A Book Review of Reading Lolita in Tehran in Regards to Geography

The Middle East is a place of turmoil. It seems the region is constantly at war with itself and with Western countries. Governments come and go, coup d’états are somewhat common, and elections are rigged. Religion is very important and often determines many laws of the area. In America, we hear of threats of nuclear weapons, of marginalized women, of terrorist organizations. However, what we don’t hear about are the citizens of these countries. We have no idea what their everyday lives are like. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, brings us into the life of a modern woman living in Tehran, Iran. Predominately discussing the thematic concepts of Gender and Power and Politics, Nafisi brings us into Iran.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a book that focuses first and foremost, on books. The book is split into four sections: Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen. These four sections also correlate to different parts of Nafisi’s life. It starts out with Nafisi having just retired from teaching at the university she was working at. She decides to choose a group of girls for their interest in English Literature and teach them privately on Thursday mornings. The girls range in age, and have been taught by her previously. This section is about these Thursday morning classes with these exceptional girls, where they don’t have to worry about the morality patrols and what they say but can instead talk about books, and by extension, their own lives, unheeded. There’s Yassi, who is the youngest and has an uncle that lives in America, and is a bit plump. Azin is a somewhat sexually free thirty-something who has been married twice before her current husband. Mahshid is quiet and reserved, and the most traditional of all the girls. Nassrin had been attending Nafisi’s classes the longest, and had been jailed for three years for protesting the revolution and required to stop her education for another two. Sanaz, who has a sweetheart who lives in England and a younger brother who tries to control everything she does. Manna, who is a poet and attended Nafisi’s classes for long after she had graduated with her husband Nima, who Nafisi is also close with. Mitra is a youngish girl who during the span of the book gets married as well.

 This group stays throughout all sections of the book, but the second section, Gatsby, focuses on when Nafisi is just returning from America where she had studied, with her husband Bijan. She gets a job at the University of Tehran, the youngest person in the English Department. The book focused on, Gatsby, also stands for the current unrest, the constant demonstrations for an Islamic Iran and the immorality demonstrated in Gatsby, from adultery to the illegality of Gatsby’s money to murder. They put the book on trial for being “too American” and the book wins.

This brings us to James. As the Revolution continues, Nafisi is told that to continue teaching, she must wear a veil, something she has sworn not to do. She is expelled from the University of Tehran for it and begins her writing career, writing articles for various newspapers, until an acquaintance convinces her to teach at the Allameh Tabatabai University with her veil. She has two children as well.

The fourth section brings us back to the class, nearing the end of it. They are discussing Austen but also their personal lives more in depth. The state of things is becoming unbearable for Nafisi, and she wants to leave to go back to America, which is a subject of unrest between her and her husband. Mitra and her husband are planning on going to Canada, and Nassrin escapes to Turkey from where she will go elsewhere because she doesn’t have a passport. Azin has divorced her third husband who was beating her, and Yassi wants to go to America to be with her uncle there. Mahshid thinks they have an obligation to stay and make the country better.

The biggest issue this book deals with is that of gender. The book is placed in a part of the world that has never been exactly kind to women, and the religious extremists in the government don’t help this at all. She talks about in 1980, when Iran had just become an Islamic Republic, her fight at the University of Tehran to not wear the veil.

“Fatmeh, Laleh, and I sat together conspicuously…I told the Revolutionary Committee that my integrity as a teacher and a woman was being compromised by its insistence that I wear the veil under false pretenses for a few thousand tumans a month. The issue was not so much the veil itself as freedom of choice. My grandmother had refused to leave the house for three months when she was forced to unveil.” (167)

Not long after, the government passed laws forcing women to wear a chador or a long scarf and robes in public, but it was more the fact that they forced her to wear them at her workplace that bothered her the most. It lowered her status as somewhat equal to something lesser, something that was looked upon as “less.” Nafisi is a good person to look at because she has lived a number of ways: Iran before the revolution, America, and Iran after the revolution. Her gender greatly affected the way that she lived in these places. Her husband, who worked in an engineering firm, had good business and was not affected nearly as greatly when the revolution came, and doesn’t really realize what his wife is going through as a highly intelligent woman being marginalized by the new government.  It also affects her daughter, Nagar. A morality teacher comes into the classroom and searches the class for contraband and a girl’s nails had been too long. Nagar came home crying to Nafisi and the rest of her secret class, where they joked that “once Nassrin had been sent to the disciplinary committee to have her eyelashes checked. Her lashes were long, and she was suspected of having used mascara….They were reprimanded by the guards: they were biting their apples to seductively.” (59) These examples seem so silly to someone living in a Western culture, but these were not considered small offenses.

