It took some time to arrive at this insight, however. In the first few years after the revolution, Makhmalbaf’s satirical arrows were still aimed at Marxism, rather than the oppressive nature of Khomeini’s Islamic state. Shervin Nekuee is a writer, now living in the Netherlands, where he is editor-in-chief of a website called TehranReview. He fled Iran when he was nineteen to avoid the high chance of “martyrdom” in the Iran-Iraq War. Eleven-years-old at the time of the revolution, he noticed how friends and relatives in Teheran quickly divided into passionate devotees of communism, or Islamism. His brother, hitherto a lover of pop music, began to learn Lenin’s texts by heart. Irritated by all this sudden dogmatism, Shervin was much amused by Makhmalbaf’s television play, A Cage Within a Cage, which poked savage fun of the communists. This play later formed the basis of Boycott, which, in Shervin’s words, was like “kicking the leftists when they were already down.”

One of the immediate effects of the 1979 revolution was the suppression of Western culture, including Hollywood movies, as well as the highly popular Indian musical films. But as Makhmalbaf observed, “some bad things can help us in good ways. Before the revolution, Hollywood and Bollywood killed Iranian film. We had zero Iranian films. After the revolution we had the chance to make our own films.” There was suddenly an audience for them. No longer able to see foreign films, and deprived of many other forms of art, such as music and dance, forbidden by the puritanical mullahs, Iranians developed a hunger for Iranian cinema, which was still allowed – possibly, as was suggested to me by several Iranians, because the Ayatollah had neither interest in, or knowledge of the movies. This is when Makhmalbaf’s, and Kiarostami’s films became wildly popular.

Recalling that early post-revolutionary period, Makhmalbaf added that political oppression itself may have helped to make cinema popular: “People wanted images, not words. Images contain fewer lies. Writing is subject to more censorship, more government control.”

This may be so, but images are still censored. Kiarostami’s latest film, Certified Copy, is banned in Iran, supposedly because Juliet Binoche’s dress isn’t sufficiently modest. Makhmalbaf told me that his son’s documentary about Samira cannot be shown in Iranian video clubs because his sister’s headscarf fails to conceal all her hair. And Gabbeh, after all, was banned at least partly for its visual effects, which expressed undesirable hedonism.

In any case, the poetic imagery in Makhmalbaf’s films became more and more metaphorical and surreal. This, too, was a way to avoid censorship. The Afghan refugee in The Bicyclist (1987), for example, going round and round a town square on a bicycle for a week without stopping, as a kind of carnival attraction, to make money to survive, is unforgettable. By then, Makhmalbaf’s had begun to lose faith in the religious revolution. In his words: “When I was seventeen I was ready to die for God… With The Bicyclist I began to move away from religion.”

It is also in this period that Makhmalbaf began to take a serious interest in the plight of the Afghans, millions of whom had fled from war and hunger to Iran, where they were treated with neglect, at best. His most famous movie outside Iran, Kandahar (2001), about a young Canadian-Afghani journalist travelling back to her native country to stop a desperate young woman from committing suicide, is perhaps the only feature film ever made about Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The movie was shot near the Iran-Afghan border. Despite some wooden acting in English, a language Makhmalbaf speaks reasonably well, it is the imagery that sticks in the mind: UN helicopters dropping artificial limbs over the desert, like loaves of bread, chased by hundreds of hopping men maimed by landmines. This, Makhmalbaf said, was the only fictional image in the film, which also features an enigmatic American black Muslim, who came to seek God, but allegedly became a terrorist.

George W. Bush asked for a screening of Kandahar at the White House, presumably to get a better idea of the country he invaded. God only knows what he made of Afghanistan filtered through Makhmalbaf’s surrealistic imagination.

Kandahar was made under the relatively moderate presidency of Mohammad Khatami, when there was some room for artistic expression, including cinema, enough at any rate to be able to make good movies in Iran. But there were still limits. Censorship under Khatami was subtle and rarely straightfoward. Instead of banning critical films, they were allowed only limited release. Kandahar was only screened in one cinema in Teheran.

In 2002 Makhmalbaf made Afghan Alphabet, a documentary about Afghani children in Iran, who were deprived of schooling. All they know is what they hear from Mullahs, who tell young girls that it is sinful to show their faces. One of the problems was the government’s refusal to educate even Afghans who were born in Iran. Makhmalbaf showed the film to Khatami and his advisors: “It made them cry and they signed a permission for Afghan children to go to school. So cinema could still play a role in Iran. ”

After Khatami lost power in 2005, Makhmalbaf was unable to shoot another movie in Iran, and left in that same year. In fact, his most profound films were made in the mid-1990s, when Khatami was a member of the powerful Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution. The films were still political, but in a philosophical way that did not upset the government enough to get them banned. It was no longer the power of this or that group that interested Makhmalbaf, but the nature of power itself. This is when he began to seriously examine what he regards as the flaws in Iranian culture: “Shooting the Shah wouldn’t have changed anything. You must shoot into the minds of people through art to make them see things in a different way. I tried to change our culture by teaching a more relative view.”

Salaam Cinema, the movie that begins with the pandemonium of five thousand actors hoping for an audition, is perhaps Makhmalbaf’s most sophisticated investigation of the dynamics of power. He plays himself, auditioning actors, telling them to do this and that, to cry, to laugh, and probing their desire to be in the movies, to be famous. You can see how the director uses his power to manipulate people into doing things they might not wish to do.

He picks two young women to audition others. They immediately become as manipulative and bullying as the director himself. Makhmalbaf said in Paris: “The two girls succeed, but they become dictators. That is because they reflect Iranian culture. My film is critical of the use of power in the shadow of fundamentalism.” I asked him why crying played such an important part in the auditions. He laughed: “Because people are always being told to cry for God. The main activity of the Mullahs is to make people cry. ‘Cry! Cry for more killing!’” I mentioned that one woman refused to cry. He clapped his hands in delight: “That woman! That woman is Green Movement. That’s what she represents.”

One astonishing thing about Salaam Cinema, a wordy, intellectual work that would be lucky to survive in an American art house for more than a week, was seen in Iran by a million people. Perhaps the success of this film, more than any other, confirms Makhmalbaf’s view that people under a dictatorship crave images with the ring of truth. They recognized that it was about them. “Iranians don’t like to be criticized directly”, Makhmalbaf explained. “But you can give them an example of how to look at themselves. So I criticize myself as an example.”

Criticism of power, in Makmalbaf’s work, also means the criticism of male power over women. This is as much of a theme in his films, and writings, as the suffering of Afghans. In 1984, just five years after the revolution, he wrote a novel, entitled The Crystal Garden, about the tribulations of a number of women living in the servants’ quarters of a house abandoned by a rich family after the revolution. His film, Gabbeh, deals with the patriarchal control of women’s lives. The true story of Kandahar begins when an Afghan refugee in Canada receives a letter from her younger sister who cannot stand living under the Taliban any longer, and says she will kill herself before the imminent eclipse of the sun.

Makhmalbaf married twice. Both his wives worked closely with him on his films. His first wife, Fatimeh Meshkini, with whom he had three children, died of burns after a tragic accident in 1992. During the making of Salaam Cinema, he married her sister, Marzieh. They raised and educated his children themselves, teaching them filmmaking from a very early age. The children learned “by helping out”, said Makhmalbaf, “by working on all levels of filmmaking.” Hana made her first documentary, in Kabul, when she was only thirteen, and Samira, who acted in The Bicyclist, made her first feature film, The Apple, when she was seventeen. Makhmalbaf, the proud patriarch, met me once more in Paris to hand over a pile of DVDs, all films made by his wife and daughters.

The question, not only concerning the Makhmalbaf family, but all artists, especially filmmakers, living in exile, is how their work can be sustained in foreign countries. There are problems of language, cultural familiarity, and of losing a home audience. Not entirely, of course. DVDs of Makhmalbaf’s films, old and new, are smuggled into Iranian underground markets, mostly from the Gulf.

Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-born professor at Columbia University who has lived in the US since the 1980s, told me that national borders don’t matter so much any more: “We live in a different world now. You can operate outside your own country.” He calls Makhmalbaf “a troubadour”, and recalled how in Paris the director would be suddenly embraced in the street by Algerians, who had seen some of his films.

One way of dealing with banishment from Iran is to make films in its periphery. Makhmalbaf has not only made films in Afghanistan, but also in Tajikistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and India. “Language is still a problem,” he acknowledged. When he made A Time of Love (1990) in Istanbul, he had to learn the Turkish dialogue by heart, “so I could control it”. However, he acknowledged, “I could never have made Salaam Cinema in another language.”

There is another factor that has mitigated the problems of exile. Technology has made national borders more porous. Twitter, Youtube and Facebook played vital roles during the protests in Iran after the last election. Makhmalbaf was so excited about these new possibilities that he called the protesters in Teheran transmitting images from their cell-phone cameras “the most honest filmmakers in Iran.” He told The Wall Street Journal that “the thing they are doing is more important than all of the history of our cinema. For the past thirty years, we were trying to reach some kind of reality in art. We used our films like a mirror in front of society. But their images are full of reality. There is no artificiality.” The borders between real life and cinema, always thin in Makhmalbaf’s work, had become seamless in the political revolt.

One can forgive him for the slight hyperbole. But technology did indeed play a vital role in keeping the outside world informed about Iran. The question remains, however, what effect people outside Iran can have on an increasingly rigid and authoritarian country. Kiarostami’s skepticism about the possibility of making good films outside the country one knows best cannot be dismissed. His own last film, Certified Copy, seems to be a perfect illustration of this. An Englishman and a French woman fret about their relationship in a beautiful Tuscan town, switching from English to French to Italian, almost at random. The movie is intelligent, beautifully made, well acted, but oddly sterile, abstract, as though shorn of genuine cultural context. To be sure, Kiarostami’s Iranian movies also tend towards abstraction, but they are still anchored in a way that is plausible, that smells of life instead of just being an intellectual concept.

Makhmalbaf has thought of moving to the US, since he is more comfortable in English than French, but gave up on the idea when he realized he couldn’t possibly make the kind of movies he wants in America. Hollywood, he says, is like a factory: “If you repeat your success, copy yourself out of fear of failure, you become like a factory. I prefer to take risks.”

Then, after a moment of silence, he repeated what he had said in the beginning of our interview: “I hate politics. And I really miss cinema. Ordinary people eat bread. An artist needs to make something, or you lose your identity.” This is not just a question of being distracted by politics, of course. Many conditions are essential for making a movie. They are hard to achieve for a filmmaker at home, let alone for a troubadour in exile. Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of more than two million Iranians forced by politics to live abroad. The sooner he can return to making the films he wants to, preferably in and around his native country, the better, not only for Iran, but for all lovers of cinema in the rest of the world.

