Nafisi’s memoir omits why Iranians revolted against the shah

Evidence

Yet, says Dabashi, perhaps the text’s greatest sin is its evacuation of history: “What is impossible to miss is the almost total absence of any sort of Iranian context.… There is not a single word as to why millions of people poured into streets and risked (and often lost) their lives to topple one of the most savage military dictatorships in modern history. It is as if the sole purpose of the 1979 revolution had been to inconvenience Nafisi.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 219

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Dabashi’s charge gives a concrete checklist — absence of revolutionary motive — to run against Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels.

Related

• Western success can mark an exile memoir as suspect native informer (similarity 0.80)