Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran 181

comparative american studies, vol. 6, No. 2, June 2008, 179–189

Reading Azar Naﬁ si in Tehran Seyed Mohammed Marandi University of Tehran, Iran

Over the past few years, partially as a result of the success of Azar Nafi si’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, a cluster of memoirs have been written by members of the Iranian diaspora. Almost all of them become deeply enmeshed in the politics of rendering Iran from a transnational perspective. Hence, in these memoirs, representation is regularly interwoven with other aims and pro- jections, which militate against accuracy. In this article, an attempt will be made to show that Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of one who has ‘Westernized’ her outlook; Nafi si constantly confi rms what orientalist representations have regularly claimed: the backwardness and inferiority of Mus- lims and Islam. This article will attempt to show that Nafi si has produced gross misrepresentations of Iranian society and Islam and that she uses quotes and references which are inaccurate, misleading, or even wholly invented. keywords Azar Nafi si, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Iran, Memoirs, Diaspora, Orientalism, Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

One important aspect of Said’s Orientalism is that it explores the methods through which ‘the Other’ was constructed by the West as its barbaric, despotic, and inferior opposite or alter ego. This ‘orient’ is a type of surrogate and underground version of the West or the western ‘self’ (Macfi e, 2002: 8). What may be even more signifi cant is that through its position of domination, the West is even able to tell the ‘truth’ to members of non-western cultures about their past and present condition, as the westerners are capable of representing the Orient more ‘authentically’, ‘scientifi cally’, and ‘objectively’ than the Orient can itself. Such a ‘truthful’ representation not only aids the colonizer or imperialist in justifying their actions, but it also serves to weaken the resistance of ‘the Other’, as it changes the way in which ‘the Other’ views itself. Although this discourse is generated in the ‘West’, Said argues, its infl uence is so powerful that it often has signifi cant impact on discursive practices in the ‘Orient’ as well. The Other may come to see himself and his surroundings as inferior or even barbaric. At the very least it can create a major crisis in the consciousness of the Other as it clashes with powerful discursive practices and ‘knowledges’ about the world. Eurocentricism, as a result, infl uences, alters, and even helps produce ‘Other’ cultures.

One signifi cant trend in recent decades within orientalist discourse is the emergence of an indigenous orientalism that can be seen in the works of some scholars and thinkers. These writers are sometimes referred to as ‘captive minds’, ‘brown sahibs’, or ‘Orientalized Orientals’, a concept which is somewhat similar to what Malcolm X would call the ‘house Negro’ (1963; quoted in Rudnick, Smith, and Rubin, 2006: 123). These local orientalists are defi ned by their intellectual bondage to and dependence on the West. A captive mind is not uncritical; however, it is for the most part critical on behalf of the West. The ‘Orientalized Oriental’ is one who may reside in either the ‘East’ or ‘West’, but spiritually fi nds its sustenance in the West. Such a person is the non-westerner who makes himself principally in the image of the West. Its history, experiences, movements, and expectations, for such a person, are more understandable and satisfying than anything that exists in the East. An ideal example of such a colonial surrogate is Azar Nafi si, who confi rms what orientalist representations have regularly claimed, the backwardness and inferiority of Muslims and Islam. She could be taken as a prime example of the Iranian intellectual comprador, a member of the Gharb-zadeh (a term made current by Jalal Ali-Ahmad, the renowned Iranian critic and intellectual, which could be rendered in English as westernized or ‘westomaniac’) intelligentsia, rather than an intellectual. In her supposed memoir of life in Iran, Reading Lolita in Tehran, she displays an extraordinary amount of contempt towards anything that has to do with Islam. This is at least partially linked to the fact that her family was a part of the country’s elite during the brutal Pahlavy dynasty. Both her parents were installed as high-ranking offi cials in Iran at a time when the American-backed Shah oversaw the implemen- tation of brutal measures against any form of dissent in the country. She is from an extremely wealthy family that benefi ted immensely from its links with the Shah. In the book she calls the Shah’s last prime minister, a very ‘democratic-minded and farsighted’ person (p. 102),1 even though during his brief premiership before the regime’s overthrow, thousands of people taking part in demonstrations throughout the country in support of Ayatollah Khomeini were killed on the streets. She was raised and educated in Europe and the United States and she shows a clear bias throughout the work in favor of anyone who is western educated. She speaks of her ‘sophisticated French-educated friend Leyly’ (p. 265) while her magician uses ‘his British training’ when reasoning with her (p. 281). Nafi si sees salvation for Iranians as possible through English literature, western thought and values, a western education, and even views a green card as ‘a status symbol’ (p. 285). She reminds one of the central character of V. S. Naipaul’s Mimic Men, who ‘pretend [. . .] to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new’ (Naipaul, 1967: 146); she is a true mimic woman. She thinks a great deal ‘about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ (p. 281), which is, signifi cantly, one of the most famous phrases in the United States Declaration of Independence. Her true love was Ted who ‘gave me Ada, in whose fl yleaf he had written: To Azar, my Ada, Ted’ (p. 84). Her hero is Henry James who, as she points out, wrote ‘war propaganda’ in 1914–15 and appealed for America ‘to join the war’ (p. 214). Accord- ing to Nafi si, James ‘had endless admiration for the simple courage he encountered, both in the many young men who went to war and in those they left behind’ (p. 214). READING AZAR NAFISI IN TEHRAN 181

