39 quotes found
"On the one hand, the ruling Islamic regime has succeeded in completely repressing Iranian women. Women are forbidden to go out in public unless they are covered by clothing that conceals everything but their hands and faces. At all government institutions, universities, and airports, there are separate entrances for women, where they are searched for lipstick and other weapons of mass destruction. ... Yet, while these measures are meant to render women invisible and powerless, they are paradoxically making women tremendously visible and powerful."
"Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran."
"I think some of the greatest writing has been also about writers like Conrad or Nabokov, who have illuminated and given us fresh views about the new countries they adopted...So it is not just that other country that comes to us. This new country is also nourished because language is also a home. And when you change that home and come to a new thing, you'd love to play with it. And that's what I love about English, I can play with it."
"Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life."
"As I trace the route to his apartment, the twists and turns, and pass once more the old tree opposite his house, I am struck by a sudden thought: memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally."
"I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes."
"Azin has bent forward, her long earings playing hide-and-seek in the ringlets of her hair. "We need to be honest with ourselves," she said. I mean, that is the first condition. As women, do we have the same rights as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have an equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don't satisfy us, then we have a right to seek satisfaction elsewhere." p. 52."
"Do not, under any circumstances belittle a works of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."
"A novel is not an allegory ... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."
"A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic — not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so."
"Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels — the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence."
"A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil."
"What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven."
"Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself."
"Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man's love for a woman, a woman's betrayal of that love. But it is also about wealth, its great attraction as well as its destructive power, the carelessness that comes with it, and, yes, it is about the American dream, a dream of power and wealth, the beguiling light of Daisy's house and the port of entry to America. It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure."
"This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy."
"It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness — a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect."
"There are approximately 100,000 clerics in Iran and over 60,000 of them are in Qom. Most of them are theology students who have been studying there for many years, between 10-25 years on average.... Every student has to study a minimum of 25 years before he can attain the status of ‘ayatollah’, however most students spend 10 years studying in the hawza."
"According to Islamic tradition (sunnah), marriage has been deemed to be an essential requirement. Celibacy has been regarded as a malevolent condition fraught with evils."
"Since is a society on the move, a society not in place, but on the way, towards an objective, having a direction, [then we need an (from the same root as umma) to lead us toward that objective]."
"'Party,' in the general vocabulary of world intellectuals, is basically a unified social organization with a 'world-view,' an 'Ideology,' a 'philosophy of history,' and 'ideal social order,' a 'class foundation,' a 'class orientation,' a 'social leadership,' a 'political philosophy,' a 'political orientation,' a 'tradition,' a 'slogan,' a 'strategy,' a "tactic of struggle," and … a "hope" that wants to change the "status quo" in man, society, people, or a particular class, and establish the "desired status" in its stead."
"The sky was dark, the night was black, obscurity reigned, the gleam of the wolves eyes was the only light that came to sight, the howling of the jackal was the only sound to be heard, conspiracies were in the making while slanderers and the malicious were busily chattering"
"Islam is the first school of social thought that recognizes the masses as the basis, the fundamental and conscious factor in determining history and society not the elect as Nietzsche thought, not the aristocracy and nobility as Plato claimed, nor great personalities as Carlyle and Emerson believed, not those of pure blood as Alexis Carrel imagined, not the priests or the intellectuals, but the masses."
"In the world view of , man fears only one power, and is answerable before only one judge. He turns to only one qibla, and directs his hopes and desires to only one source. And the corollary is that all else is false and pointless all the diverse and variegated tendencies, strivings, fears, desires and hopes of man are vain and fruitless."
"Debates on the definitions of culture versus barbarism, or on the question of who is civilized and who is modern are best discussed in the light of Islamic doctrine. Quite significantly, this point must be kept in mind, particularly as a matter of concern to individuals of the educated classes of Islamic societies upon whom lies the burden of responsibility and leadership of the Umma."
"Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilised, or if it is an altogether different issue and social phenomenon having no relation to civilisation at all. Unfortunately modernity has been imposed on us, the non-European nations, in the guise of civilization."
"In the tradition of Abudhar, who is my mentor, whose thought, whose understanding of Islam and Shi'ism, and whose ideals, wants, and rage I emulate, I begin my talk with the name of the God of the oppressed (mustad'afan). My topic is very specific."
"The enlightened soul is a person who is self-conscious of his "human condition" in his time and historical and social setting, and whose awareness inevitably and necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility."
"Similar to the prophets, the enlightened souls also neither belongs to the community or scientists nor to the camp of unaware and stagnant masses. They are aware and responsible individuals whose most important objective and responsibility is to bestow the great God-given gift of "self- awareness" (khod-agahi) to the general public. Only self-awareness transforms static and corrupt masses into a dynamic and creative cantor, which fosters great genius and gives rise to great leaps, which in turn become the springboard for the emergence of civilization, culture and great heroes."
"The Imamah (religious leadership) and ummah (religious community) shed light on...the principle of progress [which society should strive towards], of reforming the relations of society, ideology, belief, life, and the pulling and driving of society and the souls, thoughts, and minds that make up this society to the best possible form. The ummah is not a society where human individuals feel a stagnant form of comfort and happiness, or feel a free, careless sense of irresponsibility and make static comfort the goal of life."
