Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran Hardcover - 2003

Geneive Abdo is an author and commentator on Islamic affairs. Ms. Abdo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001-2002. From 1998-2001, she served as the correspondent in Iran for The Guardian newspaper of London and was a regular contributor to The Economist and The International Herald Tribune. She was also the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant for research on Iran.
She has reported from numerous Islamic countries over the course of a decade, from the Middle East to North Africa and Central Asia. As a correspondent based in Cairo, she covered the Middle East for The Dallas Morning News. Ms. Abdo reported the fall of the Soviet Union for Reuters news agency. She was a staff writer for Newsday and the Baltimore Evening Sun in the 1980s.
She is the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000). Her commentaries and essays on Islam have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washington Quarterly, The New Republic, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and Middle East Report. She has been a commentator on National Public Radio, PBS, the BBC, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, CNN and other radio and television services.
Jonathan Lyons is the Washington editor for general news for an international news agency. In 1998, he reopened the agency's bureau in Tehran, 14 years after it was closed by Iranian authorities. From 1994-1998, Mr. Lyons was bureau chief in Turkey. A Russian speaker, his first foreign post was in Moscow, from 1989-1992, where he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the independent republics.
Mr. Lyons began his journalism career in 1980 for a series of American newspapers. He was a mid-career Fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
Jonathan Lyons and Geneive Abdo, the first American journalists based in Iran since the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, are husband and wife. They were forced to leave the country in February 2001 under threat of prosecution and have been banned from returning.