Liberal Education Republic&the Imaginationof the AZAR NAFISI

SOME ASSUME that the only way academics can engage the politics of the day is FEATURED TOPIC by coming out of their ivory tower and protesting in front of the White House. But in conveying knowledge, the academy has a far more important and subversive way of dealing with po- litical issues. Knowledge provides us with a way to perceive the world. Imagina- If we manage to tive knowledge provides us with a way to see ourselves in the world, to relate to teach our students the world, and thereby, to act in the world. The way we perceive ourselves is re- flected in the way we interact, the way we take our positions, and the way we in- to be curious— terpret politics. not to take up our Curiosity, the desire to know what one does not know, is essential to genuine political positions, knowledge. Especially in terms of literature, it is a sensual longing to know but just to be through experiencing others—not only the others in the world, but also the others within oneself. That is why, in almost every talk I give, I repeat what curious—we will Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his students: curiosity is insubordination in its have managed purest form. If we manage to teach our students to be curious—not to take to do a great deal up our political positions, but just to be curious—we will have managed to do a great deal.

Cultural relativism No amount of political correctness can make us empathize with a woman who is taken to a football stadium in Kabul, has a gun put to her head, and is executed because she does not look the way the state wants her to look. No amount of po- litical correctness can make us empathize with a child who is starving in Darfur. Unless we evoke the ability to imagine, unless we can find the connection be- tween that woman or that child and ourselves, we cannot empathize with either of them. Although we cannot be in different parts of the world all of the time, we can experience the world through fiction, poetry, film, painting, music, through imaginative knowledge.

AZAR NAFISI is visiting professor and director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of ’s School of Advanced International Studies. She is author of Reading in : A Memoir in Books, winner of AAC&U’s Frederic W. Ness Book Award for 2004. Annual Meeting