Salaam Cinema (1994), one of the masterpieces of Iranian film, begins with a riot. Thousands of delirious people, men and women, press and push and shove their way towards a school building, desperate to get inside. It looks like a kind of religious stampede, or a rock concert run out of control, with waves of screaming people threatening to break over earlier waves of humanity crushed against the gates. The religion in this case is cinema. And the scene is absolutely real. To celebrate the centennial of film, an advertisement was placed in a Teheran newspaper asking for one hundred actors to audition for a new movie by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the most popular director in Iran. Five thousand people turned up.

Such films by Makhmalbaf as Salaam Cinema and Gabbeh (1995) drew millions of people in Teheran alone. He was so celebrated that in one well-known case a man went around town pretending to be him and offering people parts in his next film. This imposture prompted the no less celebrated Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, to make a film entitled Close-Up (1988), starring Makhmalbaf as himself.
Makhmalbaf can no longer live, or work in Iran. Firmly on the side of political reform, he left after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005, and is persona non grata in his own country. Two years ago he used his movie fame to enter politics as the overseas spokesman for the reformist candidate in the last presidential elections, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. When large numbers of Iranians were convinced that Ahmedinejad had robbed Mousavi of his rightful victory through fraud, hundreds of thousands protested in the streets of Teheran. Many were arrested, tortured, and in some cases killed. Makhmalbaf wrote in The Guardian of London: “I have been given the responsibility of telling the world what is happening in Iran. The office of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who the Iranian people truly want as their leader, has asked me to do so.”

And so he became a kind of roving ambassador for Mousavi’s Green Movement, giving interviews, writing op-ed pieces, donating his film prizes to the Green Movement, and making the rounds of various European capitals, the European Parliament, and the White House. He says he no longer has time to make films because he is too busy “working for the Iranian people”.

Speaking for political candidates is not normally the role of artists, but then the situation in Iran is not normal, nor is Mousavi a normal politician, or indeed Makhmalbaf a normal filmmaker. In fact, the two have some important things in common. In 1979, a painter and architect by training, Mousavi represented the leftwing of the Islamist revolution. His intellectual hero – like Makhmalbaf’s – was the philosopher Ali Shari’ati, who combined revolutionary Marxist rhetoric with Shia Islam. Mousavi’s other hero was Che Guevara. As a Muslim activist he was much favored by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he served as prime minister until 1989. When a constitutional change abolished the prime ministership, he retired from politics.

Makhmalbaf, revealing as much about himself as the politician he champions, wrote about Mousavi: “Previously, he was revolutionary, because everyone inside the system was a revolutionary. But now he’s a reformer. Now he knows Gandhi – before he knew only Che Guevara. If we gain power through aggression we would have to keep it through aggression. That is why we’re having a green revolution, defined by peace and democracy.”
This is pretty much a summing up of Makhmalbaf’s own trajectory, from a religious revolutionary zealot to a liberal critic of the Islamic regime. Not all Iranian artists see it as their role to be activists in exile. Kiarostami, seventeen years older than Makhmalbaf, has avoided political comment in his films, or acting as a public dissident. As a result, he can still move in and out of Iran, while Makhmalbaf, like many other Iranian artists and intellectuals, can’t go back. Exile is not always a matter of choice. And the question whether it is better to pull one’s punches to work inside a dictatorship, or to speak out and take the artistic and political consequences of enforced exile, is not unique to contemporary Iran. But a recent public spat between Kiarostami and another filmmaker in exile, Bahman Ghobadi, born in 1969, set out the stakes quite clearly.

Kiarostami attacked Ghobadi, who made the well-received No One Knows About Persian Cats, about the underground rock music scene in Iran, for making a sensational film, and abandoning Iran. He stated in an interview for the Iranian press: “If Bahman Ghobadi thinks there are better circumstances for creating movies outside of Iran, I congratulate him. But for me, personally, I don’t believe in leaving Iran. The place I can sleep comfortably is my home.” Ghobadi, who hardly chose to leave Iran, answered, in an open letter, that Kiarostami had the right to remain silent, while his countrymen suffered, but not the right to criticize others for speaking out. He added that: “The people will not forget the silence of artists.”

In fact, Kiarostami has not kept entirely silent. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival he protested against the incarceration of Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker (The Circle) who supported Mousavi and was openly critical of Ahmedinejad’s regime. Makhmalbaf has not attacked his old mentor, Kiarostami, but his choice was already made in 2005: better to brave the lonely freedom of exile than enjoy the dubious comfort of being the most famous film director under a dictatorship at home. And by the way, Kiarostami’s most recent film, Certified Copy, shot in Italy and starring the French actress Juliet Binoche, has been banned in Iran.

***

A slim man with large mournful eyes, Makhmalbaf now carries a French passport. He lives in a simple apartment in Paris with his family, all of whom are filmmakers involved in one way or another in each other’s work. The Makhmalbaf Film House, whose website is handled from London by the son, Maysam, is very much a family enterprise. Makhmalbaf’s wife, Marziyeh Meshkini, has made two award-winning films, scripted by her husband. His daughter, Samira, has made five, two scripted by her father, and one based on one of his novels. Maysam has made a documentary of Samira directing a film. The youngest daughter, Hana, was the last to leave Iran after making a fine documentary, entitled Green Days, about the 2010 election. Hana and Samira assisted their father in a documentary about Afghan children, Afghan Alphabet (2001), for which Marziyeh did the stills. And so on and on.

“I really hate politics”

I met Makhmalbaf at his preferred hangout, a touristy café on the Boulevard Saint Michel. He arrived on his motorcycle, sat down at a table inside, ordered a Coke, and declared with great feeling: “I really hate politics.”

For a man who professes to hate politics, Makhmalbaf always was a profoundly political figure. He was born in Teheran in 1957. His first dramatically political act was the knifing of a policeman, when the Shah was still ruling the country in 1973. Makhmalbaf was part of a group of teenage Islamist rebels. The attack on the cop was botched, Makhmalbaf was shot in the stomach, and he spent five years in prison where he was tortured by the notorious SAVAK. Among other torments, he was whipped on the soles of his feet with telephone cables, while strapped to a seat tilted backwards, known as “the Apollo chair”.

His prison experience, as a young Islamist surrounded by hardened communists, is dramatized in Boycott (1985) one of his earliest films, and the stabbing of the policeman is the subject of A Moment of Innocence (1995), which shows both the point of view of the cop and of the young rebel. In a bizarre twist, which nicely matches the cinematic world of Makhmalbaf, or indeed Kiarostami, a world where fantasy and reality are never very distinct, the actual policeman turned up as one of the aspiring actors for Salaam Cinema. He was turned down, but this episode is then used in A Moment of Innocence. Many directors, like novelists, mine their own lives to enrich their art. Few do it as much as Makhmalbaf, whose life and films are intertwined in a way that is almost seamless.

Makhmalbaf began to question his revolutionary zeal in prison. He despised the communists, whom he regarded as dogmatic Stalinists, whose endless arguments about doctrine were remote from what was happening in the streets. This is certainly the picture you get from Boycott, a propaganda film for the clerical regime which had already turned against the leftists by then and executed a large number of them. The movie is shot much like a popular thriller, with crude zoom shots, wild over-acting, and an over-excited score. But despite the callow style and the heavy-handed anti-communist message designed to help Khomeini’s regime, the underlying theme is typical of much of Makhmalbaf’s work: the conflict between private passions, and the desire to fight, or die, for a great cause.

The young rebel in Boycott is torn in this way. In the course of “saving society”, he is arrested by the Shah’s police for being a terrorist. The communist leaders in prison want him to make a great political statement in court, and die a hero’s death, whereas the young man would really much prefer to stay alive and see his wife and child again. In the end he is executed anyway, on a rainy day, alone, without heroics, still full of doubts. The communists then spin a myth of glorious martyrdom around his ignominious death.

But the problem in Iran, as Makhmalbaf sees it, went deeper than leftist dogmatism, or indeed clerical authoritarianism. In the Shah’s prison, he had a kind of conversion. He began to reject political dogma of any kind and turned to Iranian culture as his main concern. In Paris he told me: “I realized in prison that our culture had a problem with democracy. If you only believe in one God, in one religion, and that only one country, Iran, is favored by God, then truth can just be one thing, and you end up with a dictator. That is why later, little by little I tried to clean things up in my mind, by reading books, by travelling, and finding out what is true in a relative way. That is how I ended up expressing myself through art.”

“I realized in prison that our culture had a problem with democracy”

He had come a long way, from inauspicious beginnings. The son of an illiterate public bathhouse operator and a nurse, who were married for only six days, Makhmalbaf was raised mostly by three women: his mother, who kept the household going, his grandmother, who made him a strict Muslim, and his aunt, a schoolteacher, who inspired a love of reading. His stepfather, a follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, instructed him about politics.

Aspects of his peculiar childhood resurface in several films, including films by his own children. The absent father figures in Silence (1997), about a blind musician in Tajikistan. Not only is he fatherless, but the young musician is warned to put his fingers in his ears when he goes out, lest he be led astray by pretty tunes. Makhmalbaf likes to tell the story of his own pious grandmother, who ordered him to shut his ears and eyes outside the house to block out sinful sights and sounds. Mahmalbaf wrote the script for his daughter Samira’s brilliant film, The Apple (1998), about a true story of two young girls who were confined to their house for years by their religious father, out of fear that they would be ruined by worldly corruption. Makhmalbaf himself was locked up at home, as a young boy, to prevent his father from kidnapping him.

Already deeply religious – Makhmalbaf was a seminary student in the holy city of Qom – his piousness was pushed into a revolutionary direction when he was fifteen after hearing a four-hour speech by Ali Shari’ati, the same thinker who influenced Mousavi. Inspired by this, he started a library with other young friends, and collected all of Shari’ati’s works. But words were not enough. Like the young hero in Boycott, he felt the time was ripe for saving society through an act of martyrdom, in the spirit of Shari’ati’s rhetoric. When I asked Makhmalbaf what had attracted him to Shari’ati’s ideas, he stressed Shari’ati’s charismatic style: “He was our teacher. His speeches were like poems. He spoke from the heart, with the power of poetry. Listening to him, I was shaking with emotion.”

