Iranians stood against imperialism, which the United States represented for them. And in 1978, when those intellectuals heard the fiery rhetoric of a clergyman, they answered his call. . . . Ayatollah Khomeini [exiled in France] vowed to stand against the tyranny of monarchy and of the United States, which he denounced for undermining Iran’s sovereignty. He had emphasized over and over that he had no desire to be in power, only to return to his native city of Qom and continue his religious studies.

When he finally arrived in Iran on February 1, 1979 . . . , he returned as a leader who had unified the Left and the Right, and galvanized millions to demand an end to 2,500 years of monarchy. Those millions also included hundreds of young Jews. Against the wishes of their elders, many Jewish students joined the revolution, hoping to recast their identities as secular Iranians, who would then assimilate seamlessly into the fabric of the utopia that the revolution promised.

On February 12, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini’s sacred status rose to that of an “imam,” only a step away from the prophet’s in the Shiite tradition. . . . By April an overwhelming majority of Iranians voted for the establishment of an Islamic republic.

. . . By the end of the second year, he had broken nearly every promise he had made. Every underground group that had joined a coalition with him to overthrow the shah was banned again. The control of all civil and political facets of life fell into the hands of a group of young radicals who called themselves members of Hezbollah, Party of God.

The 100,000-member Jewish community of Iran, the second largest community of Jews in the Middle East, after Israel, fell into disarray. The new regime’s pronunciation of Israel as Iran’s greatest enemy reawakened anti-Semitic sentiments. Though in several major speeches Ayatollah Khomeini recognized the Iranian Jewish community as belonging to the people that the holy Koran viewed as legitimate “people of the book,” the social, economic, and educational opportunities of Jews were fast dwindling. They began to emigrate from Iran, a country in which their history preceded that of Muslims by several hundred years.

. . . For those who lived in Tehran, that brief period [of " unparalleled freedom”] following the revolution remains the most memorable time of their lives. History books speak of the Iranian revolution as one of the greatest revolutions . . . of the twentieth century. The revolution was that and more. For the children of that era, 1979 was not only a year but also a love affair, the most alluring love of their lives.

In time, it proved to be the cruelest, too.

This is the story of that affair.

― Roya Hakakian
"Historical Note” from Journey from the Land of No


For young Roya Hakakian, a Tehrani Jew on the cusp of adulthood, the years between 1978 and 1984 were years punctuated by rebellion. These were heady days of repudiation characterized by the militant, fanatical revolution that engulfed her native Iran, a change in political power that promised freedom yet delivered subjugation and authoritarianism. The idea and feel of revolt permeated the atmosphere in which Roya lived; so, for her, staging an uprising would not be an atypical action. However, Roya’s rebellion was not a wide-reaching demand on Iranian society and the political order. In her not-quite-a-woman/ no-longer-a-child state of being, hers was a personal, coming-of-age crusade to make sense of religious codes of honor and tradition, discrimination against females and Jews, societal chaos, and repression of intellectual thought.

In her valuable and excellent memoir Journey from the Land of No, Roya, whose name means “dream” in Persian and who was so named because her birth in 1966 had made her father’s dream come true—a baby girl to add to a threesome of boys—tells of her pre- and post-revolutionary life in Tehran.

She starts her story in 1975, when she was nine. The Hakakians— Haghnazar, her father; Helen, her mother; and Albert, Javid, and Behzad, her brothers—were members of a prominent Jewish community and lived at the idyllic-sounding residence of Three Alley of the Distinguished. Juniper trees, magnificent and tall, surrounded its courtyard; they exalted the neighborhood, gave it its distinction, and were, The Hakakians proclaimed, the reason for the alley’s grand appellation.

Roya’s father was a headmaster, poet, and “one of the city’s most persuasive speakers.” Haghnazar Hakakian commanded a regal reverence in his neighborhood. Among Jews, he received great displays of respect. The community declared that Mr. Hakakian could do no wrong, and that the presence of “the poet, the conscience of the community, and the tireless educator” was a blessing for all. Among Muslims, he was greeted as “Mr. Haji”—Haji being a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five Pillars, or essential practices, of Islam. To these wishes of goodwill, Roya’s father would obligingly respond, “ ‘May Allah keep you safe!’ Not Khoda, Persian for God. No. Father invoked the Koranic equivalent to express his appreciation for living at a time and in a city where a Jew could mingle with others so freely that he was mistaken for a Muslim.”