6LIBERAL E DUCATION S UMMER 2006

FEATURED TOPIC Shakespeare himself, ifyouprickus,weall are but,rather, howalikeweare.To paraphrase tion, throughrecognizingnot howdifferentwe meet iscreatedthroughthe shock ofrecogni- and benefitfrom tives, evenneoconservativesallmightlove Democrats, independents,radicals,conserva- are fororagainst they the theater, to theyarenotaskedwhether are RepublicansorDemocrats.Whenpeoplego Shakespeare, itisirrelevantwhetherthey spaces thatarenotpartisan.Whenpeopleread also failtorecognizetheavailabilityofuniversal form ofdifferencewithoutconnecting.They the connection.Onecannotappreciateany American publicingeneral? the our policymakers,businesspeople,and colleges anduniversities,howdoesitaffect relativism, comefrom?Ifthisisallowedin correctness, thisparticularformofcultural come silent.Wheredoesthiscrudepolitical like itthisway,” thenwearecowed.We be- tell us,“donotdarecriticizeourculture,we girls attheageofnine,andaSaudiprincess we saythatIslamdoesnotmeanmarrying think hecouldimposehimselfuponus.Butif much confidenceinourselvesthatwedidnot wanted toshuthimup.Instead,wehadso ample, wedidnotgetsoinsultedthat whores becauseofthewaytheylook,forex- Khomeini saidthatallWestern womenare scending viewofotherpeople.WhenAyatollah themselves onothers.Itderivesfromaconde- as badthecolonialsactuallyimposing upon othersbymerelycriticizingthemisjust ourselves uponthem. withothersforthefearofimposing exchange It madeusworryaboutanyformofcritical a waytodivideourselvesamonglittleboxes. college campuses,culturalrelativismbecame became immediatelypoliticizedevenon it it asafocusforgainingknowledge,because But becausewedidnottreat those withwhomwedisagree. make usmoretolerantof our own.Itwassupposedto tures thataredifferentfrom celebrate andlearnfromcul- It wassupposedtomakeus posed tobeaprogressiveidea. 8L This nonpartisanspacewhere peoplecan One ofthethingsculturalrelativistsmissis To fearthatyoumightimposeyourself Cultural relativismwassup- IBERAL E DUCATION The GreatGatsby S UMMER the war. Republicans, 2006 . I canr memory isliterature memory best safeguard best safeguard that theonlything memory, I learned whenI I learned was very young was very ely uponismy and the fundamentalists’ imageofmycountryand my and Europe,Iwasshockedto findthatthe too. WhenIreturnedtothe UnitedStates always cherishedwerebecomingalien I had which Ihadbeen into the waywelooked.Suddenly, thereligion we felt,thewayexpressedourselves,and alien becauseofthewaywebelieved, me wereirrelevant. like religion, claimedthatthousandsofpeople name ofthatcountryanditstraditions of peoplehadcometomycountryand,inthe lic thatIdidnotappreciate,however. Agroup themselves. both cherishanddoubttheworld our studentscertainties,buttomake The essentialroleoftheacademyisnottogive makes usposeourselvesasquestionmarks. reason knowledgeissoimportantthatit we shouldneverfeeltoocomfortable.The thankful totheIslamicRepublicforthis, covered thathomewasnothome.Iamvery home. Yet assoonIwentbacktoIran,dis- United StatesandEngland,Ithoughtof Richard Wright—through greatliterature. Nathaniel Hawthorne,RalphEllison,and ,MarkTwain, EdgarAllanPoe, in America,wasthroughCharlesDickens, peace withmynewhomeinEngland,andlater best ithadtooffer. Similarly, thewayImade tried toconnectwithmylosthomethroughthe regain myhomethroughreadingthesepoets;I Rumi, Hafez,andForughFarrokhzad.Itriedto three bookswithmebyPersianpoets: When IleftIranattheageofthirteen,took the bestsafeguardformemoryisliterature. only thingIcanrelyuponismymemory, and none ofusiscompletelyguilty. pean civilization.Noneofusisexempt,and Stalinism—grew fromtheveryheartofEuro- expressions oftotalitarianism—fascismand After all,twoofthetwentiethcentury’s worst There wasoneaspectoftheIslamicRepub- During alltheyearsIspentlivingin I learnedwhenwasveryyoungthatthe for geographically orculturally. are confinedordetermined rights norterrorandfascism ther democracyandhuman all arejealous.Moreover, nei- bleeds. We allfallinlove;we or inNewOrleans,hismother son, whetheritisinBaghdad bleed. Ifyoukillsomebody’s born andthetraditions They regardedusas them FEATURED TOPIC

Azar Nafisi, Annual Meeting religion and my traditions was the image that States, because of its Christian background to, was accepted by people in the West. say, the Southern Baptists. But we do it with To talk of “the Muslim world” is to reduce ; we do it with Turkey. countries, cultures, and histories as vastly dif- In my country, the age of marriage for girls ferent as Malaysia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, has been reduced from eighteen to nine. Over Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco a hundred years ago, it had been raised first to to a single aspect, namely religion, and then thirteen and then to eighteen. Now it has to reduce that religion to a single aspect, been reduced again to nine. The Saudi namely fundamentalism. Yet, although Ger- princess tells Karen Hughes, the U.S. under- many, France, England, Sweden, and the secretary of state for public affairs, not to in- United States have far more in common than tervene in our culture. She tells her that Malaysia, Tunisia, Iran, Afghanistan, and nine-year-old girls like to be married to polyg- Turkey, we do not talk of “the Christian amous men three times their age who can also world.” Even as you hear every day on the air- rent as many women as they want for five waves that the United States was founded on minutes or for ninety-nine years. This is like Christianity, you are fighting against the fun- Americans in seventeenth-century Salem damentalist interpretation of Christianity saying that burning witches is a part of their that someone like Pat Robertson might wish culture, or Southern confederates saying that to give it. You do not reduce the United slavery is a part of theirs.

