Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [141]
Would she apologize for being late, I wondered, even on this occasion, when she has such a good excuse and no one would blame her?
“I’m so sorry I’m late again,” she said with a disarming smile that showed no sign of repentance.
“You usurped my rights,” said Azin. “Being late is my specialty.”
Sanaz wanted to defer her news until the break. Our rule was that the personal narratives that were increasingly creeping into our Thursday session should not interfere with class. But in this case, even I was too excited to wait.
“It was all done very quickly,” Sanaz explained, caving in to our demands. Suddenly, out of the blue, he had called and asked her to marry him—said something about running out of time. He told her he had already talked to his parents, who had talked to her parents (without asking her first, I noted in passing). They were delighted, and since he couldn’t come to Iran because of the draft, perhaps she and her family could come to Turkey? Iranians didn’t need a visa for Turkey, and the trip could be arranged quickly. She was dumbfounded. It was something she’d always expected, but somehow she couldn’t believe it was actually happening. “Your fire is almost out,” she said, interrupting herself. “I’m really good with fires. Let me fix it.” She added some logs to the languishing fire and poked at it with energy. A long flame leapt out and died just as quickly.
At the start of the twentieth century, the age of marriage in Iran—nine, according to sharia laws—was changed to thirteen and then later to eighteen. My mother had chosen whom she wanted to marry and she had been one of the first six women elected to Parliament in 1963. When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and the rights of women in Western democracies. But it was not the fashion then to think that our culture was not compatible with modern democracy, that there were Western and Islamic versions of democracy and human rights. We all wanted opportunities and freedom. That is why we supported revolutionary change—we were demanding more rights, not fewer.
I married, on the eve of the revolution, a man I loved. At that time, Mahshid, Nassrin, Manna and Azin were in their teens, Sanaz and Mitra were a few years younger and Yassi was two years old. By the time my daughter was born five years later, the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother’s time: the first law to be repealed, months before the ratification of a new constitution, was the family-protection law, which guaranteed women’s rights at home and at work. The age of marriage was lowered to nine—eight and a half lunar years, we were told; adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death; and women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men. Sharia law replaced the existing system of jurisprudence and became the norm. My youthful years had witnessed the rise of two women to the rank of cabinet minister. After the revolution, these same two women were sentenced to death for the sins of warring with God and spreading prostitution. One of them, the minister for women’s affairs, had been abroad at the time of revolution and remained in exile, where she became a leading spokesperson for women’s rights and human rights. The other, the minister of education and my former high school principal, was put in a sack and stoned or shot to death. These girls, my girls, would in time come to think of these women with reverence and hope: if we’d had women like this in the past, there was no reason why we couldn’t have them in the future.
Our society was far more advanced than its new rulers, and women, regardless of their religious and ideological beliefs, had come out onto the streets to protest the new laws. They had tasted power and were not about to give it up without a fight. It was then that the myth of Islamic