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Women Finding Freedom in Iran Through Liberty, Literature & Lolita
by Aaron Goldstein
20 June 2005
Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran describes the plight of women living under the mullahs.
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Several months ago,
I penned an article in which I asked a simple question. Did women live
in greater fear at Harvard University or in Iran?
I posed this question during the height of the Lawrence Summers controversy
because the National Organization for Women had said volumes about Summer,
yet nothing on the plight of women in Iran who if raped can be whipped in
public, even executed. Why? Because under Islamic Sharia
law women who are raped are not looked upon as victims of a crime but rather
are looked upon as having brought disrepute and shame upon their family.
Of course, getting raped is not the only way for a woman to get in trouble
with the authorities in the Islamic Republic. Women can be arrested
for eating apples or licking ice cream cones. Why? Because the
mullahs liken such behavior to oral sex. Heaven help a woman who has
too many strands of hair visible from under her veil or applauds too loudly
at a concert.
However, over this past week in the run up to the Iranian Presidential elections,
we have seen unprecedented public displays of dissent from Iranian women.
At great personal risk to themselves and their families, women were out in
public holding signs such as “Freedom” and “Stop!! Bias Against Women.”
There is no doubt that this statement was spurred on by recent events in
both January’s election in Iraq and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, which
ended three decades of Syrian occupation. One also cannot
underestimate the willingness of the Bush Administration to stand with those
who stand for their freedom.
Yet it would be a mistake to attribute this public discontent to the wave
of democratization that has begun to take root in the Middle East.
Resentment towards the Iranian mullahs has been simmering below the surface
for many years. This resentment crosses generations. There is
the older generation that knew life under the Shah. Certainly, the
Shah was no democrat; however there was a time when Tehran was a city as
cosmopolitan as any in Europe. Indeed, there was a time
when both Tehran and Beirut were considered the Paris and Strasbourg of the
Middle East. Both cities were popular vacation spots for European tourists.
Iran was a relatively secular country where people lived in relative affluence.
It is a time now longed for more than a quarter century after the Islamic
Revolution. Then there are those Iranians under the age of 25 who have
never known any kind of freedom for themselves yet know of America -- the
very place they have been taught to hate from the cradle -- and look upon
America as the cradle of liberty.
This simmering resentment is captured extraordinarily in Azar Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Tehran -- A Memoir in Books.
Released in 2003, the book is an account of weekly classes that Nafisi held
in her home every Thursday with a group of female students that she had taught
over the years at the University of Allameh Tabatabai. This group would
discuss works from authors such as Austen, Fitzgerald, James and, especially,
Nabokov’s Lolita. You see, such books are banned in Iran because
they are deemed to be counterrevolutionary, decadent and too Westernized.
Nafisi’s students had to lie to their parents about their whereabouts and
activities lest they be turned over to the authorities. Remarkably,
Nafisi held these classes for two years without incident until Nafisi and
her family were granted permission to leave Iran in early 1997. Nafisi
is currently a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer of the Foreign Policy Institute
at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington, D.C.
Reading Lolita in Tehran also provides an account of life
before the Islamic Revolution, how Islamists and Communists aligned themselves
against the Shah, the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in France
and rise to power, how the Islamists then turned on the Communists and killed
them and anyone else they deemed insufficiently Islamic, the toll of the
Iran-Iraq war and the everyday absurdities of living in a totalitarian state.
Nafisi describes living in Iran as being “capricious as the month of April.”
Clearly she is not talking about slow start by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays:
Life
in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short
periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms.
It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance,
followed by a crackdown. Now, after a period of relative calm and so-called
liberalization, we had again entered a time of hardships. Universities
had once more become the targets of attack by the cultural purists who were
busy imposing stricter sets of laws, going so far as to segregate men and
women in classes and punishing disobedient professors.
A perfect
example of the capriciousness that exists is the fact that the man who was
the censor for the theater, then later became the censor for films and then
later the head of state run television….is blind:
Our
world under the mullahs’ rule was shaped by the colorless lenses of the blind
censor. Not just our reality but also our fiction had taken on this
curious coloration in a world where the censor was the poet’s rival in rearranging
and reshaping reality, where we simultaneously invented ourselves and were
figments of someone else’s imagination.