S UMMER 2006 LIBERAL E DUCATION 9 FEATURED TOPIC Annual Meeting Bible saysawoman’s place politicians andevenwomen—claimedthatthe discovered howmanypreachers—aswellas that slaverywasapprovedbytheBible.Ialso I learnedthatmanypreachersinherdaysaid way theylook,youmusttakethesideof be floggedevery want to there are onlytwowomen(and Saudi Arabiatoday change you—theneven will know—things that,onceyouknowthem, her writingforher. publicly. Herhusbandhadtotalkandread Stowe wenttoEngland,shecouldnottalk when thebest-sellingauthorHarrietBeecher 0L 10 From abiographyofHarrietBeecherStowe, If youbelievetherearethingsdonot IBERAL many morethanthat)whodonot E DUCATION S UMMER day becauseofthe is athome. 2006 if therearein In fact, those countriestoday. to lookandactbewherewomenarein eighteenth-century Americawhowanted women ineighteenth-centuryEnglandor those two her daughters-in-lawlookingthewaywedid. who alsotoleratedhergrandchildrenand meek those threemonths.Shewasadevout, my grandmotherrefusedtoleaveherhomefor women appearinpublicwithouttheirveils, Iran madeitmandatoryforthreemonthsthat her veil.WhenthefatherofformerShah controversy. Mygrandmotherneverremoved In Iran,theissueofveilcreatedmost Women inIran woman whonevertookoffherveilbut women. Therewerenotmany There are no When the Islamic Republic private spaces Western literature; where love made the veil mandatory, hun- in a totalitarian was not to be shown in movies dreds of thousands of Iranian because love for the party and for women went into the streets to society the leader came first. In Iran, protest. My grandmother took Othello’s suicide was cut from the their side. She did this because she believed in movie because it might depress the masses. the veil as a symbol of her faith. She believed The masses do not get depressed when they that if the state were to take over that symbol are stoned to death. That, they say, is our cul- and turn it into a political symbol of unifor- ture and cannot be helped. But the masses mity, then the veil would lose its meaning. In might get depressed when a British actor com- fact, many Muslim women in my country mits suicide on screen. This should also remind FEATURED TOPIC were against the imposition of the veil, not you of the Soviet Union, where the death because they did not believe in it but because of the swan in Swan Lake was cut because the they believe in choice. My mother, who be- masses might get depressed watching any- lieved in Islam and who went on pilgrimage thing that is not optimistic. Remember those during the Shah’s time, never wore the veil. Soviet paintings that depicted everybody smil- Who is to say she was not a Muslim? ing as they did harrowing work in the fields? You cannot argue with people’s religion. You should smile at all costs; you should be You cannot argue with the way people choose complicit in your oppression. to show their faith, as long as it does not in- Iran has had its own past confiscated. If you terfere with the freedoms of others. But you want to know the truth about Iran, you do not can argue against any state—be it the United go to Ayatollah Khomeini. You go instead to States of America or the Islamic Republic of Firdusi who, a thousand years ago and in op- Iran—that imposes religious values on its citi- position to the orthodox Islam that was forced zens. Indeed, it is your duty to argue in such upon his culture, wrote about the 2,500-year- cases. We are not fighting against the veil; old mythical history of Iran. He wrote in the we are fighting against the lack of freedom of pure Persian language in order to remind Ira- choice. If they genuinely believe in their reli- nians that, although they had lost their land, gion, then the women who wear the veil have they had not lost their language. You go to as much at stake in this fight as the women Hafez whose poetry explicitly criticizes hypo- who do not. critical clerics who flogged people in public That is the situation in my country after and drank wine in private seven hundred years more than a hundred years of struggle by Iran- ago. You go to Rumi, who says the place of ian women, Iranian intellectuals, and progres- prayer does not matter: it can be a mosque; sive clerics to create an open society. Before it can be a synagogue; it can be a church. In the 1979 revolution, Iranian women partici- Persian mystical poetry, the figure of the pated in all spheres of public life. Because beloved is the metaphor for God. If you have Iranian women had won that full participation not seen a Persian dancing, I recommend for themselves, the laws and the flogging and you find someone to do it for you properly. the jail and the repression did not work on I promise you, no style of Western dancing is them. That is why, after thirty years and de- as erotic or as sensual. spite the crazy president now in power, their The Iranian people do not resist their gov- skirts are getting shorter and shorter; their ernment through violence, by killing the scarves are becoming much more colorful; officials or asking for a violent overthrow. their lipstick is becoming much more brilliant. The Iranian people resist by being themselves. In Iran, the way women look has become a The fight is existential, not political. It is semiotic sign of their position on the state. about refusing to become what others want to shape you into. The triumph of art Novels celebrate the integrity of the indi- There are no private spaces in a totalitarian vidual. Lolita is not about the celebration of a society. The situation in Iran should remind pedophile’s life, as some critics would like to you of the Soviet Union, where Hemingway think. On the very first page of the novel, and Faulkner and Sartre and Camus were Humbert says that Lolita had a precedent. banned because they represented decadent In his childhood, he fell in love with Annabel

