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A list of chapter titles for both Persepolis I and II.

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Summary

Persepolis is the story of Marjane Satrapi's childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the tria... Full description

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Summary Persepolis is the story of Marjane Satrapi's childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the tria...

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Father of the man who would become known as the Shah. Rose to power with the blessings and manipulation of Western interests.

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During Marjane's early childhood years, her family supports the people demonstrating against the Shah's rule.

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Another, briefer interview with Satrapi that covers her "royal" lineage.

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Not long after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the teenage Marjane Satrapi was walking through the streets of Tehran when she was stopped by two black-clad women members of the Guardians of the Revolution. The women didn't like her outfit. Although Satrapi was wearing a headscarf, she also had on sneakers, jeans and a baseball cap. Worst of all was the Michael Jackson badge on her chest.

When the women complained about her "whorish" and "decadent" garb, she replied quick as a flash that the man on her badge wasn't Michael Jackson but Malcolm X, "the leader of the black Muslims in America". The women still threatened to denounce her, but Satrapi burst into tears and claimed that her stepmother would burn her with the clothes iron and send her off to live in an orphanage. The stony-faced fundamentalists let her go.

This incident is recounted in Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Satrapi's comic-book memoir. It sums up perfectly what makes Satrapi such a distinctive writer and personality. She is fast-thinking, spiky and very humorous. She is not afraid of being rude.

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When I met her at a lunch in Cannes to announce the movie version of Persepolis, she was openly dismissive of my questions about why Kathleen Kennedy (Steven Spielberg's producer and one of the most influential women in Hollywood) wanted to work with her. "I don't know - ask her," was the gist of her response. Inquiries about the budget of the film were dismissed in an even more peremptory fashion.

Thankfully, she was far more forthcoming about the reasons why she wrote her graphic memoir. Persepolis has earned some glowing reviews since its first publication in 2003. Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, called it "a superb piece of work". Other plaudits were: "A mighty achievement", "delectable", "brilliant", "dazzling" and "utterly fascinating".

What is most arresting about the book is how unexpected it is. Here is an account of the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution and its immediate aftermath from the perspective of a young girl who loves Kim Wilde and Iron Maiden.

We're used to Iranian movies from great directors such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jarar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami - movies that look at contemporary Iranian life in a quizzical, mildly provocative fashion. But Satrapi's storytelling voice is very different: brash, well-informed, full of political and pop cultural references - and drawn in black and white in a deceptively naive comic style. Throughout, humour is foregrounded: the funniest bits often come at the darkest moments.

"Humour is a big part of the Persian culture," Satrapi declares when asked about the incongruously ironic and witty storytelling style. Whether it's her grandmother pretending to be diabetic so she can rush inside the house and flush away the hidden booze before it is discovered by the revolutionary guards, or Marjane pretending that she prays 12 times a day to prove her fundamentalist credentials, the book exposes the absurdities of life under the Ayatollah. "When you go through war and revolution, the only thing you can do is laugh. It's a way of surviving. Plus, humour is the most subversive weapon... and I am not a very serious person."

Her own character, the precocious little Marx-quoting nine-year-old, comes across like an Iranian version of the equally smart and self-righteous Lisa in The Simpsons. "I was very intelligent, dear," she says of herself as a child. "Also, I had parents who wanted to make us into future intellectuals. Everything in the house was prepared for this. I could have all the books I wanted."

Satrapi has blue blood. Her family is directly descended from the Persian royal family. Her great-grandfather was an emperor and her grandfather was a prince. (All his property was confiscated by the Shah.)

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She is at pains to point out that this is not quite as impressive a lineage as it may first appear. "My great-great-grandfather had 1,000 wives. My great-grandfather had 100 wives. Imagine all the kids they would produce with all those wives! If you multiply these kids with the numbers of generations, you find out you have tens of thousands of princes and princesses coming from Iran."

Her parents' and grandparents' generations were among the first to study abroad. Ironically, these young Iranians from aristocratic backgrounds often soaked up Marxist doctrine abroad and became prime movers in the campaign to overthrow the Shah.

