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Chapter 0
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The World I Come From
I was born in 1370 in the Iranian calendar, which corresponds to 1991–1992 in the Gregorian calendar. I am a thirty-five-year-old woman living in the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the age of twenty-four, I became a Christian. But my journey toward faith had begun much earlier, when I was thirteen. It took eleven years of questioning, searching, and wrestling with what I had been taught before I arrived at a faith I could call my own.
This is the story of that journey, but it is also the story of the world in which it began: the family I grew up in, the society that shaped me, and the cultural and religious assumptions that influenced the way I saw myself and the world around me.
I hold a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in political science. Yet I am not writing this account as an academic study of Iranian society, nor am I attempting to offer a comprehensive sociological or psychological analysis. I am writing from my own experience, as a woman who was born and raised in Tehran, whose family roots are also in Tehran, and whose upbringing was shaped by a particular traditional cultural environment.
My perspective is necessarily limited. I cannot speak for every Iranian woman, every Iranian family, or every social group in Iran. The experiences of someone raised in a wealthy, modern family in another part of the country may differ considerably from mine. Even within Tehran, people can grow up in vastly different worlds, despite living in the same city.
Before I begin telling my story, I want to explain a little about the world I come from. Without that context, some of the choices I made, the questions I asked, and the conflicts I experienced may be difficult to understand.
Iran: A Country of Many Worlds
Iran is a country of considerable ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity. Tehran, its capital and largest city, is also the country’s political, economic, and cultural center. People from different regions and backgrounds have moved there over generations, bringing their languages, customs, beliefs, and ways of life with them.
Despite what people outside Iran may sometimes assume, Iranian society is far from homogeneous. Persian is the country’s official language and is widely used as a common language, but it is not the mother tongue of every Iranian. Many people speak other languages, including Azerbaijani Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, Turkmen, and Balochi. These are distinct languages, not simply regional accents of Persian. Iran also has a wide range of regional dialects and local ways of speaking.
The country’s religious landscape is equally diverse. Twelver Shia Islam is the official religion of the Islamic Republic and the faith of the majority of the population. There are also Sunni Muslim communities, as well as Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Bahá’ís. Christian communities include Armenians and Assyrians, whose histories in Iran go back many generations. Zoroastrianism, one of the ancient religions associated with the region, predates the arrival of Islam in Iran. Bahá’ís, meanwhile, have faced severe discrimination and persecution. Smaller religious communities, including Hindus and Sikhs, have also had a presence in parts of the country.
These identities can overlap in many different ways. Someone might, for example, belong to an Armenian Christian family, grow up in a city where Turkish is widely spoken, and speak Armenian, Turkish, and Persian. Someone else might be Kurdish and Sunni Muslim. Ethnicity, language, religion, and place of upbringing do not always fit into neat categories.
I mention these differences not because I intend to explore all of them in detail, but because it is important to understand that there is no single experience of being Iranian. The country contains many different worlds, and the one I am about to describe is only one of them.
**Three Ways of Understanding the Social ***World I Grew Up In*
To explain my own upbringing, I find it useful to distinguish between three broad social and cultural orientations that I refer to as modern, traditional, and religious.
These are not formal sociological categories, nor are they mutually exclusive groups. They are simply the terms I use to make sense of the social environment in which I grew up. In real life, the boundaries between them are often blurred. A family can be both religious and modern, traditional and religious, or traditional without being particularly religious.
When I use the word modern, I am generally referring to families whose lifestyles and relationships reflect more contemporary, individual-oriented ways of living, sometimes influenced by Western cultural norms. In such families, personal choice may play a greater role in decisions about clothing, friendships, relationships, and everyday life. This does not necessarily mean that these families are Western in every respect, or that all their beliefs and habits are the same. The word describes a broad tendency, not a precise definition.
By religious, I mean families in which Islam plays a central role in shaping everyday life, family relationships, child-rearing, personal conduct, and expectations about clothing and behavior. Within this category, too, there are many degrees of observance. Some families follow religious practices very strictly, while others interpret and apply them more flexibly. Nor does religious commitment automatically determine a person’s political views or mean that they support the government of the Islamic Republic.