It wasn’t so much what Shari’ati said, it seems, as the way he said it that excited the young Makhmalbaf: the poetry, the emotion. But Shari’ati’s blend of leftist ideas and religious puritanism was an inspiration behind the revolution that made temporary allies of religious zealots and Marxist revolutionaries. The power of poetic images, rather than narrative, is also a mark of Makmalbaf’s films, and indeed of many Iranian films. The reason, in his view, lies in the nature of Iranian culture: “Because of Islamic restrictions, we didn’t have a painting tradition like in the West.” What he meant is a tradition of realism; depiction of the human figure is forbidden in Islam. Islamic art is abstract, and this might have contributed to a strong leaning towards poetic metaphor even in Iranian cinema, instead of realism. Makhmalbaf put it this way: “We have no understanding of painting in Iran. In Europe cinema comes from painting. In our cinema we use poetic imagery. Sometimes I translate poetry into images directly.”

In Gabbeh, for example, poetry as well as the images woven into a carpet tell the story of a young woman who wants to go off and marry a romantic horseman, glimpsed in the hills, howling like a wolf. Much is made in the movie of the power of color: “Life is color, death is black.” At several points in the film, women actually draw colors from the carpet to apply them to scenes of real life, as though the story were woven from pictures in the rug. The images are poetic, but the politics are not far below the surface. Even the use of color as a metaphor is pregnant with meaning when all women are forced to wrap themselves in black. It was a bold film to make in a country where art and music are suppressed as much as sexual and political liberties. No wonder the film was banned for several years.

Makhmalbaf grew disillusioned with Shari’ati’s revolutionary zeal, and began to question his own politics when the 1979 revolution had hardened into a brutal dictatorship. He now says: “Shari’ati, despite his poetry, his power, his knowledge, justified revolution to create another prison for our culture. I still love him, but Khomeini’s ideology came from Shari’ati’s ideas.”

می گویند به هرچه باور داشته باشی، هر طور زندگی کنی، به هرچه عشق بورزی، همانطور خواهی مرد. ساعت ده شب است و پیکر بی جانت که دیشب همین ساعت ها بالای سر پدر قرآن می خواند در تاریکای شب و وحشت یک گورستان کوچک محلی به خاک می سپارند تا به گمانشان فردا دیگر خاطره ای از تو در گوش زمان و زمین باقی نماند. امشب اما گورستان کوچک لواسان تکرار آوایی را در گوش خود می شنید که خاکی های خسته مدینه هزار و چهارصد سال پیش می شنیدند. می گویند جمعیت هم صدای یا زهرا، یا مظلوم سر داده بودند و جز صدای هق هق گریه و ضجه زنان و ضربه های گورکن بر خاک نمناک گور پدرت، صدایی در شبی چنین سوگوار شنیده نمی شد.

از منبر‌هایشان شنیده بودیم که فاطمه زهرا به فاصلهٔ کمی‌ پس از پیامبر و بر اثر ضربه ای‌ که به او زدند درگذشت و شبانه به خاک سپرده شد.

می گویند مادر سهراب پیکر بی جانت را در آغوش گرفته و التماست کرده سلامش را به سهراب برسانی. خیلی های دیگر هم می خواستند از تو بخواهند پیام آور سلام شان باشی. نگاه کن به گورستان های جنوب تهران، همان گورستان خاوران را می گویم. بهشت زهرا را یادت نرود بانو … گورهای دسته جمعی امشب به احترامت یک دقیقه سکوت کرده اند.

دوم

نبودم. کیلومترها فاصله بود بین من و کلاس های قرآن ات و روسری سپیدی که به نشان صلح بر سر می کردی. نبودم و کیلومترها فاصله بود بین من و تو که در سوگ پدر، تصویر قاب گرفته اش را حمل می کردی تا شاید نگاه آنها که محاصره تان کرده بودند روی چروک های صورت پیرمرد بیافتد و یک لحظه شرم کنند. نبودم و بودند دوستانی که سال ها رفیق خنده ها و بغض هایت بودند. یکی می گفت رو بر می گردانت سلام می کند به تو، می رود سراغ دکتر ملکی سلامی کند که می بیند فریادی بلند می شود. سر می چرخاند. خبر دهان به دهان می شود. تو در چند قدمی پیکر پدرت جان دادی …

در روایات اسلامی می گویند تا وقتی مرده را در قبر نگذاشته اند و سنگ لحد بر پیکرش ننهاده اند، روح هنوز در حوالی بدن است و نمی داند که مرگی رخ داده است. می گویند خود مرده هم در تشییع پیکر خود شرکت می کند؛ اما به محض اینکه درون قبر گذاشته می شود و سنگ بر سرش می خورد می فهمد مرگی که در مراسمش شرکت داشته عزای خودش بوده. چطور پدرت در تابوت نظاره کرد ضربه بر پیکر دخترش را بانو؟

سوم

جایی خواندم که پدرت بارها خواسته بود پیش از مرگ نگاهش به نگاهت دخیل ببندد. شنیده بودم بارها خواسته بود تو را ببیند و چه غروری بود در نگاهش وقتی نامت را تکرار می کرد. تو اما وقتی آزاد شدی که چشم های پدر دیگر تو را ندید و گوشش دیگر زمزمه های بابا بابای تو را نشنید. بگو الان که سنگ لحد بر سینه تو و پدر گذاشته شده و همه، شبانه شما را ترک کرده اند کدام خاطره را برای پدر تعریف می کنی؟ برایش می گویی که چطور سوزش درد ضربه ای که به پهلویت خورد جانت را آزاد کرد تا کنارش آرامش بگیری؟

بگو هنوز هم می گویی خشم را کنار بگذاریم و متانت به خرج بدهیم وقتی تو را شبانه به خاک سپردند و بی گناه جانت را گرفتند؟ بگو هنوز هم می گویی خواسته هایمان را روی کاغذ بنویسیم؟

بگو صدای ضجه های سوگواران این سالها را به گوش خدا خواهی رساند؟

Elizabeth Bucar’s Creative Conformity: The Feminist Politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi’i Women was published in March 2011 by Georgetown University Press. We interviewed her on her book and the problems Iranian Shi’i and U.S. Catholic women face.

It seems quite strange to compare feministic movements in Catholic and Shi’i worlds. What are the similarities between such movements in Iranian and American societies?

I think the strangeness, or rather uniqueness, is what originally drew me to this case study. Although much scholarly work has been written on feminist politics in these two worlds, I am a firm believer that careful comparison can help us understand different religious traditions and practices by placing them in relief against each other. The similarities I found were not that women in these two worlds “want the same things.” Rather I found some semblance in the way they engage their respective religious traditions, particularly the way they respond to clerical directives about what it means to be a good Catholic or Shii women. For example, women it both contexts leverage their experiences as mothers to make arguments that push back against some aspects of clerical teaching, whether they are fighting for women’s legal custody of children after divorce (in the case of Shii women) or arguing for a more holistic view of sexual ethics beyond procreation (in the case of Catholic women).

You seem not to believe that Catholicism and Shi’ism are essentially against feminism. What are your reasons for refuting such a view?

This is a very good question, and cuts right to the heart of part of what I am trying to argue. First, I simply don’t believe –nor do I find evidence to support– the claim that “feminism” is merely what western, liberal, or secular women think it is. Other scholars have argued for the danger of western feminist agendas that seek to “save” Muslim or Catholic women from their men and from their religion, and how this is grounded in imperial assumptions about the superiority of some forms of secular life over all others.
Second, I understand feminist politics to be anything that challenges ideologies that misrepresent women or women’s experiences. Some of these are based in religious discourse, some are not. I intentionally leave undefined what counts as misrepresentation since this will depend to some on a woman’s perspective and context. Finally, if we look at what actual Catholic and Shii women are doing, we find incredibly innovative attempts to advocate on behalf of women within what to an outsider might seem insurmountable odds. Every feminist action takes place within some context: Catholicism and Shii Islam are simply examples in which male authority has helped support patriarchal teachings, but the traditions themselves are not anti-women or antithetical to women’s flourishing.

Other scholars have argued for the danger of western feminist agendas that seek to “save” Muslim or Catholic women from their men and their religion

Do Catholicism and Shia believe in gender equality and women’s freedom indeed? According to which principles they do?

Yes, both traditions have teachings that support a view of women as equitable to men. They share a stance of gender complementarity, in which men and women have different duties and rights, but have equal human dignity and spiritual capacity.

How can we explain the issues such as freedom of wearing or not wearing a veil and abortion under the principles of Shi’ism and Catholicism? Can we stay Shi’ite or Catholic and believe in such issues as well?

You mention the two “hot button” issues in both traditions: abortion in the Catholic church and hijab for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In both cases, the “official” position is not necessarily supported by the community. In the case of abortion, we have polls that clearly show there is almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics in terms of the moral acceptability of abortion. In other words, despite the Vatican’s condemnation of abortion, many U.S. Catholics (approximately 40%) believe it is a woman’s choice. In Iran, hijab is compulsory, and women potentially face legal punishments (e.g., fines) if they wear “bad hijab,” thus few will go on the record as being against Islamic dress code for women. That said, many women are happy to complain about the law off the record, and I don’t just mean women who see themselves as “secular” or “western.” Even women who say they would continue to veil even if the law was changed dislike the compulsory nature of veiling, which in many ways takes away a women’s ability “to choose” to veil for pious reasons.

Some believe that some of the laws being approved to limit women are not approved because of religion, but because of morality. What are the boundaries between religion and morality?

This is a very important question for the current situation in Iran. We can answer it in a number of ways. On the one hand, in Iran there is no clean line between not only religion and morality, but also between politics and religion. The Iranian constitution, for example, blurs this line, as do the current Iranian authorities who often prosecute political dissidents perceived for moral crimes. On the other hand, I think your question expresses a level of frustration in Iran that all Iranian laws are supposedly “Islamic”, which makes their reform difficult. For example, one argument often made by women trying to reform gender discriminatory laws in Iran is that these laws have their roots in cultural patriarchy rather than sound fiqh, or Islamic legal thought. In other words, reform is justified because these are not laws based in sharia. They argue, and I think often rightly so, the laws that limit women’s freedoms are actually contrary to fundamental Islamic ethical and legal principles.

According to your research, what do you think about the step Iranian feminism movement has reached? And how do you forecast its future?

This is such a difficult question given the current state of Iranian politics. Iran seems to be in such a moment of change, but I am hard pressed to predict where that change may lead. Let me also say that as an American, I certainly don’t stand in some privileged place from which I can or should judge other feminists movements. The US has its own problems, and on some issues Iranian women have much better rights. For example I often remind my students of the generous maternity and employment laws in Iran, that give time off to breast feeding mothers. At my own university, there is no paid maternity leave. I was back at the front of the classroom, teaching a full course load, three months after the birth of my daughter. Americans have a bad habit of judging others as worse off, especially other women, and especially other Muslim women. It is rarely this simple.