However, there were many women who still managed to control their own destiny. Despite the fact that sharia law had lowered the age of marriage for women to nine, each of the girls in the group had some control over their own fate. They were allowed to go to college, and were studying books that are considered difficult for most American students, like Pride and Prejudice, in a language that was foreign to them. A few were married, some still lived at home with their parents, and one had been divorced, something definitely unheard of in many other countries. Nafisi was a teacher that taught in a coed university, and was respected by both genders, if not fought with a little. Nafisi is allowed to go to public places with a male friend of hers, who she refers to as her magician and talk with him. There are a number of women in relatively powerful positions, despite the issues that they face. Despite the fact that something deeply personal, the choice to wear a headscarf or not, was being used to bring them down, despite the fact that these women’s rights were greatly stunted, they still manage to get by and even do well for themselves.

The other great concept this book discusses is that of Politics and Power. When Nafisi returns to Iran, she is still relatively free, freer than we Americans would think she’d be. She’s a teacher in a prestigious position, who can wear jeans and makeup and walk where she pleases and can find books like the Great Gatsby. However, things have definitely changed since she was last here, the airport, even, covered in posters saying “Death to America! Down with Imperialism and Zionism! America is our number one enemy!” (81) The spring semester of her first year teaching, change came. They shut down the university despite demonstrations and then forced the women to wear a veil. It was not just women that the revolution hit. They banned things like satellite dishes, certain movies, playing music that was not traditional or revolutionary, laughing too loudly, etc. Leading up to the revolution, many of her students, which fell under the “leftist” category, kept pushing for more and more books written by people like Mike Gold other revolutionary writers. They wanted essentially what those pushing for an Islamic state wanted and yet greatly opposed them at the same time. The political beliefs of Nafisi’s friend groups are varied. There are leftists, monarchists, and those that thought the revolution was more or less no good. It was interesting that there were not solely Islamic extremists and Western “modern” thinkers, and even many of those who were against the Islamic state were still against a lot of what the West stood for. There was also a lot of violence on both sides. Not just from the government but also by those against it, and it seemed as though many people could only see violence being fought by violence.

The biggest thing for me was the fact that despite all that these girls were up against, they still pushed on. They refused to let the regime define them as people, although they did blame quite a lot on the regime. Nafisi puts together this incredible group of girls that are very different from each other and creates this secret group where they think critically and speak intelligently. The fact that the books are hard to find doesn’t stop them: they xerox instead. They don’t let marriage to abusive men, or childhood sweethearts that jilt them, or social unrest stop them from their education. These women manage to overcome in a society that tells them that their opinion is worth nothing. Nafisi talks about the first time she taught at an all girl’s college, and the essays she received back were all exact copies of her lecture, because they had never been taught that their opinions meant anything. These girls in her secret group couldn’t care less about what the regime wants them to be. The first thing that I had to do, reading this book, was to disarm myself of any preconceptions I had about what they wore or how they acted or what positions they might hold. I had read books about Afghanistan before, but it’s much more strict there because I was initially caught off guard by all that the women were allowed to do.  We’re really not taught much at all about the Middle East, and I think that’s where a lot of fear comes from: the thought that all Muslims must be terrorists, all Muslim women are subservient, etc.

This book makes you think about these thematic concepts without trying. They are woven into the story of the book because so much of Nafisi’s experience is shaped by her gender and by the government and who was in power. She got to see a lot of different types of government, and eventually the Islamic state frustrated her so much that she came back to America. It makes you think about how different other people’s lives are on an individual level, humanizes them, and makes them real. That’s something that most people don’t realize, especially about Middle Eastern culture. It’s not just “Muslims,” they are individual people, going about their lives, dealing with the cards they were handed. We need to be more aware of that, the fact that we’re all people, human beings, and the best way for us to get along is to not push our ideals onto other people. Of course, that’s definitely easier said than done.

Sources: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

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