ROYA: No, because unlike a lot of people who left Iran during the year of the revolution, or immediately after, we were a middle-class Iranian-Jewish family. We had no ties to the previous regime, we had no significant wealth to worry about. The reason we eventually did leave Iran was in part because the Jewish community was experiencing more pressures than, say, an average Iranian, although an average Iranian in 1984, which is the year that we left, was under an extreme amount of pressure because we were in the middle of a war with Iraq. Saddam Hussein had begun bombing Tehran and our lives were entwined with shrieks of sirens and we were constantly going up and down into our basements to hide from the bombs, and coming back up again. The early ’80s were a time that the regime did have a lot of legitimacy because it was fighting an invading country, which was Iraq. And so a lot of what they were doing at the time was justified to Iranian citizenry as acts that they had to do. They had no choice because it was a country at war, because the CIA could come and conduct a coup. And so they were being extremely harsh and they basically obliterated any opposition to themselves in those early years.

LESLEY: Right. You mentioned that part of the appeal for you was that Khomeini talked about women’s rights. And I’ve heard in the last couple of days – and, in fact, you yourself gave an interview that I read, about the women’s movement in Iran as being very longstanding and very powerful. It isn’t something that just sprang up. Tell us something about that. And do you think that this regime now in power will try to stamp it out?

ROYA: Of course. And, you know again, neither the existence of the women’s movement in Iran, nor the regime’s attempt at trying to stamp it out, are anything new. This is what I have always known about Iran, that there was a vibrant community of women that had been accustomed to being treated as equals, at least in the large metropolises, like Tehran where I grew up.

LESLEY: You mean under the Shah?

ROYA: Under the Shah, yes. Even immediately after the revolution – women were a big part of the 1979 revolution. They joined because they had been educated and they did have ambitions. They were modern thinking and they did want the Shah to go so that we could have a democracy, so that we could have civil liberties, so we could have an open press and various political parties functioning in the country. So this has a long history. And the fact that this regime managed in its early years to push women back from the scene had actually a very interesting and paradoxical effect eventually. The regime did push back women who were secular, modern – women who had not been under the veil prior to the revolution. They walked the streets like you and me here in this country. They were educated and they were professionals. Those women were pushed back. However, the regime also strengthened a whole other community of women, and those were very religious women who felt that under the Shah they could not trust the society to leave their homes and come out. They felt that the society was corrupt under the Shah and because they were veiled they felt second class and they didn’t want to participate. Those women suddenly felt strengthened by what had happened, and they started to trickle in and they started to take ownership of the political process. What the regime had not calculated was that its own women, the Islamic-minded women, would come and say, "You know what? I am veiled and I believe in Islam and I am a perfect Muslim, and I want to run for the Congress. I want to be a Majlis representative. And you know what? I even want to compete in the Olympics. If you want me to wear the veil, I’ll wear the veil and I’ll do the Olympics of skiing and soccer, and there’s nothing in the world I can’t do with a veil on." And so suddenly they had to face this whole group of women, and as a result we had a phenomenon called Islamic feminism. They really opened up Iran to a whole other group of women who came in and changed feminism in Iran as we know it.