Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran: a story of love, books and revolution by Azar Nafisi

Joan Smith discovers how Jane Austen and Scott Fitzgerald outwitted the ayatollahs in Iran

In the late Nineties, Azar Nafisi invited a group of seven young women to meet at her apartment in Tehran every Thursday morning to discuss Western literature. One week, a student called Sanaz mysteriously failed to appear. When she arrived the following Thursday, full of apologies, she explained the reason for her absence.

During a brief excursion to the Caspian Sea, she had been arrested, held in a cell for 48 hours, forced to undergo a virginity test and given 25 lashes. Her offence had been to visit a friend's fiancé, along with five other young women, where they were arrested by Revolutionary Guards.

This was not an unusual experience for Nafisi's students. Two, Nassrin and Mahtab, had been in prison for supporting radical groups disapproved of by the Islamic regime in Iran. Mahtab served two-and-a-half years of a five-year sentence, during which she met another woman who had attended Nafisi's classes at university.

The two prisoners fondly recalled reading Hemingway and Henry James, and Mahtab described an occasion when Nafisi's students staged a mock trial of The Great Gatsby. "We laughed a lot," she told Nafisi, adding almost casually: "You know, she was executed." So was Nafisi's former headmistress, a woman who later became an education minister - bundled up into a sack, and either stabbed or shot. Such events occur regularly in a narrative which begins by describing secret literature classes and expands into a portrait of everyday life in a totalitarian state.

Nafisi began teaching at the University of Tehran in the early days of the revolution, and the nature of the regime is vividly conveyed by her account of the increasingly vocal objections of her Islamic students to the texts. The Great Gatsby condones adultery and is therefore immoral, they claim, and one of them goes so far as to describe the novel as "cultural rape". The only good thing about the book, he declares, "is that it exposes the immorality and decadence of Western society, but we have fought to rid ourselves of this trash and it is high time that such books be banned". Many books were and are banned in the Islamic republic of Iran, while cinemas and other manifestations of decadence were burned.

Nafisi was eventually expelled from the university for refusing to wear the veil, an imposition resisted by so many women that it had to be enforced by roving morality squads: four armed men and women in white Toyotas, who patrolled the streets, punishing the slightest infraction.

Steeped in literature, Nafisi describes this enforced concealment as becoming "light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe".

One of the book's most vivid images is of her students arriving at her apartment, anxiously clutching their headscarves, then removing their dark outer garments. In exile in Washington, Nafisi has kept pictures of the transition: "In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home."

Uneasy with each other to begin with - the seven young women come from very different backgrounds, religious and secular, radical and conservative - they gradually relax to a point where they can make jokes at the expense of the regime.

The youngest, Yassi, paraphrases the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice, neatly capturing the paradoxical nature of a regime that is as prurient as it is puritanical: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife". (One of the regime's first actions was to lower the age of legal marriage in Iran from 18 to nine.)

All of the women, including Nafisi, are by this time veterans of body searches which are little more than excuses for a form of sexual assault; some have also been sexually abused by male relatives. But the core of the book is the regime's total denial of freedom of expression, to a point where reading great works of literature becomes a risky act that can only be done in secret. Unsurprisingly, Nafisi finds parallels in Nabokov's description of a totalitarian state in Invitation to a Beheading, and her refusal to see the regime in Iran as unique is a useful corrective to Western misconceptions about Islam.

What she does not do quite as convincingly is make the case that Lolita is a peculiarly appropriate prism through which to view the revolution, and her lengthy early reflections on the novel may deter some readers. Nafisi admits, in a moment of touching candour, that her skill lies in teaching rather than written literary criticism, and her observations on texts veer between flashes of real insight and passages of earnest exegesis.

In that sense, her eye-catching title does the book no favours, as well as imposing a structure - its four sections are entitled Lolita, Gatsby, James and Austen - which feels like an unnecessary conceit. Nafisi is at her best when describing the gradual erosion of individual identity by a regime that eventually comes to a panic-stricken realisation that its attempts to control thought are leading to a complete collapse of originality and innovation - and an invitation to Nafisi to begin teaching again.

As she discovers, conditions at the university are still hostile to intellectual inquiry, and she eventually makes the painful decision to go into exile. In that sense, the book is elegiac, a record of a brief experiment in defiance, but it is also a moving tribute to the stubbornness - even when confronted by revolution, war and repression - of the human spirit.

Joan Smith's latest book is 'Moralities' (Penguin)