Reading Lolita in Iran

The NY Times has a piece about Azar Nafisi's memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which sounds fascinating. Nafisi, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins, recounts her experience of teaching during the heyday of the Islamic revolution there.

A snippet:

Ms. Nafisi and her students themselves discovered ? often after being warned, arrested or in some cases beaten and jailed ? that there were no boundaries between the public and the private in the Islamic Republic of Iran: the government and its morality police told people what they could read, what they could wear, how they should behave. "The colors of my head scarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist tendencies," Ms. Nafisi writes.

"Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the opposite sex, clapping or whistling in public meetings were likewise considered Western and therefore decadent, part of the plot by imperialists to bring down our culture." She adds that being accused of being Westernized in Iran in the 1980's could result in years in jail, even execution.

Having grown up in Iran before the mullahs came to power, Ms. Nafisi writes of living in "two different time zones simultaneously." She had grown up in a prominent family (her father had been mayor of Tehran; her mother was one of the first six women elected to Parliament, in 1963), she had been educated in Switzerland and England, and she had lived in the United States. She returned to Iran in the late 1970's, just as the revolution was cresting, and by the time her daughter was born several years later, "the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother's time": the age of marriage was lowered to 9, adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death, and "women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men."

Unlike her generation, Ms. Nafisi says, her students did not have a past to compare with the present. "Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry."