BOOK OF QUEENS

An Iranian American anthropologist weaves a narrative of many threads, involving horses, revolution, and an army of fearless warriors.

A specialist in human rights and migration, Mahdavi opens by conjuring an American woman long resident in Iran. Louise Firouz, an aristocratic Virginian and equestrienne, moved to Iran in the 1960s, married a member of a royal lineage, and, fascinated by a rare breed of horse, became one of the world’s leading breeders of what came to be called Caspians. “Louise had been riding her entire life, but she had never felt the smooth suppleness of a gait like the horse she had been given,” writes Mahdavi, herself an equestrienne, of Firouz’s first encounter. Others were riding these horses, too, and Firouz and an Iranian woman named Maryam came to discover the world of women cavalry warriors across the border in Afghanistan who had been fighting invaders for generations, including, most recently, the Taliban. Many of the women Maryam helped recruit were, like her, the victims of spousal abuse and determined to die fighting rather than return to their homes. A story worthy of Graham Greene follows, but with twists that sometimes threaten to become a Gordian knot. When American forces arrived in Afghanistan and encountered the women fighters, one of the women said, “We know the Taliban. But did the Americans want to hear from us? No. They wanted our horses, and then they wanted to find men in the area who would help them fight.” Undervaluing those women was but one misstep that would characterize the American war. Mahdavi—a participant in some of these events—closes by probing a mystery involving the fate of Firouz’s documentary record of the ancestry of the Caspian horses now living and breeding well beyond the borders of Iran.

Horse lovers will be fascinated, but with her focus on geopolitics and women’s rights, Mahdavi reaches many audiences.