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by
Azar Nafisi
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December 9 - December 13, 2020
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.”
“Or is it a truth universally acknowledged,”
“that a Muslim man must be in want not just of one but of many wives?”
“The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen’s times. God bless the arranged marriage! Nowadays, girls marry either because their families force them, or to get green cards, or to secure financial stability, or for sex—they marry for all kinds of reasons, but rarely for love.”
Manna used to say that there are two Islamic Republics: the one of words and the one of reality.
I know these people better than you; they change their words more often than their clothes. Islam has become a business, she went on, like oil for Texaco. These people who deal in Islam—each one tries to package it better than the next. And we are stuck with them. You don’t think they’d ever admit that we could live better without oil, do you? Can they say Islam is not needed for good government? No, but the reformers are shrewder; they will give you the oil a little cheaper, and promise to make it cleaner.
This was a period of hope, true, but we harbor the illusion that times of hope are devoid of tensions and conflicts when, in my experience, they are the most dangerous. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power—the ones who had taken it away—become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive. In many ways these times of hope, of greater leniency, were as disquieting as before. Life had acquired the texture of fiction written by a bad writer who cannot impose order and logic on his characters as they run amok. It was a
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“and suffering is another bad habit,” as Bellow had said in Herzog.
Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?”
am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won’t be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they’ve gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications?
I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know what I want,”
I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key.
elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.
ordeal of freedom, the burden of choice—so are James’s, for that matter. It’s frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.
We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?
Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them.
We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.
Haven’t you heard that if you give your child a name with a meaning she will become like her namesake? I want my daughter to be what I never was—like Daisy.
Sometimes I think men just can’t relate to how difficult it is to be a woman in this country, she said with frustration.
Lady, he says, we do not need your truths but your fiction—if you’re any good, perhaps you can trickle in some sort of truth, but spare us your real feelings.
“We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.”
Muriel Spark’s heroine in her wonderful novel Loitering with Intent,
