Azar Nafisi
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Azar Nafisi,
Ph.D. () (born December 1, 1955){{Citation needed|date=October 2009}} 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|Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) has gained a great deal of public attention and has been translated into 32 languages. It was on the
New York Times Bestseller list for 117 weeks, 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 also led to controversy about Nafisi's alleged connections to
neoconservatism and
colonialism.
(3) She moved to the United States in the last year of her high school career (citation needed). 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. She states that in 1981 she was no longer allowed to teach at the University of Tehran because she refused to wear the mandatory
Islamic veil, and did not resume teaching until 1987.
(4)Time in Iran
{{Refimprove|section|date=November 2008}}Having witnessed the
Iranian revolution and the subsequent rise to power of the
Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi soon became restless with the 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
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Henry James and
Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.
(5)When asked by an interviewer in 2003 if there was "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)Speaking to a crowd of over 1,400 people packed into
George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium on September 12, 2009 Dr. Azar Nafisi, best-selling author;
Shohreh Aghdashloo, days before winning her Emmy; and Dr. Dwight Bashir, Associate Director for Policy at the
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, added their voices to those concerned about
human rights in Iran and the
persecution of Bahá'ís in Iran.
(7)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."
(9)(10)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."
(11) In a critical article 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."
(12)Nafisi tells us in her memoirs that when studying in the U.S. she participated in the radical student movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and was a vocal opposer of the Shah's regime. In fact, she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on socialist critic
Mike Gold and the proletarian writers of the 1930s. So it is ironical that her detractors accuse her of a neo-conservative bias.
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).
References
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[The Stephen Barclay Agency]
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[Yale University Office of Public Affairs]
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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.[BBC 2004 Interview with Nafisi Retrieved August 11, 2006]
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[The Steven Barclay Agency is Azar Nafisi's Official Agent for Speaking Engagements]
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["The Fiction of Life" Interviews May 7, 2003]
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Work
Nafisi left Iran on June 24, 1997 and moved to the United States, where she wrote (Reading Lolita in Tehran|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.[Freedom House: Board of Trustees]
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[{{Citation | title = Azar Nafisi, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Dwight Bashir Join Swelling Chorus in Support of Iranian Baha'is| newspaper = Bahá'í Community of DC,News & Events| publisher = Bahai Faith, Washington DC | pages = | year = 2009 | date = 2009-09-12 | url =weblink | accessdate = 2009-09-26}}]
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[The Guardian: Conflict and catchphrases]
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[Reading Lolita at Columbia]
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[ Boston Globe , Women and Islam, by Cathy Young, The Boston Globe , October 23, 2006 weblink]
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[Richard Byrne, "A Collision of Prose and Politics]
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[IngentaConnect: Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran]
External links
Critical
آذر نفیسیAzar Nafisiアーザル・ナフィースィーAzar NafisiНафиси, АзарAzar Nafisi
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