Azar Nafisi: The Turkish Hijab Debate | Big Think

Azar Nafisi: The Turkish Hijab Debate

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No one should be forced to do something they don’t want to do, Nafisi says.

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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: Well always when you deprive people of what they . . . of whatever, they want to do it to begin with. So it is wrong to . . . People should be allowed to do what . . . what . . . I mean as I say, as long as they’re not harming others, they should be allowed to show their faith in ways that . . . I mean Hasidic men wear . . . have a special way of showing it. Why can’t Muslim women? What I object to in Turkey and everywhere else is that this is being used as a political ploy. As my student ... – we used to discuss this in Iran – veil has become a political issue. It has become a political symbol. It is not a symbol of faith. And I think Muslim women who, of their own free will, are choosing the veil should fight against this . . . If they are genuine then they should fight against turning this symbol into a political symbol, you know? So that is my . . . But I think that Turkey should allow women to look the way they want to.