THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, U.S.A.
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume V, Issue # 199, August 4, 2003
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN
By Dr. Azar Nafisi
MEQ Editors' Note:
Reading Lolita in Tehran, a new memoir by Azar Nafisi, is the story of Iran's revolution from the unusual vantage point of
an Iranian-born, American-schooled instructor of English literature, who arrived at Tehran University in the revolutionary year of
1979.
Nafisi's father, a mayor of Tehran whom the Shah imprisoned in the 1970s, had sent her abroad as a child, to study in England and
Switzerland. In 1979, she received her doctorate in English and American literature from the University of Oklahoma, where she had
joined the Iranian students' movement against the Shah. In 1979, she enthusiastically returned to a new Iran, to take up a teaching
position at Tehran University.
But the following year, Islamic zealots moved to purge Iran's universities, and she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil when it
became mandatory in 1981. In later years, she taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University. She
finally left Iran in 1997. Today, she teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford and is the author of Anti-terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels (1994).
Nafisi's new memoir is a riveting story of hope, disillusionment, and hope rekindled. Despite the strictures imposed by the regime,
Iran's women continue to contest its patriarchal premises. They now outnumber men in the universities and have been a powerful
force in favor of reform. "Just recently, a female professor was expelled because her wrist had shown from under her sleeve while
she was writing on the blackboard," Nafisi wrote in a New Republic cover story in 1999. "Yet, while these measures are
meant to render women invisible and powerless, they are paradoxi- cally making women tremendously visible and powerful. …
Every private act or gesture in defiance of official rules is now a strong political statement." [1]
This article is excerpted from the memoir.
—The Editors, Middle East Quarterly
Robed Readers:
In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my
best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature. They were
all women; to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were discussing harmless works of fiction.
For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not
get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that
room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own
inimitable self. Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our
self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.
The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality. We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our
own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights, along with Western classics—Pride and
Prejudice, Mad- ame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean's December, and, yes, Lolita. As I write the
title of each book, memories whirl in with the wind to disturb the quiet of this Fall day in another room in another country, in
America.
Here and now in that other world that cropped up so many times in our discussions, I sit and reimagine myself and my students,
my girls, as I came to call them, reading Lolita in a deceptively sunny room in Tehran. But to steal the words from Humbert,
the poet /criminal of Lolita, I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny
of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret mo- ments, in
the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, fall- ing in love, walking down the shady streets, or reading
Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us.
The Blind Censor:
Six a.m.: the first day of class. I was already up. Too excited to eat breakfast, I put the coffee on and then took a long, leisurely
shower. For the first time in many years, I felt a sense of anticipation that was not marred by tension: I would not need to go
through the torturous rituals that had marked my days when I taught at the university—rituals governing what I was forced to
wear, how I was expected to act, the gestures I had to remember to control. For this class, I would prepare differently.
Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way
to showers and storms. Life was un- predictable. The regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown.
In the mid-1990s, after a period of relative calm and socalled "liberalization," we had again entered a time of hardships. Universities
had once more become the tar- gets of attack by the cultural purists who were busy imposing stricter sets of laws, going so far as to
segregate men and women in classes and punishing disobedient professors.
The pressure was hardest on the students. I felt helpless as I listened to their end- less tales of woe. Female students were being
penalized for running up the stairs when they were late for classes, for laughing in the hallways, for talking to members of the
opposite sex. One day, one of my students had barged into class near the end of the session, crying. In between bursts of tears,
she explained that she was late because the female guards at the door, finding a blush in her bag, had tried to send her home with
a reprimand.
Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. Always, the joy
of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime—how well could one teach when the main
concern of university officials was not the quality of one's work, but the color of one's lips, the subversive potential of a single
strand of hair? Could one really con- centrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine
from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?
The best way I can think of explaining this self-negating and paradoxical inferno is through an anecdote, one that, like similar
anecdotes, defies fiction to become its own metaphor.
The chief film censor in Iran, up until 1994, was blind. Well, nearly blind. Before that, he was the censor for theater. One of my
playwright friends once described how he would sit in the theater wearing thick glasses that seemed to hide more than they
revealed. An assistant who sat by him would explain the action onstage, and he would dictate the parts that needed to be cut.
Our world under the mullahs' rule was shaped by the colorless lenses of the blind censor. Not just our reality, but also our fiction
had taken on this curious coloration in a world where the censor was the poet's rival in rearranging and reshaping reality, where
we simultaneously invented ourselves and were figments of someone else's imagination.
We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them im- portant only when they were handmaidens to
something seemingly more urgent— namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the most private, were
interpreted in political terms. The colors of my headscarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist
tendencies. 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.
