Reading "Lolita" In Tehran

“When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendors of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish rabbi, teacher and theologian

Why are people afraid to think? Why do they want to suffocate their own free thinking, and that of others, with rigid ideologies? That's what I wondered as I read this memoir by a professor of English literature who experienced the frenzied descent of her country into pseudo-religious madness.

It's not a faraway happening. These days, ideology is everywhere, threatening to overwhelm our individual ability to connect to one another through a dynamic relationship to an evolving truth, which is too often replaced by a drive to protect our fixed ideas of what truth is at all costs. In the great literature of the past, may we still find a space to think more freely, to feel more flexibly and humanly, to develop the will to reject tyranny's hold over our minds, if not our bodies.