Reading as Resistance
In 2010, Azar Nafisi published a book that I considered my favorite—a statement that might seem simplistic or superficial coming from someone who has always identified as a compulsive reader. And yet, that’s how it was. I remember sitting on a patch of grass, completely absorbed in that Adelphi edition with its utterly unappealing cover—yet it captivated me, page after page. It transported me to a world culturally distant from my own and, while discussing books I had loved during my university years, it also spoke of a country I had dreamed of visiting for its artistic beauty and cultural allure: Iran.
It was 2010. I was a young woman full of dreams and expectations. That book embodied everything I had studied, the highest expression of what I had immersed myself in over the past ten years: literature, particularly English literature, Western cultures, the cultural divide that often appears to separate geographically distant peoples, the condition of women—most visibly subordinate in the Middle Eastern world—the emancipatory power of education, Islamic law, and the role of marriage in society.
Those were the years when I was beginning to explore the internet as a space for debate, when I was leading university seminars on forced marriage, analyzing it as a representation of the cultural clash experienced by second-generation Muslim populations in the West. Yet in those seminars, I always emphasized how this institution had also been an integral part of our own culture, used as a tool of control to suppress any rebellion against the preordained norms of patriarchal societies—societies that, only on the surface, seemed distant from Islamic culture.
Those were the years when I would spend hours talking to anyone who was willing to listen about how liberating education could be, how I saw it as the most powerful weapon against political dictatorships and cultural segregation. Those were the years when I fought to prove the power of words.
Then one day, long after its publication, I came across this book, and it was love at first page. A manifesto of disarmed and disarming rebellion. Perhaps too politically correct for the louder voices of the time, perhaps even a bit bourgeois—but to me, it was a powerful and compelling battle cry.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, a professor at the University of Tehran, was forced to suspend her English literature course due to pressure from the regime that took power after Khomeini’s 1979 revolution. As a witness to the repression and violence her female students suffered at the hands of the morality police, she refused to give up teaching. Every Thursday, she gathered a small group of former students in her home, which became a refuge for reading and discussion. In this all-female space, far from the grip of dictatorship, these women spoke about themselves and their new reality in post-revolution Iran. For a brief moment, they experienced freedom—studying and seeing their own lives reflected in the pages of books banned by the Ayatollah, engaging in dialogue through the words of authors like Nabokov, Austen, and Fitzgerald.
Novels became tools for analyzing daily life, allowing these women to expose their vulnerabilities while also giving them a lens through which to deconstruct the new regime. Lolita, reduced to an object by Humbert’s monstrosity, became a symbol of their own dehumanization, while Jane Austen’s works, with their masterful use of what is said and left unsaid, provided insight into the evolving role of women across different times and places.
The professor explained to her students how, in their culture, the divide between love and sex was a barrier to a true perception of the female figure. And so, in one of their final meetings, she arrived with Pride and Prejudice in one hand and a book on female sexuality titled Our Bodies, Ourselves in the other. Once again, literature became a weapon—a means of preserving dignity and achieving self-awareness in its fullest sense. Nafisi proposed rebellion through literature, through self-knowledge and the pursuit of understanding, as the only form of resistance against censorship, against thought controlled and dictated by a society that fears women, fears equality, fears equity—but above all, fears knowledge.
I loved this book. I read and reread it until I practically wore it out. And yet, only a few days ago, I discovered the existence of a film adaptation by Israeli director Eran Riklis, released in November 2024.
The Cinematic Adaptation: A Complex Challenge
Riklis’ film takes on one of the most complex and, in a way, most spiritual challenges: adapting a literary work to the screen. A delicate endeavor that, personally, I have only ever truly admired in Ivory and Zeffirelli. On top of that, Riklis faced the challenge of bringing to the screen a book that, as mentioned earlier, is essentially a symphony of literary voices, spanning different eras and geographical origins. Nabokov, Austen, Brontë, Flaubert, Naipaul, and Fitzgerald seem to engage in conversation, prompting the reader to question the limits of their own freedom to act.
In my opinion, the director does a fairly good job of achieving his goal, effectively conveying the oppressive atmosphere of post-revolutionary Tehran even to viewers unfamiliar with its historical or political context. He highlights the stark contrast between the rigid, suffocating world outside and the secret meetings between Nafisi and her students, alternating between moments of breath and tension for the audience.
And yet, despite the film’s clear and effective message about the power of literature, it lacks the strong sociological analysis that Nafisi so brilliantly weaves into her narrative. Riklis only lightly touches on what Nafisi states outright in her book: that Islam and the Islamic Revolution are two distinct and distant entities. Furthermore, the director largely overlooks the many references to Persian literary culture, particularly excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights, which Nafisi considers just as powerful as the coveted yet forbidden Western literary tradition.
The male characters also seem stripped of depth, resulting in an almost caricatured portrayal of Iranian society—an aspect that, at times, might make viewers question the intentions behind the film’s Israeli production. Another limitation is the film’s minimal representation of historical events—aside from the initial scenes of student protests during the revolution—whereas Nafisi’s book provides a rich, detailed account of her twenty years in Iran, from her return from the United States to her final escape in the late 1990s.
Had the film been bolder in its storytelling and paid closer attention to Iran’s history, it could have reached a wider audience and made a stronger impact. Instead, it gives the impression of being aimed at a niche audience already familiar with Nafisi’s book—viewers equipped with the necessary references to understand its many literary citations.
The Power of Words
It is a powerful film, still worth watching, but one that, if I may say so, misses the opportunity to highlight an issue that extends beyond Iran’s morality police and revolution. The role of words—just like that of images, in this case—is to awaken dormant consciences, to shake us from the fragility of our time, from the precariousness and existential uncertainty that define contemporary global history.
The power of words. The power of knowledge. The freedom to know oneself as the ultimate answer to the suffocating repression of singular thought.
Reading as the highest form of freedom—this has always been the true act of rebellion.
Source: Leggere Lolita a Teheran: la ribellione della parola
