Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian writer and professor of English literature. She has resided in the United States since 1997 and became an American citizen in 2008...
NationalityIranian
ProfessionWriter
islamic iran years
I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.
islamic struggle iran
For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.
islamic past rights
In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.
thinking islam needs
I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
islamic people age
I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine.
girl religious islamic
This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?
islamic iran america
After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities.
sex islamic republic
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
struggle islam colonialism
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.
country entered extreme fiction images iranian islamic liberties lives members norms private revolution society themselves values whose within women
Iranian fiction has entered a new era...The Islamic Revolution has shaken all values and norms within society. Now, the images of women have to be rethought and redefined. Under extreme pressure, women must look at themselves not only as members of their society or their country but as individuals whose very private lives and liberties are being redefined.
portable status
I would like to think of my own status as what you called 'citizen of the world' or a 'citizen of a portable world,' if not of the world.
reading writing poor
Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.
book teaching passion
My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
children giving-up pain
I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?