Ironically, throughout the book she describes Iranians who did the same thing, during the war which Saddam Hussain and his western allies imposed on Iran, as fanatics and zealots. Naﬁ si even claims that Iranians are in essence different from Americans, thus repeating claims made by orientalists over the centuries.

We in ancient countries have our past — we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. (p. 109) When the favorite uncle of Yassi, a disciple of Nafi si’s, who lives in the United States, comes to Iran for a vacation, he puts new ideas into the girl’s head. He is unlike anyone else in the family and has a very positive infl uence on Yassi: ‘He was patient, attentive, encouraging and at the same time a bit critical, pointing out this little fl aw, that weakness’ (p. 270). His exceptional personality and moral infl uence is clearly linked to the fact that he lives in the United States. The superior westernized male benevolently puts ‘ideas into Yassi’s head’ (p. 270) in order to raise her mind to western standards.

Now he advised her to continue her studies in America. Everything he told Yassi about life in America — events that seemed routine to him — gained a magical glow in her greedy eyes. (p. 270) In part, Naﬁ si’s pride in her own father, who went to prison for allegedly embezzling public funds as the mayor of Tehran, seems to be because of his links with the West.

[. . .] I had seen a large color photograph of him in Paris Match, standing by General de Gaulle. He was not with the Shah or any other dignitary — it was just Father and the General [. . .] I learned later that the General had taken a special liking to him after my father’s welcoming speech, which was delivered in French and fi lled with allusions to Great French writers such as Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. De Gaulle chose to reward him with the Legion of Honor. (p. 45) Of course, like her father, Nafi si has also been well rewarded for her work by the neo-conservatives among others, because of the way it sits comfortably with contem- porary anti-Iranian politics in the United States and the ‘West’ in general (see Rowe, 2007). The success of this book has had other benefi ts as well, as it has led to the emergence of a whole genre of mediocre memoirs, many of which are by Iranian women living in the United States or other western countries. Many of these memoirs, like Nafi si’s, bring up the whole orientalist trope of the veil, which is now being perpetuated by ‘native’ women. In her attempts to ‘liberate’ the minds of young Iranians, Nafi si uses the work of nineteenth-century English authors such as Jane Austen, despite the fact that it is widely acknowledged that nineteenth-century English literature is profoundly tied to colonialism. Signifi cantly, one of Jane Austen’s major works, Mansfi eld Park, is viewed by many critics as a text deeply implicated in colonialism. In this novel Sir Thomas Bertram’s absence from Mansfi eld Park, because of the need to manage his Antiguan plantation, leads to moral decay amongst the young people left in the inadequate care of two women, his wife, Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris. Edward Said argues that the position of Sir Thomas Bertram at home can only be understood with 182 SEYED MOHAMMED MARANDI reference to his position as a plantation owner on the Caribbean island of Antigua. His estate in ‘civilized’ England is supported and sustained by another estate that is maintained by ‘uncivilized’ slave laborers thousands of kilometers away (Said, 1994). In addition, when Sir Thomas returns to Mansfi eld Park, he quickly re-establishes order with a self-righteousness that, one can assume, betrays his manner towards his slaves on his plantation. In this battle for the hearts and souls of young Iranians, Nafi si shows little respect for Iranian university professors — except, of course, for herself. It seems that the only university in the country which was in any way progressive (p. 9) was the Allameh Tabatabaee University; other universities do not have worthy professors (p. 179). This statement, perhaps, was infl uenced by the fact that she taught at Allameh Tabatabaee; it is diffi cult to see how she could judge over two hundred other, different universities throughout the country. Professors at other universities, such as the all-women Alzahra University dismissed by Nafi si as ‘this so called university’ (p. 220), are portrayed as utterly ignorant (pp. 185, 220). The students at Alzahra University, Nafi si claims, were mostly disturbed young women who ‘never had anyone praise them for anything’ (p. 221). However, it can be argued that this university has always had some of the countries best and brightest young minds, along with some of its best professors. One could indeed read her so-called memoir as a good example of the recurring orientalist motif of projecting one’s personal fantasies — more or less megalomaniac ones, here — onto the ‘Orient’ and ‘Orientals’. Among the many people who she caricatures in her book are respected university professors, at least one of whom has passed away (pp. 69, 99, 294). While Nafi si seems to believe that they are often obsessed with her, it can be argued she is the one who is obsessed with them and is prepared to destroy their reputations at all cost. Of course, like everyone else in the book, including the vast majority of Iranians who for whatever reason support the Islamic Republic and participate in general elections, political rallies, and other public events, they are left without voices, except for the ones she has imposed upon them in the story. Nafi si is, of course, the hero in this tale, as she taught Nabakov to her eight disciples secretly in Tehran ‘against all odds’ (p. 6). She forgets to mention, though, that, at the time her rival, the hated Professor X, among others, had students at the University of Tehran who even wrote their theses on Nabakov, after checking out his novels from the university library. By contrast, she has very little to say about ‘western’ academia — her silence implying that she has escaped tyranny and has now reached the Promised Land. According to Nafi si it seems that all religious men, such as Nasrin’s uncle, are rapists, child abusers (p. 48), sexually obsessed (p. 30), ‘sexual perverts’ (p. 210), ‘sexually sick’ (p. 211) and that their female counterparts are just as evil, with their ‘sexual assaults’ (pp. 168, 211). Paradoxically, to be religious means to be immoral. Indeed, she claims that such sexual perversion can even be seen in their religious rites as well as in their ideology. In their religious ceremonies, Nafi si feels ‘a wild, sexually fl avored frenzy in the air’ (p. 90) and, when the millions of Iranians who took part in the funeral ceremony of Ayatollah Imam Khomeini were sprayed at intervals with water to cool them off because of the extreme heat, Nafi si claims that ‘the effect made the scene oddly sexual’ (p. 244). However, it is not just all the religious men READING AZAR NAFISI IN TEHRAN 183 and women who are perverted. Iranian men who live in the United States are almost as bad. It seems they too are all obsessed with Nafi si:

I shunned the company of the Iranian community, especially the men, who had numerous illusions about a young divorcee’s availability. (p. 83) The lines above seem to give new meaning to Nafi si’s claim that ‘our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it’ (p. 304). Of course, these claims of deviant sexuality may again leave Nafi si, the pop psychologist, vulnerable to the accusation that they reveal more about the author than anything else. Of course, the fact that Nafi si often describes herself as someone who has psycho- logical problems (pp. 12, 24, 44, 46, 47, 85, 107, 170, and 171) does not decrease the authenticity of the ‘Memoir’ in the eyes of many western critics, as her claims fall well within the dominant discursive representations of Iran, the East, and Islam in the West. Hence, Nafi si can make wild and often contradictory accusations and still seem authentic to western readers, despite the fact that Iranians residing in Iran would view them as ridiculous. Nafi si tells a story that she claims to have heard from one of her disciples, Nasrin, a former member of the dreaded MKO, the Mujahedeen-e Khalgh terrorist organization (a group for which Nafi si seems to show some sympathy). This terrorist organization was based in Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, enjoyed strong western support, and committed countless crimes against the people of Iran as well as Iraq. The story is about a girl who was supposedly held in an Iranian prison.

