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
dream country past
We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
past rights iran
The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal.
passion past order
Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.
past rights regimes
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
dream lonely past
i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.
book teaching passion
My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
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.
thinking islam needs
I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
america people soul
I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
causes tehran dies
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
pain lying heart
A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
reality perfection speechless
The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
believe people mind
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
memories rain light
Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny…seconds later another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly…