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BOOKS: Author says she now has respect for book clubs

07:12 AM CST on Tuesday, March 28, 2006

By JEROME WEEKS / The Dallas Morning News

Reading Lolita in Tehran may be the ultimate "book club book." That could help explain why American readers kept a memoir about Iranian women debating Jane Austen on the best-seller lists for 114 weeks – an amazing run more typically associated with diet advice or conspiracy thrillers.

Azar Nafisi's memoir concerns the years her group of young Iranians secretly met to study Western novels, the kind of fiction that the Islamic Republic condemned. In this world, female solidarity, female self-expression and the pleasures of reading The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice put at risk the women's careers, even their lives. In this world, forming an ordinary book club became a dangerous, subversive act.

Dr. Nafisi – who will talk tonight at First United Methodist Church, courtesy of Arts & Letters Live – laughs at the idea that her book was consciously aimed at women or book clubs. What she heard while writing it, she recalls, was how no one would want to read about a tiny group of Middle Eastern intellectuals and their interest in "dead white authors."

"I didn't really know book groups at all," she says from Washington, D.C., where she teaches at Johns Hopkins' School for Advanced International Studies. "Yes, ours was a book group, but my idea of ordinary book groups was a very '50s one, fluffy ladies with nothing better to do."

Her ideas changed profoundly when she toured to promote Reading Lolita , Dr. Nafisi says. "I met so many intelligent, well-read, passionate people. And I learned how potent book groups can be."

In coming to Dallas, Dr. Nafisi is returning to old, affectionately remembered territory. In the '70s, she earned her doctorate in literature at the University of Oklahoma, writing her dissertation on the proletarian writers of the '30s, notably the now-forgotten Mike Gold, once considered more important than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"For me it was exciting to see you could not so easily categorize anyone," she says. Rather than a prairie-repressive, red-state cliché, she found Norman, Okla., to have "a wonderful mix of good, old-fashioned liberals and good, old-fashioned conservatives. And radicals, too."

While living there, Dr. Nafisi often came to Dallas, Houston and Austin because of the Iranian student movement. "It had sprouted in the most unlikely places."

The students were protesting America's support of the Shah of Iran, the dictator the U.S. had kept in power ever since installing him in 1953. Although the students were mostly Marxists or secular nationalists, they were so vehemently anti-Shah and anti-imperialist, she says, they eventually saw even the Ayatollah Khomeini as an ally.

"Looking back, how blind we all were," Dr. Nafisi says. "How dangerous politics becomes when you are against someone so strongly that it just becomes 'anyone but him.' "

But she adds in their defense, "Until the very last moment in 1979, many people thought that Khomeini would not retain power, that he would renounce it, like the pope, rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

Instead, what followed was a revolutionary regime of increasingly harsh Islamic fundamentalism. Women had to wear the veil in public. Western literature disappeared from bookstores. Franz Kafka was denounced as a Zionist author. Dr. Nafisi and other outspoken teachers either lost their jobs or quit. Moderate Iranians who questioned their country's war of attrition with Iraq were accused of being unpatriotic – and arrested.

Reading Reading Lolita, one can't help but hear occasional echoes of the angry religious-political debates that have flared in America over abortion, Terry Schiavo or our own war in Iraq.

But it's foolish to see such "moral equivalence," some have countered. There's a wide gulf between Islamic fundamentalists putting people to death for their ideas and, say, Christians advocating a ban on gay marriage.

True, there are differences, Dr. Nafisi says. "But Americans should not feel we are exempt." Religion, she says, becomes the first victim when it's used as an ideology, when the rhetoric ratchets up to legitimatize political actions.

"The inability to question yourself, the kind of intimidation that closes off thought – after a while, you just want to prove that you can't be questioned," she says. "You become like your enemy."

This is why reading fiction is a moral issue, Dr. Nafisi argues. It's the exercise of the imagination.

"The danger lies in a culture losing its ability to imagine anything different, anything other than itself," she says. "If you can't imagine, you can't empathize. And if you can't empathize, other people don't exist. They're never fully human."

In reading, we come to recognize nuance and complexity and individuality, she says. These are literature's other valuable lessons.

With Iran, Americans keep oscillating wildly between "hysteria and euphoria," she says. It's too simple, too blind to the country's history, too deaf to Islam's complexities.

It's all too common that when we hear news of another jihadist's brutalities or the mullahs advocating more repression, "people say, oh, this is the true culture of Islam. They don't know the great poets of Islam, but this, the violence, the stoning of women, this is Islam. It's like seeing all of Western culture in Adolf Hitler or slavery.

"Culture," she says, "is what people do, not what they're forced to do. It's not culture when they have to put a gun to people's heads."

E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com

Azar Nafisi speaks tonight

at 7:30 at First United Methodist Church, 1928 Ross Ave. To purchase tickets or for information, call 214-922-1219 or go to www.dallasmuseumofart.org.