What are the most effective strategies for feminism movements to confront Shia or Catholic Fundamentalism?

Creative conformity of course! What I mean by this is that the most effective tactics against fundamentalism are those that are faithful to the tradition (conform) and yet take the tradition someplace new (creative). In the book I discuss five specific rhetorical tactics focused on symbolics, procreation, hermeneutics, embodiment, and what I call “republication.” These tactics take fundamental aspects of the tradition and show how women’s experiences (as mothers, for example) provide insights into what it means to be a good Shii or Catholic woman that male clerics can not possibility know.

Yes, Mr. Llosa! Becoming aware that you have won the prize, I cheered, went and bought those books of you I had not read and suggested my friends to do so. It was a long time I had not read such thick books: seven, eight, or nine hundred pages. I was used to reading novellas, short stories, and novels of other types. But reading your novels these days put me in the mood of story. In the atmosphere of those horrible events and brilliant narrations that only you seem to be an expert in. In the busy world of today, your magic spell made us stay at home and put off every other plan we had. Only you can make us take such heavy books out to the street, keep reading them standing in the metro, and leaf them in the class while the professors frown with regret.

Oh the storyteller grandpa, this was how I became fond of you. First I read The Feast of the Goat. As the story went on I felt that it is happening right here in Iran. I felt that Urania is one of the girls of my homeland, losing their honor day by day. I felt that Trujillo is the same as the dictators of my own country who have dominated people’s lives and minds in such a way that they have lost any will and are ready to become so miserable. In your story Trujillo lies with the ministers’ wives anytime he wants. The ministers know what is happening and are even pleased about that. I wondered if such a thing is possible. “Maybe it’s only imaginary”, I thought. But as I searched more I realized that it is true and a few days ago I read on the web that “if his majesty (the supreme leader) forbids me to continue living with my wife right now, I would obey in spite of my interest in my wife.” I shivered with fear and realized that everything is possible as long as there are people who are totally absorbed in someone.

After The Feast of the Goat, I began reading Conversation in the Cathedral, a great novel which would no doubt be among the ten wonderful books I have ever read. You had once said “I spent such energy narrating this novel that I don’t think I can ever write something like it.” You are right. It is not possible to write anything similar. The book consists of a series of conversations in different situations and you keep the story going through them and describe the power relations. How have you done that? One keeps wondering how such a form can continue through seven hundred pages. Conversation in the Cathedral is a novel of dialogues and characters. It consists of a city of characters, from the pimps, prostitutes, drunks, and homosexuals to politicians, diplomats, and interviewers. You have described all of them one by one, as if you have been in their place once and have lived with them. This type of narration, mixing different stories in a complicated manner and moving them forward simultaneously is a dazzling job. Characters talk with each other and through their conversation, Peru is portrayed. A portray of Lima is drawn. How similar Lima seems to Tehran and how much Peru looks like Iran. I wondered all the time how they have permitted this book to be published when they keep censoring words like ‘breast-pocket’ and so on. I talked about it with the bookseller man and he said: I am sure they have made a mistake and will prevent its publication in the next edition. I was so anxious that I began calling my friends and telling them to go and by the book quickly before they shred it.

How similar Lima seems to Tehran and how much Peru looks like Iran

How tragic to know that Iran today is like Peru fifty years from now. In this book you have described the people around the dictator; in contrast to The Feast of the Goat the main character was the dictator himself: the same flattery, the same betrayal and brutality. I could see the example of each of the characters in the real world: people filled with lies and crafts, although having human senses. Even the most hateful people in your story are pitied and the major character sometimes does things that make the reader angry. Yes, it’s the common fate you have deliberately depicted. You are one of the writers who still believe in the influence of literature on people and said this in your Nobel lecture:

“Without fictions we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion. Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers. They do this because they know the risk of allowing the imagination to wander free in books, know how seditious fictions become when the reader compares the freedom that makes them possible and is exercised in them with the obscurantism and fear lying in wait in the real world. Whether they want it or not, know it or not, when they invent stories the writers of tales propagate dissatisfaction, demonstrating that the world is badly made and the life of fantasy richer than the life of our daily routine. This fact, if it takes root in their sensibility and consciousness, makes citizens more difficult to manipulate, less willing to accept the lies of the interrogators and jailers who would like to make them believe that behind bars they lead more secure and better lives.”

Yes Mr. Mario! You writers are the ones who encourage sedition. You are the ones who reproduce sedition with your dark books and blasphemous pens. Reading these books one begins comparing the existing situation with that of the fiction and becomes encouraged to do something. The least one can do is to read the book and then hand it to his/her friends to read, then the friend does so, and also the others, and many other books are in this way handed over. These readings become murmurs and bring this question into mind that why or why not we should live like this. This is the beginning of the sedition.

A few days ago I began reading another book of yours: The War of the End of the World! A nine-hundred-page breath-taking book. I bought it the first thing after receiving my monthly payment. I will read it with joy and I will suggest it to my friends, although I know I will not enjoy any book as much as Conversation in the Cathedral. Thank you Mr. Novel! Thank you for lighting our hearts with your books in these days of darkness.

A few months after Iran’s 1979 Revolution, the famous Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuściński was sitting alone in his Tehran hotel. ‘My hotel is…locked’, he says a few pages into the marvelous book Shah of Shahs (1985) he was writing at that very moment. ‘The sound of gunfire mingles with the creaking of shutters rolling down and the slamming of gates and doors…I have no one to talk to. I’m sitting alone looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.’ Kapuściński cannot go out into the streets, but he nevertheless sets to work. He does not describe the fall of the Shah and Khomeini’s return from exile, but tells us how all of this came about. He is trying to make sense of what is going on in those streets he has no access to.

‘Death to Khamenei’ written on a city-bus

Far from having the stature of Kapuściński, I feel related to him on this, once again, paramount day for Iran. I cannot go out into the streets of Tehran; I cannot even be locked in a hotel room, but I am also watching things from a distance, trying to make sense of notes and pictures and conversations, not lying around on my table but coming to me live and direct on my computer screen.

And indeed, how to make sense of it all? How to make sense of what has been going on in Iran since the fraudulous elections of June 2009 that I myself have witnessed? How to make sense of a picture of the bruised body of Mehdi Karroubi? How to make sense of the heartbreaking cries of young men and women shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ from their rooftops in the middle of the night? My brain just cannot make sense of it, because it is impossible to find sense in sheer injustice.

Ayatollah Khamenei however does find sense in injustice. That is where he and most of the other people of this world differ. Injustice is the only thing that makes sense to the Iranian regime. It is the only thing with which they can satisfy their sick brain; it is the only thing that makes them feel powerful and alive when they are looking in the mirror. And when they do so, they can only see their own image and not that of people suffocating in the great prison that Iran has become.

Iranians are sick and tired of trying to make sense of something that has no sense

Anyone who has a sane mind cannot understand their distorted view. All Iranians can do is accept this mirror image of their leaders as a harsh reality that will not change if they do not stand up and break the mirror. That is exactly what thousands of Iranian people are again trying to do today. They want to hear the sound of breaking glass, and who can blame them? They are sick and tired of trying to make sense of something that has no sense. They are sick and tired of how exhausted their brains have become by trying to make sense of a life that is bereft of sense by the mirror images of Khamenei & Co.

With every protest in Iran, our hopes revive, but we have been disappointed many times over the last couple of years. Today however, I feel that the turning point is coming closer. Please, do not call me naive. I can hear the turning point in the voices of my friends in Tehran, who have never sounded so angry and combatant. I could hear it yesterday in the furious reactions after the arrest of opposition leaders Mousavi and Karroubi, the greatest proof so far of how scared the regime has become. If we do try to make some sense, then there is sense in this shameful arrest: it is first and foremost a proof of the power of the people. It is a proof that in his mirror, Khamenei is gradually starting to see the open mouths and clenched fists of the Iranian masses.

In Shah of Shahs, Kapuściński describes a street exchange between two men, a protester standing at the edge of a large crowd, and a policeman. Until now, he reminds us, the policeman would scream at the man to go home; he and the rest of the crowd would turn tail. But then suddenly, things change. ‘The policeman shouts, but the man doesn’t run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman…he doesn’t budge. He glances around and sees the same look on other faces…Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting: at last he stops. There is a moment of silence. We don’t know whether the policeman and the man of on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid – and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution…the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post.’

It is precisely this moment that we are all waiting for. It is this moment that I except we will witness in the streets of Tehran, if not today, then soon, because the Iranian people are bent on hearing the sound of breaking glass. They are hearing the same sound in the Arab world, and they know that they too can do it. Already, Mousavi and Karroubi in their jails are hearing more than silence. They are hearing the sound of breaking glass, and they are seeing the cracks of the regime on the dark walls of their prison, which might very well become the Bastille of today’s protest.

Iran can, we can, and when the policeman turns around, we will be able to feel what Ahmad Shamloo once predicted: I don’t suppose/my heart was ever/warm and red/like this before./I sense that/
in the worst moments of this black, death-feeding repast/
a thousand thousand well-springs of sunlight,/stemming from certitude,/well up in my heart.

Of course, paintings were borrowed from many other cities all over the world. When entering the exhibition, the information on the wall explains that the paintings come from cities such as New York, Geneva, Moscow and Tehran. There are over sixty paintings on display and only one portrait from Tehran, but nevertheless the organizers decided to mention Tehran explicitly. Why? Obviously because of its magnetic presence in such a list, because it is a rarity to see Tehran in such lists, even though there are plenty of famous Iranian artists. Seeing Tehran in such a list remains an ambiguous experience, very different from seeing Tehran in a list concerned with artifacts of the ancient past or this or that pre-modern dynasty. On the one hand, I know that Tehran is a curious exception in a modern list (I mean here modern art, not to be confused with contemporary art, which roughly begins in the 19th century and ends in the 1960s). On the other, I wonder how it would be if a museum such as Tehran’s Contemporary Museum of Art could claim its place alongside other esteemed art institutions. For me, as a Dutch Iranian, the significance of Tehran on such lists matters.

Young Dutch Iranians such as myself are often not perceived as truly Dutch

To a significant proportion of the Dutch population, there is an identity that we may describe as “truly Dutch” (described recently by Lammert de Jong in Being Dutch, more or less). For many Iranians, who have very successfully integrated into Dutch society, with relatively easy access to high culture and society, increasingly for those who attended primary school in this country, the phrase truly Dutch is strange, even annoying. Despite their great success in this country, young Dutch Iranians such as myself are often not perceived as truly Dutch. A beard is a beard, and it means that you’re an ‘allochtoon’, which in Greek literally means not from the same land, an outsider who is tolerated, but should not complain too much about fundamental issues because he remains a guest in a host country. “If you don’t like it, why do you live here? Why don’t you go back to your own country?” is an often-repeated response to criticisms aimed at Dutch practices. For some, this atmosphere strengthens their Iranian feelings of belonging while others stress their being both Dutch and Iranian. For the latter group, the essential plurality of identities, especially in a globalized world, is experienced as something natural and obvious. But our freedom to “assert our personal identities can sometimes be extraordinary limited in the eyes of others, no matter how we see ourselves” (Sen, p. 6).

