Point of no return

Shahriar Mandanipour thought the yearlong International Writers Project at Brown University would give him a well-needed break. The Iranian fiction writer is renown ed in his country for his short stories and novels. But the specter of censorship in Iran weighed upon him. "I lost the passion for writing," he says.

He heard about Brown's program from Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur , who in 2003 became the first writer to participate in the residency. Mandanipour decided to apply, he says, because he thought if he could "touch the intellectual culture of America," he could emerge from his funk. He arrived at Brown in January 2006, but the first few months proved unstimulating. As part of the program, he gave public lectures about modern Iranian literature and censorship. Then the creative floodgates opened.

"Day and night I wrote," says Mandanipour, 50. "Seven hours, eight hours a day."

In four months, he finished the novel he named "Censorship: An Iranian Love Story," which Mandanipour says weaves together two subjects of which the Iranian government disapproves: free expression and love.

This spring he received disturbing news from Iran: Ali Farahbakhsh , a journalist for reformist Iranian newspapers , who was arrested while returning from a conference abroad, was sentenced to three years in prison , according to Amnesty International. Farahbakhsh is one of at least four people visiting Iran with Iranian and US citizenship that the Iranian government has accused this year of spying, according to Agence France-Presse.

Although Mandanipour wants to go back to Iran, he says, "My friends, my family, advise me that it's not the time to return." He will not discuss why -- "I would rather not make my situation in Iran worse." But since the Bush administration received $75 million from Congress last year to promote democracy in Iran, the Iranian government has cracked down on reformists , scholars , and artists with ties to the United States .

Mandanipour's experience exemplifies not only the trials of intellectuals and artists who find temporary refuge at universities and colleges in the United States but the organizations created to find them these positions. In addition to Brown's program for writers, there's Scholars at Risk , a New York University-based organization begun in 1999 that finds higher education positions for professors and other intellectuals through a national network of 120 schools , including Harvard and MIT. In 2002 the Institute of International Education started its Scholar Rescue Fund to help find safe havens for persecuted scholars .

Robert Quinn, director of Scholars at Risk, says he believes demand for these services is growing, based on preliminary information from a report the organization has not yet completed. Brown's Writer's Project receives about 100 applications a year; the program's director, Robert Coover , says he seriously considers about 20. Scholars at Risk receives as many as 200 applications annually and usually places 20 to 30 people.

"I do think that things have gotten worse in terms of sheer numbers and places where threats are being experienced," Quinn says.

Most of the people participating in these programs want to return home, only to find that desire tempered by political developments. Unfortunately, says Quinn, US laws force scholars in this predicament to seek political asylum .

"The two visa options that they have are linked to employment," Quinn says. "The position is ending. They're faced with going back to a place that won't be safe. Even if we're looking for a next position for them, if we haven't found it yet, at a certain point they end up having to seek some visa status, and asylum is really the only option."

Some scholars jump on the stressful grind of searching for new residencies every few years. Others escape the cycle by going to college, acquiring degrees, and finding permanent teaching positions or other jobs that allow them to effect change in their home countries even as they live here.

Brown recently extended Mandanipour's fellowship until August, but without payment, which is difficult for Mandanipour, who came here with his wife, Badri Kamyar , and his 16-year-old son, Daniel. Coover has asked Scholars at Risk for help and put out feelers for jobs locally. "I've been calling on friends," says Coover, a professor of creative writing at Brown, who spoke from London, where he's on sabbatical. The efforts paid off: Harvard's Scholars at Risk chapter recently placed Mandanipour in a yearlong fellowship in the school's comparative literature department.

Some participants in these programs quickly seek more permanent alternatives to the residencies that brought them to the United States. Rwandan Noel Twagiramungu, 40, has worked in human rights in Rwanda since 1991. As general secretary of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights , Twagiramungu worked on a report with Human Rights Watch about the Rwandan government's involvement in the torture of a high-ranking army officer. Twagiramungu fled Rwanda in January 2004, after the government learned he had worked on the report.

As Twagiramungu waited in the Netherlands for his US visa and worked to extract from Rwanda his wife and two children, it became clear that he wouldn't return soon.

"I tried to figure out what to do," says Twagiramungu, "how to proceed."

Through Scholars at Risk, Twagiramungu, who holds a master's in linguistics and a master's in law, became a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in 2005. While there, he was accepted at Clark University, which offers a doctorate in Holocaust history and genocide studies, and Tufts's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Twagiramungu recently completed his first year of doctoral studies at Tufts, where he'll focus on human security and conflict resolution.

Habib Rahiab , a 35-year-old native of Afghanistan, also ran into trouble by working on a report with Human Rights Watch. After the 2003 publication of the research, which documented the human rights abuses of Afghan warlords, Rahiab's home was attacked. He escaped to Pakistan with his mother, wife, and three children, where he waited for his US visa. But his family sustained a second attack in Pakistan that killed his mother, forcing Rahiab and his family to seek political asylum.

Through Scholars at Risk, Rahiab, who had studied law at Balkh University in Afghanistan, became a fellow in Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program in 2004. In 2006, he was a research fellow at MIT's Program on Human Rights and Justice . He received a master's in law from Harvard this month .

Rahiab remains in touch with his colleagues in Afghanistan. Through the Scholars at Risk speakers program, he spreads the word about human rights abuses in Afghanistan. He's aware that his situation in the United States would have been much different without Scholars at Risk.

"If I had come from Afghanistan and worked in a factory or a mall," Rahiab says, "I wouldn't have this opportunity to continue my work."

These programs target scholars and artists because repressive governments single out those groups, Quinn says. "Most of us are shaped to think in ways we haven't realized by the culture around us. It's the intellectuals who are pushing that space. Repressors push for less, they push for more . . . . That's what's going on with the harassment of intellectuals."

It was Moniro Ravanipour's fiction that made her a threat to the Iranian government. "I write about women. I write about love. They are against love," she says.

After Ravanipour arrived at Brown in January for the writer's program with her husband and 11-year-old son, she learned that her books had been removed from Iranian bookstores. She completes Brown's residence this month , then will spend two years in Las Vegas through the North American Network of Cities of Asylum, an offshoot of the Paris-based International Parliament of Writers, which finds refuge for persecuted writers.

"Two years is OK for me," says Ravanipour. "I have to go back. I'm a writer . . . . My language is in my country."