Her parents were radicals, but that didn't stop them leading bourgeois lives. Satrapi's father, an engineer, drove a Cadillac. In the days before the revolution, her family was comfortably well off, although not super-rich. That is to say, her relatives didn't have their own jets or a string of palatial houses. "In Iran [before the revolution], when people were rich, they were really, really rich," she recalls of the days of oil-fuelled conspicuous consumption before the Shah was toppled.

Satrapi blames Britain for many of Iran's current political problems. Not only did the British force Reza Shah (seen as a potential Nazi ally) to abdicate in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1941; Britain was also behind the 1953 CIA-backed "coup" against the government of the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalised Iran's oil industry.

After Mossadegh's removal, the Shah became all-powerful. "The idea came from Churchill, who is a big hero in Europe but for us, he is the nastiest man in the world. He provoked this coup d'état," Satrapi says.

She is acidic, too, in her criticism of Tony Blair's policies in Iran and Iraq, and reckons that the British have caused nothing but trouble in the region. "But, at the same time, you have The Who and The Rolling Stones... All this culture! You have Shakespeare, you have all these beautiful things. I make a separation between the British people and even the British kitchen - because I love fish and chips - and the British Government."

Satrapi left Iran for Vienna (where she thoroughly miserable) when she was 14. Her parents had sent her to Austria for her safety, but her schoolmates seemed to see her as the embodiment of the fundamentalism she had fled.

She returned home, but was no happier. Back in Iran, she was forced to live behind the veil in a society she despised. When she was 24, she moved to Paris, where she is still based.

It is now more than six years since she has been home to Iran. She acknowledges she is still too fretful about her personal safety to return. Memories are still horribly fresh of what happened to Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who died in Iranian custody three years ago. "She was killed and the guy who killed her was promoted and nobody has been accused," Satrapi notes.

Nonetheless, she still retains fond memories of the idealism that originally drove the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. "The end of democracy in my country was not 1979," she says, "it was 1953, when Mossadegh was pulled from power. That killed the dream of democracy, not only in Iran but in the whole region."

Nor is she sympathetic to figures such as the controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who equates Islamism with Nazi fascism. "She is just a dumbass!" Satrapi exclaims. "I don't know why people, when they become older, become stupider. OK, in Iran, we have a government that's completely out of its mind. In one way, they're completely crazy. On the other hand, the United States is just making shit in the whole world. What credibility do they have to say to a country, 'Don't do that'? They have never guaranteed peace anywhere in the world...

"I believe it is a very stupid idea to believe that we are divided into Muslim and Christian or West and East," she continues, adding that the only real divisions are between fanatics (whether Christian, Muslim or Buddhist) and moderates.

"What are the resemblances between me and a mullah from my country?" she continues. "What are the resemblances between a mullah from my country and George Bush? George Bush is God's best friend. They [the mullahs] are God's best friends, too. George Bush is going to fight the axis of evil. They are going to fight the big Satan."

This little tirade over, Satrapi acknowledges that it can be frustrating that she is regarded as a political commentator as much as an artist. "It happens always that my artistic work is completely forgotten and the political questions come over and over again."

She cites Art Spiegelman as one of her key creative influences. His comic book memoir, Maus, about his father, a Holocaust survivor, convinced her that it was possible to broach meaningful subjects in graphic novel form.

Satrapi's attitude toward her new homeland France is affectionate but predictably barbed. "Instead of the French government making a law against the veil, the question I would ask is why those kids want to wear the veil," she says. "There is a crisis of identity. Whose fault is that? The French are a big pain in the ass. They are all the time shouting and going on strike, but at least that means they are alive... I like them and hate them for the same reasons. I like the smell of the nasty cheese and also I can smoke where I want."

Work is now under way on the animated version of Persepolis, with Satrapi overseeing a team of 85 animators. "All my life I've worked with myself - and I found that unbearable," she says. The entire movie is hand-drawn. Satrapi disapproves of computer animation, which she thinks becomes quickly outmoded. "What the hand can make is never dated."

