Haleh Esfandiari: Her incarceration highlights the dilemmas facing researchers
Haleh Esfandiari's recent incarceration in Iran's notorious Evin prison highlights the dilemmas facing researchers who study the society and politics of repressive regimes.
Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar who directs the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has studied the progress of democracy in Iran, with a particular focus on the role of women under the Islamic Republic.
Her visit to Iran was personal: Her 93-year-old mother had fallen ill. Once in Iran, Esfandiari was first barred from leaving the country, then interrogated, and then detained for months in Evin prison, facing constant pressure to confess to anti-government activities.
During that time, Iranian officials ignored international appeals for her release, as well as calls for her freedom from hundreds of academics around the world. Eventually her mother had to surrender the deed to her apartment so that Esfandiari's bail could be posted.
Although Esfandiari's case was the most prominent, other dual-nationality citizens, several of whom also went to Iran to see sick family members, have faced similar horrors.
Scholars like Esfandiari are bridges between two cultures, helping different and often hostile governments and peoples better understand each other.
Although Esfandiari's work is critical of the Islamic Republic, it is not blindly so. She and area specialists like her also display an insight into Iranian perceptions that comes from direct engagement. Through work like hers, Iranians' pride, their problems, and the sometimes legitimate grievances they have with the West and the United States in particular are explained to audiences in Washington and beyond.
The government of Iran imprisoned Esfandiari to block such bridges. And the tactic is working.
Tehran's abuse of Esfandiari and other scholars casts a pall on many people's plans to travel to Iran for research. Both American scholarship on Iran and Iranian scholarship on America will be far worse as a result -- and U.S.-Iran relations will suffer further as a consequence.
In their campaign of intimidation, Iranian officials are lumping together the regime's bitter foes, its mild critics, and dispassionate scholars. Ludicrous claims that scholars are CIA plants find some credence given Iran's own history as an object of foreign manipulation and the prevalence of conspiracy theories -- a hallmark of authoritarian regimes that restrict freedom of information....