Veiled upset.

• Author: Peck, Cassius

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND what it feels like to know the tug of modernity while living under the repression of mullah authority in Iran, talk to the young women there. In Kerman, I remember a group of young women I'd run into in the bazaar who waxed eloquent on the paradox of detesting Iran's regime while at the same time resenting the interference of outside powers. A young woman I'd met trekking in the mountains north of Tehran explained to me how an Islamic magistrate had told her she had to stop climbing to avoid the unconscionable situation in which she might slip and have to appeal for a helping hand from a man to whom she wasn't related.

In Iran, the most systematic repression continues to be borne by the female half of the population, whose sexuality has always been the Islamic Revolution's driving obsession. The Islamic Republic of Iran's founding firebrand, Ayatollah Khomeini, launched his political career in 1963 by leading a protest against women's suffrage. Today, the figure-obscuring dress code known as hijab remains the Revolution's most visible and enduring legacy. Azar Nafisi, formerly a literature professor in Tehran and now director of the Dialogue Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington, has tethered her own exuberant digressions on living out this paradox to a memoir about a group of seven selected female students who, for three years, gathered in her apartment every Thursday to discuss banned works of Western literature. "I formulated certain questions for them to consider, the most central of which was how these great works of imagination could help us in our present trapped situation as women," she writes. "We were not looking for blueprints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces in the novels provided and the closed ones we were confined to. I remember reading to my girls Nabokov's claim that 'readers were born free and ought to remain free.'"

The poignancy and importance of a handful of middle-class Iranian women rebelling by reading Nabokov is eloquently described in Reading Lolita in Tehran. One has to keep in mind the conditions these women faced when they walked out the door each day. "The streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities are patrolled by militia," writes Nafisi, "who ride in white Toyota Patrols, four gun-carrying men and women, sometimes followed by a minibus. They are called the Blood of God. They patrol the streets...