Is there a more pernicious, human force than extremism? From enslaving minds to destroying governments, it has a whole host of virulent powers, but perhaps the most terrifying of these is its capacity to silence intellectuals who, in all their knowledge, are a danger to that special brand of illogic practiced by extremism. Reading Lolita In Tehran does many things well, but its articulation of this assault on society's educators is, by far, its most important achievement.
Born in Iran to a successful family, Ms. Nafisi was educated in America before returning, in the late 1970s, to her homeland to teach English at the University of Tehran. Not long after taking up her professorship, the Iranian revolution brought to power zealots who swept away many of the secular freedoms Iranians once enjoyed. Frustrated and offended by stricter and stricter codes of religious conduct, Ms. Nafisi quits the university when it is made clear to her that she will no longer be allowed to teach the great works of Western civilization made verboten by the new regime. Refusing to go quietly into the night, she establishes a small reading circle for some of her female students, running it out of her home under the guise of ladies who lunch. And it is this circle which forms the core of Ms. Nafisi's memoir, exposing us to the young women of revolutionary Iran, women who have had their freedoms usurped, their life choices narrowed, their futures dimmed by ignorance.
Though there are numerous self-indulgent detours into Ms. Nafisi's uncompelling personal history, the narrative is primarily driven by the fallout in the classroom of the Regime's crackdown on universities and the consequences this crackdown has on Ms. Nafisi's female students. The story creatively cuts back and forth between Ms. Nafisi's attempts to teach English literature in a university being radicalized by Islamic fundamentalists and the personal lives of her students, all of whom struggle with all they've been made to sacrifice. Their pain, at being treated as objects, not people, is acute, and it's a pain that I can well imagine applies to the whole of Iranian society which has now spent 30 years being slowly devoured by radical Islam. What will be left when the clerics are done? Will there be a civil society who knows of Nabokov and Joyce, Fitzgerald and Twain? We'll have to wait to find out.
Ms. Nafisi is a bit too taken with her own story -- the plight of her students is infinitely more interesting than her own --, but the extent to which she has captured the slow descent into chaos of a world governed by anti-intellectuals is powerful and revealing. (3/5 Stars)
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