03/23/03

In the late 1970s, Azar Nafisi returned to her native Iran after completing graduate studies in the United States. She envisioned a fulfilling career as a college professor and expected to be deeply immersed in a world of intellectual stimulation. Soon after she took a position in the English department at the University of Tehran, Iran was plunged into the Islamic revolution.

When militant fundamentalists under Ayatollah Khomeini emerged victorious, one of their first pronouncements was that women must wear veils in public. For Nafisi, it wasn't the veil itself that posed a problem - she recalls with warmth that her grandmother had worn it devoutly - it was the imposition of the government's will on her freedom of choice. She refused to comply and was expelled from the university.

Her love of books and teaching found a new outlet: For two years, she met weekly with seven of her brightest students - her "girls" - to secretly discuss banned works of Western literature. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is the true story of her clandestine book group and their unique perspectives on classics such as "Daisy Miller," "Pride and Prejudice" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." Even if it were nothing more than that, Nafisi's memoir would be remarkable for its insight into the nuances of personality and motive she conveys when writing of her students and the characters they discussed.

But "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is much more. In chilling, articulate terms, it portrays the genesis of a brutal theocracy whose tentacles of control sought the deepest recesses of citizens' lives - into their very way of thinking.

Intent on teaching "The Great Gatsby" to her class, which now included students sent to spy on her, she found herself defending the book's right to exist to people whose definition of morality eliminated any need for thought.

The extreme manifestation of this moral literalism took the form of roundups and mass executions. Students, some still in their teens, were arrested and jailed for months without notification to their parents. When the jails became too full to hold them, many were executed. Girls were raped before being murdered to ensure their denial to paradise. Convicted thieves suffered amputation of arms or legs. Women accused of adultery were stuffed into bags and stoned to death. The marriage age for girls was lowered to 9.

How this could have happened in a country with a long tradition of education and culture is beyond the scope of Nafisi's book. But what she makes very clear is that despite appearances, a multitude of Iranians did not abandon their intellectual needs. They simply repressed them, finding fulfillment in quiet acts of defiance, like Nafisi's group.

Many who could do so left the country to build lives elsewhere. Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. She has the professional life she dreamed of. But she remembers Iran for what it taught her: "to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom."

Marchetti is a critic in Cleveland Heights.