Azadeh Moaveni

“As a prominent conservative told me that year, "We need to go out into the wilderness for a long time, and figure out how we can one day return.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

“This is not to say that torture mechanically reshapes all individuals to make them capable of greater cruelty. But scholars of psychopathology, like the great Simon Baron-Cohen, have found strong links that show enduring trauma can cause a person to lose empathy. To lose empathy is to view other human beings as objects, which is necessary to the infliction of cruelty and violence upon them. Baron-Cohen’s research shows that torturing a person, rendering him an object, a vessel out of which intelligence can be extracted, radically dulls that person’s ability to focus on another person’s interests at the same time as his own.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS