http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/world/middleeast/13iran.html
what is it?
where is it from? who wrote/created it?
in a paragraph or two, why would this be useful to readers before they started reading? what ideas would you want them to think about? how would this piece help get at those ideas? do you agree or disagree with the ideas in the piece?

what is it?
where is it from? who wrote/created it?
in a paragraph or two, why would this be useful to readers before they started reading? what ideas would you want them to think about? how would this piece help get at those ideas? do you agree or disagree with the ideas in the piece?

http://www.islamic.org.uk/women.html
this is an article on women's oppression in Islamic countries.
This is a good article to read because it gives you a real sense of whats going to be going on in the book. Not just the article in the book but the two articles that are linked to the page that i have linked. these articles will be good to make people understand the impotence and understand the ideas of the modern Islamic person compared to the major religious ones who made it so that woman must wear the veil and keep concealed and were given no freedom what so ever.
in one of the links it takes you to a page were it list several rights that woman have in an Islamic land. some of these are: the right and duty to obtain an education, the right to obtain devorce from her husband, and the right to negotiate marrige terms of her choice. there are alot more rights listed but i picked these three because they seem to be major parts of the book. Marjane has trouble with these things and ends up coming to terms with them. such as the negotiate marrige right, her father makes it clear before he would let her get married her hudband must let her get a deivorce if she wishes. this is just an example but the article gives very usfull information as to these rights and its very helpfull to at least have an understanding of what rights woman have and were some of these ideas come from because it makes the book a little more clear with some background information.

Iran article/video

News Article

This is an article from the Washington Times about a journalist, Iason Athanasiadis, who was in Iran reporting on the elections and was locked in jail because the government thought she had information the Iranian government didn't want getting out into the public.
I think this article is useful for someone to read before reading Persepolis because it is a modern firsthand view of what can happen in Iran. I think that people have a general idea of what is happening there, and so they can relate/understand this article better. Plus, it seems very similar to how the Iranian government operated during the revolution, which was 20 years ago.

Video

This video is another, more serious viewpoint of what can happen in an Iranian prison. It is about an Iranian man, Ahmad Batebi, and how his picture was taken and it ended up on the cover of The Economist. This ended up sending Batebi to prison; this was decided in less than 3 minutes. There he would endure many months of torture, both physically and mentally.
This video was from 60 Minutes (now on youtube), interviewed by Anderson Cooper. I think that this video gives us an even better view of what can happen if you are caught doing something the Iranian government doesn't like. Batebi said that when he was in court about the picture, the judge said, "'You have defaced the face of the Islamic Republic that is a representative of God on earth. You have defaced it around the world. And therefore you have to be sentenced to death."
This video gets people to think about, and to know about a firsthand experience and what fear people in Iran go through just to not end up in jail in a similar situation, and what is probably the worst experience to happen while in jail. I think it also gets people to think that maybe not all Iranians are like their government, but that they live in obedience/fear, and do what they're told.