This is by Fatemeh Keshavarz. It was published in 2007, and its subtitle -- Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran -- overtly announces its mission.

I definitely felt Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran needed a bit of pushback. Interesting though I found it, I had the impression I was being served a story that was not only incomplete but somehow also pre-digested. Any book uncompromisingly bolstering an already widespread negative stance, and becoming a bestseller on that basis, starts to raise concerns. You want to know the other side of the story.

I was hoping Jasmine and Stars would provide that "other side", and act as a counterweight. It does, but only to a limited extent.

The problem, I think, is that Kesharvarz tries to do two ultimately incompatible things. She tries to introduce us to an Iran that goes far beyond the stereotypes that are so common in the West, and show us the wisdom, creativity, and feistiness of Iranians down the ages. And she tries to deconstruct and critique the "New Orientalist" narrative she claims is exemplified in books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran (RLT). Her beefs with this narrative focus on its tendency to simplify (offering totalizing stories, rather than nuance and complexity), and its unquestioning assumption of the superiority of Western politics and culture.

I understand why Keshavarz took this dual approach. She wants to be not merely negative (by critiquing RLT), but also positive (by promoting an alternative discourse). Her goal is to engage an open-minded curiosity in her readers. She starts, therefore, with a story that Rumi made famous (although it apparently predates him): If people examine an elephant in the dark, they come away with very different impressions of what the beast is like. Readers of RLT will come away with just one impression of Iran, and it's a pretty bleak one. Keshavarz is keen to counteract that by lighting up different bits of the elephant. She doesn't want to push bad things under the carpet, and pretend they don't exist. But neither does she want to pile on the criticism, so that her country becomes even more vulnerable to attacks by outsiders. When she recounts her childhood nights -- sleeping under the stars; the late voice of the dervish, singing verses about love and God; the sound of morning prayer; the scent of jasmine gathered every morning by her grandmother; but also nuisancy grasshoppers that grossed her out, and threatened the crops -- she doesn't want people to register only the grasshoppers, and forget all the beauty. She wants to project a holistic picture, one that leaves plenty of room for an appreciation of the wonderful.

Ultimately, I don't think her approach worked... There are two books in here. I would have enjoyed both, I think, but putting them together makes it hard to fully benefit from either.


The tomb of Hafez, Shiraz, 2000

Kesharvarz comes from Shiraz. She did her doctoral studies in London, and has lived and worked in the US since 1987. She visits Iran every year, and spends weeks or months at a time there: "Iran and America are both my home. Both make me delighted and furious at short and frequent intervals."

Strung throughout the book are many sections of memoir. These serve several purposes, aside from making clear her credentials. They highlight, for example, that restrictions on women didn't come along only with the Revolution, and yet all along the way, in the various iterations of the Iranian polity, women have been asserting their agency in different ways. Her personal stories are also "meant to counter the New Orientalist narrative's tendency to amplify fear and mistrust by ignoring similarity and highlighting difference". She wants to paint a world that has all sorts of colours. These shades may complement each other, or clash wildly. But they nuance, she says, the black-and-white accounts of both the extremists and of RLT. So, I see the point, but I found the mixed-genre approach a little jarring. Azar Nafisi does this mixing as well, but there it was integral to her purpose: Showing how literature interacts with the lives of women in Iran. Here, it felt a little like pouring everything onto the table, without deciding what was strategically most useful.

And Keshavarz can be a bit folksy... At the beginning: "You will laugh and cry with me and all the ordinary Iranians you will meet..." At the end: "We have come a long way together..." I cringe a little at this style.

I also found the ending a little odd. Having lovingly described her uncle-by-marriage, Amu Vazin, she concludes with a poem about the Alzheimer's disease that shadowed his final days. A tribute, doubtless, but a little disconcerting.


The author, as portrayed on the dust jacket (I e-borrowed my copy from Internet Archive)

All these caveats notwithstanding, Keshavarz succeeds in her goal of reminding us of the many beautiful facets of Iranian culture.

Keshavarz introduced me to some Iranian figures (writers, film-makers, and so on) that I was unaware of (she particularly spends time examining the work of Forough Farrokhzad and Shahrnush Parsipur).

And it's always a joy to be reminded of the Sufi masters and poets who influenced Islamic culture (Rumi, Hafez, and Sa'di are well known even to Westerners; Attar, Bayazid, and Junayd not so much). I loved, for example, this little couplet, attributed to Sa'di of Shiraz in the 13th century, and quoted early in the book:

I am glad to be, for being is gladdened by you
I am in love with the world, for the world is in love with you

What a moving expression of the mystic's love of God and of creation.

The book's watchword comes from Rumi's story of the shepherd, who is rebuked by Moses for conversing with God inappropriately. Moses is rebuked in his turn: "You have come in order to connect," God admonishes him. This is now a proverb in Persian, used for someone displaying kindness in an antagonistic situation. Rumi also promotes a balanced view of rationality: It is important, indispensable even; but it is not -- can never be -- everything.

