Part 1: Chapter 2 Summary

Nafisi further describes the room. It is across from an ex-American hospital. The sounds of families visiting the sick and wounded (probably from the Iran-Iraq war) waft up to Nafisi's third floor apartment. An impressive mountain range looms in the distance. Nafisi laments her mother's scolding over the lack of proper furnishings and window dressings. Nafisi's apartment appears in the manner of a Western bohemian— oddly matched furniture, benign neglect. She is a person devoted to the inner world, to literature. The apartment is a place of transgression. It is a place where each of the seven students was able to, temporarily, discard her black cloak.

Part 1: Chapter 2 Analysis

Nafisi firmly establishes the apartment as an oasis in a strange kind of desert. Here, in a place of subtle nonconformity, knowledge would spring forth from the dry sands.