Azar Nafisi, an expatriate Iranian author, dared to have a mind of her own in a country where the law demanded that she conform to official expectations. Nan Miller writes about her:
Living safely in the U.S. since 1997, Nafisi has been free to speak about “the dismal and deadly environment the Iranian regime has created” and free to write a memoir about the seven young women who met in secret at Nafisi’s home in Tehran to discuss the forbidden works of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen.
During those meetings, seven young women discovered, “It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming ruthless.”
Nafisi has come under fire from some of our Ivory Tower intellectuals because she speaks the truth about the appalling Iranian regime.
Miller notes that “Iranian expat Hamid Dabashi, who has lived freely in the U.S. since 1976” and is a Columbia professor, “denounced his fellow Iranian as a “colonial agent” who served “the most perfidious colonial projects.” She continues:
San Diego State University women’s studies professors Anne Donadey and Huma Ahmed-Ghosh piled on, fretting that Nafisi’s memoir might “cloak the operations of globalized capital” and “serve a conservative U.S. agenda that is critical of multicultural, Marxist, feminist, and generally political perspectives on literature.” Nafisi does indeed oppose scholars who politicize literature because they bear an eerie resemblance to the mullahs who “denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent — namely ideology.”
Yet more evidence of the anti-American zealotry that passes for intellectualism on our campuses.