Roya’s brother, Javid, instructed his little sister by reading The Little Black Fish by Samad Bihrangi to her. A classic of Persian literature, The Little Black Fish expresses criticism of the social, political, and economic structures of contemporary Iran and was deemed subversive by the shah’s secret police. Although, at age nine, Roya did not grasp the book’s implications and symbolism, Javid urged her constantly to scrutinize her thoughts: “ ‘If you do nothing else in life, remember what I’m telling you,’ “ Roya recalls Javid telling her. “ ‘Think! Think of any book as a riddle. . . . Look at every detail, and ask, Why this? Why that? Only then you’ll discover something new. Do you do that? Do you look at things like a smart girl, as the bright Roya that you are, or do you skim everything like a silly girl?’ “

“Think! was the command of our household god,” Roya relates. And, as she matured—leaving behind the “oblivious child” she believed herself to be in order to embrace critical thinking—and was witness to the revolution’s formation, The Little Black Fish and the curious circumstances surrounding Samad Bihrangi’s fate became the identifying markers that clarified for Roya Iran’s desperate need for revolution. They, along with pledges to end poverty and the promise of an open and freethinking society, were the markers of propagated truth that inspired Roya to sympathize with “Down-with-the-shah!” demonstrators and to agree that the swift executions of the shah’s associates were right and necessary. “They were beasts who had ravaged our land and caused the misery of the downtrodden,” Roya writes. “They had to be killed, for as [Ayatollah Khomeini] warned, ‘Left to their own devices, those “humanoids” would fester and infect us again.’ ”

And even when the Jewish philanthropist, Habib Elghanian, whose endowments benefited all Hebrew schools, was executed for “charges [that] sounded ancient, even biblical: ‘Friendship with the enemies of God, warring with God and His emissaries, and economic imperialism,’ ” Roya continued to be swept away by the revolution’s show of unity despite ethnicity. Revolutionaries rooted out tyrants—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—and though the “scene of [Elghanian’s] trial, the words that were exchanged, had invoked the memories of the old blood libels among the elder Jews . . . those memories did not belong to my generation. My classmates and I remained loyal to the adolescent code of conduct and dismissed our parents’ worries. Unfazed, we treated this particular corpse like all the others: one more enemy caught in his tracks.”

As part of the revolution, Iran decided to become an Islamic republic. For the Jewish community this was originally an acceptable alternative to the old regime. Yet slowly, but deliberately, Iranian Jews began to feel a squeeze on their liberties, which indicated to them a return to the days of segregation. An “ad hoc assembly” of six men visited Ayatollah Khomeini in an effort to gain a personal guarantee from him that the community would be protected. They wanted the imam to be aware of “one of the lesser-known pillars of Judaism: True Jews are ones who share in the wishes of the society in which they live. And now that Iranian society wished to establish an Islamic republic, so did every good Jew.”

Khomeini listened to the group. After an incongruous discourse on male-female courtship and copulation, he assured the men that Iranian Jews were nothing like the “godless,” “pharaohlike Zionists who run Israel” and that they would remain distinct.

Not long after the imam’s reassurance, though, it was mandated that non-Muslim business owners display signs in their windows that said “THIS STORE IS OPERATED BY A NON-MUSLIM” and designated certain school bathrooms and water fountains for use by non-Muslims.

For Roya, the takeover of her school, the Raah-e Danesh Hebrew Day School, by Mrs. Moghadam and her protégés, the “notorious Holy Cleaner-Uppers,” signified that “something irretrievable was happening.” Mrs. Moghadam slung cruel insults at Roya: “ ‘Since you’re so bright and know so much about the Jewish tradition, tell me, why do Jewish fathers take it upon themselves to deflower their daughters?’ " Roya’s fervency for the revolution started to wane as she realized that these extremists were turning assurances of freedom into chaotic restrictions, interdictions, and divisions.

Facing anti-Semitism was not a new challenge put before The Hakakians. Roya’s father experienced it during childhood. Yet, as was Haghnazar Hakakian’s humble manner, he “would never admit to having run into anti-semitism” [sic]. In his youth, Haghnazar was often derided as “Johoud,” which Roya, using the Mo’in’s Persian Dictionary, defines as a Jew or the yellow piece of cloth Jews sewed on their garments to distinguish themselves. “But, in the Hakakian lexicon,” she writes, “Johoud had only one meaning: a world, a word that Father buried before he left [his childhood village of Khonsar.]. There Johoud meant ‘dirty.’ “

Some forty years later in the Iran of the 1970s, Haghnazar Hakakian encountered this word again, though this time it did not translate into “dirty.” It was Jew, and it appeared with a swastika and a demand to get out of Iran. And this time, Haghnazar’s reaction was seismic.

“Najes” was the word Roya, her three brothers, and her parents encountered frequently, “for however far Iran had come, even by 1977, some Muslims still called Jews najes: dirty. [Every year, three weeks before Passover, we, the Hakakians, assumed our annual pose of piety. To honor the ancient Israelites’ hasty departure from Egypt . . . we fought against dirt.] This was the season to prove our cleanliness to our neighbors, though as I would soon learn, the war against impurity was without end, and uncleanness a most indefatigable enemy.”


