Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  After a while I myself would become part of that motion: I would rush from meeting to meeting, protesting the expulsion of a professor, attending demonstrations and sit-ins. But my point of focus was always my classes. From the moment I stepped, with fear and anxiety, into the immense room to teach a class irrelevantly called “Research,” and wrote on the blackboard the required reading: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I felt at home. No matter how contentious the atmosphere that reigned over the university, it was somehow calming to know that these books had survived wars, revolutions, famines. They had been there long before we were born and would be there long after we were gone. (What was it that Ferdowsi had said? “I shall not die, these seeds I have sown will save / My name and reputation from the grave.”) The novels of George Eliot, Jane Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy became a vehicle to express the need to foster a democracy of voices. Tom Jones taught us the value of humor, Tristram Shandy of irony, and each novel we read seemed to offer a lesson in the complexity of moral choices and individual responsibility. All became somehow deeply and urgently relevant to the reality we lived in. Sometimes I mixed in examples from Persian literature, drawing mainly from banned books such as Sadegh Hedayat’s Buf-e Kur, Forough Farrokhzad’s Another Birth, or from our classical past, discussing Rumi’s exuberant playfulness, or Hafez’s mischievous delight in undermining orthodoxy. We discussed the tyranny of bad writers who impose their own voices on their characters, taking away their right to exist. Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying: Beware, I am a monster? Doesn’t the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile?

  On March 21, 1980, on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, Aya tollah Khomeini issued a harsh statement, accusing the universities of being agents of Western imperialism. At Friday Prayer on April 18th, Ali Khamenei (who was to replace Khomeini as the Supreme Leader in 1989) attacked the universities, saying, “We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities and the training of our youth in the interests of West or East.” This was a signal for what came to be known as the Cultural Revolution: the plan to close down the universities in order to Islamize them, create a new curriculum, and purge them of undesirable faculty, students, and staff.

  The students and faculty did not give up without a fight. I remember the fiery speeches, the demonstrations and sit-ins, the vigilantes who would suddenly appear with knives and stones to attack the demonstrators. I remember running for cover in dusty alleys. I remember finding a refuge in a nearby bookstore seconds before the owner locked the doors and we all scrambled away from the window to avoid the bullets. Every day we heard news of murdered students, their bodies snatched away by agents of the regime. These scenes appear out of nowhere, still disturbing my sleep.

  Soon the tables of pamphlets in the hall would be removed. Many of those who stood behind them, representing different student groups and tendencies, would be expelled, arrested, and in some cases executed. All organizations except the Islamic ones would be closed—though not without bloody protests, sit-ins, more arrests, jailings, and executions. In our faculty, me and two other colleagues would refuse to wear the mandatory veil and soon I would be expelled from teaching along with many other colleagues.

  In time, many of the students who pressed for the Islamization of the universities would become disillusioned and start criticizing the regime, staging protests and demonstrations. Could any of us have foreseen how some would become enamored of Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Spinoza and Hannah Arendt, and begin to question the tenets of the regime they had so ardently supported? Soon they would be asking for secularism and democracy, the ones arrested, jailed, and executed.

  I WAS LEAVING AL ZAHRA, the girls’ college, for home, admiring as I often did the way the garden with its mown lawn and flower beds, carefully arranged to appear haphazardly strewn together, made one feel secure and serene amid all the turmoil just outside the gate, when I heard a loud whisper behind me: “Professor!”

  Teaching in Tehran; the veil was mandatory at the university.

  I had not noticed anyone following me and was startled when I turned around to see her standing so very close to me. “May I speak to you?” she asked. “Of course,” I said. “That day when you were talking to Miss Bagheri about Wuthering Heights,” she said, “I was there.” Miss Bagheri, whose sensibilities had been offended by the novel, was an aggressive defendant of morality on campus. She had waylaid me one day after class to protest the book’s immorality: she said it set a bad example by condoning adultery. “Novels are about life, they embrace all aspects of existence,” I said. I asked her, “When you read Ferdowsi, do you start believing in demons and people living for four hundred years? Do you decide to go whaling when you read Moby-Dick?” “This is different,” Miss Bagheri said. “Adultery is a sin.” “That is the point of novels,” I told her. “The only thing sacred about them is that they are by nature profane. It is a great love story. Can you tell me of one good love story that sticks to the rules?” By the end of the term this same Miss Bagheri had told me enthusiastically that she was now so in love with Catherine and Heathcliff that the girls in her dorm made fun of her.

  “And so,” my stealthy stalker said, “I want to know what you meant when you said that the only thing sacred about a novel is that it is profane.” She was dressed in a black chador, revealing only the “oval of the face,” as the edicts on proper dressing indicated. Her face evaded description. It was rather long, rather pale, almost bloodless, and bony. Serious eyes that, unlike those of so many other students, looked at you directly. I don’t remember her name. She was different from Miss Bagheri. There was a tenaciousness, a certain stubbornness in her that I liked—she would not change her mind about Wuthering Heights in a matter of months. Her tenacity did not come only from prejudice or her religious beliefs; it seemed to me as if she was trying to solve something as she talked to me. Despite her faith, she appeared to be driven by an inner puzzle, so wrapped did she seem to be in some interior world. The pause between my last sentence and her response was at times so long that I thought she had forgotten we were conversing. Her serious demeanor made me feel frivolous. I wanted to joke and lighten her burden. This was not the kind of discussion I was used to having with my religious students about the morality of a work of literature—I had discovered how boringly similar their arguments were to my own and my comrades’ reasoning when I was a radical activist, in the way they reduced all literature into an ideological message.

