Reading Lolita in Tehran
The thing that I found interesting were the charges leveled against Omid Gharib. The charges themselves sounded absurd, if not outrightly comical. He was accused of ‘westernized, brought up in a westernized family, staying too long in Europe for his studies, smoking Winston cigarettes, displaying leftist tendencies.’ (113)
The charges are true to the proclamation made by Ayatollah Khomeini, who stated that criminals were not to be tried and that the trial of a criminal is against human rights. According to Ayatollah Khomeini, criminals should be killed first when it becomes known that they are criminals.
Even then, the people who were executed were not criminals. They were people fighting for the liberation of the people from despotic regimes that did not show respect for human rights. Many people like Omid Gharib lost their lives after being accused of being westernized.
It is also interesting to note that the University where Nafisi teaches is a hotbed of political discussions and revolutions. However, lecturers, who found themselves on the wrong political side would be swiftly sacked. Nafisi herself gets summoned for events; she had no involvement.
Even though her family distanced itself from politics, Nafisi takes a plunge into politics. She even incorporates revolutionary material in her teaching, including novels such as The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is with the western literature materials that form the basis of her teaching, even staging a mock trial between The Great Gatsby and the Republic of Iran. It is interesting to see how Nafisi organized such an event at the height of intolerance towards anything foreign to the country.