for my book reading group, we read Lipstick Jihad (which your upcoming guest mocks, which is unfortunate). Moaveni is a pretty good writer, so I decided to read Honeymoon in Tehran which came in from interlibrary loan last week. She's been tracing the forces behind Ahmadinejad's election in 2005 so far -- she was a reporter for Time during the 2005 election and the previous one. From what she said in this and the previous book, the economic issue is a huge factor -- for people who are poor, as well as for people in the striving professional-managerial class who go off, get Western educations, return to Iran to improve their country with their degrees in engineering, computer science, etc. but are stymied every step of the way by corruption and religious hypocrisy. (Her tales of getting hit on by the mullahs when she interviews them would be the stuff of comedy were it not for how creepy they also are.) Her husband was a big open source champion, for instance, and tried to get the government to invest in open source so they could improve the country, by-pass international copyright/trade agreements, and still get stuff done. Not a chance. Endeavors like that are quickly colonized by an inept and corrupt government doling out the business idea to an untalented crony who promptly destroys its possibilities in pyramid schemes and graft.
As for Moaveni, if you are interested, you can surf her name on youtube for some pretty decent talks she's given, especially one to the California Press Club.
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws