Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008. She has held several academic leadership roles at universities such as Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Oxford. After her emigration, she became a prominent writer, known best for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which topped The New York Times Best Sellers list and remained on it for over two years. In Reading Lolita, Nafisi recounts her experience teaching censored Western literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

On a Thursday morning in September of 1995, Azar Nafisi gathered seven of her best students into her home to begin a private class on Western classics that were censored by the government. The women, hailing from different positions and backgrounds, gathered together out of a shared devotion to literature. In contrast to the dreariness and tedium of their public lives, they were able to cast off their public selves as they entered this shared space. Shedding their veils and exhibiting more of their individuality and flair, these women sought a life of the mind and a greater vocabulary by which to understand their world.

All of them were connected through the University of Allameh Tabatabai, where Nafisi taught for a few years. In the face of increasing pressure from government officials and new university restrictions, Nafisi resigned from her job, though it took nearly two years for university officials to accept her resignation. In their minds, it was not her choice when and where she should occupy her time. The hawkish monitoring (and sometimes execution) of university faculty, the fear of contrarian ideas, and the redacting of texts in Iran prompted Nafisi’s flight from formal academia. She wished to pursue an alternative, freer means of learning—without government oversight or lackadaisical students who cared little for English literature. Nafisi chose to create a sacred space, a world of her own, where she could explore the stories withheld from her students and share them freely.

Pursuing literature in this way was not solely an escape, but a form of resistance by which these women were able to step outside of their culture and critique it. In the face of their totalitarian government—which created “an atmosphere of perpetual dread”—they sought a new way forward through authors like Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen.

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The reading group operated in a culture that juxtaposed the censor against the poet. Both reshaped and rearranged reality, but while the poet was guided by truth, the censor was driven by ideology. As the women sought out their identities, they were being identified and formed in the eyes of the censor’s imagination. The pressures of the state eroded the barrier between public and private, causing political ideology to spill over into every aspect of private life. Every gesture, word, and event had a political significance, and political significance became the totalizing feature of life in Tehran.

Against the regime’s imposed identity, these women found a common desire to retain their personalities and histories. To this end, they found in the story Lolita a narrative and a character that framed their experience well. Lolita is the tale of a young girl imprisoned by her captor-guardian Humbert who lied and killed to take Lolita for himself. Beyond Humbert’s perversity and the evil he openly narrates through the text, the story reveals how one person can confiscate or hollow out the life of another. Humbert defends his actions by idealizing Lolita as his lost childhood love. Similarly, the model of the Islamic woman imposed upon Nafisi and her students reflected an idealized figment that alienated their personalities and disavowed any responsibility to their plight.

One never encounters Lolita as a character in her own right. Humbert leaves wisps and hints in his monstrous narrative, but Lolita herself is a shadow, unable to present herself or speak on her own behalf. Likewise, these women of Tehran were in general robbed of their life stories, pressured to be marionettes in a show of Islamic piety and modesty. Their resistance, like Lolita’s, must be in fits and starts. In the smaller pleasures of the fictional worlds they encountered, the women were able to glimpse a vulnerable yet possible life of individuality in their minds.

It was common for Nafisi’s group to photocopy famous Western texts from one or two copies the group had been able to secure. By the mid-90s, the literary culture in Iran was heavily regulated by the government censors. The scarcity of uncensored texts reflected the impoverishment of Iran as it was subjugated to the Islamic Republic’s regressive vision of Islam.

When this government first began its work in the late 1970s, things were much different. Nafisi began her teaching career at the University of Tehran in 1979, just as the new Islamic government was asserting its power. It did so by claiming the university as the site of weekly prayers. Recognizing the university as a key cultural institution, the government claimed this cherished site in order to purify it from the corruptions of Western ideology. Once a week, a clergyman would stand, armed with word and weapon, giving political commentary in the form of a sermon.

The situation was initially volatile as the government sought to stamp out opposition parties. While this unfolded across the 80s and into the 90s, the government’s presence at the university prompted continual meetings, demonstrations, and protests from various ideological groups. It became common for students to skip their classes to further their political agendas. In an environment such as this, education itself was displaced by ideological formation.

Alongside the government’s enforced “morality” in key public arenas, silent coups occurred in the markets, as increasing numbers of bookstores were shut down. The flow of ideas into Iran was strictly controlled, and foreign language books in particular were heavily restricted and virtually eradicated from general consumption. Books that came from America were especially poisonous, the new leaders stated, because America is the source of materialism, Satan’s primary instrument for corrupting Islam.