A few years ago, some members of the Iranian parliament set up an investigative committee to examine the content of national
television. The committee issued a lengthy report in which it condemned the showing of Billy Budd, because, it claimed,
the story promoted homosexuality. Ironically, the Iranian television programmers had mainly chosen that film because of its lack
of female characters. The cartoon version of Around the World in Eighty Days was also castigated, because the main
character—a lion—was British and the film began and ended in that bastion of im- perialism, London.
Our class was shaped within this context, in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week. There,
in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state
became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita, we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of
freedom. And, like Lolita, we took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves,
insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity of our appear- ances, growing our nails, falling in love, and listening to forbidden
music.
Into the Street:
How can I create this other world outside the room? I have no choice but to appeal once again to your imagination. Let's imagine
one of the girls, say Sanaz, leaving my house, and let us follow her from there to her final destination. She says her good- byes and
puts on her black robe and scarf over her orange shirt and jeans, coiling her scarf around her neck to cover her huge gold earrings.
She directs wayward strands of hair under the scarf, puts her notes into her large bag, straps it on over her shoulder, and walks out
into the hall. She pauses a moment on top of the stairs to put on thin lacy black gloves to hide her nail polish.
We follow Sanaz down the stairs, out the door and into the street. You might notice that her gait and her gestures have changed. It
is in her best interest not to be seen, not be heard or noticed. She doesn't walk upright but bends her head towards the ground and
doesn't look at passersby. She walks quickly and with a sense of deter- mination. The streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities are
patrolled by militia, who ride in white Toyota patrols, four gun-carrying men and women, sometimes followed by a minibus. They are
called the "Blood of God." They patrol the streets to make sure that women like Sanaz wear their veils properly, do not wear makeup,
do not walk in public with men who are not their fathers, brothers, or husbands.
She will pass slogans on the walls, quotations from Khomeini and a group called the "Party of God": MEN WHO WEAR TIES ARE
U.S. LACKEYS. VEILING IS A WOMAN'S PROTECTION. Beside the slogan is a charcoal drawing of a woman. Her face is
featureless and framed by a dark chador. MY SISTER, GUARD YOUR VEIL. MY BROTHER, GUARD YOUR EYES. If she gets on a
bus, the seating is segregated. She must enter through the rear door and sit in the back seats, allocated to women. Yet in taxis, which
accept as many as five passengers, men and women are squeezed together like sardines, as the saying goes, and the same goes with
minibuses, where so many of my students complain of being harassed by bearded and God-fearing men.
You might well ask, What is Sanaz thinking as she walks the streets of Tehran? Does she compare her own situation with her mother's
when she was the same age? Is she angry that women of her mother's generation could walk the streets freely, enjoy the company of
the opposite sex, join the police force, become pilots, live under laws that were among the most progressive in the world regarding
women? Does she feel humiliated by the new laws, by the fact that after the revolution, the age of marriage was lowered from eighteen
to nine, that stoning became once more the punishment for adultery and prostitution?
In the course of nearly two decades, the streets have been turned into a war zone, where young women who disobey the rules are
hurled into patrol cars, taken to jail, flogged, fined, forced to wash the toilets and humiliated, and as soon as they leave, they go
back and do the same thing. Is she aware, Sanaz, of her own power? Does she realize how dangerous she can be when her every
stray gesture is a disturbance to public safety? Does she think how vulnerable are the Revolutionary Guards, who for twenty years
have patrolled the streets of Tehran and have had to endure young women like herself, and those of other generations, walking,
talking, showing a strand of hair just to remind them that they have not converted?
Virginity Tested:
Yassi and I were standing in front of the green gate at the entrance to the Allameh Tabatabai University. Next to the gate there was
a small opening with a curtain hanging from it. It was an aberration that attracted attention, because it did not belong there. It gaped
with the arrogant authority of an intruder.
Through this opening, all the female students, including my girls, went into a small, dark room to be inspected. Yassi would describe
later, long after that first session, what was done to her in this room: "I would first be checked to see if I have the right clothes: the
color of my coat, the length of my uniform, the thickness of my scarf, the form of my shoes, the objects in my bag, the visible traces
of even the mildest make- up, the size of my rings and their level of attractiveness, all would be checked before I could enter the
campus of the university, the same university in which men also study. And to them the main door, with its immense portals and
emblems and flags, is generously open."
That small side opening was the source of endless tales of frustration, humiliation, and sorrow. It was meant to make the girls
ordinary and invisible. Instead, it brought them into focus and turned them into objects of curiosity.
Imagine Yassi standing with me in front of that green gate, laughing between con- spiratorial whispers, our bodies close together.
