Mahtob Mahmoody was born in Texas, the daughter of an American mother and a father of Iranian origin. During a family holiday to Iran in 1984, Mahtob’s outwardly Westernized father reveals himself to be a tyrant: he refuses to return to America and holds his wife Betty and the then four-year-old Mahtob hostage.
Despite their pleas, he swears he will never let his wife and daughter go. It takes two years before Betty manages to escape with her daughter. With the help of smugglers, they make it back to America after a grueling journey through the mountains via Turkey, after which Betty wrote the bestseller Not Without My Daughter, which was later adapted into a film.
Mahtob, now an adult, recently wrote a book of her own. In My Name Is Mahtob she tells her own story — about the fear of her father’s revenge and of being abducted again, a fear that only disappeared after her father died in 2009.
“For me, it felt as though my father had died much earlier,” Mahtob says. “To be precise: on the evening he came into our bedroom and told my mother and me that we would never go back to America. I never saw him again after the night we managed to escape. When he died, I was honestly relieved. I had already been grieving for twenty years for the father I had lost. Finally, I no longer had to be afraid that he would try to abduct me again.
As I grew up, my mother said it might be good for me to communicate with my father. She felt I shouldn’t say ‘no’ to contact out of hand, just because I was angry, or because I had decided that as a child. But honestly, I never felt the need. Not even for his apologies.
During my studies, my father tracked down my email address and emailed me for a long time. Every time he wrote, he was very demanding. He was still trying to exercise control over me. Contact would have produced nothing constructive. Besides, it seemed better not to give him hope. If he had any, he would either become angry or be hurt when he realized he had no influence over me.
After my mother wrote her book, there was a great deal of praise, but also a great deal of criticism. Some people were angry about the way she portrayed Iran — as a bad country. I received that same criticism. I find that ironic: my father had every opportunity to teach me to respect and love his country, but because of the way he handled things, he achieved the opposite. I came to hate his country.
What is in my book is purely my own, personal experience. I never intended it as a political statement. Initially, I wasn’t even planning to write a book, but I was constantly being approached by publishers. ‘Okay God, I hear you,’ I eventually said. I believe it was His intention that I should tell my story. My faith is very important to me. I have always been a Christian — not out of rebellion against my father. I have nothing against Muslims. I have friends who are Muslim. That’s almost inevitable: Michigan, where I grew up and still live, has one of the largest Muslim communities in the USA. I talk with my friends about faith regularly, but always with respect. I don’t want to impose anything on anyone the way my father did.
I believe in freedom, of thought and of choice. As a little girl in Tehran, I was deeply unhappy because I wasn’t even allowed to choose which crayons to draw with. I didn’t understand it at all. Now I do: oppression and submission begin in the earliest childhood. That my father had forced us to live that way made me bitter and angry. And it stayed that way when we had just returned to America. I remember my mother pulling me out of school when I was seven years old. She was distraught over a plane crash in which a lot of Iranian people had been killed. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope Dad was on it.’
My mother was shocked: her daughter, barely seven, so full of hatred. Back at home, she took out our old photo album, with pictures of our family from before we had left for Iran. With that, she forced me to remember the good times. She started cooking Persian dishes because she knew that food brings people together; she taught me about Persian art and sang me the lullabies my father used to sing.
Slowly, I began to thaw. I learned that forgiveness is healing. I attended a Christian school, and there too I learned about forgiveness and that I was allowed to love the good sides of my father. That is how I came to understand that Iran is a part of me. I cannot hate the country without hating a part of myself. My mother and I are therefore certainly not ‘anti-Iran’ or ‘anti-Muslim.’
Because of what I have been through, I receive many letters from victims. I notice that there is often a great deal of shame that prevents people from talking about their suspicions regarding a radicalizing partner. ‘You asked for it by marrying a foreigner’ is the response that is often given. Terribly sad, because a great deal of misery could be prevented if people were less quick to judge each other for their choices. For my mother, it was only in hindsight that all the puzzle pieces fell into place. Before we went ‘on holiday’ to Iran, she had had suspicions and fears at times, but my father would tell her she needed a psychiatrist. For a long time, she believed my father had been pressured by his Iranian family. Even after we were back in America. It was only long after her book was made into a film, that she happened to find a bag of papers among my father’s old belongings. They contained notes and diary entries in Farsi. She had those papers translated, and they turned out to contain all his plans. From the moment of my birth, he had been hatching the plot to get us to Iran and keep us there.
My father appeared Westernized, but he struggled with the less respectable side of Western culture: the focus on material things and sex. That I can understand to some degree, but he went far too far with it. When the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran, it consumed him. He felt personally addressed by Khomeini and saw it as a way to return to his cultural roots.
When my book came out, I hoped I wouldn’t have problems… that people would want to give me a symbolic role and that there would be fanatics who wanted to punish me for supposedly being Muslim. But I don’t want to live in fear. Then I would be a prisoner again, and I never want that. Still, the balance between freedom and safety is a difficult line to walk. That is also the reason I would never dare visit Iran: I am a Christian, but according to some, I should be a Muslim. That is why my life would not be safe if I went to Iran. The news lately, especially from the Middle East, makes me sad. I know from my own experience what it is to be afraid of bombs. To have no food. That is why I hope that, as a world, we find a way to come together. We must give young people something positive to fight for. In war, nobody wins.
People sometimes ask whether, after everything I have been through, I have difficulty trusting people, but this was just one experience in my life. Fortunately, from an early age I have also had other experiences. Like the man in Iran who helped us escape at the risk of his own life. And the smugglers, who had a terrible reputation, but who treated us wonderfully and saved our lives during our flight through blizzards in the mountains. And of course my teachers at school, who taught me that I could and should forgive my father. Those people have been a gift. They are the reason I continue to see the good in people.
I don’t have children of my own yet, unfortunately, but if I were ever to have a daughter who wanted to marry a Muslim, I would not stop her. I would tell her that there are challenges she would need to discuss carefully with her partner. The dynamics of Islamic and Western culture are entirely different. Fortunately, I also see that it can work well. A couple I know is half Muslim, half Catholic. They lived in Morocco for several years and their children now go to school here in America. It is very important to know what your values are. For some people it works to live with someone who sees certain things very differently, but for me that would not work. I want to be able to share my faith with my loved one. I would also want to share that with my child, but if he or she later decided not to believe, I would accept that. Coercion brings no one to faith. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that.’
Mahtob herself also wrote a book. My Name Is Mahtob is Mahtob’s own story and the follow-up to her mother Betty Mahmoody’s worldwide bestseller Not Without My Daughter, which was adapted into a film. Now Mahtob tells her story: how she was taken hostage, and how she escaped. And how the shadow of her father would always linger around her.
Mahtob Mahmoody — My Name Is Mahtob
ISBN 9789044342796
Publisher: The House of Books
This article was published in 2015 in the Dutch magazine Crazia.