Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi is a wonderful, recent best-seller and many of you may have seen it -- it's a devastating account of life in Koumeni Iran -- Nafisi was fired from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil -- she now teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Washington -- while I have not made notes on the book itself, Nafisi has established "The Dialogue Project" at John Hopkins University at her website -- this page contains some extracts from that website
Back to TopThe Dialogue Project website is dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu/.
Back to TopThe purpose of the Dialogue Project website is to provide a global forum where voices from around the world can meet and interact intellectually about the issues that both affect and define the relationship between the Islamic world and the West.
Back to TopThe Dialogue Project is a multi-year initiative designed to promote-- in a primarily cultural context-- the development of democracy and human rights in the Muslim world. In doing so, the Dialogue Project also hopes to educate those in non-Muslim communities-- whether they be policy makers, scholars, development professionals, members of the media, or ordinary citizens-- in the complexities and contradictions that govern both Western relationships with and life in many predominantly Muslim societies around the world.
In pursuing democracy and human rights in the Muslim world, one must realize that the battle is both ideological and cultural in nature and must be met on these grounds. Too often, oppressive regimes and organizations have attempted to suppress any movement towards pluralism and democracy under the banner of ideological Islam, protecting tyranny in the name of religion. For this reason, the topics addressed by the Dialogue Project will be those that have been the main targets of Islamists and, as a result, are the most significant impediments to the creation of open and pluralistic societies in the Muslim world, including culture and the myth of Western culture imperialism, women's issues, and human rights, among others.
Back to TopAzar Nafisi is a Visiting Fellow and professorial lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. A professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, Dr. Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabaii before coming to the United States-- earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981, and did not resume teaching until 1987. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture as well as on the human rights of Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran and other Muslim societies.
Dr. Nafisi's writings include Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabakov's Novels (1994) and chapters in Muslim Women and Politics of Participation (1997), Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran (1992), and Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, (1999). Her op-eds and articles have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic, and her cover story, "The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem", published in The New Republic (February 22, 1999), has been reprinted into several languages. She is currently teaching on the relation between culture and politics at SAIS. Her new book, the critically-acclaimed bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, was published by Random House in 2003.
Back to TopToday, the challenges posed by Islamism in the Muslim world and in the West significantly impact both international policy and the everyday lives of millions of people. In order to respond to these challenges, those in the West need to understand "Islamic societies" as much as those living in the Muslim world need to understand the West, with all the attendant complexities and contradictions that such an understanding must entail.
Islamism has become the biggest threat to the development and survival of democracy in the world today. The Islamist threat lies not only in its potential for terror-based violence, but in the appeal and mass embrace of its ideological and cultural claims. Islamism's combination of visibility, virulence, and aggressive self-righteousness has allowed it to become the dominant lens through which the West judges the Muslim world and the Muslim-majority countries judge the West. Their ideology has come to underlie much of the international discourse on the "East-West" relationship.
To legitimize their claims, Islamists have formulated and developed an ideology and a mythology which abuse religion as a political and ideological tool to target human rights, the rights of women, and culture under the guise of defending Islam from the corrupting influence of Western- particularly American- culture. The Islamist confiscation of a religion and their perversion of its history makes tools of culture and tradition which are then used to undermine and ultimately destroy democratic institutions and aspirations in their own countries, as well as to attack Western democracies and their interests abroad. The Islamists have attempted not only to redefine the aspirations of whole peoples, but to confiscate and rewrite history-including that of Islam-to further their cause.
Unfortunately, whether consciously or unconsciously, many in the West have become complicit in imposing the Islamist discourse on international relations. Among the expert and policy communities, people have adopted a language and a mindset that encompass concepts such as "Western cultural imperialism" and "cultural relativism"-- deploring the former as they applaud the latter. In this way, the worst claims of Islamist rhetoric are accepted as fact, and this apologist thinking imposes on the peoples of the Muslim-majority countries a repressive form of cultural determinism.
In order to effectively combat ideological Islam we need to create alternative discourses which will reformulate and question Islamist claims. This project will demonstrate ways through which culture can both create mythologies and be subversive of them, ways through which we can examine these mythologies both in the Muslim-majority countries and in the West. Policy cannot be made based on information alone: it needs to have the benefit of genuine knowledge -- cultural, social and historical -- in order to be effective. If we believe, for example, that women in Muslim-majority countries believe that being flogged and stoned are appropriate punishments for public hand-holding or adultery because that is their "culture", our policy will be different than if we believe that they -- like women in other parts of the world -- would want free choices and happiness. Thus we will bring voices from the Muslim world together with voices from the West in order to re-question the mythologies and challenge the Islamist claims.
The threat of ideological Islam must be met not only on the international stage but locally, by creating genuine understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims based on cultural exchange and intellectual discourse. The lessons that are learned here go beyond current issues to the shaping of the world order in years to come. The world can no longer ignore the issue of culture nor can policy be shaped adequately without an understanding of it. Crafting that understanding is the primary goal of this program.
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