There was one girl there — her only sin had been her amazing beauty. They brought her in on some trumped-up immorality charge. They kept her for over a month and repeat- edly raped her. They pass her from one guard to another. The story got around jail very fast, because the girl wasn’t even political; she wasn’t with the political prisoners. They married the virgins off to the guards, who would later execute them. The philosophy behind this act was that if they were killed as virgins, they would go to heaven. (p. 212) However, if this is true, one wonders why the prison guards supposedly shot and killed the twelve-year-old girl that ‘was running around the prison ground asking for her mom’ (p. 191). Nafi si and the guards seem to have forgotten about the fundamentalists’ ‘philosophy’ outlined on page 212. Gayatri Spivak, in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, writes about how the British campaign against the sati was a colonialist attempt to save ‘brown women from the brown man’ (Spivak, 1988: 296). While this work plays on the West’s long-time attention to oriental tales of female slavery and defi lement, the above argument seems to apply here as well, except for the fact that such acts of rape never took place, as no such fundamentalist philosophy exists, except in the mind of Nafi si and other likeminded people. What makes these bizarre accusations especially signifi cant and dangerous is that Nafi si falsely associates them with Islam and the ideology of those whom she opposes. She does not feel the need to provide evidence to support her accusation and neither do her western supporters. She writes about her unambiguous and absolute ‘love’ for ‘moral imperatives’ (p. 181) and moral principles (p. 182), which, ironically, makes her a fundamentalist of sorts. Obviously, evidence of this supposed 184 SEYED MOHAMMED MARANDI

