A good game: How I brought women’s soccer back to Iran
A good game: How I brought women’s soccer back to Iran
- August 13, 2026
- Roxanne Varzi, anthropology, shares her experience in Le Monde diplomatique
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“Reza looked at my Doc Martens and asked whether I could run in them. I thought he meant in case the morality police caught us outside together as an unmarried couple. I was more than ready to run away — even from the morality police, if necessary.
I had been confined to my uncle’s house for weeks and was desperate to discover the Tehran beyond the garden wall.
My 12-year-old cousin walked to school alone every morning. But for me, her 20-year-old relative from the United States, the city was “not safe.” In 1991, I neither spoke fluent Farsi nor was I familiar with Islamic social conventions. And I certainly didn’t know how to keep the morality police at bay.
My only contacts with the outside world were my family and their friends, who came for lunch once a week — a ritual my grandfather had established long before I was born. The last time I had been part of it was in 1979; then the Islamic Revolution burst into my sheltered Iranian-American childhood.
When, twelve years later, I told my Iranian father that I wanted to return to Tehran as a Fulbright scholar, he was horrified: “People your age would do anything to leave the country. And you want to go there voluntarily.”
But I didn’t want to become an armchair anthropologist, and I no longer wanted to listen to people saying that all Iranians were terrorists.”
Continue reading in Le Monde diplomatique (requires translation).
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