What is being touted as Islam by the Islamic state is not genuinely religion; it is religion being used as an ideology. Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose ...

... Austen told us that a woman has the right to choose the man she wants to marry, against all authority. Nabokov taught us that people have a right to retrieve the reality that totalitarian mindsets have taken away from them. That is why works of imagination, especially fiction, have become so vital today in Iran. And I wish that Americans would understand that. Their gifts to us have been Lolita and Gatsby. Our gift to them has been reasserting those values that they now take for granted, reminding them that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness belong to everyone ...

... I don't want my students to look at the U.S. as a place of pilgrimage. I want them to understand its ambiguities. That is why I taught them Saul Bellow's novels, like The Dean's December, like More Die of Heartbreak, where he talks about the sufferings of freedom. Where he talks about how a vibrant culture like America is also in danger of losing its poetry, of losing its heart.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2003-05-07.htm