خلاصه ماشینی:
Working under the assumption that exposure to literary self-representation is an effective way of familiarizing students with contemporary Muslim women’s lives, I eventually chose three books written in English by three contemporary Iranian women specifically for western audiences.
In its own particular way, each one addresses gender and the experiences of women in Muslim societies: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House: 2003), Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press: 2007), and Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening: A Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country (Random House: 2007).
Keshavarz reveals that she chose Reading Lolita in Tehran as an example of New Orientalism not only because it is one of the twenty-first century’s best-selling titles, but also because of the little-known furious debate it has caused among American Muslims in general and Iranian Americans in particular (p.
One such example is found on page 25 of Reading Lolita in Tehran: “We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent – namely ideology.
Jasmine and Stars ultimately transcends its quarrel with Reading Lolita in Tehran and offers its own rich and complex account of lives blended with religion and culture, “painstakingly weav[ing] a multihued tapestry of human voices and experiences” (p.
1 These three memoirs may well be read together, for Ebadi and Keshavarz insist on a more nuanced and realistic reading of Iranian women’s lived experiences than Nafisi offers.