Hopefully you are not telling us, UmmeJahan, that everything is just a question of who rules — whether it is "we" or "you"?

OK, hypocrisy is counter-productive. Telling that we are pure and fine, altogether, and "they" are barbaric altogether doesn't help anyone and makes the world just worse.

For instance: I have not read Betty Mahmoody's book (Not Without My Daughter) and probably will not either. Why? Because I have seen a splendid film document made here in Finland (2002) by Kari Tervo and Alexis Kouros with Bozorg Mahmoody, the father. Also Tehran and the USA were visited, and US-born former Tehran neighbors of the Mahmoody family interviewed. The most striking moments of the documentary showed several "respectable" American award granters telling bluntly that they were not at all interested whether the story was true or not — they just thought it was a good, well-written and politically correct story, and they were making it a best-seller. Still more striking was the powerless figure of Bozorg Mahmoody visiting Helsinki, invited by the document-makers, trying here to contact, several times, by phone, the US consulate so as to ask for any chance to phone or send a message to her now almost-adult daughter in the US. The camera was filming, the phone call was taped, and the discourtesy from the employee (ending in an abrupt shut-off) was palpable. Still, finally, he somehow got a phone number to his daughter's student dwelling. Once she answered … but shut immediately off. I might weep. At the end of the document, there definitely was no credibility whatsoever left for Betty M. and William Hoffer, the actual book writer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_My_Daughter

I've also seen Kim Longinotto's documentary "Divorce Iranian Style" (1998) of a day-to-day working of a moslem divorce court in Tehran. The warmth, humor and understanding in this document is heartening. She clearly had won the confidence of both the well-meaning old judge and his secretary, and of the divorce-seeking women. One of the latter actually admitted to the camera: "I don't want to divorce, in fact — just to make him a bit jealous and nicer to me."

http://www.wmm.com/filmCatalog/pages/c454.shtml

But Kim Longinotto was not there to say that everything's OK. She just wanted to show an everyday side of things, milder than macabre. Because we must have this understanding, too. Another documentary by her that I've seen, "Sisters In Law" (2005) of female judges in a Cameroonian town dedicated to eradicate family violence, is equally heartening.

Now, I don't know what kind and quality this Soraya film is of — and I certainly will see it if I can. Irshad's opinion of its value and necessity weighs much at me.

What I'm trying to say is that black-and-white conceptions concerning even one person — not to speak of whole cultural or political spheres — are perilous. But that is a reason for trying to see all sides, not a reason to brush away the apalling sides.

UmmeJahan's attitude seems to me just as counter-productive as the hypocrisy of the world rulers.

Actually, that's not true. Women who receive the punishment of stoning are considered to have atoned for their sins, and are actually accorded a full Islamic burial. Its the same as all those who have received punishment for their sins. There's even a story of a woman who willingly submitted to stoning during the prophet's time (the story is interesting because the prophet worked hard to dissuade her from being stoned, apparently). Some blood spattered on one of the apostles, and the man hurried to brush it off. The prophet stopped him, though, claiming her body had been purified of sin, and therefore her blood was not "unclean." Interesting that people don't remember these kinds of stories when they practice Islam.