Iranians who were raised in Tehran instead of Amsterdam all too often create clear demarcations of inside and outside as well. Those who have lived for many years outside Iran are not perceived as true Iranians. Coming from Iran, they feel that Westerners cannot understand, or cannot sense, what it means to be a real Iranian. “But my dear, you have no idea what it is like here” and “He doesn’t know, he is a fake Iranian” are really existing thoughts that fail to do justice to the multiplicity of Iranian stories. Iranians raised in Iran, who immigrated or fled later in life, naturally feel more confident in their Iranian identity. But those who were raised in a Western country that, despite all its great advantages, very often perceives them as outsiders are in a more sensitive position. In the eyes of the dominant beholder, we are neither truly Dutch, nor truly Iranian. In reality, we are both and should not suffer a “civilizational incarceration,” a reduction that overlooks the internal diversity of identities and the “reach and influence of interactions – intellectual as well as material – that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations” (Sen, p. 10-11).

For me, the memories of the war with Iraq are quite vivid, in particular the bombs that hit Tehran including the very street where I played as a child. My Iranian feelings of belonging had always been strongly shaped by the disaster that was the eighties and the experiences of my parents’ generation. The perception that I, and others like, me would not be true Iranians, expressed in very subtle and less subtle ways, comes as a great shock, especially because of the sense that Dutch society, where I live, has a hard time realizing that I can have multiple identities and do so de facto. The safety that the Iranian identity offers is then relativized in a negative, exclusive, manner. And what Iranians in Iran think about us, and what we think about them, does matter. Our perceptions of each other shape the other person, whether he or she likes it or not. This is most clearly expressed by the ambiguity that I experienced when thinking about the Green Movement. Was this a “we” that I belonged to as well?

For me, the rise of the Green Movement meant that I needed to stop doing whatever it was that I was occupied with, just freeze, and stop

For me personally, the rise of the Green Movement meant that I needed to stop doing whatever it was that I was occupied with, just freeze, and stop, immediately. In the summer of 2009, I visited Berlin but my mind was continually focused on Iranian friends and family. When reading about the 1953 uprising against the Soviets, I could not help thinking about the 2009 post election violence in Iran. Graffiti dedicated to Neda Agha Soltan on the walls of Berlin only strengthened my distraction, reminding me, in a way for the very first time, of the sad meaning of exile. My eyes were focused on incoming news. Often, pictures, videos and news reached those outside Iran faster than people inside. Absurdly, normal distinctions like private and public, inside and outside, believers and unbelievers, even men and women, were fading in a massive catharsis that was longed for and anticipated for years. This was an event, very much so in the sense of the word described by philosophers of the Event such as Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley. The Event called for my attention and shaped my subjectivity, the kind of person I want to be. The event of the Green Movement, especially being aware of the silent marching citizens of Tehran, showed its own truth, that which Hamid Dabashi describes as a “people interrupted” in his history of modern Iran. With this kind of truth Badiou and Critchley mean something else than a correspondence theory of truth, where something is true if it corresponds to a fact. The truth of the event of the silent marching of a people interrupted has much more to do with loyalty, with the Dutch ‘trouw’ and the German ‘treue’, being faithful to something. Even though I was in the West, I and countless others, experienced the silent marching as a call so that truth means being true to this call. In the words of Levinas, the call reminded me of the infinite value of the finite individuals who were acting together. Hearing this call is a fundamentally heteronomous experience, where the others define who I am. I am what I am because of them.

Time passed and one day my friend Golrokh decided to organize an empty chair protest for the empty seats of her classmates. I helped her and one day she asked me why my description of the action was so neutral, why I didn’t write “our classmates” in one of our blogs. I responded that I hesitated to use the inclusive “our” because that would include myself and that I didn’t want to be criticized by others: “Some people, they can be Western or not, don’t want to include Western Iranians to this “we,” which has made me weary of using that language. So automatically, I don’t use that word, but that is what I say to my own heart in private.” She immediately understood my predicament and wrote the following:

“I, who grew up in Tehran, have nothing in this city. Even my parents don’t live there anymore and I have no house or room for myself. But I always think this city is mine, as it also belongs to its millions of fellow citizens. Every day that I was in Tehran [during protests], I thought this city belongs to me. And in every corner of the street, the authorities were standing there and denying with their sheer presence that this city belonged to me as well. They said this with weapons. Others say these things in a different way, with words. Don’t pay attention to them! This city belongs to you and you can influence it. When people left their homes in Tehran and saw how much they are alike, the city was ours until weapons were used against us. But whether these police forces are there or not, this city belongs to us and we are alive and breathe. It all depends on what we choose to be … The Green Movement created a new house for us, it transformed who we are. The same goes for you. You didn’t sit still; you were strongly affected by what happened here and affected your Green friends as well. Home is where we share these experiences, a place where we are not just fellow Iranians but people who share common hopes and ideals… We can all be a part of the Green Movement. So don’t worry about criticisms and say “we” whenever you are talking about us.”

Of course, there still are good reasons to be careful with using “us”. Using “us”, for anybody, always requires a critical sense of fairness. It is my hope that Western Iranians will try hard to understand their fellows in Iran, but also that Iranians in Iran and the many who are coming to the West today try hard to understand their Western friends, in particular the multiplicity of their identities. A hundred years ago, Kees van Dongen insisted on working with many artistic groups and not just one. He did not want to be reduced to a single artistic identity. His joyous wisdom is important for the art of life itself, something which the Dutch fail to adequately respect today: “The joy of our time is that you can mix everything, blend everything: it really is the age of the cocktail.” (Quoted in the Boijmans en van Beuningen exhibition in Rotterdam)

Literature
Lammert de Jong. Being Dutch, more or less. Rozenberg Publishers, Amsterdam, 2010.
Hamid Dabashi. Iran, a people interrupted. The New Press, New York and London, 2007.
Simon Critchley. Infinitely Demanding, Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. Verso, New York and London, 2007.
Amartya Sen. Identity and Violence, the illusion of destiny. W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2007.

It was already two weeks that Tehran was in a critical condition. Everyone was crying for rain drops to make this unbearable situation disappear. One of the grand ayatollahs had claimed that sending Iranian female athletes to the Asian Games in Guangjo, China, was the cause of the drought in Tehran. As we went outside in the streets, we started coughing and our eyes burned. Ministries and schools were closed for a few days. A plan of’odd or even’ was operated for the many cars in the city. They said they had charged the clouds and planes started to spray water in the air, but it did not help: we could not see more than a few streets ahead because of the pollution. People were talking non-stop about it, venting different points of view about the causes. Gradually however, people started whispering about some leaked news, telling that this time the air pollution had another reason than before. Tehran had always had the problem of pollution, especially during the cold months of the year, but this time it seemed the gas processed in domestic refineries could be the cause – the gas which was promised to be produced in only one week after we were faced with gas sanctions and which would makes us self-sufficient in gas production. I thought about Ahmadinejad’s phrase “’the sanctions have no effect’, and then I thought: yes, maybe no effect on him and his ministers and their families, but definitely on us, and I wondered why a whole nation should pay a price for the obstinacy of its leaders.

Why should a whole nation pay a price for the obstinacy of its leaders?

On one of those polluted days, we were talking in the taxi with the passengers: what if instead of all these calls and appointments for demonstrations for human rights and freedom, we could have a demonstration against this terrible air pollution? We are suffocating because of this polluted air – I was even scared to go out for a few days. In newspapers, they report around 4000 annual deaths caused by air pollution, and this is what they announce officially – the real number is probably much higher. 4000 dead people is not a joke. The total number of the martyrs of the Green Movement cited by any source does not exceed the maximum of 300, while 4000 people died from air pollution and nobody cares. Ultimately, they may shut down the city, but what if they keep producing this terrible gas? One passenger said we would have the same disaster as in England, and the other one said: let’s forget about the pollution, each year around 30.000 people die because of car accidents, that has lead to more dead than during the war between Iran and Iraq.

If we really consider Tehran as the symbol of civilization in Iran, then which characteristic about it can make us proud? Its highways and streets that are always blocked because of the heavy traffic? Its cultural centers where they only discuss the matters the regime likes to be discussed? Our cinema with those cheap movies that are being screened? What are the symbols of Tehran? Milad or Azadi Tower that are both lost in the masses of dust and smoke? Should we be proud of the city theater that now looks like a bankrupted commercial agency as its frontage is being violated by the metro and that huge mosque they are building just next to it? Or Café Naderi, about which we hear every day that it is sold out, or those book stores in Karimkhan or Enghelab streets where their showcases are filled with books that had their first editions years ago?

It has been a long time that I don’t like Tehran anymore. Sometimes I feel tempted to go to one of those villages around Tehran where there is even no gas for heating, and start my life there. Maybe I ask someone to make a korsi (2) for me and I get a stack of firewood in the yard, and during long autumns and winters I sit under the korsi and read books and breathe the fresh air and enjoy the blue sky…

There is only one reason keeping me dependent on this city and making me stay here and fill my lungs with the lead in the air, and that is the hope for a better tomorrow. What I saw last year was a demand for a relative improvement of living conditions. It seems that those 300 martyrs decided to improve a little bit their citizen rights, improve a little bit the situation of the media in Iran, improve air pollution, decrease a little bit the number of car accidents. It is right that the main slogan of the Green Movement was ‘where is my vote’ but all these little demands were also hiding behind that slogan. I want to stay in this mesmerized city and see the day in winter when the mountains are covered by snow and the peaks of Tochal and Kolak Chal are again visible, and Evin has become a nice valley where its small river is being fed by the snow, preparing for the roaring spring ahead.

