Azar Nafisi: What was it like living in Iran as a Western-educated woman? | Big Think

Azar Nafisi: What was it like living in Iran as a Western-educated woman?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Iran, Nafisi says, is a very paradoxical place.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Azar Nafisi: Iran was in . . . is a very . . . like many maybe Middle Eastern countries, but more so is a very paradoxical place. Where I was growing up, I grew up in a very modern environment. Tehran was a modern and cosmopolitan city. The love of stories . . . For example my father always, right alongside ...and other Persian storytellers . . . From early childhood for my brother and I, he would buy books or tell the stories from La Fontaine, to Pinocchio, to Tom Sawyer, to . . . By the time I was . . . Before I left for England I had read . . . I don’t know why Balzac used to be a favorite, but I remember closing the door in my room and crying over.... We loved the Russians, most of which were translated and we had read them. I had already fallen in love with Jane Austin. So when I went to England at first, these ideas were not foreign. One of the things that brought about the revolution was the fact that you had a very lively middle class, and you had an educated class who compared itself to Europe. And because of the culture and the institutions, what they wanted was political freedom, and that is what you didn’t have. So that was what bothered us. And my family has always been a family of political rebels. Somehow we don’t fit into any one political party or agenda. And so my father was the youngest mayor of Tehran in early ‘60s. And then because he would not sort of move with the crowd, he was put in jail without a trial for over four years. And once they gave him a trial in which he defended himself, he was exonerated of all charges except . . . First they said all charges except disobedience. Later they even tool that. I thought they should have left that. Insubordination – I loved that idea. So what bothered me in comparison with the countries I had lived in – U.S. and Europe – was lack of political freedoms basically; which of course affected the culture and all the other walks of life.