by Azar Nafisi
“But who is thinking about love these days?” said Azin with mock chastity. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and clusters of tiny turquoise beads trembled slightly on her ears as she turned her head. “The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen’s times. God bless the arranged marriage! Nowadays, girls marry either because their families force them, or to get green cards, or to secure financial stability, or for sex—they marry for all kinds of reasons, but rarely for love.”
I looked at Mahshid, who, although quiet, seemed to be saying, “Here we go again.”
“And,” Azin continued, reaching for her mug, “we’re talking about educated girls—girls like us, who’ve gone to college, who one might think would have higher ambitions.”
“Not all of them,” Mahshid said quietly, without looking at Azin. “Many women are independent. Look at how many businesswomen we have, and there are women who have chosen to live alone.” Yes, and you are one of them, I thought, a studious working girl still living with her parents at thirty-two.
“But most don’t have a choice,” said Manna. “And I think we’re way behind Jane Austen’s times.” This was one of the few instances I can remember when Manna implicitly sided with Azin against Mahshid. “My mother could choose whom she wanted to marry. I had less choice, and my younger sister has even less,” she concluded gloomily.
“How about a temporary marriage?” said Nassrin, rearranging the orange peels on her plate like pieces of a puzzle. “You seem to have forgotten our president’s enlightened alternative.” She was referring to an Islamic rule peculiar to Iran, according to which men could have four official wives and as many temporary wives as they wished. The logic behind this was that they had to satisfy their own needs when their wives were unavailable, or unable, to satisfy them. A man could enter into such a contract for as short a period as ten minutes or as long as ninety-nine years. President Rafsanjani, then honored with the title of reformist, had proposed that young people should enter into temporary marriages. This angered both the reactionaries, who felt it was a shrewd move on the president’s part to curry favor with the young, and the progressives, who were equally skeptical of the president’s motives and, in addition, found it insulting, especially to women. Some went so far as to call the temporary marriage a sanctified form of prostitution.
“I’m not in favor of the temporary marriage,” said Mahshid. “But men are weaker and do have more sexual needs. Besides,” she added cautiously, “it’s the girl’s choice. She isn’t forced into it.”
“The girl’s choice?” said Nassrin with evident disgust. “You do have funny notions of choice.”
Mahshid, lowering her eyes, did not respond.
“Some men, even the most educated,” Nassrin continued fiercely, “think of this as progressive. I had to argue with a friend—a male friend—that the only way he could convince me this was progressive was if the law gave women the same rights as men. You want to know how open-minded these men are? I’m not talking about the religious guys—no, the secular ones,” she said, tossing another orange peel into the fire. “Just ask them about marriage. Talk about hypocrisy!”
“It’s true that neither my mom nor my aunts married for love,” Yassi said, furrowing her brow, “but all my uncles married for love. It’s strange when you think about it. Where does that leave us—what sort of legacy, I mean?
“I suppose,” she added, brightening up after a moment’s reflection, “that if Austen were in our shoes, she’d say it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.” And this was how we started our play on Austen’s famous opening sentence—a temptation that almost every Austen reader must have felt at least once.
Our merrymaking was interrupted by the sound of the bell. Mahshid, who was closest to the door, said, I’ll get it. We heard the street door close, steps on the stairs, a pause. Mahshid opened the front door to sounds of greetings and laughter. Sanaz came in, smiling radiantly. She was holding a big box of pastries. Why the pastries? I asked. It isn’t your turn.
“Yes, but I have good news,” she said mysteriously.
“Are you getting married?” Yassi asked lazily from the depths of the couch.
“Let me sit down first,” said Sanaz, taking off her long overcoat and woolen scarf. She tossed her head to one side, with the proud ease of women with beautiful hair, and pronounced: “It’s going to snow.”
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 feminism—a contradictory notion, attempting to reconcile the concept of women’s rights with the tenets of Islam—took root. It enabled the rulers to have their cake and eat it too: they could claim to be progressive and Islamic, while modern women were denounced as Westernized, decadent and disloyal. They needed us modern men and women to show them the way, but they also had to keep us in our place.
