Azar Nafisi

There is always something hopeful and loving in the act of writing. Writing requires empathy, opening up oneself to other people’s hearts and minds.

Shirin said the worst thing about it, from what she heard from me and other friends in the US, was that so many Americans felt the totalitarian Republic of Gilead in Atwood’s book was a terrible place, to be avoided at all costs in America, but that something similar to it, like the Islamic Republic, was good for us in Iran because it represented “our culture.”

condescending to believe that others from other cultures don’t want to be as free as we are, and that their women do not wish for the same rights American women fought for—this, despite the fact that women in most of these cultures, including Iran, have, for more than a century, fought and are fighting for those very rights that women in the West demand. So many times when I have lamented the plight of women under the Islamic
Republic, I have heard, “But you are being Western” and “It’s their culture!”

my utter surprise and dismay, the myth that the Islamic Republic had created about Iran and Islam had been accepted and extended to all Muslim-majority countries. All these nations, with vastly different histories, nationalities, languages, and cultures were reduced into one aspect: religion. And that religion, which, like other religions, had many different denominations and interpretations, was brought down to its most extreme elements: fundamentalism and Sharia law. So now these countries were even deprived of their proper names and were all generalized into the Muslim
world, denying the diversity of Islam and its followers.

we can imagine, we are still free.

After our conversation, a young man who had been in the audience approached me to say that he was bewildered by our focus on imagination at the expense of facts. Facts, he felt, were central, were real, while imagination was a luxury, mainly of writers and artists, irrelevant to our everyday lives. Our real lives. I began to argue that Grossman and I were both living proof that while facts are important, they do not negate imagination. My experience of coming from an oppressed society where the regime considered writers, poets, and artists as its enemies—where so many of them had been jailed, tortured, and even killed—was confirmation of how pivotal imagination is to freedom

I keep explaining to whoever is interested that the mandatory veil forced on Iranian women after the 1979 revolution had little to do with faith and everything to do with state’s control of its citizens through imposing uniformity, making women invisible and depriving them of power. And the fight against the mandatory veil is not a fight against religion, but for freedom of choice and expression, which is why some women who voluntarily wear the veil support the fight against it.

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE role that ordinary, often decent, people play in bringing about a totalitarian state? Such systems may seem to appear out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning. But really, this is because many choose not to see the warning signs, even when they become all too obvious. Slowly, over time, there is a buildup. At first, the rulers may target people and things that are unsavory to us, and that we dislike or disapprove of—as they did in Iran, when they executed officials of the former regime. So we shrug them off, or we might even approve, but our time will come when they take away what pleases us, what is important to us. It is like the reaction to the virus, when people hope things will get better, but they won’t until we do something about it.

The first step in resisting totalitarianism is refusing to allow extreme brutalities or the confiscation of individual freedoms to become routine or ordinary.

Totalitarian systems are against pleasure, against joy or beauty; there is a self-righteous puritanism to them that turns simple pleasures into sinful temptations.