Haleh Esfandiari | My Prison, My Home with Ali Eteraz | Children of Dust
Recorded 10/20/2009
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A distinguished Iranian-American intellectual, Haleh Esfandiari is the founding Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program. Falsely imprisoned for four months in Iran under the belief that she knew of a U.S. plot for "regime change," Esfandiari was placed in solitary confinement, subjected to interrogation, and threatened with a show trial and life in prison. Weaving her personal story of capture and release with her extensive knowledge of Iran, My Prison is a survivor's portrait of Iran today.

An international lawyer who founded a think tank dedicated to legal reform in the Muslim world, Ali Eteraz writes an award-winning blog on the site Islamosphere. In Children of Dust, Eteraz recounts his schooling in a madrassa in Pakistan, his move to America, and his subsequent return to find a Muslim wife, at which time he becomes the subject of an abduction plot by the Taliban and is forced to grapple with his Islamic identity. Called a "love letter to one man's fading faith," author Yael Goldstein Love insists that the memoir "is a gift and a necessity."