Iranian of the Day

Anonymous or bitter today?

I suggest you choose another name like bitter-today to go with your sour mood :-0)

Plus... what's wrong with her talking? Do you prefer a writer to go silent? Or would you prefer that she only talks about something that you would be able to understand? 

Anyway, I wouldn't mind to donate my copies of her books to you as an act of charity...a good read could actually reduce your bitterness! Because considering the out of context content of your comment, it is obvious that you haven't even read RLT...

Cheers, Azarin

Things she's been silent about??

Is there anything she's been silent about? The Mars mission perhaps? The current food shortage? The situation of Iran's national soccer team? Azar has been talking her head off for the last 7 years. She has more to talk about? There we go, we have our own version of Forrest Gump. Azar was there when they overthrew Mossadegh. She was the woman without the hijab in the crowd on 15th Khordad demonstrations back in '64. She was with the Fedayian in Siahkal. With Khomeini on the plane when he came back (look behind Yazdi in the image and you see Azar's head peaking). Oh, I can't wait for her book to come out. Perhaps Azarin Sadegh can lend me her advanced copy.

Mr Kadivar, please...

do not set Nafisi as the role model for the gifted writers of the Iranian Diaspora, or even good writers anywhere. Very disrespectful! 

Azar Nafisi on Charlie Rose (youtube)

Thought this interview should also be of interest: Azar Nafisi on Charlie Rose a few years ago:

Watch here.

GO GO AZAR ! ;0)

Asghar_Massombagi

Well Actually my Friend regarding Hoveyda I have here

As for your other objections well even if I disagree I do respect your views and honesty for defending it with your real name, unlike most people on this site.

So My Hats off to you with this song

interviews with both Keshavarz and Dabashi

Readers may find these interviews useful. Both of them have healthy portions dedicated to "Lolita."

Lolita and Beyond (Aug. 2006)
Jasmine and Stars (Aug. 2007)

And then there was this piece of satire by Peyman Khorsandi. I'm almost positive is making fun of my interview with Dabashi. I found it hillarious, but he does hit a bit below the belt in its silliness. I won't blame Professor Dabashi if he finds it unfunny.

Nafisi and Dabashi

It seems that many on this discussion like to compare Dabashi and Nafisi. These two cannot be compared. The difference between them is like night and day. Firstly, the reason some think Reading Lolita in Tehran is a good book is because they have not read this book. If you actually read Reading Lolita in Tehran you will notice that this book has NO literary value. The English is below high school level. Sentence construction is at a middle school level. Most importantly, there is really no story to talk about. The ONLY reason this book got the publicity is because it was against Iran. In contrast, Dabashi’s writing is wonderful. I always go back and read his article over and over again because they are so beautifully written. In addition, Dabashi is an extremely keen observer, and is a wonderful thinker. This is why he teaches at a prestigious university like Colombia. Dabashi writes about his observations and the way he analyzes them. He owes no one. I suggest you go and read his article about the President of Columbia University. Now compare this with Nafishi who has no observation power and entirely at the service of the Neocons.

"Things I've been silent about"

What is interesting is that Azar Nafisi has never bad mouthed Keshavarz and Dabbashi even if these two scholars have found their 15 minutes of fame through their loud critic of her work.

I think it tells a lot about Azar Nafisi and places her above these shallow discussions rooted in envy and malice.

BTW, her new memoir “Things I’ve been silent about” will be available in January 2009! I have already reserved my copy on Amazon.com!

Azarin

Daniel Pipe=Nonsense

Zion, I wouldn't quote Daniel Pipe if I were you. He is definitely is in the same league as Khomeini and Mahmud. Promotin hate, lies and accusation seems to be the name of their game.

Nafisi and Dabashi

I read `readin Lolita in Tehran` last year, and I found it really fascinating. Mrs. Nafisi is a very well read and talented writer.

As for Dabashi, who seems to be the side topic here, from the little I have heard of his `antiques`, I tend to agree with you Mr. Kadviar. Is he now ranting against Nafisi? LOL.

You might find these interesting. They are quite funny:

//www.danielpipes.org/article/2255
//www.danielpipes.org/article/2496
//www.danielpipes.org/article/476

Mud slinging?

Well, you have kindly provided the link to my article about late Hoveida so interested readers can read it and judge for themselves if I slung any mud.  Taking public figures, dead or alive to task is a right in a democracy.  If you did indeed read my piece you surely must have seen that I brought examples from his own book to back my argument unlike you who makes snippy remarks about Dabashi, accusing him of being an IRI apologist without bothering to present a shred of evidence.  Of course you can get off your pampered rear end and write a rebuttal to my piece on Hoveyda.  No one has stopped you. 

dear Raastgoo

Why not? I don't believe those are the only books that Nafisi has read or agreed with. I think that she got the publicity of the US because in a way the media loves these kind of stories and not because her book is the best book ever. You can't deny however that she is a talented writer and that's important, if you are a writer of course!

