National Geographic Society

Also in the front-of-the-book essay is this photo of a Savannah, Georgia, mosque that was burned to the ground in an arson attack in the summer of 2003. The attack followed threatening letters and gunshots fired at the mosque in the night. Muslim Americans were under quite a lot of pressure after 9/11, even though most of them love America as much as any other immigrants.

The other picture, not in the book, is of Sikh Americans who were mistaken for Arabs in November 2004. Their gas station/convenience store was torched in a hate crime in Chesterfield, Virginia, and anti-Arab slogans were spray-painted on trash bins out back.

Though based in Moscow, I traveled widely in Iraq after the first Gulf War and returned in 1999 to cover Iraq's problem with looted archaeology. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a difficult, miserable, fear-soaked universe crawling with informants. People could not even trust family members, much less neighbors. A child might even unwittingly betray its parents if politics were spoken of openly in the home. The parallels to Stalinism were no coincidence. Saddam used Stalin's tried and true methods to great effect.

I wrote a story for Time magazine in February 1992 about how a Baghdad family had to turn up music and shut windows before they would discuss politics with me, about the young girl who had to be hustled out of danger by an older relative simply because she talked to me. I have never forgotten her. She asked me for a book to read in English and I was not able to give her one. During that trip I visited a Basra nightclub with the writer, also a woman, and our government minder. We spent the evening talking with two prostitutes who told us of their woeful lives, one of them in tears. Then the lights were turned on and army troops marched in, led by an officer. They rounded up all the young men in the club and took them away. I had slipped my camera below the table, and my finger was on the shutter. I was tempted to shoot a picture quietly--just lay the camera on the table. With just one click I would have something. The minder begged me as if he had read my mind: "Don't do it--please. I will be punished." How could I?

This picture was taken on a movie set on Kish Island, Iran, in the Persian Gulf. The Islamic Republic was using Kish as a social testing ground for mild liberalization at that time.

The director was the dissident Bahram Beyzaii. This is his wife, actress Mozhdeh Shamsai. I was fascinated with how actresses navigated Islamic rules. When I visited her during her preparation for a play in Tehran, she donned a wig instead of the customary headscarf to comply with the law against showing one's real hair. For her costume people, attention to covering her wrists was important so as not to break the law by revealing too much, thereby risking the production being shut down. The makeup artist was a man who begged me not to photograph him touching this actress as he applied makeup, as it would have brought scandal upon them. My mother is an actress and my father and stepfather are film and theater directors, so I grew up backstage and on movie sets. I felt very at home in this milieu and was attuned to the restrictions artists have to face in Iran.