She was talking about the teacher who taught Islamic morality and translation. A Pillsbury Dough Boy personality, she said.
Three months after his wife's death, he had married her younger sister, be- cause a man—and here Yassi lowered her voice—a man
has his special needs. Then her voice took on a serious tone as she began to describe his recent lecture on the difference between
Islam and Christianity. She now became this dough-faced little man standing by the blackboard, pink chalk in one hand, white chalk
in the other. On one side he had written, in large white letters, MUSLIM GIRL, and drawn a vertical line in the middle of the board.
On the other side, in large pink letters, he wrote CHRISTIAN GIRL. He had then asked the class if they knew the differences
be- tween the two. One was a virgin, he said at last, after an uncomfortable silence, white and pure, keeping herself for her husband
and her husband only. Her power came from her modesty. The other, well, there was not much one could say about her except that
she was not a virgin. To Yassi's surprise, the two girls behind her, both active members of the Muslim Students' Association, had
started to giggle, whisper- ing: No wonder more and more Muslims are converting to Christianity.
We were standing there in the middle of the wide street, laughing—one of the rare moments when I saw Yassi's lopsided and shy
smile disappear and give way to the pure mischief hidden beneath it. I cannot see that laughter in most of her photo- graphs, where
she stands at some distance from the others, as if indicating that she, as the junior member of our class, knows her place.
One Thursday morning, a so hot that the heat seemed to have permeated the cool of our air-conditioned house, seven of us were
talking aimlessly before the class began. We were talking about Sanaz. She had missed class the preceding week without calling to
explain, and now we didn't know if she would come again. No one had heard from her. We were speculating that maybe her
troublesome brother had hatched a new plot. Sanaz's brother was, by now, a constant topic of conversation, one of a series of
male villains who resurfaced from week to week.
"Nima tells me we don't understand the difficulty men face here," said Manna, with a hint of sarcasm. "They too don't know how to
act. Sometimes they act like macho bullies because they feel vulnerable."
"Well, that's to an extent true," I said. "After all, it takes two to create a relation- ship, and when you make half the population invisible,
the other half suffers as well."
"Can you imagine the kind of man who'd get sexually provoked just by looking at a strand of my hair?" said Nassrin. "Someone who
goes crazy at the sight of a wom- an's toe … wow!" she continued, "My toe as a lethal weapon!"
"Women who cover themselves are aiding and abetting the regime," said Azin with a defiant flourish.
"And those whose trademark is painting their lips fiery red and flirting with male professors," said Manna with an icy stare. "I
suppose they are doing all this to further the cause?" Azin turned red and said nothing.
"How about genitally mutilating men," Nassrin suggested coolly, "so as to curb their sexual appetites?" She had been reading
Nawal as-Sadawi's book on brutality against women in some Muslim societies. Sadawi, a doctor, had gone to some lengths to
explain the horrendous effects of genitally mutilating young girls in order to curb their sexual appetites.
"I have to tell you that the Ayatollah himself was no novice in sexual matters," Nassrin went on. "I've been translating his magnum
opus, The Political, Philosophi- cal, Social, and Religious Principles of Ayatollah Khomeini, and he has some inter- esting
points to make."
"But it's already been translated," said Manna. "What's the point?"
"Yes," said Nassrin, "parts of it have been translated, but after it became the butt of party jokes, ever since the embassies abroad
found out that people were reading the book, not for their edification, but for fun, the translations have been very hard to find. And
anyway, my translation is thorough—it has references and cross-refer- ences to works by other worthies. Did you know that one
way to cure a man's sexual appetites is by having sex with animals? And then there's the problem of sex with chickens. You have to
ask yourself if a man who has had sex with a chicken can then eat the chicken afterwards. Our leader has provided us with an answer:
No, neither he nor his immediate family or next-door neighbors can eat of that chicken's meat, but it's okay for a neighbor who lives
two doors away. My father would rather I spent my time on such texts than on Jane Austen or Nabokov?" she added, rather
mischievously.
We were not startled by Nassrin's erudite allusions to the works of Ayatollah Kho- meini. She was referring to a famous text by
Khomeini, the equivalent of his disser- tation—required to be written by all who reach the rank of ayatollah—aimed at re- sponding to
the questions and dilemmas that could be posed to them by their disci- ples. [2] Many others before Khomeini had written in almost
identical manner. What was disturbing was that these texts were taken seriously by people who ruled us and in whose hands lay
our fate and the fate of our country. Every day, on nation- al television and radio, these guardians of morality and culture would make
similar statements and discuss such matters as if they were the most serious themes for contemplation and consideration.