The word traditional is particularly important for understanding the environment I grew up in. In my experience, tradition often occupies a distinct place between, or alongside, modern and religious ways of life. It is rooted in inherited Iranian customs, family expectations, social conventions, and ideas about what is considered proper or respectable. Some of these traditions can provide a sense of continuity and belonging; others can place considerable limits on individual choice. Tradition may also include beliefs or superstitions passed down through generations.
A traditional family is not necessarily deeply religious, nor does it necessarily embrace a modern, individual-oriented lifestyle. Its expectations may be shaped less by strict religious rules than by family customs, social reputation, and the desire to behave in ways considered appropriate.
Clothing offers one simple example of how these orientations can differ, although clothing alone can never tell us everything about a person’s beliefs. A woman from a highly observant religious family may follow what she understands to be the Islamic rules of hijab. A woman from a more modern family may reject compulsory head covering as a social norm. A woman from a traditional family may wear a headscarf but allow some of her hair to show, observing certain expectations of modesty without following the strictest interpretations of religious dress.
These examples are not rules, and the categories should not be treated as rigid boxes. They are a way of describing patterns I encountered in my own surroundings. I am not suggesting that traditional values exist only in Iran, or that every Iranian family can be classified neatly according to these three terms. I use them because, for me, they help explain the social expectations that shaped my childhood and adolescence.
It is also important to remember that the relationship between these orientations and political views has changed over time. When I was growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, the distinctions sometimes appeared more pronounced in my own experience. Some highly religious people supported the political system, while others did not. People who lived in more modern ways were often less sympathetic to the state, although this was never a universal rule.
Over time, the relationship between personal beliefs, social identity, and political allegiance became more complicated.
Patronage, access to power and economic privilege, and the gap between public appearances and private behavior made these distinctions less reliable. People do not always act according to the values they claim to hold, and political loyalties cannot be inferred simply from someone’s lifestyle or religious observance.
I will return to these contradictions when they become relevant to my own experiences. For now, it is enough to say that the social world I grew up in had its own particular patterns, and that those patterns influenced how I understood family, religion, freedom, and belonging.
Social Class and Family Background
Cultural and religious orientations are only part of the picture. Economic circumstances also shape people’s lives, opportunities, and expectations.
For the purposes of my story, it is useful to distinguish broadly between wealthy, middle-class, and less affluent families. These categories overlap with the cultural orientations I have described. A wealthy family can be modern, traditional, or religious. The same is true of a middle-class or less affluent family.
Money alone, of course, does not explain a family’s worldview. Education, occupation, social connections, family history, and access to opportunities all matter. Nor do families necessarily spend their resources in the same way. One family might prioritize travel, entertainment, and social gatherings; another might devote a significant part of its resources to religious trips, charitable giving, or nazri—food or other offerings prepared and distributed in connection with religious vows or observances.
I do not want to turn this introduction into an abstract discussion of social class. These differences will become clearer as I describe my own family: what mattered to them, how they lived, what they valued, and what they expected from me. Through those details, I hope to show how economic circumstances and cultural beliefs interacted in the world I knew.
I will also try to distinguish between the society I experienced as a child and the society I see today. Iran has changed, and my own understanding of it has changed, too. I do not want to project today’s realities backward onto my childhood, or to suggest that my memories can explain the experiences of people whose lives unfolded in very different circumstances.
I was born and raised in Tehran, and Tehran is the only city I can describe from the standpoint of having lived there. I will not pretend to offer a firsthand comparison between life in Tehran and life in other Iranian cities. Differences between places may emerge naturally through the people I encountered and the events that shaped my life, but my story begins with the world I actually knew.
That world was neither all of Iran nor a complete representation of any single social group. It was the world of my family, my neighborhood, my upbringing, and the expectations surrounding me. It was the world through which I first learned what was considered right and wrong, what could be questioned and what should remain unquestioned, and what it meant to belong.
To understand the woman I became, we must first understand something about the world that shaped the girl I was.
And so, before I tell you how my questions about religion began, I need to take you back to where my story started: my family.
#autobiography #Christian #Converting #Freedom #Culture #MiddleEast
Kudzai Kutukwa on Nostr: "Iran has changed, and my own understanding of it has changed, too. I do not want to ...
"Iran has changed, and my own understanding of it has changed, too. I do not want to project today’s realities backward onto my childhood, or to suggest that my memories can explain the experiences of people whose lives unfolded in very different circumstances."