We
lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them
important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent
-- namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the
most private, were interpreted in political terms. The colors of my
head scarf or my father’s tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist
tendencies. Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the
opposite sex, clapping or whistling in public meetings, were likewise considered
Western and therefore decadent, part of the plot by imperialists to bring
down our culture.
Such
a place is dangerous enough to its own people. However, when such a
place has nuclear ambitions and a desire to use them one cannot help but
paraphrase Natan Sharansky: If a government does not respect the rights
of its own people how can one expect them to respect the rights of its neighbors?
With this in mind one might ask why many amongst the women protesters were
advocating a boycott of the Iranian Presidential elections? President
Bush put it succinctly in a statement on June 16th. “Power is in the
hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process
that ignores the basic requirements of democracy," said the President.
Iran has Presidential elections every four years, just like America.
However, unlike America, in Iran no candidate is authorized to run for office
unless approved by the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who succeeded
Khomeini after his death in 1989) through the Council of Guardians (re: the
Mullahs). The Supreme Leader through the Council of Guardians also
has veto power over any legislation passed by the Iranian Parliament.
Simply put, no man (never mind woman) can become President of Iran without
the approval of the Supreme Leader and the Mullahs. The popular vote
is nothing more than a sham.
Indeed, the man who will most likely become President of Iran is Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani. If he sounds familiar, he should. Rafsanjani
served as Iran’s President from 1989 to 1997. After Khomenei’s death,
Rafsanjani painted himself as a reformer. In 2005, Rafsanjani brushes
himself in the same manner. Yet Nafisi, her students and many women
in Iran “won’t be fooled again,” to quote The Who’s Pete Townshend:
Our
president, the powerful former speaker of the house, Hojatol-Islam Rafsanjani,
the first to earn the title of reformist, was the new hope, but he who called
himself the general of reconstruction and was nicknamed Ayatollah Gorbachev
was notorious for financial and political corruption and for his involvement
in terrorizing dissidents both at home and abroad. He did talk
about some liberalization of the laws -- again, as Manna reminded us, these
reforms meant that you could be a little Islamic, you could cheat around
the edges, show a bit of hair from under your scarf. It was like
saying you could be a little fascist, a moderate fascist or communist, I
added. Or a little pregnant, Nima laughingly concluded.
The result
of such moderation was that Sanaz and Mitra were not afraid to wear their
scarves more daringly, show a bit of hair, but the morality police also had
the right to arrest them. When they reminded the police of the president’s
words, the Revolutionary Guards would immediately arrest and jail them, hurling
insults against the president, his mother and any other son of a…who issued
such orders in the land of Islam. But the president’s liberalism, as
would later be the case with his successor, President Khatami, (who is leaving
office), stopped there. Those who took his reforms seriously paid a
heavy price, sometimes with their lives, while their captors went free and
unpunished. When the dissident writer Saidi Sirjani, who had
the illusion of presidential support, was jailed, tortured and finally murdered,
no one came to his assistance -- another example of the constant struggle
between the Islamic Republic of words and deeds, one that continues to this
day. Their own interests precede everything, Mrs. Revzan was fond of
reminding me. No matter how liberal they claim to be, they never
give up the Islamic façade: that’s their trademark. Who would
need Mr. Rafsanjani in a democratic Iran?
Well,
Mr. Rafsanjani only received 21% support of those who voted in Iran last
week. At this point, it is unclear what the turnout was for the vote.
What is clear is that there will be a runoff on June 24th between Rafsanjani
and Mahoum Ahmadinejad, the current mayor of Tehran, who is considered more
hardline than Rafsanjani. The liberal media in the West may be content
to portray Rafsanjani as a “moderate” or a “reformer.” However, for
most Iranians, choosing between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad is like choosing
between being hung or being beheaded. It will be interesting to see
how many Iranians are prepared to make any choice at all, as either will
govern with the blessings of Khameinei and the mullahs. Of course,
Iranians may choose to make another decision altogether. If so, America
will stand with them. In the meantime, there are undoubtedly scores
of groups of women in Iran who are coming together over Turkish coffee and
pastries to catch up on the adventures of The Great Gatsby, Emma and, of course, Lolita, all the while letting their hair down.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is available on Amazon.com.
Aaron Goldstein, a former member of the socialist New Democratic Party, writes poetry and has a chapbook titled Oysters and the Newborn Child: Melancholy and Dead Musicians. His poetry can be viewed on www.poetsforthewar.org.
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