S UMMER 2006 LIBERAL E DUCATION 11 Annual Meeting FEATURED TOPIC ple likeLolita orEmmaBovary. Thatisthe nation overtheshabbyreality thatkillspeo- cry. We celebrate thetriumphofthatimagi- of theworsttragedies,weread onevenaswe writing. WhenaNabokovor aFlaubertwrites enjoying itforthesensualpleasures ofthe but bygoinginsideofitanddefendingit, out ofaworkartisnotbyfindingmessages used inthatway. Thewaytogetsomething Lolita isme”).Aworkofartshouldnotbe ture. Itisnotaboutfindingparallels(“ah, cause theyimmediatelyunderstand my feministfriendsreactto 2L 12 act to who camefromtraditionalfamilies,donotre- room cryingbutthencomesbacktocryonhis the firstnightherapesher, sherunsoutofthe high fever. Hegleefullyremindsusthat,on her everysinglenight,evenwhenshehasa himwouldgivethelicensetorape seduce seduce him—asifthefactthatshetriedto looked likeamoviestar, hesaysshetriedto Lolita’s smallchildishaspirations.Becausehe could havebecome. her potential.We canneverknowwhatLolita wants hertobeuponanddeprivesof of frozentime.Heimposeshisimagewhathe He tries,hesays,tokeepLolitainanisland is thathedeprivesLolitaofherchildhood. tions attheendofnovel, sees. Hiscrime,ashemen- every livinglittlegirlthathe age ofhisdeadloveupon time, andheimposeshisim- torial mindsetsarefrozenin frozen intime,asmostdicta- consummated. Humbertis Lee, andthatlovewasnever Like theAyatollahs, Humbertvulgarizes IBERAL Lolita E DUCATION the waysomecriticsorof S UMMER wore theveiland even thosewho desires. torted dreamsand ing toone’s owndis- and shapeitaccord- being’shuman life confiscate another sism, oftryingto demnations of most poignantcon- This is nowhere elsetogo. shoulder. Shehas If mystudents, Lolita 2006 one ofthe , itisbe- human beingswhen from AbuGhraibor from the struc- we see pictures we seepictures We losehopein being beheaded about hostages when wehear solip- of allgreatliterature. human dignity. Theindividualisattheheart and RothMorrison,celebratesindividual Stearns andSmollettFieldingtoBellow ity: individualdignity. Everygreatnovel,from celebrate thehighestachievementofhuman- or toretainourprideashumanbeingsis stained. Theonlywaytoretrieveourdignity about hostagesbeingbeheaded.We areall pictures fromAbuGhraiborwhenwehear We losehopeinhumanbeingswhenwesee just inourexecutioners,butourselvesalso. are senttoovens,weallloseourfaith—not people’s goldteethareremovedbeforethey goes todeathbravely. tion camp,remembersFlaubertorDanteand shtam atdeath’s doorinaSovietconcentra- Nazi concentrationcamp,oranOsipMandel- That iswhyaPrimoLeviatdeath’s doorina peoplewhowanttolivewithdignity.ordinary ature enablesustocelebratethecourageof committed againstawholepopulation.Liter- people whoopposeitandarenowinjails.Itis Itisnotjustcommittedagainst totalitarianism. What aboutAmerica?We need American values had toimagine theimpossiblewaya had tomakesomethingout of nothing.They thatbreaksourhearts.Thesepeople Jefferson Luther King,andeventhe slave-owning poetry ofLincoln,Frederick Douglass,Martin day whenhegavethataddress. Butitisthe was highlypolitical;peopleweredyingevery Independence. Lincoln’s GettysburgAddress etic ofalldeclarationsistheDeclaration especially trueofthiscountry. The mostpo- could imaginewhatdidnotexist,andthatis stop thinkingaboutit. you canfinditinmostuniversities,then be forbiddeninorderforittocelebrated.If but here?Manypeoplesaythat and intheSovietUnionNaziGermany, At timeswhenbrutalityissohideousthat Every democracywasbuiltbythosewho their ownimaginations. turning usintofigmentsof to imposeanimageuponus, minded usofthemenwhotry this countrydonot. many high-mindedcriticsin mediately understandwhat triumph ofart.Mystudentsim- This istheworstcrimeof Lolita Lolita Lolita needs to in Iran re- writer looks at a blank page and imagines that K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award he or she can create the impossible. In More Die of Heart Break, Bellarosa Con- nection, and Deans’ December, Saul Bellow The K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award recognizes graduate brings out the two worlds, the totalitarian students who are committed to developing academic and civic world and the democratic world. He worries responsibility in themselves and others, and who show exemplary about his Chicago and about the America he promise as future leaders of higher education. The awards are loves so much. With totalitarian societies like sponsored by K. Patricia Cross, professor emerita of higher educa- Iran or Sudan or Cuba, some of us immediately tion at the University of California–Berkeley, and are administered see the brutality and condemn it. But, as Bellow

