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 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.
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.
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?
challenges negative culture
Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.
america poetic-license vision
America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
thinking issues want
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
dream stars iran
When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.
pay crime settling
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.