Now this is a feud, however one-sided, that’s worth following.

[Columbia professor Hamid] Dabashi’s basic point, draped in shopworn academic prose, is that [Azar] Nafisi used her readings of some Western classics—Austen, James, Fitzgerald, and Nabokov—to undermine Persian cultural autonomy. Nafisi, on his account, is a “native informer and colonial agent” whose writing has cleared the way for an upcoming exercise of military intervention on Middle Eastern soil—this time in Iran. … He deconstructs the book’s cover image—which appears to be two veiled teenage women reading Lolita in Tehran—as “Orientalised pedophilia” designed to appeal to “the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against the phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of U.S. empire in New York.” Apparently frustrated by the lack of anything resembling an outraged response, Dabashi intensified his attack in an August interview in Z magazine: “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England”—one of the soldiers convicted of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib—”and Azar Nafisi.”

[...]

Rather than reading Nafisi’s well-intentioned book, however, as a mostly inoffensive and well-marketed literary trifle—he is, after all, a professor of literature—Dabashi insists on seeing it as political perfidy. He writes that her book “pushes back the clock half a century” in promoting “the cause of ‘Western classics’ at a time when decades of struggle by postcolonial, black and Third World feminists, scholars and activists has [sic] finally succeeded to introduce a modicum of attention to world literatures.” This sort of claim makes clear what ultimately binds Dabashi and Nafisi to each other: their shared overemphasis on the politically salutary effects of reading novels and writing literary criticism. Dabashi’s purposes are not served by calling the book bad because it is cliché, which would be right but pointless. He must call it bad because it is dangerous. In the end, Dabashi must conspire with Nafisi to make the book more important than it is: the besieged Nafisi gets to preserve her fantasy that removing her veil to read Austen in her home was not only therapeutically powerful but politically noble, and Dabashi gets to preserve his fantasy that criticizing Nafisi makes him a usefully engaged intellectual. But those whose fingers are on the triggers of those targeted nuclear warheads couldn’t possibly care about what either of them has to say.