(1) This refers to a poem by Sohrab Sepehri
(2) a type of low table found in Iran, with a heater underneath it, and blankets thrown over it

As we are only a couple of days past the previous decade, let us look at the political currents which shaped its politics, and which, if looked into properly, could tell us a thing or two about what is up with us in the decade(s) to come. The landscape is far too large; I will therefore paint the picture with very broad strokes by enumerating very succinctly the major undercurrents that are the signatures of the past decade. My approach would be relational,that is to say, there’s neither a logical, chronological, nor indeed a causal necessity in the order of the presentation of the items below, the idea being that each process meshes into other processes, simultaneously influencing and being influenced by other flows in a co-evolutionary sort of way. Here we go:

1. Economic shifts (or ‘crises’?)

First off, the economy! The historian Niall Fergusen rightly argues that ‘the study of modern history is simply inseparable from the study of the economic history’, so let us begin with that. In the past decade, we witnessed major transformations in the economic landscape of the world, which many around here called the economic ‘crisis’, but I would prefer terms such as economic ‘shift’ rather than ‘crisis’, because crisis, like beauty, is always in the eye (or the pocket) of the beholder! It’s a ‘crisis’ (as for the US and some EU members) only if you lose (some of) your stakes in the game, and a ‘boom’ (as for China, India, etc.) if your stakes are increased.
The climax occurred with the 2008 financial crisis actuated by the collapse of the Wall Street banking system, which led to austerity measures being implemented in many Western countries. This has made plausible (even palpable) the prospect, for the first time in the modern history of the world, of the West losing its economic (and political) hegemony over the world. During the past centuries the West has consistently possessed more than two-thirds of the world’s wealth. If things go as they have, it will be in possession of about one-third of the world’s wealth in a matter of decades. This has generated unease.

2. Rise of a multilayered, multipolar world

During the Cold War, the world was bipolar; after that, it was unipolar with the US as the sole hegemon. The last decade witnessed the emergence of new economic and political powers in the world, especially those referred to as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) that demand a bigger say in international affairs. The US can no longer call the shots unilaterally but should negotiate its position with the rest of the world. Apart from the BRIC countries, local powers (such as Turkey, Mexico, Israel, Iran, etc.) have come to consciousness about the significance of their positions and influence the politics of their regions. Regional coalitions and unions are getting more and more powerful; some of them include The Union of South American Nations, The African Union, The Arab League, SAARC in south Asia, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, etc. There are also private actors whose operations are more significant than ever, including (but not limited to) INGOs, bankers, entrepreneurs, private militaries, terrorist groups, etc. All these changes have provoked jittery feelings across the board especially in Europe and the US, which used to have the final say in world politics. These feelings of insecurity have had negative aftermaths, such as the resurgence of religion, nationalism, xenophobia, etc.

3. Rise and problematization of EU(ro)

The beginning of the past decade brought about the greatest collective European project ever, the EU and its Eurozone, which was meant among other things to counter the tremendous leverage the US and its dollar held economically and politically. It got off to a flying start, but towards the end of the decade and the troubles the Eurozone faced in the aftermath of the financial shifts, the idea of European Union in general and the very idea of Euro in particular have been cast under severe doubt and scrutiny. Greece and Ireland have already caved in economically and have been bailed out by the richer nations such as Germany in the face of popular discontent. Next in line are Portugal, Spain, and Italy and later on Belgium. One of the serious problems facing Europe is birth-rates lower than the replacement level. The only viable solution to this problem is indeed wise immigration policies. Not only has Europe not shown that wisdom recently, but it is experiencing a one-eighty process of scapegoating the immigrant as the root of all evils. Some of the most serious challenges of the next decade(s) for Europe will be to deal with such political and economic crises as Eurozone, bankrupt EU members, austerity measures, nationalist and xenophobic tendencies at the same time as it needs more immigrants, etc.

4. Resurgence of religion

Not long ago, religion was pronounced dead. Some countries even called themselves “post-religious”. In the past decade due to the feelings of insecurity all over the place, we witnessed a dramatic revival of religion or at least religious vocabulary. There are two scholarly positions with respect to this phenomenon: a) it’s a revival of religion, plain and simple, and b) it’s the death throes of religion, taking its last noisy gasps. I personally would like to sympathize with the latter, while being afraid of the possibility of the former being true. Be the accuracy of either position as it may, we can definitely say that religion made a lot of noise in the decade and religious vocabulary became part of the mainstream political discourse especially after 9/11 when Bush divided the world into good and evil camps, with no differential sensitivity, as it were, to the nuances of reality (‘you are either with us or against us’).

In the past decade due to the feelings of insecurity all over the place, we witnessed a dramatic revival of religion

The same holds true for other regions, such as the Middle East, where different grievances (social, political, economic, etc.) were and are expressed via the language of religion. The reason is rather obvious; religion, as scholars such as Reza Aslan have argued, is a ‘language’ through which the masses can make sense of the world and communicate with one another about it, thereby cohering and expressing their diverse collective identities and projects. I quite agree that religion is a language, but would add the qualification that it is a simplistic and dangerous language via which to express collective concerns. It is not for nothing that most (if not all) of the wars in human history have been waged in the name of religion and nationalism (in the broad sense of territorialism) or a combination of both.

5. Resurgence of Nationalism

Towards the end of the 20th century, there were calls to celebrate the erosion of boundaries on many planes of life and politics with the advent of “turbo-capitalism” or “rapid globalization” and its offshoots such as advanced transportation and communications technologies. This rapid erosion, together with financial uncertainties and other reasons, dealt a severe blow to territorial (e.g. local, national, regional) identities, which in the past decade backfired as a frighteningly rapid rise of territorialism in general (e.g. the so-called “clash of civilizations”) and nationalism in particular, as evident in the epidemic rise of nationalist parties (especially in EU and US) that got unprecedented popular momentum, unprecedented in recent memory, that is. Another flow concomitant to this one has been the rise to power of many right-wing conservative governments in the world, again especially in Europe, which has made the left ask itself the painful question ‘is there anything left of the left?!’

6. Rise of xenophobia

Quite obvious in the decade was the popping up of xenophobic, Islamophobic, and Arabophobic tendencies. This xenophobic tide was and is quite ironically strongest in Europe (a continent which more than any other place on the planet is in need of immigrants) and the US (which enjoyed its superior position because of the fact that it was and is an immigrant society). Brimful of such xenophobic sentiments, the Tea Party and Republicans in the US bemoan the loss of ‘real America’, whatever that may mean. The same is true about populist xenophobic parties that are plunging Europe into yet another dark chapter in its history.

7. Decline of American Empire

Also outstanding in the decade was the process of the US showing a combination of symptoms that many historians, such as Niall Fergusen (from Harvard) and Amy Chua (from Yale), argue most declining empires show when they are on the brink of collapse. Fergusen argues that ‘most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises;’ the US experienced it in 2008. It has also shown the other symptoms: currency debasements and engaging in desperate and costly wars thereby overstretching its military capabilities (in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the prospect of war with Iran). Persian, Roman, French, British, Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish empires all engaged in desperate, bloodthirsty wars when they were in a state of decline and military overextension, and the defeats thereof precipitated their falls. The US did also up the ante in immigration policies and rhetoric, which is another sign of declining empires according to Amy Chua, who argues that empires can survive only as long as they let different people(s) live, plain and simple! The reason? To be an empire = to rule over different people(s)!

8. The Internet and Social Networks

The decade also witnessed the widespread popularization of the Internet-related phenomena such as email systems, YouTube videos, blogging, virtual social networks, Whistle-blowing websites such as WikiLeaks, etc., all of which played major roles in the politics of the decade. There are roughly speaking three camps with regard to the role of the Internet in politics: a): The happy-happy camp that argues that the Internet has made it possible for everyone to tap into new political possibilities and horizons, and that it is a more readily available space for political news, campaigning, advertising, opposition, etc. b): The unhappy camp that argues that the Internet operates as a safety valve for people who vent off their anger in a blissful isolation from reality (with a couple of clicks and dislikes!), thus dissipating the galvanizing effect that is the true spirit of collective activism in politics. This has made people take to the streets, make a presence, and act publicly and civicly less and less. c): The camp with mixed feelings that sees both emancipatory and repressive possibilities in the Internet. They argue that it is a perfect tool for reaching across the aisle and opening up new horizons, but is simultaneously a perfect repressive tool for surveillance and control, in the sense that online privacy is at the end of the day an illusion rather than a reality. I tend to sympathize with the third camp, and would also add that politics is in the final analysis a real struggle of toils and tears and blood and not a virtual struggle of likes, dislikes, and blogs.

9. Etc.

Needless to say, the list is not exhaustive. The preceding was just a rough sketch, a partial interactive meteorological map which aimed at capturing some of the intensive flows that were behind the political make-up of the past decade, which if comprehended scientifically, would help us forecast the political weather of the decade(s) to come.

In November, a Belgian TV station broadcast the documentary The Red Card about the trial against Shahla Jahed, the mistress of famous Iranian soccer player Nasser Mohammad Khani who was accused of murdering her lover’s wife in 2002. I had heard about the plight of Shahla Jahed, but getting to know her full story in The Red Card made me hold my breath in amazement for one hour and kept me speechless for hours afterward. I was – obviously – outraged by the injustice of the Iranian legal system, but what striked me even more was the way in which Shahla Jahed defended herself in court. She had no lawyer and pleaded her own case. I was dumbfounded, realizing while watching her speak and stay silent, cry and laugh, ask and answer that I had again witnessed the extraordinary braveness of Iranian women.

Some weeks later, on December 1st, I had a lecture in the Belgian city of Antwerp and planned to show a part of The Red Card, taking the fighting spirit of Shahla Jahed as an example of how Iranian women are trying to defy a system that systematically wants to turn them into victims. And then, the evening before that lecture and in a coincidence that sent shivers down my spine, I saw some Iranian friends on Facebook change their profile picture into that of Shahla Jahed, as Iran’s judiciary had announced that she would be executed in the early morning of December 1st. If I had believed in God, I would have prayed for it not to happen, but I don’t, so I just went to bed that night hoping that it would not be true, that the regime would change its mind, that it was just once again using one of its scaring tactics, that maybe international pressure could stop this cruelty from happening. But my hope was in vain. When I put on my computer on December 1st, I heard Shahla’s last words coming out of my speakers. It was snowing outside, and it started raining in my heart.

That evening, talking in Antwerp about Shahla made me feel very sad for some minutes. But I did not give in to those dark feelings because it would have been a dishonor to how I will remember Shahla Jahed after having seen The Red Card: a brave woman who spoke out for herself. After refusing to talk for 11 months, she confessed to the murder of Laleh Saharkhizan, but later repeatedly retracted her confession at her public trial. Nevertheless, she was hanged in Evin Prison; in Iran, people rarely get a second chance. Still, Shahla may have lost in court, but The Red Card will always remind us that she was the verbal and moral winner of her case. The Iranian regime judged her for being a woman, but that didn’t stop her from showing her femininity. She for instance defied all Islamic conventions by wearing make-up during the court sessions. Shahla also managed to make a fool of the judge: sometimes she flirted with him, visibly throwing him off his feet and showing us which one the real powerful sex in court was. In her brave defense, in her defiance of rules and her determination to keep fighting against the injustice she was faced with, Shahla Jahed shows us that Iranian women are, yes, victims, but also born fighters the regime can no longer deny. Shahla Jahed is dead, but she is alive in those millions of Iranian women who, filled with hope, stand up to oppression and do so the loudest because they are the ones being hit the hardest in a dictatorship where every human being’s dignity is destroyed.

