Азар Нафиси: Жизнь, Литература и Изгнание.

Iranian American writer and professor

Azar Nafisi (آذر نفیسی; born 1948) is an Iranian American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U. S. citizen in 2008. Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University. She is the niece of a famous Iranian scholar, fiction writer and poet Saeed Nafisi. Azar Nafisi is best known for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 117 weeks, and has won several literary awards, including the 2004 Non fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense. In addition to Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi has authored, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books and That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile. Her newest book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times was published March 8, 2022.

Nafisi was born in Tehran, Iran. She is the daughter of Nezhat and Ahmad Nafisi, the former mayor of Tehran from 1961 to 1963. He was the youngest man ever appointed to the post at that time. In 1963, her mother was a member of the first group of women elected to the National Consultative Assembly. Nafisi was raised in Tehran, but when she was thirteen, she moved to Lancaster, England, to finish her studies. She then moved to Switzerland before returning to Iran briefly in 1963. She completed her degree in English and American literature and received her Ph. D. from the University of Oklahoma. Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution and taught English literature at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled from the university for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. Years later, during a period of liberalization, she began teaching at Allameh Tabataba'I University. In 1995, Nafisi sought to resign from her position, but the university did not accept her resignation. After repeatedly not going to work, they eventually expelled her, but refused her ability to resign. From 1995 to 1997, Nafisi invited several female students to attend regular meetings at her house every Thursday morning. They discussed their place as women within post revolutionary Iranian society. They studied literary works, including some considered "controversial" by the regime, such as Lolita alongside other works such as Madame Bovary. She also taught novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective. After staying in Iran for 18 years after the Revolution, Nafisi returned to the United States of America on June 24, 1997, and continues to reside there today.

In addition to her books, Nafisi has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, "The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem," published in The New Republic (February 22, 1999) has been reprinted in several languages. She also wrote the new introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, as well as the introduction to Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon, published by Modern Library (April 2006). She has published a children's book (with illustrator Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice (translated into Italian, as BiBi e la voce verde, and Hebrew). She served as director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University. in which using The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, as well as the writings of James Baldwin and many others, Nafisi responds to an Iranian reader that questioned whether Americans care about or need their literature. In 2019, the English translation of That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile was published by Yale University Press. Nafisi has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, the human rights of Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the change process for pluralism and open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights by policy makers and various human rights organizations in the U. S. and elsewhere. She is also involved in promoting not just literacy but of reading books with universal literary value. In 2011, she was awarded the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation International Thought and Humanities Award for her "determined and courageous defense of human values in Iran and her efforts to create awareness through literature about the situation women face in Islamic society". She also received the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Award. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Susquehanna University (2019), Pomona College (2015), Mt. Holyoke College (2012), Seton Hill University (2010), Goucher College (2009), Bard College (2007), Rochester University (2005) and Nazareth College. In 2018, she was named a Georgetown University/Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow.

In a 2003 article for The Guardian, Brian Whitaker criticized Nafisi for working for the public relations firm Benador Associates which he argued promoted the neo conservative ideas of "creative destruction" and "total war". In 2004, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Nafisi had dedicated Reading Lolita in Tehran to Paul Wolfowitz, the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and a principal architect of the Bush Doctrine. Hitchens had stated that Nafisi was good friends with Wolfowitz and several other key figures in the Bush administration. Nafisi later responded to Hitchen's comments, neither confirming nor denying the claim. In a critical article in the academic journal Comparative American Studies, titled "Reading Azar Nafisi in Tehran", University of Tehran literature professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi states that "Nafisi constantly confirms what orientalist representations have regularly claimed". He also claimed that she "has produced gross misrepresentations of Iranian society and Islam and that she uses quotes and references which are inaccurate, misleading, or even wholly invented." John Carlos Rowe, Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California, states that: "Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) is an excellent example of how neo liberal rhetoric is now being deployed by neo conservatives and the importance they have placed on cultural issues." He also states that Nafisi is "amenable to serving as a non Western representative of a renewed defense of Western civilization and its liberal promise, regardless of its historical failures to realize those ends."

In 2006, Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi, in an essay published in the Cairo based, English language paper Al Ahram (Dabashi's criticism of Nafisi became a cover story for an edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education) compared Reading Lolita in Tehran to "the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India", and asserted that Nafisi functions as a "native informer and colonial agent" whose writing has cleared the way for an upcoming exercise of military intervention on the Middle East. He also labeled Nafisi as a "comprador intellectual," a comparison to the "treasonous" Chinese employees of mainland British firms, who sold out their country for commercial gain and imperial grace. In an interview Z magazine, he classed Nafisi with the U. S. soldier convicted of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib: "To me, there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi." Finally, Dabashi stated that the book's cover image (which appears to be two veiled teenage women reading Lolita in Tehran) is in fact, in a reference to the September 11 attacks, "Orientalised pedophilia" designed to appeal to "the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against the phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of U. S. empire in New York." In the acknowledgements she makes in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi writes of Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis as "one who opened the door". Nafisi, who opposed the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, rejects such accusations as "guilt by association", noting that she has both "radical friends" and "conservative friends." Ali Banuazizi, the co director of Boston College’s Middle East studies program, the co director of Boston College's Middle East studies program, stated that Dabashi's article was very "intemperate" and that it was "not worth the attention" it had received. Christopher Shea of The Boston Globe argued that while Dabashi spent "several thousand words eviscerating the book," his main point was not about the specific text but the book's black and white portrayal of Iran. Writing in The New Republic, Marty Peretz sharply criticized Dabashi, and rhetorically asked, "Over what kind of faculty does [Columbia University president] Lee Bollinger preside?" Robert Fulford sharply criticized Dabashi's comments in the National Post, arguing that "Dabashi's frame of reference veers from Joseph Stalin to Edward Said. Like a Stalinist, he tries to convert culture into politics, the first step toward totalitarianism. Like the late Edward Said, he brands every thought he dislikes as an example of imperialism, expressing the West's desire for hegemony over the oppressed (even when oil rich) nations of the Third World." Fulford added that "While imitating the attitudes of Said, Dabashi deploys painful clichés." stated that Dabashi's accusation that Nafisi is promoting a "'kaffeeklatsch' worldview callously ignores the extreme social and political conditions that forced Nafisi underground." Papan Matin also argued that "Dabashi's attack is that whether Nafisi is a collaborator with the [United States]" was not relevant to the legitimate questions outlined in her book.