Roya’s lesson on cleanliness came quickly, and it came from her own community. She learned that she would never be “clean” because she was female. This demeaning ostracism devastated, confused, and angered her:

[The] imminent flow [of blood] out of my body . . . had already defiled me. Defiled! What did a word so unkind have to do with me? . . . Blood, the blood that was flowing out of a sheep’s body was so holy, was unclean flowing out of mine? Why? What made one clean and the other . . . bad? Was it . . . “filthy?” Filthy? Me? I had seen a protestor, clubbed in his face, be raised upon the arms of men, his bloodied shirt instantly a talisman. I had seen the group of mourners, their heads wrapped in white bandannas, slap their chests, stand in a circle, and with chains flagellate themselves, with daggers beat their heads until blood gushed forth. No matter how young or old, that bleeding head was venerated. And not my blood?

Roya composes a fantastically insightful passage on traditional womanhood—in particular, motherhood—in which women are extolled for their “stillness” and silence. Roya explains what is expected of all good Jewish girls and all good Muslim girls: they “had to be demure and demand nothing.” She and her friend, Zaynab, a “distinctly religious name—the name of the prophet Muhammad’s cousin and wife . . . [and a] name uncommon in the Alley of the Distinguished,” tried their best never to seem too eager for anything, but they were restless; the zealous hand of the revolution had tapped them on their shoulder and tempted them to contemplate their independence.

And, as one of the “women-to-be” in her extended maternal family, Roya was waiting for her future womanhood, “that sublime possibility of which no one had ever spoken.” Dark, " ‘alarmingly thin,’ " according to her parents, and possessing a nose with a bump on the bridge, Roya understood that she may never be as beautiful as her fair-haired cousin Farah, but when she looked in the mirror she “had seen to the heart of the dreamy girl who wanted her share of happiness.”

Soon though, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was created by the ayatollah to assure that each Iranian citizen mastered every desire by way of its annihilation. Armed guards arrested men in short sleeves, women who wore a hint of makeup, girls whose hair peeked out from their mandatory veils, people drinking alcohol. “All lines that had once separated the citizenry—age, gender, even religion—paled. A new line, invisible but terribly palpable, was drawn. On one side of it, they stood. On the other, we."

In April of 1979, Roya was thrust over this palpable division between she and them. Her actions stand as one of the many poignant and evocative moments in Journey from the Land of No. On the day before the eight-day Passover holiday vacation, Mrs. Moghadam summoned Roya and her classmates for a speech, an “opus long in the making.” Moghadam’s rant centered on the “delicious topic of corporeal sin”:

Do you understand sin? It is of sin that I speak to you. The sin that no ablution can cleanse. Sin that cannot be expiated. For this sin there is no penance, no atonement. No amount of alms can repair its consequences. Once the beast unleashes itself upon your innocence, you’re not a child of Allah anymore. You’re a child of Satan, and appropriate to your kinship, you deserve to receive a hail of stones and nothing less.

Moghadam’s vitriol continued to spew and ended with the announcement that the eight-day vacation was canceled. Rage, rancor, and rebellion was heard in the shouts of “ ‘Down with Moghadam!’ " that came from Roya and her classmates. In a supreme act of defiance, the girls revolted and took to the schoolyard:

Frenzy had overtaken us. But so had an order that ruled our throng in unison. We marched from the yard into the corridor, now vibrating only to our echoes. . . . Never had mayhem brought more peace. All our lives we had been taught the virtues of behaving, and now we were discovering the importance of misbehaving. Too much fear had tainted our days.

Too many afternoons had passed in silence, listening to a fanatic’s diatribes. We were rebelling because we were not evil, we had not sinned. . . . This was 1979, the year that showed us we could make our own destinies. We were rebelling because rebelling was all we could do to quell the rage in our teenage veins. Together as girls we found the courage we had been told was not in us.

By 1984, all of Roya’s brothers had emigrated to America, and the remaining three Hakakians were contemplating doing the same. Iran was in its fourth year of war with Iraq. Anguish was the prevailing sentiment, and “grief and vengeance were the only feelings the public could safely express.” Food rations, a closed-off Tehran University, anti-Semitism and emigration of Jews, and hundreds of thousands killed in the war coalesced into a sense of irrevocable pointlessness.

However, now at age 18, Roya had a feeling that she “was on the brink of one of the most important experiences of [her] life.” Roya called that experience Mrs. Arman, her Persian literature teacher. At long last, Roya had found a powerful force in which to forge optimism and allow the dream of a future beyond fanaticism, female inequality, and repression to flourish.

Journey from the Land of No is an indelible depiction of innocence lost and discernment gained. With prose that is poetic and beautifully rendered, Roya Hakakian’s debut mesmerizes.