Azar Nafisi wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran to celebrate novels, yet almost 18 months after the release of the best-selling memoir, she's sought more for her views on fundamentalist Islam than literature. These are questions she doesn't avoid.
'I'm not a religious expert,' she says at her hotel in Rome, where she's appearing at the annual literary festival. 'However, I know more about Muslims than those who rely on the stereotypes so common outside Islam. The oppression in Iran in recent years is due not so much to religion itself as to religion being exploited as an ideology. What interests me in this situation is that fine imaginative writing subverts an oppressive mindset and can open new perspectives.'
A friend of Nafisi once called her a 'very American Alice in Wonderland'. Perhaps she shares Alice's curiosity, but her broad cheek bones, nose and lively, dark eyes suggest Iran rather than America. She has an engaging, responsive smile. But to have opposed fundamentalist diktats, there must be steel beneath.
In the early 1980s, Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran for not wearing a veil. Later, she taught at the Allameh Tabatabai University, but resigned in 1995 because of the hostile atmosphere. She then invited seven enthusiastic female students to her apartment each Thursday morning to discuss writers the regime considered subversive, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov. She sees a parallel between Humbert's abduction of the teenage Lolita and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's imposition of a distorted image of Iran on
the society.
'I wanted to protect the interior life from the encroachment of politics,' she says. 'My memoir shows how it impinged on the life of the members of the weekly study circle. Like all other females, they were liable to 67 lashes if their hair was not always fully covered and further sanctions from the morality police if they did scandalous things such as running in the street or licking an ice cream in public.
'When they took their scarves off in my apartment and removed their robes, the jeans and bright blouses they wore underneath revealed females indistinguishable from those in the west. What many outsiders don't realise is that Iranians never considered themselves as different from others. It's the State which has insisted they are different.