  I said to her, “Perhaps if you and I discussed some of these so-called immoral novels my meaning would become clearer.” She asked for a list of books. She said she had read Forough Farrokhzad, and I reminded her that her works were banned. She said, “Everything is permissible, I think, if it is in pursuit of knowledge.” Pursuit of knowledge! That was one way of putting it. “Anyway, Forough Farrokhzad was more Western,” she said. “She did not follow our traditions.” I suggested that she should perhaps take another look at the women in the Shahnameh and other classical tales. After all, adultery is not a Western construct, nor is love. In Vis and Ramin, the lovers openly commit adultery, because their main moral commitment is to love. But while we are on the topic of adultery and the novel, how about starting with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina?

  Over the next two months this student and I met at least once a week. We sat on the lawn or walked up and down the leafy street on which the campus was located. Once or twice I brought a cream puff or two and she made sure the next time to bring a big box of pastries. She read Madame Bovary and some of Anna Karenina. She said these women were repentant in the end. “Not repentant,” I said, “desperate. Anna’s heart was broken, Emma had reached the end of her rope.” “You said it’s about love,” she said. “That too, but with Emma it’s more about illusions, the dreams we impose on a drab and harsh reality. She married bec
ause of that dream and she cheated on her husband for the same reason. She had read too many romantic novels and wanted to be a romantic heroine.”

  “She broke her contract,” she said; “she had a contract to honor.” “She did,” I said slowly, “but Charles Bovary was also partly a victim of his own romantic illusions. He loved the idea of Emma as much as, if not more than, he loved Emma herself. He was blind to who she was and what she wanted from him.”

  I asked, “Why don’t you think women who marry without love are adulterers? It seems to me they are worse.” “They are bound by their duty,” she said, “they don’t lie.” “There are so many different kinds of lying,” I said. “I know a woman, a very morally correct woman who would never dream of adultery, yet for almost thirty years she has been cheating on her husband, emotionally, with her dead first husband.” (Once I asked my mother why she never danced again after that dance with Saifi and she said, “Because there was no one to dance with.”) When I told my student about that woman, she said, “I feel sorry for her and for everyone else too. This woman you talk about, she suffered from the absence of love”—my student said this as if the absence of love were a form of malady. I registered that phrase and returned to it every once in a while when I thought of my mother and grandmother, of Aunt Mina, the poet Alam Taj, and so many other women who felt their lives were wasted not just because of their aborted social ambitions but also because they suffered from an absence of love.

  We trailed from there to the meaning of loyalty and self-respect, and, inevitably, time and again to women, women in Europe, in America, in Egypt, in Turkey, who had fought the same fights, tolerated the same humiliations. “But why aren’t we told about all that?” she asked. “Why is it never mentioned in school?” We ended up talking about women in our country, who could go to school and read Wuthering Heights, but were deprived of the right to make the most basic choices about their lives: whom to marry, how to dress, where to work. Her intelligent eyes took on a new light. “It’s funny now that I think of it,” she said, “before the revolution I most probably would have given in to an arranged marriage, to spite the government, but now I am not sure anymore. I guess this is what the novel is, it makes us think about these things—or something like that.”

  Suddenly she stopped coming to classes and the term ended. I left Al Zahra and was immersed in the campus battles that flared up at the University of Tehran. I wanted to ask Miss Bagheri about her, but I did not. Only from time to time I returned to her and wondered what became of her. Did she marry a man of her choice? Was she ever tempted by another man, or the idea of another life?

  OFTEN IN THE MORNING we would wake up to some new and unexpected event. My mother’s sources (she had her “eyes and ears” in every corner of the country, like the emperor Darius) had informed her that soon there would be a reversal of fortunes for the new rulers. She would wink at my husband, who, along with my father, she called Mr. Churchill. For some reason she considered Churchill very sly (which he probably was) and diplomatic (which at times he was not). “He is so diplomatic,” she would say of Bijan, “saying nothing, just smiling, but very dangerous all the same. Soon,” she confided, “the grand Ayatollahs will rebel against Khomeini.”

  And they did rebel. Many clerics did not believe that the religious establishment should interfere directly with the affairs of state. For centuries the clerics had exerted power by pressuring the state and posing as supporters of the poor and the needy. Although Khomeini seized power in the name of tradition, his ideological interpretation of religion was modern and, according to some, antitraditonal, influenced by modern totalitarian ideologies. Around the country traditional religious leaders, further up in the hierarchy than Khomeini, were making their unhappiness known. The most prominent of these, Ayatollah Shariatmadari, began to openly criticize the regime. In Tabriz a million people reportedly participated in demonstrations in support of Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who was calling for the separation of religion and state, which he insisted was one of the cornerstones of Shia Islam.

