By Azar Nafisi, this was published in 2003. The subtitle is A Memoir in Books.

Nafisi was born in Iran, and gained her doctorate in the United States. She returned to her country of birth in 1979 -- the year of the Islamic Revolution -- to teach English Literature at the University of Tehran. She was expelled in 1981 for refusing to veil, and for many years did not teach at all. In 1987, she started teaching classes again at Allameh Tabataba'i University, but resigned in 1995.

For the next two years, she ran a small private reading group for young women who had shown promise in the subject. The theme of the sessions was the relationship between fiction and reality, and the works to be studied were chosen for "their authors' faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature". The students discussed many texts, but her memoir is organized around the work of Vladimir Nabokov (in particular, Lolita, as is clear from the title), Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen.

Reading Lolita in Tehran blends personal experiences of these women's lives in the Islamic Republic, analysis of the books they're studying, and reflection on the way those two strands relate to each other -- how, in other words, the young women are affected by the literature they read.

In 1997 Nafisi left for the United States, where she has since resided.



I bought this book twice. The first time was when I was back in New Zealand. Having previously spent many years editing translations of Iranian press material, anything to do with Iran was attractive. But I bought it in the midst of an extraordinarily busy time in my life. It followed me to Australia, and then to Malaysia. But the busyness never stopped; the book never got read; it was given away to a library in the days when reducing our belongings to almost zero seemed an important thing to do.

It reappeared on my reading-list-as-long-as-the-Nile when I saw that it had been included on The Economist's list of "six books you didn't know were propaganda".

Really?? They justify the claim like this: "[The book] owes a debt to institutions that are not typical of literary memoirs. Ms Nafisi thanks the Smith Richardson Foundation, which seeks to 'advance US interests and values abroad', for a grant that helped her write the book. It is only through 'literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes', Ms Nafisi writes. For Western readers, Reading Lolita is enlightening in the way that literature was for her students. It also supports a harsh judgment of Iran’s theocracy that America continues to hope will be influential."

This was intriguing. So, when I found a copy at the Kuching second-hand book fair the other month, I decided to buy -- and actually read -- the memoir, and having just finished The Stationery Shop of Tehran, now seemed as good a time as any.



I'll talk about the book first, before coming back to the political context.

Pros:

-- Nafisi is a good teacher. For sure, her classes would have been interesting. When conservative students objected to studying Fitzgerald's best-known novel, for example, she staged a "trial": "The Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby." She explains: "I wanted to tell them that this book is not about adultery but about the loss of dreams... 'A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.'"

-- The literary commentary is eminently approachable. She has been accused of adopting an "amateurish" approach to the texts, but she ably demonstrates that literature "can speak to us without the mediation of theoretical baggage", and "suggests that it is better to have the student confront the text without lengthy commentary", allowing the language, story, and characters to work their magic.

-- It's one big reading list. And I do love a book that comes with a reading list... (Never mind that I'd need to live at least 100 more years to get through my current reading list...) I've read many of the key texts Nafisi refers to (though not Lolita, which I must tackle, as it came up recently in The Bookshop as well). But she mentions plenty of interesting authors I'm not familiar with.

-- It's a powerful reminder of those early days of the Islamic Revolution. And you do feel a tremendous sadness that things went the way they did. Could the revolution not have remained purely Islamic? Was it predestined to take on the harsh tenor of coercion? I guess it's naive to ask that. Revolutions are not known for their qualities of mercy. And this one had powerful global opponents. But it left many behind, by Nafisi's account. The formerly pious feel betrayed. (There's a lovely passage about the chador, contrasting the "cold and menacing" way it is worn by the zealots with "the shy withdrawal of my grandmother, whose every gesture begged and commanded the beholder to ignore her, to bypass her and leave her alone", and who saw the garment as "a shelter, a world apart from the rest of the world". Now the chador is inseparable from its political significance.) The liberals, meanwhile, feel trapped. The only winner, then, is autocracy, supported by cliques of powerful people who know how to pull the right strings and move the right wheels. It could have been different, Nafisi underlines: "At all times, even after the revolution, the Muslim students, especially the more fanatical ones, were a minority overshadowed by the leftist and secular student groups... These were crucial days in Iranian history. A battle was being fought on all levels over the shape of the constitution and the soul of the new regime. The majority of people, among them important clerics, were in favor of a secular constitution." But from the early days, violence takes over: "There was seldom a day when our routine was not interrupted by a death or assassination."


The Mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, 2000

-- The section on Lolita is perhaps the part that works best, because the parallel Nafisi is drawing is very clear: "At some point, the truth of Iran's past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita's is to Humbert... Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people."

-- But the Gatsby study is intriguing as well: The undercurrent of Fitzgerald's novel, says Nafisi, is "the question of loss, the loss of an illusion... What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven... [I was beginning to discover] how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfil his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?"

-- The Henry James section is interesting for its discussion of the revulsion that World War I provoked in him.

-- The section on Jane Austen was, to me, the least satisfying, but it provides a background for a series of conversations on marriage, and Nafisi returns again to the subject of empathy: "It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy."


