The classics under cover

Nobokov's Lolita has dominated literary and cultural theory as a paradigmatic case of perverted sexuality, but is scarcely seen as a classic story of a women's boundless exploitation.

By casting it as an example of woman's suffering, resulting from the nested rules and convoluted customs of a patriarchal society, the author has given a fresh meaning to Lolita. She has invented "the universal woman" in Lolita in ways that no author has ever done.

This text is as much about resistance as it is about freedom. Only by pursuing these two rather mutually contradictory objectives simultaneously can a feminist do justice to the cause of women's emancipation.

This book is about those women who are not even what Simone De Beauvoir once famously described as the "Second Sex". Given the enormity of their suffering, the description of "The Seventh Sex" would be more fitting perhaps""for even the status of the "Second Sex" might sound respectable though the realities would always defy that claim.

After all, we might lump Arundhati Roy and Phoolan Devi in the same category of "The Second Sex" despite their varied experiences. We would subvert the goal of women's liberation by claiming them as similar stories.

Azar Nafisi went to Teheran to teach. What she could not understand was that the troubled world of Islamic morality might shatter her determination to pursue her profession into pieces. Their dress code and day-to-day rules designed in the name of Islam encouraged her to give resistance a new connotation.

She eventually chose to give up her job. She did something completely extraordinary, something that only a brave heart could do. She asked her favourite students to get together to read, deliberate, and comprehend not only the characters and contexts that defined the themes of forbidden texts, but also to relate them to their own as well as other women's experiences.

This led to the creation of a secret literary society, and gave birth to this amazing text that any reader who sincerely believes that multiple wrongs are being committed in the name of Religion""particularly against women"" would love to call it a major holy book of our time.

This secret reading group had the following members: Manna, Mahshid, Nassrin, Azin, Mitra and Sanaz. They are women from different class backgrounds, and they selected to read equally different, but forbidden texts""such as Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisey Miller, and The Deans December, and, above all, Lolita.

However, they needed permission from their family members, which was rather hard to get, to join this society regularly. When Ms Nafisi asked Nassrin how she secured permission, she admitted that she had tricked her father because that was the only way she could leave her home.

She even justified her decision to lie to her father and explained, "What else can you do with a person who is so dictatorial he won't let his daughter, at this age,go to an all-female literature class? Besides, isn't this how we treat our regime? Can we tell the Revolutionary Guards the truth?

We lie to them; we hide our satellite dishes. We tell them we don't have illegal books and alcohol in our houses. Even my vener able father lies to them when the safety of his family is at stake."

Nassrin's resourceful alibi to her father was that she had volunteered to help translate Islamic texts into English with her friend Mahshid. The author, however, has not told us whether Nassrin's father looked for the translated text at the end.

If he did, how did Nassrin deal with that situation? Through the characters of Nobokov, Henry James, Jane Austen, and others, Nafisi has illustrated vivid stories of these un-emancipated women whom she found chained and tortured by the pretentious moral world of Islam.

Living in the Islamic world is like having sex with a man whom you do not like, according to Ms. Nafisi. It is perhaps worse. This book has a made an invincible case for the growing need for political and cultural reform in Iran from within and outside.

For the progressive elites of the non-Islamic world, it would be naïve to wait until a Ram Mohan Roy, or an Ambedkar or a Gandhi to appear in Islamic world even to launch reform let alone to give it direction. This emancipatory change has to be actively engineered from the outside because the space within is totally destroyed by Islam's self-styled holy custodians. Or else, more painful stories of atrocities against women in Islamic world are in store for us.

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READING LOLITA IN TEHERAN

Azar Nafisi
Random House, New York
Price: $13.95, Price: 353