  These rebellions were quashed violently. The venerable Ayatollah Shariatmadari was defrocked and jailed. His supporters were arrested and some murdered, and he died while under house arrest. (“Remember that when Khomeini was in trouble with the Shah this same Shariatmadari sat under a tree weeping in protest,” Father would remind us with an ironic smile. “Our new Imam knows how to show his gratitude.”) A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy.

  Father felt that this spelled the end of Islam in our country, and he did have a point. “No foreign power,” he said, “could destroy Islam the way these people have.” Later a friend would say, “How can you believe in a religion when, from politics to plumbing, it is held responsible for everything?”

  Mother was becoming increasingly interested in my activities at the university. Now, when she called me down to join her and her friends for coffee, she would say, “Tell them, tell them what ‘they’ are doing at the universities to women.” She would count all the injustices committed against women: banning them from serving in the judiciary, from participating in sports, abrogating the family protection law (she conveniently forgot that she had herself voted against it), lowering the age of marriage, and on and on she would go. Then she would turn to me and say, “Tell them.” She wanted me to describe the demonstrations and sit-ins staged by women, the battles over the veil. “And then what did your friend Haideh say to the committee on the Cultural Revolution,” she would ask, egging me on, and before I could say anything she would turn and say triumphantly, “And this woman, Azar’s colleague, gets up and says, ‘You have turned the universities, the bastions of knowledge, into torture houses.’ Of course, she, Azar, and two of her colleagues went to the meeting without the veil,” she would add, with evident pride. “My poor daughter, is this what I gave up my life to educate her for?”

  Mother on her pilgrimage to Mecca, in the mid-1970s.

  On Friday mornings my mother would brutally attack anyone who objected to my protests about the regime’s infringements on women’s rights. Many felt that this was not the time to fight for such unimportant matters when the question of independence and the anti-imperialist struggle was at stake. On one particularly memorable morning, Shirin Khanoom raised the question of “authentic Islam.” It was said that Ayatollah Khomeini represented the true faith (Eslam-e rastin) while the Shah and Khomeini’s opponents embraced a false version, “American Islam.” This infuriated my mother. “Who are these people to tell us who is a true Muslim, or a true Iranian, for that matter? My family served this country for over six hundred years,” she said with mounting indignation. “I went to Mecca because I believed in this religion.” Casting what can only be defined as a withering look at poor Shirin Khanoom, she said, “Who made these people the representatives of true Islam?”

  Later, as she became ever more indignant, my mother said, “These people are not true Iranians.” She would remind us, interrupting anyone who tried to get a word in, that for almost two thousand years we had been Zoroastrians. A few years later, she would often point to Tahmineh Khanoom, my children’s nanny, who was Zoroastrian, and say, “Our Tahmineh Khanoom here is more Iranian than any of us. You need to take over the country,” she would tell her jokingly. “If I were born into your religion …” and she would leave it to our imagination to conceive of what she would then have done.

  CHAPTER 25

  reading and resistance

  AFTER THE CLOSING DOWN of the universities, in 1981, some of my faculty colleagues and I formed a fortnightly dinner group. We had become close during the confrontations with the university officials and took to meeting in restaurants and coffee shops to strategize and plan our next move. Once the reason for these meetings was gone, once we had either resigned or been expelled, they evolved into social forums and extended to our families. Bijan had h
is weekly poker nights with his male friends and I had weekly afternoon meetings with the women from our group, a more sophisticated and perhaps less spontaneous version of my mother’s coffee sessions. We talked about our past, our mothers, husbands, and lovers, our problems, and sometimes we indulged in just pure gossip. Later, in my last years in Iran, I joined another, similar, woman’s group. We were very frank in our willingness to talk about ourselves, moving naturally from the personal to the political or the intellectual. Sometimes it appeared that although we had far more opportunities and freedoms than our mothers had, our problems were basically the same: abusive husbands, aborted love, guilty feelings about the conflict between work and family, unresolved sexual problems and resentments. These different groups became surrogate families, some closer, some more distant, with all the problems and attractions and contradictions that families entail. There were unexpected loyalties and betrayals. We fell in and out of love, traveled together, and our children grew up together.

  On a sunny day in the early fall of 1979, my friend and colleague Haideh and I were leaving the University of Tehran when a slight man with dark features, a shock of tightly curled black hair, and a large mustache followed us and invited Haideh to join his literary group. His eyes, even behind the glasses, were filled with amusement, as if he had been engaged in a secret conversation with a particularly mischievous elf, while the rest of his body carried on in our normal, ordinary world. That is how I first met Houshang Golshiri, one of Iran’s most prominent writers. He was born in Esfahan, and had been part of a group of intellectuals and writers who greatly influenced Iranian literature in the sixties and seventies. Golshiri and his group had discovered and encouraged my cousin Majid when he first started writing and publishing poetry.