It was in the middle of this scholarly discussion that we heard the sound of screech- ing brakes, and I knew that Sanaz was being
deposited by her brother. A pause, a car door slamming, the doorbell and a few moments later Sanaz entered, wit the first words on
her lips being an apology. She seemed so distraught at being late and hav- ing missed the class that she was ready to burst into tears.
She seemed to want to at once say something and reveal nothing. There were tears in her voice before they became visible in her
eyes. Her story was familiar. A fort- night earlier, Sanaz and five of her girlfriends had gone for a two-day vacation by the Caspian Sea.
On their first day, they had decided to visit her friend's fiancé in an adjoining villa. Sanaz kept emphasizing that they were all properly
dressed, with their scarves and long robes. They were all sitting outside, in the garden: six girls and one boy. There were no alcoholic
beverages in the house, no undesirable tapes or CDs. She seemed to be suggesting that if there had been, they might have de- served
the treatment they received at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards.
And then "they" came with their guns, the morality squads, surprising them by jumping over the low walls. They claimed to have
received a report of illegal activi- ties and wanted to search the premises. Unable to find fault with their appearance, one of the guards
sarcastically said that looking at them, with their Western atti- tudes … Nassrin interrupted: What is a Western attitude? Sanaz looked
at her and smiled. I'll ask him next time I run into him. The truth of the matter was that their search for alcoholic beverages, tapes, and
CDs had led to nothing, but they already had a search warrant and didn't want it to go to waste. The guards took all of them to a
special jail for infractions in matters of morality. There, despite their protests, the girls were kept in a small, dark room, which they
shared the first night with several prostitutes and a drug addict. Their jail wardens came into their room two or three times in the
middle of the night to wake up those who might have dozed off and hurled insults at them.
They were held in that room for forty-eight hours. Despite their repeated requests, they were denied the right to call their parents.
Apart from brief excursions to the rest room at appointed times, they left the room twice—the first time to be led to a hospital,
where they were given virginity tests by a woman gynecologist, who had her students observe the examinations. Not satisfied
with her verdict, the guards took them to a private clinic for a second check. On the third day, their anxious parents in Tehran,
unable to locate them, were told by the concierge at their villa that their children might have been killed in a recent car accident.
They set off at once to the resort town in search of their daughters and finally found them. The girls were then given a summary
trial, forced to sign a document confessing to sins they had not committed, and subjected to twenty-five lashes.
Sanaz, who is very thin, was wearing a T-shirt under her robe. Her jailers jokingly suggested that, since she was wearing an extra
garment, she might not feel the pain, so they gave her more. For her, the physical pain had been more bearable than the indignity
of the virginity tests and her self-loathing at having signed a forced con- fession. In some perverse way, the physical punishment
was a source of satisfaction to her, a compensation for having yielded to those other humiliations.
When they were finally released and taken home by their parents, Sanaz had to deal with another indignity: her brother's admonitions.
What did they expect? How could they let six unruly girls go on a trip without male supervision? Would nobody ever listen to him,
just because he was a few years younger than his scatterbrained sister, who should have been married by now? Sanaz's parents,
although sympathetic to her and her ordeal, did have to agree that perhaps it had not been such a good idea to let her go on the trip;
not that they did not trust her, but conditions in the country were unsuitable for such indiscretions. On top of everything else, I am
now the guilty party, she said. I've been deprived of the use of my car and am being chaperoned by my wise younger brother.
I cannot leave Sanaz and her story alone. Time and again I have gone back to it—I still do—recreating it bit by bit: the garden fence,
the six girls and one boy sitting on the veranda, perhaps telling jokes and laughing. And then "they" come. I remember this incident
just as I remember so many others from my own life in Iran; I even re- member the events people have written or told me about since I
left. Strangely, they too have become my own memories.
Perhaps it is only now and from this distance, when I am able to speak of these ex- periences openly and without fear that I can begin
to understand them and overcome my own terrible sense of helplessness. In Iran a strange distance informed our rela- tion to these
daily experiences of brutality and humiliation. There, we spoke as if the events did not belong to us; like schizophrenic patients, we
tried to keep ourselves away from that other self, at once intimate and alien.
University Days:
I return to the first days of the revolution, when I innocently, and with feelings utter- ly inappropriate to the circumstances, started
my teaching career as the youngest and newest member of the English Department at the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages
and Literature at the University of Tehran. Had I been offered a similar position at Oxford or Harvard, I would not have felt more
honored or intimidated. The University of Tehran was the navel, the immovable center to which all political and social activities were
tied. In the United States, when we read or heard about the turmoil in Iran, the University of Tehran seemed to us to be the scene of
the most important battles. All groups used the university to make their statements.