What differentiated this revolution from the other totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century was that it came in the name of the past: this was both its strength and its weakness. We, four generations of women—my grandmother, my mother, myself and my daughter—lived in the present but also in the past; we were experiencing two different time zones simultaneously. Interesting, I thought, how war and revolution have made us even more aware of our own personal ordeals—especially marriage, at the heart of which was the question of individual freedom, as Jane Austen had discovered two centuries before. She had discovered it, I reflected, but what about us, sitting in this room, in another country at the end of another century?
Sanaz’s nervous laughter brought me out of my reverie. “I’m so scared,” she said, her right hand going to her brow to push back an absent strand of hair. “Up till now, marrying him has been sort of a dream, something to think about when I was fighting with my brother. I never knew—I still don’t know—how it would all work out in real life.”
Sanaz was worried about the trip to Turkey and what it would be like to see him again. “What if he doesn’t like me?” she said. She did not ask, What if I don’t like him? or, What if we don’t get along? Would her brother become more vicious and her mother more depressed? Would her mother, with her martyr’s look, make Sanaz feel guilty, as if she had failed her on purpose? These were serious questions for Sanaz. It was hard to tell if she was going to Turkey to please the others or because she was in love. This was my problem with Sanaz—one never knew what she really wanted.
“After six years, God knows what he’ll be like,” said Nassrin, absentmindedly rotating the coffee mug in her hands. I looked at her with some concern, as I almost always did when our talks turned to marriage and men. I couldn’t help but wonder how she dealt with her buried memories. Did she compare herself with her friends who were free of such experiences? And were they free of such experiences?
Sanaz glanced at Nassrin reproachfully. Did she really need to hear this now? At any rate, going to Turkey would be good for her, even if it didn’t work out. At least she’d get him out of her system.
“Do you love him?” I asked her, trying to ignore the girls’ sardonic smiles. “You’ll always be taking a risk when you decide to marry, but the question is, Do you love him now?”
“I loved him when I was very young,” Sanaz said slowly, too excited to participate in their joke. “I don’t know anymore. I’ve always loved the idea of him, but he’s been away for so long. He’s had so many chances to meet other women. . . . What chance have I had of meeting other men? My aunt says I don’t have to say yes or no. She says if we want to find out how we really feel about each other, we should meet in Turkey alone. We should spend some time together without our families’ interfering presence.”
“What an unusually wise aunt,” I said, unable to stop myself from breaking in like a referee. “She’s right, you know.”
Mahshid raised her eyes in my direction for a fraction of a second before lowering them again. Azin, quickly catching Mahshid’s look, said, “I agree with Dr. Nafisi. You’d be wise to try to live together for a while before making any decisions.”
Mahshid decided not to take the bait, and remained demurely silent. Was it my imagination or did she cast a reproachful glance in my direction as she lowered her eyes, fixing them once more on an imperceptible spot in the carpet?
“The first thing you should do to test your compatibility,” said Nassrin, “is dance with him.”
At first we were puzzled by her statement, which seemed far-fetched even for Nassrin. It took me a second before I grasped her meaning. But of course! She was referring to the Dear Jane Society we’d invented in my last year at Allameh! The idea for that society—defunct even before it started—had begun with a memorable dance.
2
I see it now as if through the large window of a house in the middle of an empty garden. I’ve pressed my face to the window, and here they come: five women, all in black robes and head scarves. As each passes by the window, I can begin to differentiate their faces; one is standing and watching the other four. They are not graceful; they bump into one another and into the chairs. They are boisterous in a peculiarly subdued manner.