There's talk of home-made wine and vodka in the book, but the best you could get officially was "non-alcoholic malt beverage"

-- This stress on empathy really stands out in Reading Lolita in Tehran. It nicely encapsulates the POINT of reading literature in the first place. "Empathy is at the heart of the novel," says Nafisi: "This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience." I think she's absolutely right there. You read in order to get inside the thoughts and lives of others. And she obviously communicated that very effectively. The book's closing paragraph is contributed by a former student from her reading group: "Five years have passed since the time when the story began in a cloud-lit room where we read Madame Bovary and had chocolate from a wine-red dish on Thursday mornings. Hardly anything has changed in the nonstop sameness of our everyday life. But somewhere else I have changed. Each morning with the rising of the routine sun as I wake up and put on my veil before the mirror to go out and become a part of what is called reality, I also know of another 'I' that has become naked on the pages of a book: in a fictional world, I have become fixed like a Rodin statue. And so I will remain as long as you keep me in your eyes, dear readers."

-- Elsewhere Nafisi argues: "Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed." I don't think, mind you, that it is only authoritarian governments that lack empathy...

-- The stark contrast between literature and life -- underlining the fact that all this is not a game -- is powerfully conveyed when the author comes across a former student again. She has been in prison: "I did think of you and of our classes, she said... After the initial interrogations, she had been assigned to a cell with fifteen others. There, she had met another student of mine, Razieh. Balancing the small cup of tea I had offered her in one hand, without letting her chador slip, she said, 'Razieh told me about your classes on Hemingway and James at Alzahrah, and I told her about the Gatsby trial. We laughed a lot. You know, she was executed. I was lucky, she said." (Punctuation as in the text.)

-- Literature -- providing you read a wide enough range of it -- nuances your views on almost anything. It was during and after the US Embassy siege that the myth-making about America took hold, Nafisi tells us: "Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost." The antidote to such visions is American literature "[My students] tend to look at the West too uncritically; they have a rosy picture of the West, thanks to the Islamic Republic. All that is good in their eyes comes from America or Europe, from chocolates and chewing gum to Austen and the Declaration of Independence. [Saul] Bellow gives them a truer experience of this other place. He allows them to see its problems and its fears."


Tourists in Iran

Cons:

-- The time jumps (the book is a series of zigzags) are a little disconcerting. Confusing, even.

-- Pace Gertrude Stein, I wish people would use conventional punctuation...

-- I'm always a little distrustful of emigre(e) accounts... I know -- that sounds extraordinarily arrogant. But people have reasons for leaving places. In Nafisi's case those reasons are incontrovertibly pressing: She grows ever more impatient at the interventions of the morality police; and she is spooked by a wave of cases where intellectuals are bumped off in various ways. I am not calling this account into question. But the fact remains that there will be as many different stories to tell as there are women in Iran. Clearly, it's not so easy to hear from them, but still it seems wise not to totally privilege one version. And when I read in that Economist article that this book was an instant hit in America, and spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, I have to wonder... Was it so popular because it "proves" all that people had been told to think about Iran?

-- When I visited Iran in 2000 (for a mere two weeks, so I'm not claiming any authority), things were a little more relaxed, and there were plenty of off-the-forehead hijabs in evidence. But these things go in waves; conservative pushback is possible at any point; and the tragic death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 drew the world's attention to one of the more brutal instances. (See Amy Motlagh for some context on the veiling debate, and these news stories for subsequent developments.) It angers me when women's bodies and attire are made to carry such political weight. I hate the coercion -- whether to cover or uncover -- that has taken the place of individual choice (not just in Iran, of course). But I feel these battles have to primarily be fought locally, by the people affected. Just piling in globally can, I think, be counter-productive.


Kerman, 2000

-- I think this is the feeling that lies behind Assia Hamdi's critique in the Muslim Women's Times. She praises the book, but regrets that Nafisi doesn't extrapolate from "the way the Islamist Iranian imagination manipulates and molests the image of women" to a discussion of the way "Islam has been manipulated and molested by centuries of Western prejudice and patriarchal powers". I'm not sure Nafisi intends us to see all Muslim women as an oppressed monolith, but I can see how that conclusion could be drawn.

-- On the same lines, but massively inflated, was the controversy that erupted back in 2006, when Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi attacked Nafisi's book as co-responsible "for cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran, having already done a great deal by being a key propaganda tool at the disposal of the Bush administration during its prolonged wars in such Muslim countries as Afghanistan (since 2001) and Iraq (since 2003)". Ah ha! So is this where the propaganda accusation came from? Dabashi continues: "So far as its unfailing hatred of everything Iranian -- from its literary masterpieces to its ordinary people -- is concerned, not since Betty Mahmoody's notorious book Not Without My Daughter (1984) has a text exuded so systematic a visceral hatred of everything Iranian. Meanwhile, by seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India." Not only, he says, does Nafisi play the role of "native informer and colonial agent", but her promotion of Western literature is a retrograde step at a time when postcolonial scholars are just beginning to draw attention to a broader range of "world literatures".

-- Dabashi is keen to point out that Nafisi's account is "predicated on an element of truth". He does not deny Iran's poor human rights record: "But the function of the comprador intellectual is not to expose and confront such atrocities; instead, it is to take that element of truth and package it in a manner that serves the belligerent empire best: in the disguise of a legitimate critic of localised tyranny facilitating the operation of a far more insidious global domination -- effectively perpetuating (indeed aggravating) the domestic terror they purport to expose."

-- Dabashi's argument is a little overblown (for a rebuttal see Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who is not a fan of Nafisi's book, but criticizes it on literary rather political grounds). But there's enough in it to make you see what The Economist's columnist means.

All up, then, three conclusions:

1. There's lots that's good about this book. It's worth reading.

2. But it needs to be read in context.

3. I want to read more Iranian literature...