The best news this week

Will break on 18 September, inshallah. On that date, Anousheh Ansari will become the first muslim in space (this millenium, thanks Mike). Ansari will lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and fly to the International Space Station as part of an effort to conduct experiments on human physiology in space.

Ansari was born in Iran, but fled with family to escape the madness of the Islamic Revolution. Arriving in the US as a teenager who spoke no English, Ansari eventually went on to earn a BS in computer science and electrical engineering at George Mason University before earning a master’s from George Washington.

Along with a brother, Ansari opened two major technology companies, serving as the CEO at the first, and chairman at the second. And for those who didn’t bother to check the links, here’s the best part: Anousheh Ansari is a woman. A self-made woman who paid her own way to space.

Why is this good news? Well, it’s good news because women are still treated as chattel in her homeland, meaning half the country’s intellectual capital is pretty much going to waste. Some of them, accused by fickle husbands or abusive relatives of adultery, have escaped the hangman’s noose only to suffer death by stoning. In the 21^st Century!

So for a restive, youthful population like that of Iran – not to mention the broader arc of Islam – a fiercely patriotic population furthermore with no personal memory of the Shah’s depredations or the original high-mindedness of the revolution, a population caught between envious appreciation of all things modern on the one hand and the stultifying mullahcratic insistence upon the sere virtues of antiquity on the other, what could be a more vivid demarcation of the choices before them than this: The first muslim in space (this millenium) will be a woman who made a fortune through the use of her mind, applied in the free and open spaces of the West. Who has done so, in fact, in what they have been taught to think of as the Great Shaitan.

In the battle of hearts and minds, she is worth a division to us.

Per ardua ad astra

Update: Oh. Well. This is pretty good news too.

Update 2: Bummer.