Azar Nafisi

Professor and writer Azar Nafisi was born in 1955 in Tehran, Iran. Her father Ahmed Nafisi was the mayor of Tehran and her mother Nezhat Nafisi was one of the first women to serve on Iranian parliament. The Nafisi family had a passion for literature and exposed young Nafisi to stories of Persian classics during family walks and before bedtime. At an early age, Nafisi developed an appreciation for literature that would ultimately be the focus of her literary career

Nafisi was educated in Switzerland but returned to Iran when her father was imprisoned. She later attended the University of Oklahoma, earning a PhD in English and American Literature. At the University of Oklahoma, Nafisi joined the Iranian student movement, but was more interested in the opportunity to examine revolutionary writings such as Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Nafisi felt conflicted as a member of the Iranian student movement because she appreciated Western literature despite protesting against Western imperialism.

After obtaining her PhD and her fellowship at Oxford University, Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 and taught American literature at the University of Tehran. 1979 was a crucial time in Iranian history; it marked the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, an influential figure of the Islamic Revolution. His vision was for Iran to be ruled as an Islamic state. The veil was enforced for Iranian women and strict regulations were implemented in order for women to have conservative roles. Nafisi was enraged by the restrictions placed on women. She felt that the rules stripped women of their individuality. Being educated in the West, Nafisi was exposed to the political and personal freedoms of Western women, and growing up in pre-Revolutionary Iran, she had known women to have more freedom.

In Tehran, Nafisi taught Western classics such as The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice, books that were banned by the Iranian government because they contradicted the values of Islam. Some revolutionary students reacted negatively to the books she taught, believing that the characters acted immorally and justified the selfish views of Western civilization. In 1981, Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil. She taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University until she quit her teaching positions in 1995. She then formed a reading book group with several of her best female students where she secretly taught Western novels, such as Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Madame Bovary. Nafisi challenged her students to establish a connection between the novels and contemporary Iran. Nafisi's secret reading group was the inspiration for her critically acclaimed novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

Nafisi left Iran for the US in 1997. She wrote op-ed articles for publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Republic about the political relevance of literature and culture as well as human rights for Iranian women. Also, some of her articles focused on the relations between the United States and the Middle East and how people can avoid misconceptions of the Middle East portrayed by the West. In her article, “The Veiled Threat,” the cover story for the February 22nd 1999 issue of the New Republic, she criticizes the Iranian government for the harsh restrictions placed on women. She also talked about the importance of Iranian women historical figures and how the restrictions prevent Iranian women from having a history. Nafisi asserts that making the veil mandatory for women conflicts with their Islamic faith. “For some traditional women, the imposition of the veil was an affront to their religiosity—changing what had been a freely chosen expression of religious faith into a rote act imposed on them by the state. My grandmother was one such a woman. An intensely religious woman who never parted with her chador, she was nonetheless outraged at those who had defiled her religion by using violence to impose their interpretation of it on her grandchildren. ‘This is not Islam!' she would insist.” Nafisi presented her grandmother's testimonial as a rebuttal to those who believed that imposing the veil on women was an affirmation of Islam. She used this argument to point out that the extreme actions under Khomeini's rule were against the values of Islam.