It was thus not surprising that the new Islamic government took over the university as the site of its weekly Friday prayers. This act
gained added significance, because, 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. It seemed as if, with this act, the Islamic faction asserted
its victory over other political groups, acting like a victorious army positioning itself on the most cherished site of the occupied land,
at the heart of the vanquished territory. Every week, one of the most prominent clergymen would stand on the podium to address the
thousands who occupied the university grounds, men on one side, women on the other. He would stand with a gun in one hand and
offer the sermon of the week, preaching on the most important political issues of the day.
Yet it seemed as if the grounds themselves rebelled against this occupation. I felt in those days that there was a turf war going on
between different political groups and that this struggle was being fought out mainly at the university. I did not know then that I
would also have my own battle to fight. Looking back, I am glad I was unaware of my special vulnerability. With my small collection
of books, I was like an emissary from a land that did not exist, with a stock of dreams, coming to reclaim this land as my home. Amid
the talk of treason and changes in government, events that now, in my mind, have become confused and timeless, I sat whenever I
had a chance with books and notes scattered around me, trying to shape my classes.
On a mild day in October, I tried to make my way through a crowd that had gathered in front of our building around a well-known
Leftist professor from the History De- partment. I stopped impulsively to listen to her. I do not remember much of what she said, but
part of my mind picked up some of her words and hid them in a safe corner. She was telling the crowd that, for the sake of
independence, she was willing to wear the veil. She would wear the veil to fight U.S. imperialists, to show them … To show them
what?
I hastily made my way up the stairs to the conference room of the English Depart- ment, where I had an appointment with a student,
Mr. Bahri. Ours was a formal re- lationship—I was so used to calling and thinking of him by his last name that I have completely
forgotten his first name. At any rate, it is irrelevant. What is relevant, perhaps, in a roundabout way, are his light complexion and
dark hair, the stubborn silence that remained even when he spoke, and his seemingly permanent lopsided grin. This grin colored
everything he said, giving the impression that what he did not say, what he so blatantly hid and denied his listeners, put him in a
superior position. He was not an agitator—he did not give fine, passionate speeches—but he worked his way up doggedly, with
patience and dedication. By the time I was expelled from the university, he had become the powerful head of the Muslim Students'
Associa- tion.
For as long as I stayed at the University of Tehran, Mr. Bahri somehow appeared beside or behind me all through the agitated
meetings. He became my shadow, cast- ing the weight of his lopsided silence upon me. He wanted to inform me that he liked my
classes and that "they" approved of my teaching methods. When I had assigned too much reading, the students at first reacted by
considering a boycott of the class, but, on later consideration, they voted against it. He had come to ask or instruct me to add more
revolutionary material, to teach more revolutionary writers. A stimulat- ing discussion on the implications of the words literature,
radical, bourgeois, and revolutionary ensued, which proceeded, as I recall, with great emotion and intensity, though little substantial
progress was made on the simple matter of definitions. All through this rather heated conversation, we were both standing at the end
of a long table surrounded by empty chairs.
At the end of our talk, I was so excited I reached out to him in a gesture of goodwill and friendship. He silently, deliberately, withdrew
both his hands behind his back, as if to remove them from even the possibility of a handshake. I was too bewildered, too much of a
stranger to the newness of revolutionary ways, to take this gesture in stride. I recounted it later to a colleague, who, with a mocking
smile, reminded me that no Muslim man would or should touch a namahram woman—a woman other than his wife, mother, or sister.
He turned to me in disbelief and said, "You really did not know that?"
My experiences, especially my teaching experiences, in Iran were framed by the feel and touch of that aborted handshake, as much as
by that first approach and the glow of our naïve, excited conversation. The image of my student's oblique smile has remained, brilliant
yet opaque, while the room, the walls, the chairs, and the long conference table have been covered over by layers and layers of what
usually in works of fiction is called dust.
Nest of Spies:
I do not remember what I was doing or where I was on that Sunday when I first heard the news that the American embassy had been
occupied by a ragtag group of students. It is strange, but the only thing I remember was that it was sunny and mild, and the news
did not sink in until the next day, when Ahmad, Khomeini's son, an- nounced his father's support of the students and issued a defiant
statement: "If they do not give us the criminals," he said, referring to the Shah and his former ministers, "then we will do whatever is
necessary." Two days later, on November 6, Prime Minister Bazargan, who was being increasingly attacked by the religious hardliners
and the Left as liberal and pro-Western, resigned.
