Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The ayatollahs are

Yet one of the ugly lessons of the last century is the ease with which the far left shades into the far right, a convergence that is especially stark in Iran. The Islamists might have hijacked the leftists' revolution, but the leftists helped them do it. Nafisi writes that during the protests against the veil, for example, Communists sided with the fundamentalists. The Iranian Marxists, she says, "had tacitly taken sides with the government, denouncing the protesters as deviant, divisive and ultimately acting in the service of the imperialists ... Focusing on women's rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into [the imperialists'] hands."

Meanwhile, the fundamentalists co-opted the secular leftists' language to an astonishing degree. Attempting to talk Nafisi out of demonstrating against the veil, a fundamentalist student tells her, "What was more important, to fight against the satanic influence of Western imperialists or to obstinately hold on to a personal preference that created divisions among the ranks of the revolutionaries?" She remarks, "In those days, people really talked that way. One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel."

Perhaps because they spoke a similar language, the Iranian leftists didn't take seriously the extent to which the Islamic fundamentalists opposed much of what they stood for (a naiveté of the same kind that Paul Berman castigates his erstwhile comrades for in his recent book "Terror and Liberalism.") Early in "Persepolis," Satrapi's idolized Uncle Antoosh raises his fist and proclaims, "The religious leaders don't know how to govern. They will return to their mosques. The proletariat shall rule!" Antoosh is one of Satrapi's most moving characters, repeating the optimistic phrase "Everything will be alright," as his face grows more despairing from frame to frame. Thrown in jail, he makes Satrapi a tiny swan out of bread and tells her, "But you'll see! One day the proletariat will rule!" On the next page, he's executed as a Russian spy.

In recent months, commentators such as Berman and Christopher Hitchens have repeatedly drawn parallels between Islamic fundamentalism and other forms of totalitarianism. "Persepolis" and "Reading Lolita in Tehran" make you feel that similarity in your sinew. Antoosh's story could transfer seamlessly to China or, except for the "Russian" part, Eastern Europe. Nafisi writes, "[W]as it surprising that we so appreciated and responded to [Nabokov's] 'Invitation to a Beheading'? We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us."

Yet the brave people in both these books refuse, as much as possible, to yield to these fictions. Even as morality police roam the streets in their white 4x4s doling out whippings, fines and worse, Satrapi's family and Nafisi's circle insist on socializing, indulging in pop music and American movies, flirting and falling in love. In "Persepolis," a friend of the family is sentenced to 75 lashes after the police raid his house on a tip that he's planning a party. Still, on the next page Satrapi's whole family is dancing at her uncle's house and toasting with "gallons" of wine made in a basement lab, and when the power goes out because of a bombing raid, they light candles and her father plays a drum.

Nafisi's seminars in contraband novels, then, form a systemized resistance to the regime's own fictions. Nafisi doesn't acknowledge her own courage in holding these blasphemous classes. Nor does she speculate on the punishment she risks for teaching them. Only the stories of murdered friends and colleagues and imprisoned activists and writers in both books show us what's at stake. Yet as "Persepolis" and "Reading Lolita in Tehran" also reveal, complying with the regime carries its own existential dangers. To assert your humanity in a totalitarian regime is to risk having it snuffed out. To not assert it is to risk the same thing.

"For those few precious hours we felt free to discuss our pains and our joys, our personal hang-ups and weaknesses; for that suspended time we abdicated our responsibilities to our parents, relatives and friends, and to the Islamic Republic," Nafisi writes. "We articulated all that happened to us in our own words and saw ourselves, for once, in our own image."

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