‘philosophy’ must exist in religious and political texts produced by these people, in order for this apparently principled woman to be able to make such shocking claims. That is, unless they are mere fabrications, which would make her accountable for the rape of truth. Indeed, her blind hatred is so deep that she does not even bother to validate the numerous quotes that she uses, as she claims, from Ayatollah Imam Khomeini and others — assuming, perhaps charitably, that she is under the illusion that they exist. Most of the quotes are inaccurate, misleading, or altogether nonexistent, such as the outrageous claim about curing a man’s sexual appetite ‘by having sex with animals’ (p. 71), among others (see, for example, pp. 93, 96, 137, 158). This is a rather curious point for someone like Nafi si, the self-proclaimed intellectual (p. 115) who sees herself as ‘too much of an academic’ (p. 266). Her book in general, it seems, relying on almost total recall, even though she admits, paradoxically, that she does not have a very precise memory (p. 161). If Nafi si really wanted to quote the late Ayatollah Imam Khomeini accurately, she could have done so easily, as all of his public speech- es and letters have been digitalized and are accessible to researchers. However, despite all this, Nafi si is widely believed in the ‘West’, largely because her work operates within the dominant discursive practices in the West concerning Islam and Iran. Nafi si also seems to have lived in a very secluded world while in Iran, as she seems to know little about people and events other than those she sees or hears about in her small circle. She exposes her ignorance about Iranian and Islamic culture and law when she tried to shake hands with Mr Bahri. Similarly, when she tries to explains the word namahram, she gets it wrong (p. 98). She is one of the few people, including Saddam Hussain, who claim that the Iranians were the ‘perpetrators’ of the Iran-Iraq war (p. 209). She makes the ludicrous claim that ten- to sixteen-year-old Iranian military combatants carried out ‘human wave’ attacks (p. 208) and were promised the ‘keys to a heaven where they could fi nally enjoy all the pleasures from which they have abstained in life’ (p. 209). As a veteran of that war, in which Saddam Hussein with the backing of western powers invaded Iran and used Weapons of Mass Destruc- tion against Iranian civilians and combatants, I would like to see evidence of the offering of these keys, or other evidence to support these claims. Indeed the absurdity of such claims could be regarded as one of the features of Iranian native orientalist discourse. It seems that people such as Nafi si are so sure of the uncritical reception of anything opposing the Islamic Revolution and Islam in general or, indeed, simply Iran, that they do not deem it necessary to give the least touch of credibility to their claims. There is little or no reason for most western critics, from whatever back- ground, to question her claims, as they reinforce the dominant representations of Iran in America by constructing an exotic Iran principally derived from US archives. Whether it is the notorious orientalist Bernard Lewis or the ‘progressive’ Susan Sontag, few question her authenticity. Apparently, there is no reason for her claims to be questioned, as this sort of behavior is to be expected from that part of the world. She is an oriental woman who has been enlightened by western thought and culture, thus she is an authority on the backward and barbaric land that she has left behind. This problem is compounded by the fact that, throughout the text, Nafi si uses, or misuses, the feminist cause to strengthen the perception of her text’s authenticity, a READING AZAR NAFISI IN TEHRAN 185 point well explained in Roksana Bahramitash’s article (2005). It would probably come as a surprise to many in the West that in Iran, before the Revolution, only a small percentage of all university students were women, while today 64% of the country’s undergraduate student population is female. This dramatic rise was partially due to an ‘affi rmative action’ law passed by the government after the Revolution which made it mandatory for at least half of all new students in certain fi elds, such as medicine, to be female. It was also partially due to the fact that successive admin- istrations after the Revolution advocated and implemented universal education in a country where roughly three decades before over half of the female population was illiterate. Nafi si seems to believe that the only way for progress to be made is for the oriental woman to follow western models of progress, because in her eyes western values are universal values. These are not the only problems with her work. Nafi si states that at her university there were only two lawful student organizations, one of which was called ‘Islamic Jihad’ (p. 193). However, the reality is that there are numerous student organizations active on Iranian campuses and there has never been an organization active in any Iranian university with the name ‘Islamic Jihad’. Islamic Jihad is the name of a