Fundamentalist interpretation, not Islam itself, caused Iran’s tragedy

Evidence

By contrast, the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur-whose experiences of state brutality included periods in prison, leading to mental breakdown-is very clear when she says, “Islam was not the cause of the ills of Iran. It was the fundamentalist interpretation of the faith that had brought about the tragedy that continued to unfold” (Kissing the Sword: A Prison Memoir, trans. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 732

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Directly relevant to the ‘contestation’ axis for Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist — Parsipur’s distinction between Islam and fundamentalist interpretation parallels Changez’s own ambivalent positioning of the ‘fundamentalist’ label.
• SEED: Angle: the native-vs-Orientalist distinction — Parsipur’s emic caveat (fundamentalism, not Islam) as a corrective to Nafisi’s etic framing is a clean contrastive tool for teaching both texts.