About Azar Nafisi: Azar Nafisi is an Iranian writer and professor of English literature. She has resided in the United States since 1997 and became an American citizen in 2008.
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic...
You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.
America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a...
Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any...
The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.
Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job.
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsessi...
Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.
I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of...
I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.
My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the...
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