Palestinian organization fi ghting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. It is diffi cult to understand how she links this to Iranian universities. This indicates the extent of her ignorance about Iranian campus life, let alone life in Iran in general. There are, indeed, numerous inaccuracies in her text, as when she states that the Council of Guardians chose Ayatollah Khamenei as the new leader after the demise of Ayatollah Khomeini (p. 274). However, the Council of Guardians has absolutely no role to play in the constitutional process of choosing or removing the country’s leader. Elsewhere, she attacks and ridicules the Iranian cinema of the 1980s and claims Iranian fi lms to be ‘propaganda’ (p. 206), whilst in reality Iranian cinema gained some global recognition and acclaim during the period. She also claims that the country’s ‘chief censor’, who later became ‘head of the new television channel’, was ‘nearly blind’ (pp. 24–25), a claim which seems to have been made solely to ridicule. There is no offi cial bureaucratic position that matches the description, let alone a person who fi ts her depiction. Is she referring to IRIB, the Ministry of Culture, the Farabi Cinema Foundation, or some other government body? These are just a few examples which show how little Nafi si knows about Iran, assuming that she is really attempting to produce an ‘authentic’ text. In her memoir, she authoritatively speaks on behalf of all Iranians and claims that ‘We’ Iranians ‘living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected’ (p. 23) by the government. However, later she admits that huge crowds participated in the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini (pp. 243–45). She also contradicts herself elsewhere, when she admits that there were many young students on campus who were pro-revolution (p. 119) and ‘fanatical’ (pp. 250, 251). Iranians generally, then, are, according to Nafi si, all inferior, irrational, simple- minded, crude and often perverted — people who can only be redeemed if they read ‘works of Western thinkers and philosophers’ and question ‘their own orthodox approaches’ (p. 277). She, on the other hand, represents superior, westernized intellectual authority (p. 176), even though she does not have the knowledge to 186 SEYED MOHAMMED MARANDI recognize that the ideas that ‘pleasure is the greatest sin’ and that ‘sex is for procre- ation’ (p. 298) are not Islamic. She presents herself as a wonderful academic whose learned articles won her ‘respect and admiration’ (p. 173), even though she admits that, unlike some of her own students, she was unacquainted with the works of Edward Said (p. 290), widely read in Iranian academic circles at the time. She represents herself as unlike the uneducated and backward Iranian masses that were supposedly ‘given food and money’ to demonstrate against the United States. Nafi si goes further, and makes an even more extraordinary claim when she states that these monolithic and backward Iranians were ‘bussed in daily from the provinces and villages’ and ‘didn’t even know where America was and sometimes thought they were actually being taken to America’ (p. 105). Regarding the class debates, suicides, street battles, and other events that are claimed to have taken place, there is little to say except that professors and former students at the University of Tehran and Allameh Tabatabaee University that I inter- viewed for this article do not remember these events in the way that Nafi si depicts them. Indeed, some of the claims that she makes are in confl ict with television footage that was broadcast live on Iranian television, such as the story about Nategh Nouri and the whip (p. 45). One interesting example from within the text, perhaps, will help to reveal the many problems existing concerning its authenticity, and credibility. Nafi si claims that her disciple, Nasrin, was thirteen or fourteen years old when she unoffi cially attended Nafi si’s classes at the University of Tehran alongside Mahtab, who seemed to be cultivating her for the MKO terrorist organization (p. 122). However, only a few pages later Nafi si states that only those who had a student ID card could enter the University of Tehran campus, which is surrounded by fences. Indeed, entering the university without a student ID card ‘had become a challenge’ faced with which the ‘most dedicated and rebellious jumped over the fences to escape the guards at the entrance’ (pp. 138–39). Under such conditions, if they were true, how could a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl slip through to attend her classes? Nafi sii’s book is not the only one to pursue this course. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood is in many ways almost identical to Nafi si’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Iranians are again portrayed as foolish (Satrapi, 2003: 32) and her explanations regarding Muslim beliefs and culture are misleading (pp. 94–96). Here, too, the fantastic story about the key to heaven is repeated. According to the family maid, at school her son was given a plastic key painted in gold:

