Before she moved to the U.S., before her career with 60 Minutes, and before her recent books brought a history to light in sharp and nuanced focus, Roya Hakakian was just a teenager, and on her way to a hike with friends in northern Tehran.
One of five children in an Iranian Jewish family, she hadn’t yet experienced the “jolt of fear” that came with the murder of Habib Elghanian under the Islamic Republic of Iran. She hadn’t thought about leaving Iran permanently, nor did she until emigrating to the United States five years later. She just wanted to go for a hike.
No dice. At the entrance to the park was a sign, reading only “The Mountain is Closed.”
Hakakian and her family came to realize that a “great deal of absurdity and lack of logic that permeated every aspect of life” in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini.
The mountain enoounter was just one of the stories that Hakakian — who went on to become a noted poet, journalist and 60 Minutes producer, and who now lives in the New Haven area — recounted during the first episode of WNHH’s “Sam Gejdenson Show.” Click on the sound file above to listen to the entire episode.
Carrying Gejdenson from the eve of the 1979 revolution through the hotly contested sanctions with Iran, Hakakian answered questions that ranged from Khomeini’s use of pre-2000s social media to ISIS to the current persecution of religious groups in Iran.
Her bottom line throughout all of it?
“Nobody wants another revolution like 1979,” she said when Gejdenson asked why Iran’s young population hadn’t had a significant uprising amidst the rocky political terrain in which the Middle East finds itself. The specter of 1979 is there as a scarecrow for the whole nation. People are deathly afraid … that it could get worse. Because it did, once.”