In my graduate seminar that spring, I had compared the structure of Pride and Prejudice to an eighteenth-century dance. After class, some of the girls had stayed behind to talk this over—they were confused by what I’d meant. I thought it best to explain myself by going over the motions of the dance with them. Close your eyes and imagine the dance, I suggested. Imagine you are moving back and forth; it would help if you could imagine that the man standing opposite you was the incomparable Mr. Darcy, or maybe not—whoever is on your mind, imagine him. I heard a giggle from one of the girls. Suddenly hit by inspiration, I took Nassrin’s reluctant hands and started to dance with her, one-two and one-two. Then I asked the others to form a line, and pretty soon we were all dancing, our long black robes twirling as we bumped into one another and into the chairs.
They stand opposite their partners, give a slight bow, step forward, touch hands and twirl. I say, Now, as you touch hands, look into each other’s eyes; okay, let’s see how much of a conversation you can hold. Say something to each other. They can barely keep their faces straight. Mojgan says, The trouble is we all want to be Elizabeth and Darcy. I don’t mind being Jane, says Nassrin—I always wanted to be the most beautiful. We need a Mr. Collins. Come on, Mahshid, won’t you enjoy stepping on my toes? Mahshid demurs. I’ve never danced in my life, she says awkwardly. This is one dance you needn’t worry about, I said. In fact as your professor, I command you to do it. As part of your homework, I added, and it was one of the rare times I actually enjoyed my authority. Forward, backwards, pause, turn, turn, you have to harmonize your steps with the rest in the set, that’s the whole point; you are mainly concerned with yourself and your partner but also with all the others—you can’t be out of step with them. Well, yes, that is the difficult part, but for Miss Eliza Bennet it comes naturally.
All dance is performance and presentation, I tell them, but do you see how different dances invite different interpretations? Oh yes, says Nassrin. Compare this to the Persian dance. If those British could quiver their bodies the way we do . . . next to us, they are so chaste!
I ask, Who can dance Persian-style? Everyone looks at Sanaz. She is shy and refuses to dance. We start to tease her and goad her on, and form a circle around her. As she begins to move, self-consciously at first, we start to clap and murmur a song. Nassrin cautions us to be quieter. Sanaz begins shyly, taking graceful little steps, moving her waist with a lusty grace. As we laugh and joke more, she becomes bolder; she starts to move her head from side to side, and every part of her body asserts itself, vying for attention with the other parts. Her body quivers as she takes her small steps and dances with her fingers and her hands. A special look has appeared on her face. It is daring and beckoning, designed to attract, to pull in, but at the same time it retracts and refracts with a power she loses as soon as she stops dancing.
There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. I found Sanaz’s look, years later, in the face of my sophisticated French-educated friend Leyly as she suddenly began to dance to music that was f
illed with stretches of naz and eshveh and kereshmeh, all words whose substitutes in English—coquettishness, teasing, flirtatiousness—seem not just poor but irrelevant.
This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. It is calculated. It predicts its effect before another little step is taken, and then another little step. It is flirtatious in a way Miss Daisy Miller and her likes could never dream of being. It is openly seductive but not surrendering. All this is there in Sanaz’s dance. Her large black robe and black head scarf—framing her bony face, her large eyes and very slim and fragile body—oddly enough add to the allure of the movements. With each move she seems to free herself from her layers of black cloth. The robe becomes diaphanous; its texture adds to the mystery of her dance.
We were surprised by a startled student who opened the door. The lunch hour was over; we had not noticed the time. Looking at the student standing on the threshold, with one foot in the classroom, we started to laugh.
That meeting created a secret pact among us. We talked about creating a clandestine group and calling it the Dear Jane Society. We would meet and dance and eat cream puffs, and we would share the news. Although we never formed any such secret society, the girls referred to themselves from then on as Dear Janes, and it planted the seed for our present complicity. I would have forgotten all about it had I not recently started to think about Nassrin.
I now remember that it was that day as Mahshid, Nassrin and I walked to my office that quite suddenly, without thinking of it, I asked them to join in my secret class. Looking at their astonished faces, I quickly sketched out the concept, improvising perhaps on what I had dreamed of and planned for so many years in my mind. What will be required of us? Mahshid asked. Absolute commitment to the works, to the class, I said with an impetuous air of finality. More than committing them, I had now committed myself.