by AAC&U. Following are the recipients of the 2006 award: FEATURED TOPIC knew, there is a different kind of problem in a country like the United States. We survived the Derek Cabrera, education, Cornell University ordeal of the Holocaust, but will we survive Michael Coyle, justice studies, Arizona State University the ordeal of freedom? The sufferings of free- Emily Fairchild, sociology, Indiana University dom have to be counted, he said; more die of heartbreak than of Chernobyl. Molly Beth Kerby, educational administration, educational leader- What Bellow meant was that, in the West, ship, and organizational development, University of Louisville we are threatened with atrophy of feeling. A Diane Nutbrown, inorganic chemistry, University of country that has lost its love for its poetry and Wisconsin–Madison for its soul is a country that faces death. That Regina Praetorius, human resource education, Louisiana is what we face today in our culture of sleeping State University consciousness, where religion and American values are discussed through sound bites. Victor Raymond, sociology, Iowa State University I want to end with one image from one great Joan Shin, language, literacy, and culture, University of book. During the 2004 presidential election, Maryland, Baltimore County both parties talked about American values. It Ian Stewart, chemistry, University of California–Berkeley really broke my heart the way each was vying to become more like the other just to win the Nominations for the 2007 awards are due September 22, 2006. election. At the time, a scene came to my mind (For more information, see www.aacu.org.) Recipients of the and I have been talking and writing about it award will be introduced to the AAC&U membership at the 2007 ever since. It is the scene from Huckleberry Finn annual meeting and will deliver a presentation on “Faculty of the where Huck contemplates whether or not to Future: Voices from the Next Generation.” give Jim up. Huck had been told in Sunday school that if you do not give up a runaway slave, you go straight to hell. And he is genuinely worried; he thinks he will go to hell. So he writes a let- ter saying that Jim had escaped. But then he imagines Jim in the morning, and he imagines Jim in the evening, and he imagines Jim as Jim was with him. When he remembers his experiences with Jim, Huck and Jim become one. Huck realizes that his true ally is Jim— not the horrible brat Tom Sawyer, who im- poses his dream of romance upon Jim’s reality. Huck says, “I don’t care if I go to hell.” He tears up the letter and never thinks about it again. When we talk about American values, we should go to F. Scott Fitzgerald or Zora Neal Hurston. We should go to Huck and say with him, “I don’t care if I go to hell.” ■

To respond to this article, e-mail [email protected], with the author’s name on the subject line. K. Patricia Cross with winners of the 2006 award