"The bringing down of one of the most oppressive regimes, that of the Shah monarchy, was a remarkable event of twentieth century. Whether one finds the outcome of the Revolution in terms of the establishment of an Islamic Republic under the dominance of Ulama (Islamic clerics, in narrow, contemporary sense) agreeable or disappointing, a most remarkable aspect of this revolution that has become an object of interest of observers of contemporary events is the mass movement that underlies the revolution. Indeed, the kind of mass participation - in terms of both absolute and relative magnitude - in the movement leading to the revolution is still unprecedented. While the role of the Ulama, especially that of Imam Khomeini, received overwhelming attention worldwide, there were other powerful influences that shaped the ethos of the revolution. One such source of influence was Dr. Ali Shariati. A sociologist, trained at Sorbonne University (France), he was gunned down in United Kingdom by Savak for his anti-monarchy stance and popular influence among the modern educated and youth of pre-revolutionary Iran."
"Ali Shariati wrote more broadly ranging critiques and provided important intellectual foundations for the later Islamic revolutionary movement in Iran. Early in the 1970s, some of the last elements of the perceived Western successes were undermined. For a long time, non-Western intellectuals had been willing to admit that at least in terms of material advancement and power, Western civilization was successful. These last spheres came to be seen in a very different light during the 1970s. In terms of sheer military power, the prestige of the West was undermined in the years following World War II."
"Ali Shariati wrote extensively on an Islamicized version of historical materialism, which sought to offer a radical reading of Shi’ism. According to Shariati, the central teachings of Islam offer the oppressed, the poor, and the excluded the means to achieve emancipation from further class conflict. Most significantly, Shariati argued that the abolition of all institutions associated with property would lead to a more just and classless society. Such arguments found a sympathetic ear in the People’s Mujahedine. Wealth creation is not therefore concerned solely with investment, profit maximization and personal wealth. Under Islamic economics, the duty to use surplus wealth for the good of the um m ah demands that investment and production activity includes social utility calculations before proceeding. This could include the goal of full employment, environmental protection, health provision, social welfare, and social housing."
"The fire was sparked in 1977. It began with the death in June of Ali Shariati, the dangerous visionary ideologue of the revolution. Tall and dapper, in his early thirties, with fuzzy hair on top of his balding head, Shariati was a nationalist who had studied sociology in Paris. He was of the same generation as Chamran and the other LMI members, and he too had grown up in the era of Mossadegh. As a young man, he was caught scrawling pro-Mossadegh graffiti and was made to lick the wall clean. Shariati was full of contradictions: the son a religious leader in the holy city of Mashhad, he disliked the influence of the clerics; he was devout but admitted once that if he were not a Muslim he would be a Marxist. Leftist and Islamist, he dressed the Western way, in a suit and tie, always clean-shaven. Nonetheless, he despised the sterile modernity of Europe and railed against Iranians who rejected their own history and embraced everything Western. At the same time, he derided the commoner wedded to tradition and stuck in the past: “A futureless past is a state of inertia and stagnation, while a pastless future is alien and vacuous.” And yet in his search for a future that was anchored in his country’s past and Iran’s distinct identity as well as in Islam, he looked to foreign authors. He was inspired by Frantz Fanon, the anticolonialist thinker from Martinique, and by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who was close to many Iranian revolutionaries."
"From all these contradictions, Shariati produced a new brand of Shiism, even more militant and mobilized than what Imam Sadr had been preaching in Lebanon. There was nothing quietist or ritualistic in Shariati’s deeply political and insurgent version of Shiism. He coined the term Red Shiism, one tinged with Marxism ready for sacrifice to attain social justice. It stood in opposition to Black Shiism, the quietist, ritualistic one who submitted to rulers and monarchs. By rediscovering an authentic Islam, he asserted, Iran could be a utopian society with a perfect leader, a philosopher king, as in Plato’s Republic. The similarity to Khomeini’s faqih was striking, except that Shariati did not believe clerics had any role to play in politics. Khomeini despised secular thinkers, but he let the militant fervor that Shariati had awakened serve his purposes. In 1971, Shariati openly called for the masses to rise against the shah. Lecturing at the university of Mashhad, he smoked while he talked, sometimes holding forth for as long as six hours, his audience enthralled, their minds captivated. By 1973, he was in jail. After four years he was released and left for London. He died a month later from a heart attack—though many felt the circumstances were mysterious and attributed his death to the shah’s secret service, the SAVAK. Imam Sadr praised Shariati’s efforts to produce a discourse for emancipation and change that was indigenous to Muslim societies."
"I hope that you will have learned from the pain and suffering which you have endured in the past few decades, and have realized how to cherish the blessings of liberty. You will therefore know that freedom does not mean that the people should be licentious and behave in an arbitrary fashion, but that it also involves certain limits, since if there are no constraints no one will be free, and the strong will enslave the weak."
"The limits set to arbitrary behavior are none other than those defined by law, so everyone will know his own rights and will not go beyond them. It follows that in a country where there is no law, or the law is not observed, the people will not be free and will not enjoy security ... Therefore, the first thing … which I would suggest to you is to note that a free people is one whose affairs are based in law, so that whoever ignores or violates the law is an enemy of freedom ..."
"I suspect that some of you would say ‘A civilized nation is one that has railways, modern industry, organized army, tank, aircraft, etc., and an uncivilized nation is one that does not possess such things.’ Or you would say that a civilized nation is one whose cities ... have wide and paved streets, with multi-storey buildings, and so on.’ Civilized nations, of course, do have such things, but I submit that these are products of civilization, not its essence. The essence of civilization is that people are mature, and the clearest sign of their maturity is that they observe the law."
"The (Iranian) government failed to quarantine and disinfect all cities (from SARS-CoV-2) before it was too late. We must comply with the health rules to protect from the (COVID-19) disease."