Through a number of character studies, Keshavarz goes on to illustrate the high respect for literature that has long been a hallmark of Iranian culture (one memorable case is the man who is illiterate, but whose long familiarity with recited poems has enabled him to know them by heart).



The other side of Keshavarz's coin provides a very sharp critique of RLT, which she describes as "incomplete". She explains: "Like many works contributing to the New Orientalist narrative, RLT contains a few patches of truth. In its entirety, however, it is a tapestry with many holes, a mosaic that has every other piece missing."

Her dissection is thorough. There were one or two points that I thought were a bit nit-picky. And I don't think Nafisi was as admiring of American culture as Keshavarz makes her out to be (she regrets the myths that have formed around the United States, for example, and recommends a good dose of Saul Bellow to help to dispel them). I'm also not sure what to make of criticisms that castigate Nafisi for not including Iranian literature in the book. Her subject, after all, was the Western literary canon... But then again, you have to take care not to imply to your students that all the good stuff is "out there", and there's no domestic equivalent.

Those cavils aside, Keshavarz very effectively skewered all the elements that had made me a little uncomfortable as I read RLT, and identified a few more that I hadn't noticed.



Her criticism could be encapsulated in her rejection of RLT's black-and-whiteness: "Although unflattering literature on Islam is not hard to find these days, it is difficult to find a fuller Islamization of wickedness than the one configured by RLT, particularly among works that are not expressly a commentary on Islam. The book's anger is not directed at traditional culture in general but is specifically targeted at Islam... The Islamization of wickedness is one side of the conceptual coin. The other side is the book's efforts to reward American readers with the unqualified assocation of good things with the West. I call this the Westernization of goodness." She is concerned not only with the preponderance of certain negative types in the RLT, but also with the tendency to portray the governmental system as "a homogeneous and unified body of thought and action". This is always a huge mistake. Whenever we talk of a monolithic "China" or "Russia" or "Iran', we're blinding ourselves to the tapestry of contending groups behind the scenes, and to the various strands of argument that may be present.

She also correctly points out that RLT "plays on the ambiguity of the generic territory it occupies between fact and fiction". By presenting not only the narrator's voice but also the unexpurgated comments of the various figures she portrays, it is as though she dodges her "responsibility for the accuracy of the facts and the reliability of the perspectives". Tossing charged comments -- for example, that all Americans deserve to die -- at readers who have limited contextual background is tantamount to misinformation, Keshavarz feels (she expands on this point here). This is one of the problems of memoir (as opposed to a journalistic account). Journalists are supposed to weigh what they quote, and give us some idea of the degree to which such remarks are typical. Not all do, of course. But that's the goal. To what extent do memoirists share that responsibility?

She provides detailed examples of the way Nafisi constructs a uniformly dark subtext, leaving no room for anything positive. This is the way, she argues, the book achieves its goal: "By and large, RLT satisfies mass curiosity and affirms preexisting perceptions. Its central message to the reader, delivered by a member of the native culture, is: Meet the subhumans you always knew were there!"

Keshavarz doesn't want to join in Nafisi's barrage of criticism. Yet, as this review points out, there's an incompleteness in this book too: Keshavarz is selective in the issues she addresses, leaving a number of questions unanswered. Nor does she "fully face up to many of the issues Iranians have to deal with (such as even a limited discusssion of literary censorship in post-revolutionary Iran)".



As an example, it's worth quoting in full the response Keshavarz gave in an interview with regard to this cover image: "The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran has caused controversy because it presents a cropped image. The full image depicts two young girls, involved in the election of the reformist Iranian President Khatami. The girls are reading a newspaper in anticipation of the election results. In the cover image the newspaper is taken out, leaving two young faces with downcast eyes framed by black scarves. The full and cropped images would send two very different messages about Iranian women to the reader. Critics have compared the book to its cover image because it also omits the aspects of the culture that show that Iranian women have agency and are actively improving their lives. The jacket of Jasmine and Stars [above] shows a full image of two Iranian women in a demonstration outside Tehran University in 2005. The women hold signs that say they object to injustice to women and demand equal rights with men. They smile and look directly at the camera. The goal is not to show a rosy picture of gender equality in present-day Iran -- had that been the case, there would be no need for the signs these women carry. The point, however, is that the picture demonstrates women’s agency in the face of all odds and their active presence in the public domain. In other words, the cover shows that Iranian women are not passive victims."

That was 2007, of course. Keshavarz could not have been expected to predict the events of 2022 that sparked an ongoing "revolution" (the term is the one used by Shirin Ebadi, who is singled out by Keshavarz as "a person to remember", but has been in exile since 2009). Jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, meanwhile, accuses the Iranian authorities of carrying out a "full-scale war against women".

How to fairly depict Iran? We'll be working that out for a long time to come, I think. But Keshavarz at least reminds us that criticism of the government should not also target the Iranian people, or Islam, or Iranian culture.