Secular Islam.NET

Tired of everything!

Lately I have been quite disgusted and disheartened with pretty much everything in the Muslim world, (with some exceptions such as Irshad Manji and the recent defeat of the PAS Islamist party in Malaysia), but they only serve to point how few they are! Hence my sparse posting, since it's just so depressing. It's like I have to take a breather so as not to get completely overwhelmed with despair. Yes, I know "what did you expect, given all you've read and discovered?", but what can I say? I am both strongly attracted and dismayed by the Arab and Islamic worlds.

I am hoping for some GOOD news! If anybody has some, leave a comment below.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

I've been reading this book, which combines Middle East studies with English literature and women's studies, all under the form of a memoir about a teacher and her students under the shadow of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I really like the way that you "get into" the mind of someone who was there, part of the society, and you get to know what her feelings and opinions are of what's going on around her.

It doesn't hurt to have read the books discussed, or at least to know something about them (namely, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen are the primary texts discussed), but it is not absolutely necessary, since the plots and numerous passages from the books are incorporated into the text. I found Lolita an especially telling choice; the plot concerns a 37-year-old man having sex with a 12-year-old girl (to put it into the most blunt terms possible), and is read in a country where, according to the Islamic law as propogated by the mullahs, girls as young as 9 can be married to men far older than they are, claiming that since Muhammad married Aisha when she was 6 and consummated the marriage when she was 9 (and he was 43), who are they to contradict the example of the Prophet, peace be upon him? Like the character Lolita, the women and girls (and men and boys, for that matter) are trapped in a horrible relationship with a powerful man--in this case, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I was very encouraged to see works of Western literature losing none of their relevance and emotional impact on people of other cultures and nations. The way the students in the book identify with the charachters in the novels they are reading, and the way the novels speak personally to them, are a rebuke to the tired multicultural claim that people are essentially trapped in their own cultures, unable to identify with charachters not of their own race, religion or culture, or with novels written by "dead white European males." The author does not see these novels as artifacts of "decadent Western colonialism," the way that the revolutionaries in Iran do (and some idealogues in the West), but as humanist texts with universal meaning.

The first-hand accounts of the Islamic revolution, the student demonstrations, and the Iran-Iraq war are fascinating. I was intrigued by the fact that the veil (hijab) was such a large part of the story--the author refuses to wear it and is expelled from Tehran University for it. It is not just a "piece of cloth," it is a symbol of everything that the author rejects about the fundamentalist Islamic republic. Needless to say, freedom of choice in what to wear is not a value endorsed by the Islamic Republic of Islam!

I did wish that the author had written more about her thoughts on the religion of Islam (as opposed to the political developments of it in Iran), what effect, if any, it has had on her life, and so on. On the other hand, the very fact that very little is written about it suggests that Islam actually has very little impact on her life--after all, she is very secular, more interested in literature than the Qur'an, and I wonder how religious Iranians as a whole are today, in the privacy of their homes and minds. There are a couple of religious female students profiled at length, and, interestingly enough, those are the only ones who end up staying in Iran.

The author eventually leaves Iran, unable to take any more of the totalitarian mullahcracy, and moves to the US, which is why this book could be written. I hope that more students in Iran will become fed up enough with the Islamic Republic and demand change, without being trampled by the iron feet of the regime.

Another thing: I've noticed that women's rights in Iran is an important issue in the West, as so many Iranian writers and intellectuals have made it an issue, as opposed to the position of women in Arab countries, which, unfortunately, does not seem to have as many eloquent people championing the cause (besides writers like Nawal al-Sadawwi in Egypt and Fatima Mernissi in Morocco). While few in the West can deny the injustice of women's lack of rights in Iran, given the number of women (and men) from Iran demanding justice, you not infrequently see a lot of crap in the West about how "women are honored in Islam" or "feminism is a Western colonialist concept" or "women in the West have it just as bad as women in the Arab countries," given that there seem to be fewer well-known Arab feminists visible, many of them silenced or forced to moderate their views by fear of the Islamists in their midst. There is also the spectacle of "Arab-Islamic solidarity," where some progressive minds in the Arab world are unwilling to draw attention to the deep problems within Arab-Muslim society, for fear of giving the West fuel for what they see as its "imperialist" attitude towards them. But the example of Iran, and also the Algerian civil war, show that that tactic usually backfires; women's rights, as well as human rights, are typically ignored in the name of "solidarity" and "nationalism" and "anti-imperialism." It is an interesting subject to me. I guess that, since many Iranian women had become well-educated and somewhat "Westernized," they can lead the way in calling for their rights, while in the Arab world, women tend to be poor, badly educated, and, unfortunately, all too willing to support the misogynist traditions they grew up with, a condition not limited to Arab women, that's for sure!