Whatever Satrapi's reservations about George Bush, she is relishing her first brush with Hollywood. "Americans can be enthusiastic and that's why I like them so much." When her film is released, she hopes it might just teach audiences in the West a little more about Iran than they know from the TV reports they see about "fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism".

The film version of ' Persepolis' will be released next year. ' Persepolis 1' and ' Persepolis 2' are published by Jonathan Cape

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Not long after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the teenage Marjane Satrapi was walking through the streets of Tehran when she was stopped by two black-clad women members of the Guardians of the Revolution. The women didn't like her outfit. Although Satrapi was wearing a headscarf, she also had on sneakers, jeans and a baseball cap.

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A ready for American cable television summary of the conflict. Provides helpful dates and names.

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In September 1980, Iraqi forces launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War. Fueled by territorial, religious and political disputes between the two nations, the conflict ended in an effective stalemate and a cease-fire nearly eight years later, after more than half a million soldiers and civilians had been killed.

Background to the Iran-Iraq War

Tensions between Iran and Iraq began almost immediately after the establishment of the latter nation in 1921, in the aftermath of World War I. By the 1970s, one enduring source of conflict involved control of the Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the southern end of which forms the border between the two nations. Signed in 1975, the Algiers Agreement reduced Iraqi control over the waterway in exchange for Iran's withdrawing support for a Kurdish insurgency in northern Iraq.

A turning point occurred with the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, which toppled the pro-Western government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pallavi in favor of a fundamentalist regime led by Shi'ite Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq and leader of the country's Ba'ath Party in July 1979, counted on the support of his nation's minority Sunni Muslim population, and feared an expansion of Iran's revolution to Shi'ite-dominated Iraq. Saddam also sought to overturn the border agreements of 1975 and reassert control over both sides of the Shatt al-Arab, Iraq's only access point to the Persian Gulf.

Iraqi Invasion of Iran

Mindful of Iran's weakened military in the wake of its revolution, Saddam decided on a preemptive strike against Iran. On September 22, 1980, Iraqi forces launched air strikes on Iranian air bases, following up with a ground invasion of the oil-producing border region of Khuzestan. The invasion was initially successful, with Iraq capturing the city of Khorramshahr and making other territorial gains by November.

But the Iraqi advance soon stalled in the face of a stiff Iranian resistance, powered by the addition of revolutionary militia to the regular armed forces. In 1981, Iran launched a counteroffensive; by early 1982, they had regained virtually all of the lost territory. By the end of that year, with Iraqi forces withdrawn to pre-war border lines, Iraq attempted to seek peace. Under Khomeini's leadership, Iran refused, insisting on continuing the conflict in an effort to topple Saddam's regime. In July 1982, Iran invaded Iraqi territory in an unsuccessful attempt- the first of many-to gain control of the Iraqi port city of Basra.

A Protracted Conflict

With Iran now on the offensive, Iraqi defenses solidified, and the war settled into a virtual stalemate along a front running roughly along the border. Both sides launched air and missile attacks against cities, military sites and oil facilities and transports, prompting the United States and other Western powers to send warships to the Persian Gulf to regulate the output of oil to the global market.

While Iran enjoyed a large numerical advantage, Iraq had more sophisticated weaponry and a better-trained officer corps, thanks to direct support from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Arab states and tacit support from Western nations including the United States.

In the aftermath of the 1979-81 hostage crisis involving diplomats at the U.S. embassy at Tehran, Khomeini's regime remained largely isolated from the international community; Iran's only allies during the conflict were Syria and Libya. Iraq continued to seek peace, but drew outrage from the international community for its use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops as well as Kurdish civilians in Iraq, who were thought to be sympathetic to Iran.

