Robert Fulford, a wise, urbane scholar wrote a review of Reading Lolita in Tehran. (National Post, B1, Aug. 12, 2003) The author is Azar Nafisi, an Iranian woman, who had taught literature in a Tehran university. She retired in disgust at how censored her lectures were becoming. The mullahs wanted one version of a novel to emerge--their version.
Nafisi recounts how she had been been a leftist rebel during her college years in the States. The Shah was a despot and America was his backer, she had shouted through her bullhorn. Then in 1979 the Shah was deposed and a theocracy was born that made his rule seem amost benign. She discovered this upon her return to Iran. What fledgling rights women had gained under the Shah disappeared overnight. Now women were to be flogged for not wearing their veils properly. Coloured shoelaces were taboo, as was eating ice cream in public. Hundreds of new religious rules prohibited and controlled everything from dress to music. She also saw that the mullahs were in favour of girls marrying at the age of nine. Any show of moral ambiguity in her university lectures was labelled subversion.
Fulford sums up with this, "We sympathize with her tyrannized students, grimace at the insane edicts of God-maddened clergymen, gasp at the ingenious ways that humans find to make each other miserable. Nafisi leaves her readers aghast at the thought that all this is done in the name of God. Yet her book lifts the spirit and warms the imagination."
I will be looking for this book in my library. I have an American acquaintance who lived in Tehran during the Shah's era--and who helped American wives of Iranian husbands escape Iran for the US, singularly dangerous missions--as well as an Iranian friend here. Their narratives of life in Iran differ significantly.