Soon the walls of the embassy were covered with new slogans: AMERICA CAN'T DO A DAMN THING AGAINST US! THIS IS NOT
A STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE U.S. AND IRAN, IT'S A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND BLASPHE- MY. THE MORE WE DIE,
THE STRONGER WE WILL BECOME. A tent was raised on the sidewalk and filled with propaganda against America, exposing its
crimes around the world and proclaiming the necessity to export the revolution. At the university, the mood was both jubilant and
apprehensive. Some of my students had disappeared and were presumably active on the front lines of this new struggle. Tense
discussions and excited whispers replaced regular classes.
Both the religious and Leftist organizations, especially the Mujahideen-e Khalq and the Marxist Fedayeen, supported the
hostage-taking. I remember one heated de- bate where one of the students who was mocked as a liberal kept saying, What's the point
of taking them hostage? Haven't we already kicked them out? And one of my students unreasonably reasoned that no, not yet, that
American influence was still everywhere. We wouldn't be free until the Voice of America was shut down.
By now, the American embassy was no longer known as the American embassy—it was "the nest of spies." When taxi drivers
asked us where we wanted to go, we would say, Please take us to the nest of spies. People were bused in daily from the provinces
and villages who didn't even know where America was, and sometimes thought they were actually being taken to America. They
were given food and mon- ey, and they could stay and joke and picnic with their families in front of the nest of spies. In exchange,
they were asked to demonstrate, to shout, "Death to America," and every now and then to burn the American flag.
Three men sit in a semicircle talking eagerly, while, a little farther on, two women in black chadors, with three or four small children
hovering around them, are making sandwiches and handing them over to the men. A festival? A picnic? An Islamic Woodstock?
If you move a little closer to this small group, you can hear their conversation. Their accents indicate that they come from the
province of Isfahan. One of them has heard that the Americans are becoming Muslims by the thousands and that Jimmy Carter is
really scared. He should be scared, another one says, as he bites into his sandwich. I hear the American police are confiscating all
portraits of the Imam. Truth is mixed with wild rumors, rumors of the Shah's mistreatment by his former Western allies, of the
imminent Islamic revolution in America. Will America hand him over?
Farther down, you can hear sharper and more clipped cadences. "But this isn't dem- ocratic centralism … religious tyranny …
long-term allies …" and, more than any other word, liberals. Four or five students with books and pamphlets under their arms
are deep in discussion. I recognize one of my Leftist students, who sees me, smiles and comes towards me. Hello, professor. I see
you've joined us. Who is us? I ask him. The masses, the real people, he says quite seriously. But this is not your demonstration, I
say. You're wrong there. We have to be present every day, to keep the fire going, to prevent the liberals from striking a deal, he
says.
The loudspeakers interrupt us. "Neither East, nor West; we want the Islamic Re- public!" "America can't do a damn thing!" "We will
fight, we will die, we won't com- promise!"
I could never accept this air of festivity, the jovial arrogance that dominated the crowds in front of the embassy. Two streets away,
a completely different reality was unfolding. Sometimes it seemed to me that the government operated in its own sep- arate universe.
It created a big circus, put on a big act, while people went about their business.
The fact was that America, the place I knew and had lived in for so many years, had suddenly been turned into a never-never land
by the Islamic Revolution. The Ameri- ca of my past was fast fading in my mind, overtaken by all the clamor of new defini- tions. That
was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had
become both the land of Sa- tan and Paradise lost. A sly curiosity about America had been kindled that, in time, would turn the
hostage-takers into its hostages.
The Veil:
The Spring semester of 1980 started ominously. From the very beginning, there were few classes. For the past year the government
had been preoccupied with suppressing political opposition groups, closing down the progressive newspapers and magazines,
punishing former government functionaries, and carrying on a war against the minorities, especially the Kurds. Now it turned its
attention towards the universities, hotbeds of dissent, where the Muslim revolutionaries did not hold power. The universities
played the role later assumed by newspapers in protesting the suppression of progressive forces.
That year, the government managed to shut down the universities. They purged the faculty, students, and staff. Some students were
killed or jailed; others simply dis- appeared. The University of Tehran had become the seat of too much disappoint- ment, too much
sorrow and hurt. Never again would I rush so innocently, so eagerly, to a class as I did in those days at the dawn of the revolution.
After the socalled "cultural revolution" that led to the closing down of universities, I was essentially out of a job. We went to the
university, but we had nothing much to do. I took to writing a diary and reading Agatha Christie. Instead of classes, we were
summoned to endless meetings. The administration wanted us to stop working and, at the same time, to pretend that nothing had
changed. Although the universities were closed, the faculty was required to be present and to offer projects to the newly elected
Committee on the Cultural Revolution.
