A Legacy of Sisterhood Beyond Beliefs

Sisterhood isn’t always a political bazaar ; sometimes it’s simply real. Stonewall, New York, 2015

When the 1979 Iranian Revolution happened, gathering the family around one table became difficult. Everyone had become a supporter of a group, ideology, or party, and everyone argued that only their own ideology spoke the truth. Islamists considered communists impure; communists accused liberals of being compromisers. Each of these “-ists” was itself divided into several factions and tendencies.

These divisions scattered families everywhere. Ours was a large one. Apart from my traditional parents and my younger brothers, my three sisters and I, along with our spouses, supported opposing parties. Years of disagreement and ideological rifts came between us — until the martyrdom of my strong, eighteen-year-old brother in the Iran–Iraq War in 1988 brought us closer together. Losing him taught us that life is not worth all this hostility and fighting. In fact, our shared grief brought us into a period of empathy and a deeper look at the meaning of life.

Honestly, we no longer had the patience for arguments and disputes; we just wanted to spend more time together and give each other strength. That’s how a new custom entered our family — or perhaps it’s better to say, a new trait entered our social behavior. Without ever making a formal agreement, we decided simply to be sisters and loved ones, not to speak of our personal political beliefs in front of one another, and to focus only on what we had in common. Not that we denied our differences of opinion — but we went beyond them, to feel the friendship and love we had for each other behind them.

Years passed. In my American life, by a twist of fate, I ended up working in some TV show which was a political bazaar. My job was working in broadcasting journalism alongside some friends and coworkers who were staunch supporters of Trump. Even when, during Trump’s second term, he cost hundreds of us our jobs, some of my dear colleagues still chose to stand with him.

In the midst of deep grief and anger over the loss of freedom of speech and the journalists who were laid off, the only thing that kept me from sinking into the hell of hostility and resentment was my spiritual effort to return to a legacy stored in my subconscious from the past: seeing and understanding people beyond the aura of their beliefs and ideologies. Both equanimity meditation and metta meditation helped me greatly in freeing myself from the pit of resentment.