Iranian-American writer Azadeh Moaveni has sought in her work to challenge prevalent western views about Iranian society and politics.  When we interview her before the Union debate on Thursday, she speaks with a kind of practiced reflectiveness born out of some fifteen years of communicating on these complicated issues.  It is clear that she has become used to providing ‘the Iranian perspective’ in media interactions, and perhaps inevitably our questions are along these lines; but she answers so as to never obscure the complexity of the situation and diversity of opinion in Iran.

Moaveni’s first book Lipstick Jihad, published in 2005, paints an intricate picture of Iran based on her experience of living there from 1999 to 2001.  In it, Moaveni – one of only a few American correspondents allowed to work in Iran continuously since 1999 – tells of a dynamic, frustrated young generation of Iranians willing change in their country.  The book also explores Moaveni’s complicated relationship with her own Iranian-American identity.  This developed as she grew up in the eighties and early nineties in San Jose, California.  The reader is taken on a journey of reconciliation between two seemingly distinct and distant identities: one Western and American, the other Iranian.

In Thursday’s Union debate she argued that the West’s active condemnation of Iran’s nuclear programme is hypocritical, and is undermining the West’s ability to exert influence.  The recent economic sanctions are crushing Iran’s middle-class, the group most supportive of liberal reform and, she argues, the group most likely to be sympathetic to the West.  In our interview she tells us that this mistaken foreign policy is the product of perhaps the biggest misconception held in the West about Iran: “That the government is still irrational, extremely ideological and runs a sort of mad Islamic, extremist, unpredictable foreign policy.  This caricature of an unhinged state is very far from the truth.”

On issues of foreign policy and regarding the nuclear programme, Moaveni argues that the government is sensitive and responsive to Iranian popular opinion.  She thinks that, “Iran’s foreign policy is extremely calculating and based on national interest”.  And in extreme contrast with the irrational and deranged administration often depicted in the Western media, she describes one whose policy considerations are governed by “stark political calculation just like pretty much any other state.”  She adds that it “makes it difficult to conceive of how to conduct diplomacy with Iran when we are surrounded, especially by the media, with this – I think false – sense of who is ruling Iran and with what interests in mind.”

How have misconceptions like these come about?  Part of the problem is that “there’s not a lot of good reporting coming out of Iran” because restrictions on journalists are so severe.  But there are also problems with the way the Western media reports on these events.  Moaveni notes that the West found it difficult to accurately gauge the significance of the Green movement of 2009, which was sparked by allegations of widespread election fraud in the 2009 Presidential elections.  The story in the western media was one about a massive and significant popular uprising powered by social media against a crazed and out-of-touch regime.  But Moaveni tells us that the western media had a hard time “gauging whether there was a wide breadth of support for those demonstrations.”  And the attractiveness of the social media story distorted the narrative: “I think that it became very overly trendy in foreign policy circles and in media circles to take 2009 as this exemplar of the social media revolution and I don’t think that in Iran it was that at all.”

It is on issues of social policy that the current regime and the Iranian middle class clash dramatically.  In recent years the government has made a clear effort at liberalisation; it has introduced pre-marital sex education classes and HIV prevention classes.  Moaveni tells us, “it really tries but I think that sometimes it hits the wall of its own limitations when it comes to ideology sometimes or opposition from clerical circles on some of these issues.”  We ask her about a recent Iranian court ruling that a man convicted of domestic abuse should be sentenced to walk the streets of his hometown dressed as a woman, which has sparked an online campaign with men from the Kurdish community dressing as women as a show of solidarity.  “It’s an example of how Iranian society – in terms of gender – is ahead of its government.  And that creates a lot of tension because there’s an acceptance to a certain degree of men and women having different sexual orientations, there’s an acceptance of people having pre-marital sex, sex outside marriage – but the government is not there yet.”

On one hand Moaveni’s account is of an Iran whose leadership is responsive to popular opinion; on the other, the government is lagging behind Iranians on issues of social reform.  Will the impasse that Moaveni describes result in some sort of popular uprising, in favour of a more Westernised form of government?  “No, I don’t see that [happening].”  She says, “Iranians are exhausted from revolution, and I think that sanctions have created an economic crisis that’s akin to what they faced at the end of the Iran-Iraq war.  So people are suffering quite a lot just in terms of daily life.”  Besides, the supposition that the Iranian middle class’s calls for a more liberal form of government are akin to calls for a more westernised one is another of those fundamental misunderstandings on the part of the West.  For one thing, Moaveni points out, Iranians already see the West as culpable for many of the problems in the Middle East.  And many are also increasingly angry about the sanctions imposed by the West; if these continue Iranians will blame the West for this and “the middle-class openness to the West that made Iran so different than the rest of the Middle East for so long will slowly over time revert to the kind of radicalism that there is in the rest of the region.”

In both Lipstick Jihad and her more recent work Honeymoon in Tehran Azadeh Moaveni describes her ultimate disappointment with Iran and, on two different occasions, her decision to stop living there permanently.  We finish the interview by asking whether she will move back to Iran.  “I don’t think that at this point, short of major social, structural and political change, I would go back to live there.  Unfortunately sanctions are crushing the Iranian middle class.  That Iranian middle class is what we have come to know and understand Iran to be all about, and I think: would I want to go back to an Iran that wasn’t like that?”

Azadeh Moaveni addressed The Cambridge Union Society on 25th April.