The lack of freedom in Iran is experienced on a systemic level and prompts small gestures of rebellion—modifications in dress and forbidden activities in the private space of Nafisi's apartment—that testify to the attraction of that which is being denied. Nafisi talks about the sometimes absurd effect of censorship on the cultural items they can access. This censorship is part of a broader set of postrevolutionary purges characterized by an anti-intellectualism that bursts out in the temporary closures of the universities and the harassment and even murder of artists and intellectuals.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 223