Azar Nafisi was born around 1950 in Tehran, Iran, into an intellectual, influential Iranian family. She is the daughter of Ahmad and Nezhat Nafisi. Her father once served as the mayor of Tehran, while her mother was one of the first female members of the Iranian Parliament in the early 1960s. When Nafisi was thirteen years old, she was sent abroad to complete her education. She went to schools in England and Switzerland before returning to Iran upon the arrest of her father when she was a high school student.

When Nafisi was eighteen years old, she married her first husband and went with him to the United States, where he was completing his university education. The couple settled in Oklahoma, and she ended the marriage four years after it began. Nafisi remained at the University of Oklahoma to finish her own education there. As a university...