Women of Allah

I wonder how I hadn't heard of Shirin Neshat until today. Browsing The New Yorker website a while ago, I came across a slideshow of her work. At once beautiful, disturbing and empowering, she seems to have penetrated the minds and the lives of the women she portrays. Her work, to a large extent, is autobiographical, hopefully not as much a personal experience as a cultural experience.

First it was Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and now another glimpse into this tightly veiled world. Every glimpse is frightening, and, inexplicably, alluring. I wonder what they think - these women about whom so much is portrayed. I wonder if, in reality, they're happy behind their veils, in their tightly regulated lives, with their immediate concerns. I wonder if they even agree with their sisters who've portrayed them as struggling birds in chains. Maybe they actually don't care any more; maybe they're actually happy to be looked after so well that they don't even need to think in order to exist.

Do all these women wish they were a Nafisi or a Neshat? Do they hold them as beacons for their daughters or burn them in silent effigy? Or, do they denounce them in the courtyard of their houses, with their men looking on, and then secretly raise their children to look up to them - so that a new generation of bearded men will finally snap the chains off their mothers and sisters and allow them to live? Are they even as upset for themselves as I seem to be for strangers I don't know and am unlikely to ever interact with? Where do their loyalties really lie?

Who are these women, the women of Allah?