03/27/03

As the world seems to further divide itself into them and us, writer Azar Nafisi reminds her readers of the folly of thinking in black and white.

The Iranian-born scholar, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, resists easy labels. She speaks impeccable English with a moderately thick accent. Her parents were Muslim, but also liberal and financially well-off. She loves Persian poetry, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. She has been known to listen to Jim Morrison and the Doors.

Even her age slides into shadow. In a recent interview, Nafisi said she was "almost 50," while The New York Times puts her at 52, and public records state she was born in 1946.

Perhaps the most interesting contradiction of Nafisi's life concerns the years she spent living under Islamic rule in Iran. Nafisi loathed the regime that closed bookstores and movie theaters, that forced her to wear a veil in public and denied her the right to shake the hand of a male student in her literature course at the University of Tehran.

Yet she doesn't denounce the 18 years of oppression. On the contrary, she expresses repeated gratitude for her experiences in Iran. Otherwise, she says, "I would never understand what freedom meant."

She shares this understanding in "Reading Lolita in Tehran" (Random House, $23.95), a new memoir that's as timely as it is well-written. As Americans continue to rediscover the pleasures of discussing books in groups, Nafisi writes of the women who met in secret at her home in Tehran to talk about literature.

And as the events of Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq inspire a hunger for a better understanding of the Middle East, Nafisi's friendly voice imparts a nuanced picture of the various faces of Islam.

At the start of an interview about the book, Nafisi laughs and says, "You're not going to ask me about Iraq, are you?" Then she launches into an explanation of how friends in Iran are reacting to "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

"When you live under a totalitarian society, unfortunately, you start reacting to events in light of what would happen to your life. A lot of people in Iran think that if the U.S. is successful in Iraq, that would help change the regime in Iran," she says. "Yet Iran is very different from Iraq. It has a very dynamic movement for democracy."

This was less the case in 1979, when Nafisi, who just had completed studies at the University of Oklahoma, returned to a country in turmoil and ended up teaching literature at the University of Tehran. The Shah was out; the Ayatollah Khomeini was in, and with him came a vision of a Muslim state that would denounce Western values and trade on anti-American passions.

This Iran was little like the intellectually progressive one of Nafisi's youth, and she was wholly unprepared for the Islamic Republic's social restrictions.

"I had not imagined a political life for me at all. I just wanted to teach and write," she says. "Many people felt Mr. Khomeini would . . . leave the affairs of the state to the statesmen."

Her first year as a teacher was marked by a dramatic shift away from the intellectual freedoms she always had taken for granted and toward a culture so restrictive that most Western novels became verboten. As supplies of foreign literature started to dry up, Nafisi stopped one day to grab copies of favorites at the bookstore. When she ran out of money, the shop owner bagged up those she couldn't afford and held them for her.

Life was especially difficult for women, who were sometimes rounded up and forced to undergo gynecological exams to ascertain whether they were virgins. They could be detained for improperly wearing the veil. They watched husbands and brothers retain a level of personal freedom, while the women themselves were shoved into hiding.

"Our life was so ruled by unpredictability," Nafisi says. "You wake up in the morning, and you don't know when you leave the house if you'll be coming back to it. And that's not because you're a terrorist or a member of an underground organization. It's because you're a woman."

Nafisi rebelled by refusing to wear the veil. She lost her job at the University of Tehran, though she always has remained a teacher, of one kind or another.

She came to the United States in 1997 and immediately began to formulate ideas for the book. Her biggest problem was how to make compelling characters of the seven women in her group while protecting them from retribution. She gave them new names and changed details to an extent that they might not recognize themselves. Still, she says, she remained "faithful to the truth."

The women showed courage, both in reading banned books and by performing small acts of rebellion. Some dared to wear lipstick. Some let a few stray hairs peek out from beneath the veil.

"They were not like the intellectual elite, who sometimes get advantages out of their fights," Nafisi says. "They were simply fighting for their right to be themselves."

The memoir's title is more than nicely rhythmic word play. Among the books Nafisi's group read and argued over was "Lolita," Nabokov's deeply psychological novel about a middle-aged man's seduction of a 12-year-old girl. Nafisi says she is "obsessed with Nabokov because he writes about tyrannies." She and the group found salvation and community not only with each other but with fictional characters who took on the dimension of reality.

"When I went back to Iran, I realized there was such an amazing wisdom in my dad putting my first book in my hands," Nafisi says. "Even during the times I was not teaching, the fact that I could open these books and go into this other world . . . ." Her voice trails off for a moment. "I'm sure everybody finds their way of survival."

These days, Nafisi lives with her husband and children in Maryland. Her life is a collection of cultural influences, East and West. But she has staked out a territory of the mind, where the most comforting sound is her ongoing conversation with the likes of Humbert Humbert, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Miller and Emma Bovary.

If she is never completely at home outside her homeland, she is never entirely away from home, either. Nabokov, she says, wrote about a "portable world."

"I see my future in a portable world," she says. "I have completely dissolved and vanished into the world of books."