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 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.
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.
rights imagination bills
I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.
past rights regimes
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
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?
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.
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.
believe usual moral
A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.