Azar Nafisi

Shirin said the worst thing about it, from what she heard from me and other friends in the US, was that so many Americans felt the totalitarian Republic of Gilead in Atwood’s book was a terrible place, to be avoided at all costs in America, but that something similar to it, like the Islamic Republic, was good for us in Iran because it represented “our culture.”

condescending to believe that others from other cultures don’t want to be as free as we are, and that their women do not wish for the same rights American women fought for—this, despite the fact that women in most of these cultures, including Iran, have, for more than a century, fought and are fighting for those very rights that women in the West demand. So many times when I have lamented the plight of women under the Islamic
Republic, I have heard, “But you are being Western” and “It’s their culture!”

my utter surprise and dismay, the myth that the Islamic Republic had created about Iran and Islam had been accepted and extended to all Muslim-majority countries. All these nations, with vastly different histories, nationalities, languages, and cultures were reduced into one aspect: religion. And that religion, which, like other religions, had many different denominations and interpretations, was brought down to its most extreme elements: fundamentalism and Sharia law. So now these countries were even deprived of their proper names and were all generalized into the Muslim
world, denying the diversity of Islam and its followers.