REWRITING LOLITA IN TEHRAN:

Challenging the mullahs, a signature at a time (Maura J. Casey, February 7, 2007, International Herald Tribune)

'Well-behaved women rarely make history," my favorite bumper sticker says. It surely applies to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose relentless campaign against discrimination has enraged the mullahs for more than 25 years.

In a country where the law values a woman's life at only half the price of a man's, Ebadi will not be quiet, and she is urging other women to find their voices. Her newest effort is to help collect the signatures of one million Iranian women on a petition protesting their lack of legal rights.

The concept is simple and revolutionary, melding education, consciousness-raising and peaceful protest. Starting last year, women armed with petitions began to go to wherever other women gathered: schools, hair salons, doctors' offices and private homes.

Every woman is asked to sign. But whatever a woman decides, she receives a leaflet explaining how Iran's interpretation of Islamic law denies women full rights.

Azar Nafisi is explicit in her memoir about how the women in her reading group are not precise dopplegangers for Lolita nor the Ayatollah Khomeini for Humbert Humbert, but she does draw parallels between how Humbert sought to freeze the world at a distant point in his historical imagination but could never succeed in making Lolita accept the role he envisioned for her. Suffice it to say, the effort to freeze Iran in the 7th Century is hardly proceeding any more successfully.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2007 12:58 PM