They gave this to my son at school. They told the boys that if they went to war and were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven [. . .] All my life I’ve been faith- ful to the religion. If it’s come to this [. . .] Well I can’t believe in anything anymore. (Satrapi, 2003: 99) Like Naﬁ si, she makes the extraordinary claim that children are taken to the war fronts, hypnotized, and thrown into battle to be slaughtered (Satrapi, 2003: 101–02). History is distorted to make it appear as if Iran was to blame for the war and that the Islamic Republic actually ‘admitted that the survival of the regime depended on the war’, although she does not tell the reader where this alleged statement came from (p. 116). Also there is the repetition of the accusation that girls are taken to jail, forced to marry their jailors, are effectively raped, and then executed (p. 145). READING AZAR NAFISI IN TEHRAN 187

Signifi cantly, Satrapi’s explanation for these alleged atrocities contradict Nafi si’s, who claims that the jailors do this because ‘it is against the law to kill a virgin’ (Nafi si, 2004: 145). Both texts work so fully within a western orientalist discourse they are thus largely left unquestioned in the West. It seems unnecessary, even, for the accusations to have consistency one with one another. Signifi cantly, in Reading Lolita in Tehran there is a reference to another so-called memoir, Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (Nafi si, 2004: 324). In this work Mahmoody, who briefl y lived in Iran, tells her version of life in the country and her escape from the country and from her husband. In this story she speaks about the irresolvable differences between eastern and western culture. Iranians are fi lthy (pp. 15, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 36, 37, 85, 231, 335, 365), scheming (p. 220), corrupt (p. 17), violent (p. 21), hostile (p. 342), lazy (p. 429), ‘eager to kill’ (p. 203), unorganized (p. 35), unpredictable (p. 342) and animal-like:

