Do you think Nafisi and her students are taking action against this repressive regime by meeting to read and discuss literary works, or does...

This is one of those interesting questions that posits an either/or binary, so let's unwrap this a little. In the end, the question becomes: to what extent is escapism political action?

Nafisi is at pains to argue that in a totalitarian regime that is trying to control all aspects of an individual's life, all acts are inevitably political. She evokes Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheadingto discuss the immense importance of the small gesture, such as...

This is one of those interesting questions that posits an either/or binary, so let's unwrap this a little. In the end, the question becomes: to what extent is escapism political action?

Nafisi is at pains to argue that in a totalitarian regime that is trying to control all aspects of an individual's life, all acts are inevitably political. She evokes Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading to discuss the immense importance of the small gesture, such as letting a lock of hair fall out from under the veil in 1980s Tehran, to point to the political nature of her reading group. Under a regime that considered women's higher education highly suspect and Western novels one of the dangers of the decadent West, Nafisi strongly gestures towards her group as political. She sees the kind of intellectual work her reading group is doing, such as reading Daisy Miller or Pride and Prejudice, as laying the groundwork for change:

In Austen’s novels, there are spaces for oppositions that don’t need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space—not just space but a necessity—for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. 

However, while we can agree that discussing these novels is political—as she notes, the novel itself is a democratic form—and that therefore escapism into these novels is political, the escapism stops short of "taking action against this repressive regime." Heady as the readings of the novels are, the women actually take no direct action against the government: they organize no political underground, hand out no handbills, don't work to expand their circle wider. They are carving out as comfortable a space as they can in their privileged world. Nafisi has hand-picked an elite group of young women: they talk about novels while eating pastries and drinking the tea served by the maid. This may be a useful prequel to political action, but in the end stops short of action itself.