The committee visited the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences and the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature
at the auditorium in the School of Law. Despite the formal and informal instructions to the female faculty and staff on the issue of
the veil, until that day, most women at our university had not obeyed the new rules. That meeting was the first I had attended at
which all the female partici- pants wore headscarves. All, that is, except three: Farideh, Laleh, and me. We were independent and
considered eccentric, so the three of us went to that meeting with- out headscarves.
The three members of the Committee on the Cultural Revolution sat rather uncom- fortably on the very high stage. Their expressions
were by turns haughty, nervous, and defiant. That meeting was the last at the University of Tehran in which the fac- ulty openly
criticized the government and its policies regarding higher education. Most were rewarded for their impertinence by being expelled.
Farideh, Laleh, and I sat together conspicuously, like naughty children. We whispered, we consulted one another, we kept
thrusting our hands up to talk. Farideh took the committee to task for using the university grounds to torture and intimidate the
students. I told the Revolutionary Committee that my integrity as a teacher and a woman was being compromised by its insistence
that I wear the scarf under false pretenses for a few thousand tumans a month. The issue was not so much the veil itself as freedom
of choice. My grandmother had refused to leave the house for three months when she was forced to unveil. I would be similarly
adamant in my own refusal. Little did I know that I would soon be given the choice either of veiling or being jailed and flogged if I
disobeyed.
After that meeting, one of my more pragmatic colleagues, a "modern" woman, who decided to take up the veil and stayed there for
another seventeen years after I was gone, told me with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, "You are fighting a losing battle. Why lose
your job over an issue like this? In another couple of weeks, you will be forced to wear the veil in the grocery stores."
The simplest answer, of course, was that the university was not a grocery store. But she was right. Soon we would be forced to
wear it everywhere. And the morality squads, with their guns and Toyota patrols, would guard the streets to ensure our adherence.
A few days later, I went to the University of Tehran for a meeting with Mr. Bahri. He had asked for this meeting, hoping to convince
me to comply with the new rules. The conference room looked and felt just as it had when I first met Mr. Bahri to discuss the role of
literature and revolution: large, cool and bare, with a dusty feel to it, although, except for the long table and twelve chairs, there were
no surfaces to collect dust. Mr. Bahri and his friend were already sitting near the middle of the table, facing the door. They both
stood up when I entered and waited until I had taken a seat before settling back down. I chose to position myself opposite them.
Mr. Bahri did not take long to get to the point. He could not understand why we were making such a fuss over a piece of cloth. Did
we not see that there were more im- portant issues to think about, that the whole life of the revolution was at stake? What was more
important, to fight against the satanic influence of Western imperi- alists or to obstinately hold on to a personal preference that
created division among the ranks of the revolutionaries?
These might not have been his exact words, but they were the gist of his language. In those days, people really talked that way. One
had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islam- ized version of a
Soviet novel.
It was ironic that Mr. Bahri, the defender of the Faith, described the veil as a piece of cloth. I had to remind him that we had to have
more respect for that "piece of cloth" than to force it on reluctant people. What did he imagine our students would think of us if they
saw us wearing the veil, when we had sworn never to do so? Would they not say that we had sold out our beliefs for a few thousand
tumans a month? What would you think, Mr. Bahri?
What could he think? A stern ayatollah, an improbable philosopher-king, had de- cided to impose his dream on a country and a people
and to recreate us in his own myopic vision. So he had formulated an ideal of me as a Muslim woman, as a Mus- lim woman teacher,
and wanted me to look, act, and, in short, live according to that ideal. Laleh and I, in refusing to accept that ideal, were taking not a
political stance, but an existential one. No, I could tell Mr. Bahri, it was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation
being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become.
I think that day I realized how futile it was to "discuss" my views with Mr. Bahri. How could one argue against the representative of
God on earth? Mr. Bahri, for the time being at least, derived his energy from the undeniable fact that he was on the side of Right; I
was, at best, a stray sinner. For a few months, I had seen it coming, but I think it was that day, after I left Mr. Bahri and his friend, that
it first hit me how irrelevant I had become.
When I left the room, I did not make the mistake of trying to shake his hand. Mr. Bahri walked with me like a polite host seeing an
honored guest to the door, his hands firmly clasped behind his back. I kept repeating: Please don't bother. I almost toppled down the
stairs in my eagerness to get away. When I had nearly reached the first floor, I looked back. He was still standing there, in his frayed
brown suit, his Mao shirt buttoned up to the neck, hands behind his back, gazing down at me with a look of perplexity.
I knew that my meeting with Mr. Bahri meant it would only be a matter of time be- fore I was expelled.