Being a nation of Islam, the Iranian government enforced strict moral standards and executed “dangerous elements” who would not comply. Removing corruption entailed obliterating political dissidents and Western books side by side. As the restrictions upon universities strengthened, Nafisi noted the way that zealous Muslims would repudiate literature for depicting immoral characters and actions.

In reading The Great Gatsby, one can easily see the moral issues at play. Adultery, lust, greed, pride, and vanity are all present and in some cases predominant within specific characters. Yet at the same time, to reduce these stories down to vices and virtues would not be a story, but a moral dictum for or against certain figures. Such was the problem that emerged in Nafisi’s classes. Overly pious students decried Western literature as decadent, satanic, and worthless for their instruction. The presence of adultery and other vices in these texts required the removal of this American rubbish.

Much of studying literature is understanding the way that narrative formats, especially the novel, probe beneath the surface of human action. It is one thing to indict Gatsby as an adulterer and his love Daisy as a murderer. But to truly understand Fitzgerald’s novel is to grapple with, amongst other things, how any type of single-minded obsession is ultimately self-destructive. 

Criticizing the American dream as decadent and immoral is a shallow remark that dismisses the complexity of human life. Gatsby embodies the hard problems that arise when one attempts to single-mindedly bring one’s ideals into reality. Whether ideals of love and success or religion and righteousness, Fitzgerald emphasizes that challenges always come that can make dreams perish on contact or transform them into commensurate nightmares.

Much of the appeal of great literature is a compelling protagonist, someone who stands out in a crowd thanks to their virtue, ambition, and poise. Oftentimes a story reminds us that a good protagonist is not always a hero of epic proportions, but rather a steadfast person trying to seek his or her own path to a good life.

In war-torn Iran, where missile strikes punctuated days, no one imagined a grand savior wiping out the current regime and seeking swift peace. It was the little entrenchments, the steady resistance of the soul to evil that made one heroic. In her refusal to compromise her courses while teaching, Nafisi was committed to the belief that her integrity was more valuable than making life easier or happier.

In many ways, Henry James wrote a protagonist in a similar position. Catherine Sloper reverses expectations by not being brilliant, tragic, poetic, or beautiful. The antagonists in the book claim these adjectives, but Catherine has compassion, unlike her enemies. Her compassion makes her gullible to the point of personal hardship at the hands of her loved ones. She is not an infallible hero, steadily striding toward her goal. Rather she is a young woman, challenged in her very heart as to what kind of person she will be. As her story unfolds, her indomitability confounds her enemies, who cannot fathom her principled commitment to care for those who scorn her.

Though it takes Catherine time and heartbreak to gain the wisdom she needs to stand up to her villains, she exhibits growth. The villains wither away. Ultimately, she becomes a prime example of the modern novelistic hero. Catherine defends her integrity in the face of a world that runs on compromisable identities. She finds an alternative way to live in a world that sets different expectations.

Most importantly, she doesn’t achieve happiness. Her growth undoubtedly makes her a stronger and wiser person, but it comes with heartache and loss. In her humility, she gained victory, but not happiness. Instead of becoming happy in the world, Catherine settles within herself, becoming more whole. 

This is the model of modern heroism that inspired Nafisi as well. In defense of her own integrity, Nafisi maintained her work as a teacher, leading others toward the wisdom and virtue she found in literature.

As the burdens of living in the Islamic Republic of Iran increased, Nafisi and her students continually used literature to furnish their hope—their hope of a better day, a better Iran, or even a better place for them as women. For Nafisi especially, who had already attended graduate school in England and America and experienced political freedom, hope led her beyond the borders of Iran. Most of her female students found the same hope through literature, having read the stories of great American authors who possessed liberties only dreamt of in Iran.

Eventually, Nafisi ended her secret Thursday class when she returned to the U.S. in 1997. Though she was torn between her homeland and her call to freedom, remaining in Iran was an increasingly dangerous proposition. The regime of the day reduced the mind through ideology, and crushed one’s spirit through indiscriminate torture and murder. Through literature, the women in the secret class had learned to nurture their own sense of self. They articulated beliefs through their readings, cultivated dispositions from their beliefs, and from their dispositions, found hope for a life free of oppression.

Much of their despair was due to this division in their identities between the public and the private, the political and the personal. The West, and specifically America, offered them fresh air and space to be themselves, not the model Islamic woman they were forced to be. Yet against an overidealized hope that made America into a promised land, Nafisi and the others were tempered by the same authors who nourished their desire for freedom. Through modern fiction, one is not only set free from the present, but also shown the tribulations and triumphs that affect all people, in every time and place. In the end, the hope these women found was not merely in changing their geography, but in bringing Iran with them. Rather than escape from their past, Nafisi and her students learned to inhabit a broader world that contained more stories than their own.

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