Azar Nafisi

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

—Salman Rushdie

In Iran, like all totalitarian states, the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them. The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them. They are silenced not by torture and jail but by indifference and negligence. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s claim that “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” In the United States, it is mainly we, the people, who are the problem; we who take the existence of challenging literature for granted, or see reading as solely a comfort, seeking out only texts that confirm our presuppositions and prejudices. Perhaps for us, the very idea of change is dangerous, and what we avoid is reading dangerously.

the society was fast becoming polarized—too much ideology and not enough discourse

the structure of great fiction is based on multivocality, on a democracy of different perspectives where even the villain has a voice, while bad fiction reduces all voices to one voice, that of the writer, who, like a dictator, stifles all the characters in order to impose his message and agenda. Great works of literature—works that are truly dangerous—question and expose that dictatorial impulse, both on the page and in the public space. As I sat down to write my father on that day in October, reading dangerously had never felt more important.

Knowing your enemy involves discovering yourself. Democracy depends upon engagement with our adversaries and opponents.

specific mindset: an absolutist one that allows no room for dialogue or change of mind, that sees everyone in the opposition or different as an enemy.

The fatwa confirmed my belief in the close association between imagination and reality: suppression of one inevitably leads to suppression of the other. I had become obsessed with the ideology that shaped Ayatollah Khomeini’s mindset, the way that it had penetrated every aspect of our lives. He had taken up all of my mental space, making life itself claustrophobic.

particularly recall you telling me that regimes like the Islamic Republic make us withdraw from the world and other people, and we have to find creative ways to connect.

Plato is after a “well-ordered state,” with the philosopher king at the top. You will remember that in order to preserve the state, Socrates suggests the noble lie, which should be told to the laymen as a kind of “medicine” to help ordinary citizens stay in their place and facilitate the rule of the philosophers. According to this lie, the republic is composed of a hierarchy. At the top are the guardians/philosophers, whose souls God has mixed with gold and who are “competent to govern.” Next come the auxiliaries, or warriors, whose souls contain silver. And at the bottom are the farmers and craftsmen, whose souls are mixed with iron and bronze.
Baba jan, suddenly I saw why Socrates’s state was so hostile toward poets and storytellers. Within such a hierarchy, there was no place for poets who indulge in “irrational nature,” which is the “inferior part of the soul.” They were not utilitarian, could not rule, or make people more virtuous. Even worse, their tales might “engender” the “laxity of morals among the young.” According to Plato, the Homeric kind of poets bring confusion and “The greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free and who should fear slavery more than death.” Sound familiar?

They were blinded by their demand that the old system must go, without having any idea what they wanted to replace it with. Don’t you think that there is a moment in most political upheavals when people lose their individual voices and become one, when a sort of blindness takes over their faculties, and that is the decisive moment that can allow a tyrannical mindset to take over?