Ceasefire, Peace Agreement and Legacy

In the spring of 1988, with Iran demoralized by its many failed offensives over the years, Iraq launched its own series of ground attacks. Iraqi battlefield gains convinced Iran's clerical leaders they had little hope of decisive victory. That July, the two nations agreed to accept a United Nations-brokered ceasefire under Security Council Resolution 598; the war ended formally on August 20, 1988. Though total casualty figures in the Iran-Iraq War are uncertain, estimates range from 1 to 2 million, with the total number killed reaching an estimated 500,000, including tens of thousands of Kurds killed by Iraqi forces.

As nearly all Arab nations had supported Iraq during the war in order to contain Iran, Iraq emerged from the conflict with more power in the region than it had before, fueled by a strengthened military and the ruthless ambition of its leader. On August 2, 1990, Saddam ordered the invasion of Kuwait, beginning the first Persian Gulf War.

Sources

Iran-Iraq War. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 4, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.

Iran-Iraq War. Encyclopedia Britannica.

"Iran-Iraq War: Eight Brutal Years." New York Times, July 22, 1988.

Paul Johnson. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Revised Edition). (Harper Perennial, 1991)

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In September 1980, Iraqi forces launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War. Fueled by territorial, religious and political disputes between the two nations, the conflict ended in an effective stalemate and a cease-fire nearly eight years later.

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Seems important...

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Founded by Darius I in 518 B.C., Persepolis was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. It was built on an immense half-artificial, half-natural terrace, where the king of kings created an impressive palace complex…

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A guide to some of the styles of head covering drawn or mentioned in the text.

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What in the World offers you glimpses of what our journalists are observing around the globe. Let us know what you think: whatintheworld@nytimes.com
They are banned in France, mandated in Saudi Arabia and a fashion statement in Indonesia. Veils for Muslim women come in all sizes, shapes and colors - and with terminology that can mean different things in different places.

The Quran is oblique in its references to "hijab," which is described not as an article of clothing but something akin to a curtain or "separation" that allows for privacy. Here's a guide to how that looks around the Muslim world.

Abaya: The ubiquitous (and requisite) covering for women in Saudi Arabia is seen throughout the Arabian Peninsula and parts of North Africa. Typically black, the garment is constructed like a loose robe or caftan and covers everything but the face, hands and feet.

Burqa: The Taliban-required garment is worn mainly in Afghanistan, and covers the entire face, with a crocheted mesh grill over the eyes. When first mentioned in The New York Times, in 1988, it was described as "tentlike." In Kabul, most burqas are blue, but in other parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan they're brown, green or white.

Chador: For centuries, women in Iran have worn these semicircles of fabric draped over the head like a shawl. The chador has no fasteners; it is held in place under the neck by hand. Black is the preferred color in public, but women often wear colorful versions at home or at the mosque.

Hijab: The term has become a catchall, particularly in the West, for all Islamic veils, but is mainly used to mean a head scarf. Styles vary not only by geography, but also fashion trends.

Jilbab: Also mentioned in the Quran, the term generally refers to a protective article of clothing, not a specific garment. In Indonesia, jilbab refers to any head-to-toe style of modest dress, especially a head scarf, but in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula it typically means a long dress or tunic.

Khimar: This is the third term, along with hijab and jilbab, that is mentioned in the Quran; cumulatively, they make up the religious justification for veiling. Historically, khimar refers to any article of clothing that promotes modesty, covering the genitals and breasts of a woman and protecting her from the gaze of unrelated men. In some countries, the term is used to describe any veil or head scarf, similar to a hijab.

Niqab: A veil that covers a woman's face with a slit left for the eyes. Though not required in Saudi Arabia, it is almost always worn, with an abaya, by women in public. In much of the world, including South Asia and North Africa, women often don a half-niqab, a square of fabric tied or held with a band below the eyes.

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What's That You're Wearing? A Guide to Muslim Veils

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What in the World offers you glimpses of what our journalists are observing around the globe. Let us know what you think: whatintheworld@nytimes.com They are banned in France, mandated in Saudi Arabia and a fashion statement in Indonesia. Veils for Muslim women come in all sizes, shapes and colors - and with terminology that can mean different things in different places.