Azar Nafisi

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Azar Nafisi, Ph.D. (Persian: آذر نفیسی) (born December 1, 1955) is an Iranian academic and writer who has resided in the United States since 1997 when she emigrated from Iran. Nafisi is currently a visiting Fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and serves on the Board of Trustees of Freedom House.

Nafisi's bestselling book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has gained a great deal of public attention and been translated into 32 languages. It was 117 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, and has won numerous literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, and the Europe based Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature. [1] [2] The book has led to criticism about Nafisi's perceived connections to neoconservatism and colonialism.[3] She has a new memoir out called "Things I've Been Silent About: Memories" (2008), in which she narrates the upheavals in her dysfunctional family, including her childhood sexual abuse, where her father, the mayor of Tehran, was jailed for alleged financial irregularities under the Shah, an incarceration Nafisi yearned would bring about her parents' reconciliation.


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[edit] Early Life

She is the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran who was the youngest man elected to the post by the Shah's regime at that time, and Nezhat Nafisi, who was among the first women to be sent to the Iranian parliament under the Shah of Iran. Nafisi is married to Bijan Naderi, and has two children, Negar and Dara.

Born in Iran, Nafisi was sent to school in Lancaster, England at the age of 13.[4] She moved to the United States in the last year of her high school career. She received a Ph. D in English and American literature at the University of Oklahoma. She also holds an honorary doctorate from Bard College. Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 where for a brief time she taught English literature at the University of Tehran. She then taught at the Free Islamic Azad University, and Allameh Tabatabaii before her return to the United States in 1997 — gained western support for her work. She states that she was no longer invited to teach at the University of Tehran because she refused to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981, and did not resume teaching until 1987.[5]

Nafisi married twice and has two children.

[edit] Time in Iran

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Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)

Having witnessed the Iranian revolution and the subsequent rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi soon became restless with what she thought to be stringent rules imposed upon women by her country's new rulers. She spoke of the freedom that she believed women in some countries took for granted, and which she stated women in Iran had now lost.

In 1995, she states that she was no longer able to teach English literature properly without attracting the scrutiny of the faculty authorities, so she quit teaching at the university, and instead invited seven of her female students to attend regular meetings at her house, every Thursday morning. They studied literary works including some considered controversial in post-revolutionary Iranian society such as Lolita alongside other works such as Madame Bovary. She also taught novels by Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.[6]

When asked by an interviewer in 2003 if there where "ever a time, when you were living in Iran, when you would have welcomed the idea of a regime change implemented by foreign forces", Nafisi claimed, "Some Iranians were so desperate that they would have wanted the foreign powers to come in, but I didn't feel that way. ... in Iran, I don't think that we needed foreign intervention at any point." [6]

[edit] Work

Nafisi left Iran on June 24, 1997 and moved to the United States, where she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a book where she describes her experiences as a secular woman living and working in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the book, she declares "I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me."

Nafisi is currently a visiting Fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. Nafisi serves on the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, a U.S. NGO that is close to the government and which conducts research and advocacy on liberal democracy.[7]

[edit] Criticism

In a 2003 article for The Guardian, Brian Whitaker criticized Nafisi for working for the public relations firm Benador Associates which he argues promoted the neo-conservative ideas of "creative destruction" and "total war".[8]

In 2006 Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi compared Reading Lolita in Tehran to "the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India," and asserted that Nafisi functions as a colonial agent. He then classed Nafisi with the U.S. soldier convicted of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib. "To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi."[3][9]

Critics such as Dabashi have accused Nafisi of having close relations with neoconservatives. In the acknowledgements she makes in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi writes of Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis as "one who opened the door". Nafisi, who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, rejects such accusations as "guilt by association," noting that she has both "radical friends" and "conservative friends."[10]

In a critical article published in the academic journal Comparative American Studies titled 'Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran', University of Tehran literature professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi states that "Nafisi constantly confirms what orientalist representations have regularly claimed". He also points out that she "has produced gross misrepresentations of Iranian society and Islam and that she uses quotes and references which are inaccurate, misleading, or even wholly invented."[11]

[edit] Works

  • Nafisi, Azar. "Images of Women in Classical Persian Literature and the Contemporary Iranian Novel." The Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran. Ed. Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994. 115-30.
  • Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels (1994).
  • Nafisi, Azar. "Imagination as Subversion: Narrative as a Tool of Civic Awareness." Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation. Ed. Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997. 58-71.
  • "Tales of Subversion: Women Challenging Fundamentalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran." Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women (1999).
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003).
  • Things I've Been Silent About (2008).

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Stephen Barclay Agency
  2. ^ Yale University Office of Public Affairs
  3. ^ a b Reading Lolita at Columbia
  4. ^ BBC 2004 Interview with Nafisi Retrieved August 11, 2006
  5. ^ The Steven Barclay Agency is Azar Nafisi's Official Agent for Speaking Engagements
  6. ^ a b "The Fiction of Life" Interviews May 7, 2003
  7. ^ Freedom House: Board of Trustees
  8. ^ The Guardian: Conflict and catchphrases
  9. ^ Boston Globe , Women and Islam, by Cathy Young, The Boston Globe , October 23, 2006 [1]
  10. ^ Richard Byrne, "A Collision of Prose and Politics
  11. ^ IngentaConnect: Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran

[edit] External links

[edit] Critical

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