Although the book seems at first glance to be a targeted indictment of the instrumentalization of religion by the Islamic Republic, in fact it attacks Islam as a whole for legitimizing oppression. There is no clear view of whether politically ambitious clerics have hijacked the religion or whether the religion itself is a tool historically shaped for use by aggressors—although the latter is implied by Nafisi's wholesale dismissal of Islam in all its manifestations. Nowhere does Islam feature as a spiritually fulfilling site of comfort, only occasionally as a desperate security blanket resorted to by those seeking protection against social suspicion on the one hand and the unnerving challenges of real autonomy on the other.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 227