Irrelevant:
In 1981, the government passed new regulations restricting women's clothing in public and forcing us to wear either a chador or a
long robe and scarf. Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by
force. 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 monetary fines, up to
seventy-six lashes, and jail terms. Later, the government created the notorious morality squads: four armed men and women in white
Toyota patrols, monitoring the streets, ensuring the enforcement of the laws.
As I try now to piece together the disjointed and incoherent events of that period, I notice how my growing sense that I was
descending into an abyss or void was ac- companied by two momentous events that happened simultaneously: the war with Iraq
and the loss of my teaching job. I had not realized how far the routines of one's life create the illusion of stability. Now that I could
not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own
body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light
and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.
This new feeling of unreality led me to invent new games, survival games I would now call them. My constant obsession with the
veil had made me buy a very wide black robe that covered me down to my ankles, with kimono-like sleeves, wide and long. I had
gotten into the habit of withdrawing my hands into the sleeves and pre- tending that I had no hands. Gradually, I pretended that,
when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared: my arms, breasts, stomach, and legs melted and disap- peared and what was
left was a piece of cloth the shape of my body that moved here and there, guided by some invisible force.
The beginning of this game I can trace back quite specifically to the day I went to the Ministry of Higher Education with a friend
who wanted to have her diploma vali- dated. They searched us from head to foot and, of the many sexual molestations I have had
to suffer in my life, this was among the worst. The female guard told me to hold my hands up, up, and up, she said, as she started
to search me meticulously, going over every part of my body. She objected to the fact that I seemed to be wear- ing almost nothing
under the robe. I explained to her that what I wore under my robe was none of her business. She took a tissue and told me to rub
my cheeks clean of the muck I was wearing. I explained that I wore no muck. Then she took the tissue herself and rubbed it against
my cheeks, and, since she did not achieve the desired results, because I had not worn any makeup, as I had told her, she rubbed it
even harder, until I thought she might be trying to rub my skin off. My face was burning and I felt dirty—I felt like my whole body
was a soiled, sweaty T-shirt that had to be cast off.
That was when the idea of this game came to me: I decided to make my body invisi- ble. The woman's coarse hands were reverse
X-rays that left only the surface intact and made the inside invisible. By the time she had finished inspecting me, I had be- come as
light as the wind, a fleshless, boneless being. The trick to this magic act was that, in order to remain invisible, I had to refrain from
coming into contact with other hard surfaces, especially with human beings. My invisibility was in direct ratio to the degree to
which I could make other people not notice me. Then, of course, from time to time I would make part of me return, like when I
wished to defy an obstructionist figure of authority, and I would leave a few strands of hair out and make my eyes reappear, to
stare at them uncomfortably.
Sometimes, almost unconsciously, I would withdraw my hands into my wide sleeves and start touching my legs or my stomach.
Do they exist? Do I exist? This stomach, this leg, these hands? Unfortunately, the Revolutionary Guards and the guardians of
our morality did not see the world with the same eyes as me. They saw hands, faces, and pink lipstick; they saw strands of hair
and unruly socks where I saw some ethe- real being drifting soundlessly down the street.
Hope:
I left Iran in 1997, but Iran did not leave me. Much has changed in appearance since I left. There is more defiance in the gait of
women; their scarves are more colorful and their robes much shorter; they wear makeup now and walk freely with men who are
not their brothers, fathers, or husbands.
Parallel to this, the raids and arrests and public executions also persist. But there is a stronger demand for freedom; as I write, I
open the paper to read about the recent student demonstrations in support of a dissident who was sentenced to death for
suggesting that the clergy should not be blindly followed like monkeys and calling for a revision of the Constitution. I read the
writings of young students and former revo- lutionaries, the slogans and demands for democracy, and I know now, as much as I
will ever know anything, that it is this dogged desire for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by young Iranians today, the
children of the revolution, and the an- guished self-criticism of former revolutionaries that will determine the shape of our future.
End Notes:
[1] Azar Nafisi, "The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem," The New Republic, Feb. 22, 1999.
[2] Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, A Clarification of Questions (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984). Eds.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Middle East & the Problem of Iran
The Threat of Radical Islam
More on the Threat of Radical Islam
War & Peace in the Real World
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Azar Nafisi is a professor and Director of the Dialogue Project at the School of Ad- vanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns
Hopkins University, in Washington, DC. The foregoing article is excerpted from her book Reading Lolita in Tehran,
copyright © 2003 by Azar Nafisi, to be published by Random House Trade Publishing, an imprint of The Random House
Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
August 4, 2003
The original version of the article appeared in the Middle East Quarterly (Spring, 2003) and can be found on the Internet website
maintained by the Middle East Forum.
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