Jinn of Current Events

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe. If you're forced ... you make your mind blank — you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. As Azar Nafisi tells in her memoirs, the Islamist regime in Iran doesn't just want to make women blank their minds, and forget or hate their selves: the theocracy wishes to politicize every Iranian's life so completely that there remain no space left for the individual, the personal, the private, the happy, the free. Just like any totalitarian system.

Nafisi is a US-educated academic who had returned to Iran one year before the 1979 revolution, and managed to escape to the USA only 18 years later.

In a terrible anecdote from her book, musicians are giving a performance to an audience that hasn't heard any music in years. Neither side is allowed to show emotions, which would be un-Islamic: Every time the audience ... started to move or clap, two men in suits appeared from either side of the stage and gesticulated for them to stop clapping or humming or moving to the music.