As you remember, Elizabeth taught us more about the Muslim culture from her perspective last month in class.
If you're interested in learning more about the difficulties women in the Muslim culture face, you may want to check out this book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azir Nafisi.
The following is a summary of the book and author from the editors of the Middle Eastern Quarterly Forum:
"Reading Lolita in Tehran, a new memoir by Azar Nafisi, is the story of Iran's revolution from the unusual vantage point of an Iranian-born, American-schooled instructor of English literature, who arrived at Tehran University in the revolutionary year of 1979.
Nafisi's father, a mayor of Tehran whom the shah imprisoned in the 1970s, had sent her abroad as a child, to study in England and Switzerland. In 1979, she received her doctorate in English and American literature from the University of Oklahoma, where she had joined the Iranian students' movement against the shah. In 1979, she enthusiastically returned to a new Iran, to take up a teaching position at Tehran University. But the following year, Islamic zealots moved to purge Iran's universities, and she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil when it became mandatory in 1981. In later years, she also taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University; she finally left Iran in 1997. "
