Azar Nafisi: How has your relationship to Islam changed? | Big Think

Azar Nafisi: How has your relationship to Islam changed?

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Nafisi’s passion was always literature. Religion was an externally imposed reality.

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Azar Nafisi:

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Azar Nafisi’s new book, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009.

Azar Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Azar Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She has taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabaii.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Azar Nafisi: You know for me religion was not something that I had . . . I mean my preoccupations were different. My obsessions were literature. Religion’s obsessions have been imposed on me because of the situation. When I was younger the Islam that I was offered was a very gentle and liberal version. Both my parents were Muslims. My mother went to the pilgrimage in Mecca, but she never wore the veil. She was a very modern woman. My father would tell me that the most important thing in Islam is that do unto others as you do . . . have them do unto you. Serving the people is . . . That is how . . . And my grandmother on my father’s side . . . My grandmother on my mother’s side died very young. I never saw her. But on . . . My paternal grandmother who always wore the veil, she was a very orthodox woman. She was the gentlest of all women. She never told me because I wore a bikini and went swimming I was not a Muslim; or I was dirty; or I was, you know . . . So I was brought up with a very tolerant view of religion. It was after the . . . And then I turned into a Marxist, which was as bad as . . . Not being a Marxist or a variance of Marxism, but I turned into a Stalinist mainly, which is as bad as being a fundamentalist for a while. Although I don’t think I was as bad. I had . . . I was constantly being called bourgeois by my other .... So it was the revolution that brought up for me the question. And I feel that what is happening in my country in many ways is interesting, because many of the ...Islamists like ...or many of the dissidents we have now; at the beginning of the revolution they were so fundamentalists. And now they’re quoting ... and ... And I think there is a movement going on within Iran that because it was the first theocracy in 20th century, I think it’s also bringing out the reform to reform; to bring religion up to date. Within the clerics, people like ...; and within the militant Islamic . . . you know the younger people . . . And I think that that is what should happen – that there should be the change. We need to be self-critical and interrogate ourselves rather than constantly interrogate the world.