Sitting on the fl oor cross-legged or perched on one knee, the Iranians attacked the meal like a herd of untamed animals desperate for food. The only utensils provided were large ladle-like spoons. Some used these in tandem with their hands or a portion of bread folded into a scoop; others did not bother with spoons. Within seconds there was food everywhere. It was shoveled indiscriminately into chattering mouths that spilled and dribbled bits and pieces [. . .]. The unappetizing scene was accompanied by a cacophony of Farsi. (Mahmoody, 2004: 26) In this ‘strange society’ (p. 45) large numbers of children suffer from ‘birth defects or deformities of one kind or another. Others had a peculiar, vacant expression’ (p. 28). Daily showering is viewed as a strange western custom (p. 42) to the ‘hordes’ of ‘grim-faced’ Iranians (p. 43). The country is a ‘strange symphony of the damned, full of beggars who go from door to door crying for help and struggling for survival’ (p. 114). According to Mahmoody, some Iranian’s attempt to copy western culture, but fail due to their lack of sophistication. This literally meant that she did not like the taste of Iranian pizzas (p. 116). Iranians also, allegedly, pay homage to anyone who has been educated in the United States. Her construction of the Iranian psyche is extraordinary. They are childlike, inferior, ignorant, and do not know what is good for them. Hence, within such an orientalist framework, it is understandable for her to claim that ‘Time seemed to mean nothing to the average Iranian’ (p. 81). However, the claim that ‘Once a year everyone in Iran takes a bath’ (p. 207) is truly extraordinary, even from someone who ‘did not care a thing about Iranian customs’ (p. 84). Her extraordinary comments about Iranian men, her ignorance about Islamic history (p. 89), Islam (p. 309), Islamic law (p. 170), or Iranian laws (p. 288), refl ect the fact that her ‘knowledge’ is derived from western sources rather than from real experiences in this ‘horrid land’ (p. 132). Hence, like Nafi si and Satrapi, she too can claim that:

Whenever the pasdar, arrested a woman who was to be executed, the men raped her ﬁ rst, because they had a saying: ‘A woman should never die a virgin’ (Mahmoody, 2004: 366). 188 SEYED MOHAMMED MARANDI

The ‘ideological’ reasons why girls are allegedly raped in prison differ from one another in these texts. However, it makes no difference, as there is no necessity to provide evidence that such ‘sayings’ or rapes actually existed. When the religious Iranian Muslim is being discussed in the West, for the most part such contradictions do not affect the story’s credibility and are of little importance. They must be true, as such actions are to be expected in such a ‘mad country’ (Mahmoody, 2004: 391). Perhaps one of the most extraordinary claims made in Not Without My Daughter is where the writer claims that in Iran women are not allowed to show their faces (p. 367). Indeed the picture on the cover of the Corgi edition published in 1989 shows a woman whose face, except for her eyes, is completely covered by a veil. But the fact is that in Iran women do not cover their faces. What is important is that when Nafi si makes reference to this work there is no criticism of it. In fact, it is implied that Nafi si’s disciple, Nassrin is confronting similar conditions in Iran to those that Betty Mahmoody purportedly confronted. Hence, in the eyes of Nafi si, it seems that Not Without My Daughter is an authentic representation of life in Iran. One does not wonder at Nafi si or the likes of Nafi si, but rather one wonders at those progressives in the West who would be outraged if such language were ever used to describe other peoples or races. In order to understand the motivation behind the writing of a book such as Nafi si’s and its connection with that by Betty Mahmoody, one just needs to ponder the statement by the author to the effect that many have become famous in the West by opposing the Islamic government (p. 181). Thus Nafi si’s writing is certainly orientalist. It is orientalism pursued to absurd extremes without the slightest effort taken not to be absurd. This does not mean that a completely objective form of representation exists; however, the extent of Nafi si’s misrepresentation of Iran is extraordinary. The only thing more extraordinary is the extent to which critics and ‘scholars’ in the West view Reading Lolita in Tehran as an honest representation of Iran, thus reducing the lives of millions of people to prejudicial caricatures.

Notes 1 References to Naﬁ si, 2004 will appear in the text as bare page references.

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Notes on Contributor Seyed Mohammad Marandi is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran and Head of Department of North American Studies. Seyed is also an honorary research fellow in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. He has most recently co-authored a book entitled The British Media and Muslim Representation: The Ideology of Demonisation, published by the Islamic Human Rights Commission in Great Britain.