“My Name is Mahtob” by Mahtob Mahmoody is a truly welcome, if not necessary, chapter in the tale of the highly-politicized international abduction of both Mahtob and her mother, Betty. In recent years, efforts have been made by the late Dr. Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody and his supporters to claim that there was no kidnapping and that the 1987 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Not Without My Daughter” by his wife was a lie. Indeed, he countered it with a book of his own, “Lost Without My Daughter.”
In her own book, daughter Mahtob sets the record straight that, however much people may not want to hear it, she joins her mother in the steadfast assertion that her father did commit intense domestic violence and did hold his family hostage in his native Iran.
More than a simple witness to the events, Mahtob Mahmoody is both a talented and engaging writer. Her book does in many ways compliment her mother’s version of events, but in no way is it incapable of standing completely on its own, particularly as the bulk of the story does not take place in Iran, but rather the suburbs of the American Midwest, where Mahtob grows up in constant fear of either being abducted again or killed by her father and his fundamentalist family for sins as innocuous as wearing makeup or dancing with boys.
In an era where domestic violence is finally being discussed, it is a sad turn of events that a victim of it will not be believed because external factors, (such as ethnic difference between victim and aggressor,) make listeners uncomfortable. Betty Mahmoody put her life on the line to ensure a better future for her daughter. Today, in eloquent, thought-provoking prose, Mahtob defends her mother’s honesty as well as her own right to have a life free from the abuse which her father perpetrated.
Despite Dr. Mahmoody refusing to ever apologize for the suffering which he had inflicted upon his daughter, Mahtob ultimately found the compassion to forgive him. Her book stresses that forgiveness is possible while at the same time maintaining personal boundaries.