Asghar_Massombagi

Given your own mud slinging of dead people in the public eye like your piece on Fereydoun Hoveyda ( when they are no more around to defend themselves unlike Mr. Dabashi), I gather that you are indeed well qualified to speak about ugly remarks ...

Best,

DK

Jaleho

Thank you for proving my point !

LOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooL !

Dabashi Thinks he is the Iranian Edward Said. He spent too much time amongst his dusty books in the library. Someone should tell him or remind him that schizophrenia is a disease.

The denomination of the Languagespoken and written in Iran is not Farsi by the way but Persian. Dixit Pejman Akbarzadeh article

Coming from Pejman a good friend and native from Shiraz and precisely belonging to the generation of kids that Your likes were ready to so gladly send to sacrifice themselves on the Iran Iraq front I take your Insults Mr or Mrs Jaleho as a compliment and a testimony to your own mediocrity and morbid sense of humor.

VIVE LA LITERATURE !

Why Lolita?

My question to Ms. Nafisi is that why, from the rich repertoire of Russian literature, she chose Lolita, a mediocre novel by a mediocre author to discuss with her students. Even here in the US (the so-called beacon of democracy in the World) Lolita is engulfed in controversy, let alone in a religiously and socially conservative country like Iran.

Same goes with Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, a work that idolizes the glamorous lifestyle of a group of rich Americans in the 1920s when the rest of the US population (and most of the World for that matter) were being crushed under the weight of the great depression.

Selecting these questionable works from the rich repertoire of Russian and American literature indicates that Ms. Nafisi was not simply trying to emancipate the young and impressionable Iranian women (what, to go have sex with older men and immerse themselves in a worry-free and leisurely lifestyle a la Paris Hilton?). Are these really the kind of literature we want our teenagers be reading whether in Iran or in the US. If Ms. Nafisi was ernest in her attempt to educate the Iranian youth, there are far more greater works of Russian and American literature to use inside or outside the class that would have served the young Iranian generation better and would not have cost her her job.

Azar Nafisi in LA Book Expo this weekend

Azar Nafisi is going to be in LA this weekend.

She will be part of the panel Something to Hide: Writers Against the Surveillance State:

//www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1593

And this info is for those of you who like and appreciate her work :-)

Azarin

PS: Thanks a lot erfan342 for the link to the part 4.

Thanks Darius for your comments..so true indeed!

Oghdeh that's all

Amazing how much jealousy and oghdeh is among some Iranian people. You know, it’s a menthol disorder!

Every time some One reaches to some high level, way above these people capability and
Intellect, they immediately start character assisination. We saw same behavior towards
Anoush ansari, then Satrapi, and now nafisi. Of course what burns these people are the
Facts that these are women, and women in their warp islamo fascist thinking are considered half equal and used for sexual gratification and not much else....

Mr. Kadivar, I challenge you...

to show in any of Professor Dabashi's books or writings an apology for the IRI. This kind of reckless writing is frankly unbecoming from someone who fancies himself a journalist.  I have my opinion about Ms. Nafisi's book and expressed it in an article in this site before Dabashi's piece appeared in Al-Ahram.  I read Dabashi's piece and although on many points we agreed I found his tone a little too harsh.  However Dabashi is a scholar with many books to his credit.  He teaches in a venerable institution and the last I checked Columbia University wasn't controlled by the agents of the IRI.  To dismiss people with ugly remarks like yours and calling anyone who doesn't agree with your point of view book burning Nazis is pathetic.

Humor for you Kadivar/Thanks Rastgoo

Nice article in Al-Ahram, thanks Raastgoo.

Mr. Kadivar, you find Dabashi's writing as boring with no sense of humor?! Actually, I think he has a delicious sense of humor as seen in the article provided by Rastgoo, see:

"I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage "girls" and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.....

In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem."

But let me guess what kinda humor appeals to YOU. I think you LOVE Satrapi's "plastic key for heaven and the virgins and better-than-Disney world promise" to the 14 year old Iranian teens of Iran-Iraq war, ha? The tens of thousands of Iranian youth, thanks to the sacrifice of whose young blood, you can still call your language "Farsi", and travel to Khorramshar as an Iranian city.

I actually do not need to guess your sense of humor. Your first post in this thread tell plenty about you and your sense of humor.

Hamid Dabashi is a jealous IRI apologist

Dabashi is a bitter intellectual who wants to blame everything on America but hardly understands American culture or Cinema. He has a good knowledge of Iranian Cinema and I respect him for that but his critics against Nafisi are entirely based on an inferiority complex than anything else. They see anyone who critisizes the IRI mindset as traitors and neo con puppets but offer no logical or valid argument.

Besides Dabashi has no sense of humor and that makes his writings extremly boring and pretentious.

Sorry IRI apologist's you need to offer better arguments to convince us that Nafisi is a bad writer but you guys hardly read books, you prefer burning them like your buddies the Nazi's ...

Sieg Heil !