Iranian women are born fighters the regime can no longer deny

I added this element of hope when I talked about Shahla Jahed in Antwerp, and I always add hope when I talk about Iran in general because I believe, as philosopher Karl Popper said, that ‘optimism is our moral duty’. ‘So we have a duty’, Popper added, ‘instead of predicting something bad, to support the things that may lead to a better future’. I for one see this as my duty, not only as a human being but also and especially as writer. Of course, we have to be outraged and keep talking about the cruelty of the Iranian regime. But as a writer with a passion for Iran, I want to share with my readers my belief that there is always room for optimism, which is exactly what can help people in Iran who are daily struggling for their future. Why always put so much emphasis on only the bad things that are happening? It sometimes seems we have become so spoiled in the West that complaining is our new hobby. When the Persian-Dutch author Kader Abdolah – he himself a non-believer – translated the Quran two years ago, wanting to pay tribute to ‘the book of his father’, he stressed the beauty of the Quran, calling it bad as a book of law but marvelous as a literary work. Some journalists and Islam specialists blamed Abdolah for not talking enough about the terror the Quran has led to. First, that was not true as he called the Quran not valuable as a book of law, and second, what is wrong with trying to show another side of Islam? What is wrong with showing people in the West that there is great beauty in the book they seem to have become so afraid of – great beauty even for those who do not believe in Allah or any other God? I admire Abdolah for his brave stance in bringing this message of optimism, because it leads to more understanding, which is what we very much need at a time when people in the West have become scared of people whose culture they don’t even try to understand better.

I refuse to bring a message of pessimism to my audience, whether they are readers or people coming to listen to my lectures. When talking about Europe and Iran, I never only mention the sanctions and the nuclear program. I also refer to the three Iranian diplomats in Europe who have defected and joined the Green Movement. The surprise of people coming to tell me afterwards that they did not know about these hopeful signs coming from Iran is my greatest satisfaction.

I refuse to bring a message of pessimism

Last year, a librarian from a small town invited me to come and give a lecture on the occasion of my book being published. To my astonishment, she said she found the title of my book, Thousand-and-one dreams, ‘a very bad one because things are so terrible in Iran that it is very naïve of you to suggest that people have dreams over there’. I had rarely been spoken to with such dumb arrogance, but it confirmed my belief that talking about Iranian dreams and hopes is even more important than talking about Iranian nightmares and tragedies.

This evening, Iranian people throughout the world will celebrate the longest night of the Iranian calendar year, Yalda, in a tradition welcoming the birthday of the Zoroastrian god of light, Mitra. 
Reading poems of Hafez is one of the most familiar activities on Yalda night. I know which verse I will read tonight, thinking about the hope and dreams of Iran: “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”

Showing my readers the astonishing light of Iranian people is my wish for this Yalda.

It was called ‘Loknat’ and I listened to it a thousand times. It was the first Iranian song sneaking like an earworm into my brain, determined to stay there for days in a row. Not that this really bothered me: I confess that I adored this song of the popular, young and handsome Benyamin. Looking back, I know why I liked it so much: I had just started learning Farsi and I loved just about any song that was sung in that sweet sugary language. I was so voracious for new words that the musical quality was not my main concern. ‘Loknat’ by Benyamin had a simple text which I could understand almost completely without having to run to the dictionary, and that made me very happy. Moreover, Benyamin was stuttering in his song, something which was rather familiar to me at the time, not because being in love (which I very much was) stopped me from speaking, but because all these new Persian sounds were gymnastics for my tongue and mouth. The first Persian line that I ever sang out loud without stuttering was this one by Benyamin: Donya dige mesle to nadare, nadare na mitune biyare (The world has no one like you, it hasn’t and it will never have). I had never been so proud in my entire life.

That was six years ago. Today, I still love Benyamin, but not primarily for his music. I love him like people love their first boyfriend or girlfriend: you realize that he or she was really not your type, but you still have a warm feeling about them because they handed you the key to the world of love, which opened up an entire new universe for you.

Benyamin did the same. He opened the world of Persian music for me, a path of discovery that I haven’t left ever since. Of course, I got to know the classical Persian masters like Mohammad Reza Shajarian, who made me cry in the streets of Isfahan a couple of days before the 2009 elections, and who can still make me cry when listening to him at home in Belgium. My best friend one day handed me an album of Marzieh, adding: ‘Listen to this. She’s a miracle’. I did, and he was right. Marzieh has died but lives on forever in my mind.

But I do not want to talk about classical Persian music. I want to tell you about modern, contempory Iranian music. If as a westerner interested in Iran you go out looking for modern Iranian music, the first singers and groups you encounter might give you the idea that the Iranian music scene is one big kitsch paradise – or hell, depending on how much you like kitsch. When I first searched for modern Iranian songs on the famous website bia2.com, it seemed as if Iran only produced lookalikes of Benyamin. I listened to Saaeed Ashayesh and could not even discern his voice from that of Benyamin. If on YouTube you type ‘Benyamin’, you often hear songs of Asayesh, mistakenly posted as songs by Benyamin, leading to confused reactions of listeners. Benyamin and Saaed of course have their right of existence, but if their music sounds so similar, then where is the personality of the individual artist?

The Iranian music industry has reeked dollars in LA and now automatically produces the songs that part of rich Tehrangeles wants to hear

This is my problem with many modern Iranian singers, whom I cannot call artists, but only singers: they are interchangeable. A lot of this music is not even made in Iran, but in Tehrangeles, hometown of approximately one million Iranians. The music videos that accompany these songs are full of the superficial, upbeat LA lifestyle in which Iranian-Americans try to be even more Hollywood-like than the ‘real’ Americans. It is the kind of lifestyle that we will witness in the controversial television series The Persian Version – a Persian version of Jersy Shore set in LA – which is now in a preproduction phase. In april 2010, this reality show was announced as follows: ‘Two thousand years ago the Persian Empire ruled the ancient world…but they didn’t have your soundtrack, your style, or your swagger. For you, life is all about Gucci, Gabbana, Cavalli and Cristal. From BMWs and Bugatis, to Mercedes and Movado – money is no object.’ Many Iranian Americans strongly objected to The Persian Version, because it would be a far too stereotypical representation of their community. There might be truth in this, but at the same time, we have to admit that there is truth in the stereotype. The wealthy, superficial, filthy rich and Mercedes-loving Iranian LA community does exist. They have quite a lot in common with the wealthy Iranians living in the North of Tehran, and they often originate from these areas. They say they are proud of being Persian, but are above all trying hard to become real Americans. In that typical Persian trait of character of always trying to be the best, they exaggerate in their copycat behavior of the Hollywood biatch or hip-hop macho. The commercial Iranian music industry has reeked the smell of dollars over here and now automatically produces the songs that Tehrangeles folks want to hear: copycat versions of American R&B and hip-hop, the only difference being that the lyrics are in Farsi. Apart from that, the big silicon boobs, the golden bracelets, the baggy trousers and the million dollar cars are the same. Just take a look at this video, and you know what I’m talking about.

I have become sick and tired with this kind of Iranian kitsch. Although this is a side of Iran that is real, it is not the side that I love. To me, it does not at all represent the richness and variety of Iranian society, which is one of the things that music, just like literature, should do. That is why I was so happy when the underground band Kiosk made its appearance on the world stage. This was a band that was also operating from ‘the West’ (San Francisco and Toronto), but what a huge difference with the usual LA Iranian techno beat. When I listen to Kiosk, I can hear modern Iran in all its richness and variety. Moreover, I’m a writer, so words are important to me, and when I listen to the lyrics of Kiosk, I can hear poetry. In their song ‘Love and Death in the Time of Facebook’, there are references to Nima, Shamloo, Forough and Behrangi. The text in itself is modern poetry about how Iranians not only use Facebook for political reasons, but also, as all world citizens, for love. Also highly enjoyable are some subtle but clear criticisms on the Iranian regime: I had the guys from Fars News Agency photoshop my profile picture and make me look cool.


A band like Kiosk brings us modern Iranian music that has become mature and is ready to conquer the world. It is music that is open to that world, as it is has itself opened up to influences from around the world. In Kiosk, I hear Spanish flamenco, gypsy music, San Francisco basement jazz, Bob Dylan, and so much more. In every lecture I give about Iran, I try to tell people that they should adjust their one-sided view of Iranian society as a backward, closed community that has no idea about the outside world or a desire to get in touch with it. Anyone who listens to Kiosk can understand that this is not true. Yes, this is music made in Los Angeles, but Kiosk was just as refreshing when they were recording in their Tehran basement. The only difference was that the Iranian regime did not want to hear their talent.

But I do want to hear it, again and again, not only because I love this music, but also because it gives me hope for Iran’s future. There are more bands like Kiosk and they are now still playing underground in the basements of Teheran, Shiraz or Isfahan, but they are ready to conquer the world and break free from the prison the regime wants to keep them in. Shajarian is great, Googoosh is great, but Kiosk, Abjeez, Mohsen Namjoo and the complete soundtrack of No one knows about Persian cats are the musical future of Iran that we can already discover today. This is the music of a green Iran, this is the music of a generation that is saying ‘salam’ to the entire world and embraces the entire world in their music, without denying – contrary to the Iranian LA musical kitsch – their Persian origins.

When one day the ayatollahs will finally have taken their hands off my beautiful Iran, I will get on the first plane to Tehran, take a deep breath and listen with joy and hope to all those great hidden songs that are coming, like roaring laughter, out of Tehran’s basements, ready to conquer the world and make it more beautiful.

I myself just see the streets in green colors. When I pass Vali Asr Square I remember Qods day. Passing through Vanak Square reminds me of the day after the election, and when I get to Tajrish I remember the green human chain. Then I take my eyes from the streets and direct them towards the mountains, the weekly resort of people who gather there after six hard days of working – no arrangements needed; everyone just knows to be there.

