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by
Azar Nafisi
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October 30 - November 15, 2016
only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down.
Because of women’s overwhelming objection to the laws, the government enforced the new rule first in the workplaces and later in shops, which were forbidden from transacting with unveiled women. Disobedience was punished by fines, up to seventy-six lashes and jail terms.
My constant obsession with the veil had made me buy a very wide black robe that covered me down to my ankles, with kimonolike sleeves, wide and long.
The problem for me was that I had lost all concept of terms such as home, service and country.
How could I know that instead of my protecting him, he was coming into the world to protect me?
Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made us more appealing, more dangerous and, in a strange way, more powerful. It had made us scarce and, because of this, also in demand.
You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.
There were reprimands posted about the color of our uniforms, codes of conduct, but never a notice about a talk, a film or a book.
I understood then what it meant when I was told that this university and my department in particular were more “liberal.” It did not mean that they would take action to prevent such incidents: it meant that they would not take action against me on account of them.
They gave me to understand that they were prepared to put up with my antics, my informal addresses to my students, my jokes, my constantly slipping scarf, my Tom Jones and Daisy Miller. This was called tolerance. And the strange thing is that in some crooked way it was tolerance, and in some way I had to be grateful to them.
The war had become a good excuse for some of the Islamic activists to force undeserved privileges from the faculty.
What is it, he asks, that makes these women so revolutionary? Daisy Miller is obviously a bad girl; she is reactionary and decadent. We live in a revolutionary society and our revolutionary women are those who defy the decadence of Western culture by being modest. They do not make eyes at men.
“People are afraid to talk. This is a controversial subject. If we tell the truth, we’re afraid he will report us. If we say what he wants to hear, we are afraid of you.
When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves, transforming them into ardent revolutionaries, like Farideh, or hermits, like Mina and my magician. They withdrew and simmered in their dashed dreams.
He told me laughingly that the less they understood, the more they treated it with respect. I said if that is the case, then they must love James. He responded, shrewdly, That is different; they respect Joyce the way they respect Tarkovsky. With James, they think they understand him, or that they should understand him, so they just get angry. They have more problems with James than with the more obviously difficult writers, like Joyce.
Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a
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After the first attack, the notoriously overpopulated and polluted city of Tehran had become a ghost town.
We could not openly articulate what we wished, but we could by our silence show our indifference to the regime’s demands.
In almost all of his novels the struggle for power is central to the way the plot moves and is resolved. This struggle for power is rooted in the central character’s resistance to socially acceptable norms and in his desire for integrity and recognition.
It is interesting to note that in this struggle the antagonist always represents worldly concerns, while the protagonist’s desire is to preserve a sense of personal integrity in the face of outside aggression.
This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.
I think most of my students would have agreed with this definition of evil, because it was so close to their own experience. Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.
In each of these instances her actions arise not from a desire for revenge but from a sense of propriety and dignity,
Their reward is not happiness—a word that is central in Austen’s novels but is seldom used in James’s universe. What James’s characters gain is self-respect.
Women, in growing numbers, shunned the prescribed dark colors to put on their brightest scarves; many wore makeup, and their nylon stockings became more visible under their robes.
This mood was reflected in the universities, especially among the militia, the veterans of the war and their affiliates: for them, peace meant defeat.
Those in the Islamic associations had tasted power and things Western; they used their power principally to gain privileges denied to others.
Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream.
“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?
Yet for people like him, in a strange way the war must have been a blessing. It gave them a sense of community and purpose and power.
What we had with all the writers, but especially with Austen, was fun. Sometimes we even went wild—we became childish and teasing and just plain enjoyed ourselves. How could one read the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice and not grasp that this was what Austen demanded of her readers?
“The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen’s times. God bless the arranged marriage! Nowadays,
When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and the rights of women in Western democracies.
By the time my daughter was born five years later, the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother’s time: the first law to be repealed, months before the ratification of a new constitution, was the family-protection law, which guaranteed women’s rights at home and at work. The age of marriage was lowered to nine—eight and a half lunar years, we were told; adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death; and women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men. Sharia law replaced the existing system of jurisprudence and became the norm.
What differentiated this revolution from the other totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century was that it came in the name of the past: this was both its strength and its weakness.
In my graduate seminar that spring, I had compared the structure of Pride and Prejudice to an eighteenth-century dance.
There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to.
The backwards-and-forward rhythm of the dance is repeated in the actions and movements of the two protagonists, around whom the plot is shaped. Parallel events bring them closer together and then thrust them apart. Throughout the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy constantly move towards and away from each other. Each time they move forward, the ground is prepared for the next move.
the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen’s novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space—not just space but a necessity—for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change.
At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives.
“You used to preach to us all that she ignored politics, not because she didn’t know any better but because she didn’t allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her. At a time when the world was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars, she created her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy. 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?” he continued patiently. “You keep talking about
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That girl was her whole life, and you know the courts, child custody always went to the father.
“If everybody leaves,” said Mahshid, her eyes glued to the floor, “who will help make something of this country? How can we be so irresponsible?” This was a question I asked myself day and night.
I want to stay because I love this country, he told me. We should stay as a form of resistance, to show that we are not out-maneuvered. Our very presence is a thorn in their side.
Fat girls, I’m told, have a much better time over there. They say Americans like them with a little meat on their bones.”
Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction. Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in the case of Jane Austen.
she reached the conclusion that a plain outright no would be dangerous to deliver to someone as influential as Mr. Nahvi. Best to tell him a convincing lie that would put him in an impossible position.
Her voice was filled with the intimate formality of Tehran.
Nassrin, I told her, none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your childhood when you played marbles or whatever with boys and never thought anything of it.
After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public—seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends—shifted to private homes.