Jasmine and Stars - Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

"Reading Lolita in Tehran" is hard to read, hard to understand and hard to believe. It's full of misstatements, out of context exaggeration, and biased misinterpretation.

For a great response to Azar Nafisi's book, look at Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz' book titled "Jasmine and Stars - Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran". (She is Professor of Persian & Comparative Literature and Chair, Dept. of Asian and Near Eastern Lang. & Lit. at Washington University in St. Louis.)

Prof. Keshavarz' talk at UCLA on the same topic is available at: //www.parstimes.com/gallery/keshavarz_lecture...

Jaleho, What is your IQ?

Dr. Nafisi, Ms Satrapi, and Shirin Ebadi according to Jaleho and his IRI buddies are not very smart or intelligent.
Who is smart? Rafasanjani, Mahmood Atom, Khamenai, Khomaini or you. So far all we have heard from these idiots have been about sexual activities with thier aunts and cousins. They also talked a lot about killing other people.
Dr. Nafisi, Ms Satrapi and Shirin Ebadi work on message of peace through lecture, movie, books, and speeches.
Well, again, you don't understand anything, if it is not in Arabic. You are not Iranian, you are from Nasl Arab whom burned iran libararies and raped our women.

Dr. Nafisi is very kind, smart, intelligent Iranian. Against all odd, she has helped many young women in our country with her lectures.
Of course, they got out of Iran. If you have not noticed, 60% of Sharief , 40% of U of Tehran , and almost 90 out of top 100 Konkor leave Iran after Graduation.

Then again, you don't notice this stuff. Blame it on Israel, America and Europe...

Wondeful Talk

She is such an intellectual and an asset to the Persian culture and literature. I learned a lot just by listening to her. Good job girl.

To Jale, the lame writer

Where in the world has either Satrapi or Nafisi spoken of bombing Iran? Stop lumping everone and everything together and start showing your real self. Pro-IRI voices such as your own will nag forever to stop intellectuals and free-thinkers such as Dr. Nafisi, but there are no followers to these babling non-sensicals.

Intellectual or Collaborator?!!

For those enamored with Azar Nafisi and her pathetic _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ I recommend Hamid Dabashi's devastating review of her book:

//weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm

...as well the following synopsis on the debate:

//chronicle.com/free/v53/i08/08a01201.htm

Azar Nafisi and pseudo-intellectuals like her who make a career out of Iran-bashing to get a job in the US are even bigger criminals than Neo-Cons who conspire to attack Iran, for they are betraying their own homeland and their own fellow Iranians. If anyone on this website has any desire to see Iran being raped, pillaged, and devastated the same way Iraq has been they should be aware that the like of Nafisi are paving the way for such a deplorable outcome...

Such a lame speaker!

Worse than her at-best-mediocre writing. People like Azar Nafisi and Marjan Satrapi who are being used as propaganda tool by Bernard Lewis and Spielberg types should at least recognize that fact!
Alas, she really thinks as highly of herself as Bernard Lewis thinks of her :-)

That's bad for her. If she manged to keep quiet instead, she could evade attention from the undeserved credit she got for her first book.

I wish Iranian.com would devote some time to talented Iranian writers and professors like Fatemeh Keshavarz or Hamid Dabashi types to balance out their daily dose of the Satrapis and the Nafisis! Remember, we get a lot of the latter in the piled up racks of Costco books anyway!

But again, the site choice of tons of writings by Bahais in the propaganda form, heavy traffic of Zionists who believe bombing Iran is a good "liberating" thing, the many neocon idologies wraped and presented as "anti-mullah" rhetoric, Iranian feminsim warped and presented by people like Nafisi and Satrapi, all seem to go well with an IRAN that these fringe groups DREAM of, or are nostalgic about, not the REAL IRAN of REAL IRANIANS.

Azar Nafisi Part 4

I think u forgot to put part 4, which is the final video I uploaded on youtube.
this is the link: //ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-R1fdvDEQI

She is a real Iranian intellectual

I have read "Reading Lolta in Tehran", it is a long boring book screaming "sour grapes".

Azar Nafisi did nothing to remain and teach in Tehran at the University level.

She had a get together at her house. Eventually, most of the women including Azar Nafisi "fled" Iran.

I write "fled" because no one in Iran was after her.

After the Iranian Revolution there are more Iranian female University students. More Iranian women in the work force. Did those Iranian women make a mistake by remaining in Iran? No.

The same goes for Marjan Satrapi. Ms. Satrapi on the other hand is just plain confused. She soen't know where she fits in... in french or Iranian culture.

All in all, these two individuals add as much to Iranian culture as the gloomy Iranian movies of Makhmalbauf and Kiarostami which get a lot of Awards at the Cannes Film festival.

If you look at it in an objective way, it's all just one big bad publicity stunt to sabatoge tourism to Iran.

This is just more feminist garbage

This is just more feminist garbage

This is just more feminist garbage

This is just more feminist garbage