Protests in Iran and ironically enough, I’m reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (Amazon).

Nafisi was forced out of her teaching position at the University of Tehran in the early eighties when she refused to comply with the required veiling. Perhaps that refusal was inevitable, and perhaps the personality that sparked the refusal also made the memoir inevitable.

Nafisi writes of living others’ dreams, and that the revolution of 1979 was just that: Ayatollah Khomeini was recreating the Iran of his youthful dreams. Dreams for some, nightmares for others.

We’re all wondering whether Iranians will force themselves to emerge from the nightmare. Reading Nafisi and today’s headlines gives me hope to believe that there are enough independently minded Iranians that a new revolution is possible, that armed conflict over Iran’s nuclear program is not inevitable.