Humbert Humbert goes to war
An article in The Boston Globe begins with a rather provocative lead:
If the United States takes military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, planning for which has been much speculated about but denied by the Bush administration, who will deserve the blame? The Iranian regime, for its brazen defiance of the international ban on nuclear proliferation? America’s neoconservatives, itching to remake the Middle East? Or Azar Nafisi, the Iranian expatriate author of the 2003 women’s book-club fave Reading Lolita in Tehran?
The answer, according to Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, is “all three.” Dabashi accuses Nafisi in an article in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram of perpetuating the image of post-revolution Iran as “vile, violent, and above all abusive of women.”
Dabashi, who has himself accused Iran of practicing “gender apartheid,” nonetheless goes on to accuse Nafisi of harbouring a secret agenda in regards to Iran, and even compares her to Lynndie England, the U.S. soldier who notoriously tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Though he makes some cogent criticisms of Nafisi’s book — that it ignores the abuses of the Shah’s pre-revolutionary regime, for example — most of his accusations are far less, um, hinged.
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Read the article at The Boston Globe (registration req’d)
