Azar Nafisi - Time in Iran

Time in Iran

Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 where for a brief time she taught English literature at the University of Tehran.

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nafisi soon became restless with the stringent rules imposed upon women by her country's new rulers. She spoke of the freedom that she believed women in some countries took for granted, which women in Iran had now lost as the Khomeini regime enacted laws curtailing women's rights.

In 1995, she states that she was no longer able to teach English literature properly without attracting the scrutiny of the faculty authorities, so she quit teaching at the university, and instead invited seven of her female students to attend regular meetings at her house, every Thursday morning. They studied literary works including some considered controversial in postrevolutionary Iranian society such as Lolita alongside other works such as Madame Bovary. She also taught novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.

When asked by an interviewer in 2003 if there was "ever a time, when you were living in Iran, when you would have welcomed the idea of a regime change implemented by foreign forces", Nafisi claimed, "Some Iranians were so desperate that they would have wanted the foreign powers to come in, but I didn't feel that way. ... in Iran, I don't think that we needed foreign intervention at any point."