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    The Stoning of Soraya M.: A Story of Injustice in Iran
    The Stoning of Soraya M.: A Story of Injustice in Iran
    The Stoning of Soraya M.: A Story of Injustice in Iran
    Ebook171 pages2 hours

    The Stoning of Soraya M.: A Story of Injustice in Iran

    By Freidoune Sahebjam and Richard Seaver

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Soraya M.’s husband, Ghorban-Ali, couldn’t afford to marry another woman. Rather than returning Soraya’s dowry, as custom required before taking a second wife, he plotted with four friends and a counterfeit mullah to dispose of her. Together, they accused Soraya of adultery. Her only crime was cooking for a friend’s widowed husband. Exhausted by a lifetime of abuse and hardship, Soraya said nothing, and the makeshift tribunal took her silence as a confession of guilt. They sentenced her to death by stoning: a punishment prohibited by Islam but widely practiced.

    Day by daysometimes minute by minuteSahebjam deftly recounts these horrendous events, tracing Soraya’s life with searing immediacy, from her arranged marriage and the births of her children to her husband’s increasing cruelty and her horrifying execution, where, by tradition, her father, husband, and sons hurled the first stones. A stark look at the intersection between culture and justice, this is one woman’s story, but it stands for the stories of thousands of women who sufferedand continue to sufferthe same fate. It is a story that must be told.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade
    Release dateApr 27, 2011
    ISBN9781628721058
    The Stoning of Soraya M.: A Story of Injustice in Iran

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    Reviews for The Stoning of Soraya M.

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Let me begin by offering a quotation from the preface:"After the shah was deposed and the fundamentalist regime headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in February 1979, many dubious elements of the population, including common-law criminals who had been jailed for good reason under the shah, were released from the country's prisons. Taking advantage of the religious fervor sweeping the land, a number of these people, especially those with at least a basic knowledge of the Koran and its tenets, donned clerics' garb, gave themselves the title of mullah, and roamed the country seeing opportunities for self-enrichment or, quite simply, to conceal their past from the authorities."In 1986, the author was waiting in a small mountain village in Iran for a contact to take him over the border into Pakistan, when he was offered tea by an elderly woman. She then proceeded to tell him that two weeks earlier, her niece Soraya had been stoned to death for being unfaithful to her husband, and that she had been innocent of the charge. The author's contact showed up and he had to leave, but he promised the woman he'd be back, and he returned some six months later to hear her story, which ended up being the substance of this book. The book recalls a beyond-horrible crime instigated by one of these above-mentioned mullahs in cahoots with Soraya's husband. This mullah (Sheik Hassan) had been in prison and was running away from the regime that put him there. He had fled to a small village of about 250 people where he was able to quickly gain the trust of the village leaders and become the go-to guy for settling disputes, and he was able to profit monetarily from his position as well. The sheik's background is important, because he represents one of those people whose position allowed him to manipulate religious beliefs for his own gain, and in this particular case, vengeance.The basic story is this. Soraya's parents had betrothed her to Ghorban-Ali whom she had known since childhood and whom she didn't like even then. He was an abusive husband and later father, who would beat his wife regularly and then start in on his children. He spent a great deal of time turning his two older children against their mother. When he wasn't in the village, he was involved in black-market and other illegal activities until the change in regime, when he became a prison guard and realized his potential for power over others. Once he got a taste for power and life in the city (and the gains he'd made financially and materially in his position as prison guard) he no longer wanted to be a peasant from the village, but instead wanted to live the life of Riley in the city complete with a 14 year old honey that he wanted to marry. The problem was his marriage to Soraya, and how to get rid of her; ultimately with no way out of the marriage, he turned to Sheik Hassan. And this is when Soraya's life went from one of abuse to one of utter horror.There are a couple of things worth mentioning. First, there is no doubt that this event actually happened, and there is no doubt that stoning as a punishment for adultery is a reality among some Muslim fundamentalists in some areas. You can go to any human rights organization's website and find out all that you want to know about it there and to be fair, you can go to the website of Al-jazeera (an Islamic news organization) to read about recent developments about stoning as well. It is also an abominable practice that is beyond my scope of comprehension in the realm of human cruelty.Second, there's no doubt in my mind that as far as the story this book tells, the stoning of Soraya M. a) reflects a plan conceived by a few misogynistic individuals who deliberately used the existing Sharia laws for their own personal gain and b) was allowed to happen as a result of an abuse of power in this small village.To get the full story, you need to read the book. It is a difficult story but an eye-opening one that you will probably not soon forget. I know I won't. I don't think I need to see it on the big screen, though. This is a book that will keep you reading, even though you know things are not going to be good in the long run. A very tough account, but one that is very readable and will make you think.
    • 4/5
      I could barely finish The Stoning of Soraya M.and at the same time I found it difficult to put down. Essentially the book tells the story of what leads up to the barbaric stoning of Soraya M. under Islamic law in Iran. The portion of the book devoted to the stoning itself is graphic, but what leads up to the stoning is equally as graphic and difficult to withstand. Freidoune Sahebjam draws a stunning portrait of the oppression of an entire village, particularly its women, and the devastation that fundamentalist religion combined with the power of government has on any diversity of thought in Khomeini-era Iran. Simply put Soraya M. was murdered by her husband and her own village because their fundamentalist version of religion gave them permission to place women in positions of servitude, sexual slavery to be killed in the name of God when a husband demanded it. I cannot imagine being governed by Sharia law if this book contains an accurate portrait of it.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely horrific - nearly as bad as the film. Hard to believe that this continues to happen, and not only happen but celebrated.

      This is probably one of the worst cases of injustice and woman abuse that I've heard of. I can't say more to avoid spoilers, but if you have interest in the absolutely miserable and cruel lives of women in Iran and Afghanistan, then this book will confirm what you already know or open your eyes to what is going on in certain parts of the world.
    • 4/5
      This is, quite possibly, the most disturbing book that I've ever read, and not an easy one to rate. I can't really say that I recommend it, for all that my fellow international affairs peeps kept telling me to read it, but it's definitely an important book. The details of what happened to Soraya are disturbing, and the author definitely didn't hold back in making sure the reader knows what happened. It's sickening, disturbing, heart-breaking, and utterly haunting, all at the same time. Read with caution, and with tissues nearby (and, yes, the movie, which I saw long before reading the book, is even better/worse on that note).
    • 4/5
      Just as Pat Tillman gave a face to the countless and needless military casualties in Afghanistan, Soraya's tragedy personalizes the stoning of over 1,500 women in Iran over the course of the last 25 years. Sahebjam's biography is a compelling account, but it is not, however, an easy read, as the violence is stark, gratuitous with the author leaving no detail unexamined.Written in 1986, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, this account of the brutal execution of an innocent woman illuminates, once more, the extent to which religious fervor, regardless of sect or creed, can be manipulated for personal gain and emptied of any moral integrity. Although Soraya was stoned, theoretically, in accordance to Islamic dictums, her aunt astutely notes that her fate is the outcome of "the law of men, the law that men make and say it is the law of God."My only problem with this biography lies within the preface, as I would have preferred an update to the 2011 edition, detailing how the political climate and relative position of women in society has changed since the original manuscript.

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    The Stoning of Soraya M. - Freidoune Sahebjam

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