Ahmadinejad Says Esfandiari Should Go Home

By A. Scheherezada Jerome, York College of Pennsylvania

August 29, 2007

Source: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)

Ahmadinejad Says Esfandiari Should Go Home Elle Jerome Philadelphia, PA Tehran-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reported as saying today that formerly-imprisoned Iranian-American scholar and director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program, Dr Haleh Esfandiari, should be allowed to return to her family in the United States and at the very least, be permitted to contact them. He added though, today in a press conference in the Iranian media, that the final decision on Esfandiari’s fate would be at the discretion of the judge in charge of her case.

Esfandiari was released on bail on August August 21st, after spending more than three months in solitary confinement and under intense interrogation in the country’s infamous Evin Prison.

A. SCHEHEREZADA JEROME

A. Scheherezada Jerome is an Anglo-Ottoman Instructor of Islamic Studies at York College of Pennsylvania. She graduated from Dickinson College in 2003 with a self-developed major in Middle Eastern Studies and Spanish.

In 2004, she graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies with an M.A. in Islamic Societies and Cultures. Finally, in 2005 she finished her second M.A. in Gender and Identity in the Middle East (Summa Cum Laude) at the University of Exeter. After finishing the first stages of her postgraduate work, she was an intern in Women’s Affairs at the Embassy of Afghanistan.

In addition to her academic work, she manages her non-profits, The Shaherazade Project and Women Against Crimes of Honor. She’s also the coordinator for postgraduate students in the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies.

Currently, in addition to her teaching duties she is the editor of Kohl an anthology of Muslim-American women’s writing to be published in 2007 and is working on research for her second novel, Hürrem Sultan.