Before the sun rises, large crowds gather at the square with the sculpture. Each of them is doing something. One is adjusting the belt of backpack; another is putting the food that he has bought in his bag. That one over there is waiting for his friends’ arrival and the other one is jogging to get warm. After some minutes people leave the crowd in groups and start going upwards. It is still dark and exhalations of people get out of their mouth like a bulk of steam, but no one feels cold anymore. And they all start talking cheerily and are guessing what the weather would be like this evening and what that weather forecast site predicts, or what the news said last night. In the beginning of their walk, most talks are about the mountaintops and how big the possibility is that they could climb them today. Then talks change to how much they slept last night and what they ate and to what extent they are ready for climbing. But one by one, as the sun rises and the weather gets lighter and faces get more recognizable, mouths open with laughter and the funs start. All people say hello to each other and say “more power to your elbow”, and then you can hear a soft murmur from behind or above and after a while it becomes a loud song that resounds in the mountains. It seems coming back to us with thousands of mouths. Everyone goes silent and listens to the song.

After a while, the soft murmur becomes a loud song that resounds in the mountains

You can see many of these scenes in the mountains: a lover who sings for his beloved, and a political prisoner who reminisces his period of battle and youth. If you leave according to program, you are far enough from Tehran when the sun rises and you feel it under your feet. Tall buildings and skyscrapers have the size of your little finger; even from up above it is clear that still Tehran isn’t waking up. One hour left until breakfast time, you have to go fast and orderly to reach the shelter on time. On each stone that people can do so, they write green mottos and greet the fighters for freedom.

When the shelter appears the first exhaustion disappears. When you enter a warm and friendly environment, every person you see says hello to you and asks you to join them in eating breakfast. This environment of shelter to me is something totally different from Iranian society. You can’t find this anywhere else, all this diversity of colors, euphoric mountain climbers and the hope glittering under that roof. Without even being aware of it, you can feel fun over here that is not just superficial. Suddenly from somewhere behind a bench someone is humming and a bit later another one start singing and one gets up and starts dancing, and after a while another one joins and another one … and now they are a crowd that has gathered in a shelter and is swinging and dancing. Then they remember it is time to go, they drink their teas and pack their backpacks and get out of the shelter. From now to lunch, which takes place on the mountaintop, no one eats, just some dates and raisins.

Mountain climbers try not to talk from here to the mountaintop and use their energy just for climbing. After three or four hours of climbing, with some short stops in between, the mountaintop appears. Now there is no sign of that crowd which had gathered beside the sculpture square; just a few of them remain, the real professionals. In climbing the mountain, each 1000 meters that you go up the people around you are clearer and more pure. At last, those who can reach the mountaintop and get in its shelter are those who I believe can be my best friends.

The scenery of the mountaintop is unique and cannot be compared with anything else. Standing on the mountaintop and looking around gives you such a great feeling of power: it seems as if after having done this, everything else is easy for you. From up above, Tehran is a small matchbox that you can hold with your two fingers and shake out of it whatever you hate and is persecuting you.

On the mountaintop, climbers do different things according to their power: some sleep, some eat their lunch and others are busy with joking and having fun. Those who have more energy than others sing for them or are telling their memories. I remember once a climber sang a song with such deep feelings that tears came from everyone’s eyes. In the end, you should come down quickly because usually the weather gets bad in the evenings and the mountain with his all its beauty and charm can be so cruel. If the temper of mountain gets you, your survival is not certain.

On the way back to the hillside they sing first of all the indelible song of ‘Sar Oomad Zemestoon’ (Winter Has Passed), although there are many centuries that winter hasn’t passed for Iranians, but shouting and wishing freedom in the mountains is the thing that gives us hope for the arrival of spring, although the mountains are full of tulips today (tulip is the symbol of martyr in Iranian culture). Or then it is time for other songs, one starts singing and the rest accompany him till they reach the hillside, and sometimes they are all silent to enjoy the silence and magnificence of the mountains.

And at last the sculpture welcomes them and in contrast to the early morning, the square is crowded and surrounded with restaurants and shouts of salesmen who are inviting people for buying their stuffs and people that have come out of their houses to eat kebab and smoke hookah. Again climbers gather around the sculpture and say goodbye to each other till another morning and another Friday when again they say hello to each other in the middle of the square.

It is almost impossible to go to a governmental organization or institute and ask a man or a woman working there if they like their career and to get a positive answer. It is impossible to look into their eyes and not see their regret. The head of the university inscription office desired to be a traveler but becoming a mother has changed her destiny. The supermarket salesman in the neighborhood wanted to continue his education but his father prevented him to do so. You meet a chief manager of a successful enterprise claiming he used to like to play the piano but in their small city music was haram (banned by religion). One guy was involved in political activity; the other one has gone bankrupt; the third one’s husband has prevented her from doing what she wants. There are thousands of these stories. You can find only very few people who confidently state: yes, I am interested in my career, I love my job.

Yes, this is a love story, a classical type of love story, not one of those new kind of love affairs that end very fast. You have to be in love and just take your hatchet with you, just as Farhad (2) did, and start striking at Mount Bisotoon. The blaze of love for your career should burn from the bottom of your heart. From the very beginning you should keep in mind that thousand and one obstacles and limits will appear along your way. You have to learn the ways to pass and most importantly the ways not to pass. You have to learn not to talk and think about some specific subjects, especially if you are a girl. And in the end, you just have to keep striking at Bisotoon, not think about Bisotoon and about the result, just keep on striking at Bisotoon with your hatchet and call for Shirin.

My story is the story of that young lover who is walking in the street and hanging around in the crowd. Whether he’s sitting at home and reading a book or going to university to protest, something is being repeated non-stop in his mind; one question is hesitantly being asked over and over again: can I do it?

It is incredible. In Iran you should always expect to face strange things.

It is incredible. In Iran you should always expect to face strange things. For instance, you get in a taxi and after a long chat with the driver you might be surprised by the amount of knowledge he has. You ask him about his education and he answers that he was a professor at university but has been fired so he had to start working as a taxi driver. You may travel to a distant village, and there you will meet a shepherd playing the flute for his sheep, and when talking to him you find out he is a professional in Iranian musical instruments and even had some performances in Tehran. But to earn his money for a living, he has to be a shepherd. These are not stories belonging to the past. I have witnessed them with my own eyes.

I never forget that when I was nine years old, I used to take the road passing by the bookshop when coming back from school, to say hello to the book seller and take a look at his books from the window. Having my school bag with me, I arrived in front of the bookshop. While looking at the books, something started burning inside my head, something started repeating itself in my mind and finally came out of my mouth: “I must write”. Ever since, I could not stop thinking about it. As soon as I arrived home, I opened my diary notebook at a blank page, wrote the date and then in capitals: STORY NUMBER 1. Naively I started writing about daily school events and full of excitement showed it to my mother and said: “I have written a story.” My mum also got excited or at least she pretended so and answered: “Really? Read it for me, I’m interested.” I read it out loud to my mother and she gave me a pat on the back and said: “That’s great, son, let’s keep doing it and we’ll see how it goes.” Until midnight I gloriously wrote four more of those so-called stories and waited for my father to come back. When he arrived home, the story took a turn. He told me that it was great that I write but it was nevertheless useless because I can’t earn money by writing short stories and it is better not to be a dreamer. That was the first punch I got as a nine-year-old boy. At night in my bed I was thinking: why can’t I write and why should I earn money and what is the problem with writing? But as I was a kind of rebel child, I soon decided not to listen to my father’s advice and become the greatest writer of the future.

Fourteen years later, I wish I never grew up old enough to understand the meaning of my father’s advice. In Iran, as people get older, each year their problems become ten times bigger, especially if they want to take risky decisions like marrying or having a career. At some time you have to finally face the facts and then you see you are so involved in the details of life that you have forgotten about your dreams. That was the reason I bought a calligraphy of a poem by Shamloo and put it on the wall in my room. The poem is about never-ending dreams and the desires of the poet that can’t be achieved because of the material and financial reasons and every stanza ends with this phrase ‘just if the blues of bread (i.e. material concerns) let me ‘.

Now I understand how difficult it can be to follow your dreams in real life. Social problems, political problems, limits and shortcoming: they all make you hold your breath and that is why when someone in living in the third world wants to pass all these obstacles, he should be a perfect character who has battled with faith in many dimensions, who has been injured and has ultimately overcome all problems.

I do not care if as a writer I cannot earn money. Losing your dreams in Iran means death, because reality has nothing to do with what is on your mind. Always when I read this phrase in a text about a famous poet or writer “since then he dedicated his life to writing” I jealously think: “will the day arrive when I can sit behind my desk and write just free from any concern?”

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged brid
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

(1) Farsi for ‘grow’
(2) referring to the classical love story Khosrow and Shirin, about the love of Sassanian king Khosrow II towards an Armenian princess, Shirin. It recounts the story of King Khosrow’s courtship of Princess Shirin, and the vanquishing of his love-rival, Farhad, by sending him on an exile to Bisotoon mountain with the impossible task of carving stairs out of the cliff rocks.

France has recently been slammed for controversially expelling the Roma. The Roma are nomadic ethnic groups, rooting back to South Asia, who are now dispersed around Europe and the rest of the world. They have faced horrific atrocities in their history. In WWII, they were, along with the Jews, the main targets of the Nazi extermination policies. This fact has to do mainly with their nomadic way of life. They have always been deemed an instance of ‘the Other’. In this piece, I will try to address the question of the Roma in Europe with a focus on France, with some dispersed philosophical inroads into the more general question of ‘the Other’.

‘I think I’ve found a concept of the Other,’ says Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, ‘by defining it as neither an object nor a subject but the expression of a possible world. Someone with a toothache, and a Japanese man walking in the road, express possible worlds.’ The Roma, the nomads, remain open to all such worlds; whereas, we, the sedentary, the citizens, have become light years removed from such new forms of expression and space of possibilities, so much so, in fact, that not only do “We” find the Other(s), the Roma, the non-“We” alien to our state of being but oftentimes the very menace to it, hence, the desire to punish them. “We” see them as “criminals” (mind Sarkozy’s “war on crime”), the cause of our downturns, economic and otherwise (mind the rhetoric in Italy and the U.S. against “immigrant workers” and Wilders on Immigrants destroying “the Dutch culture” or Thilo Sarrazin on immigrants destroying “the German culture”). “We” expel them; and all of us (right, center, left) are complicit in this crime: the right for having done it, the majority of the left for neither stopping it nor even post facto protesting against it, and the center for being, as is its custom, cold and confused spectators.

As for the recent French case with the Roma, there are some questions that pop up right away in one’s mind: Why the Roma? Why in France? Why now? As a matter of fact, the Roma have been consistently ousted from France. Last year alone, 10,000 of them were sent back “home” (whatever ‘home’ means to a nomad!). It is unfortunately old and marginalized news. But this time it was a conscious political decision made by the Sarkozy administration to accelerate the pace and incite ubiquitous media hype around it. He wants to ingratiate himself with the populist xenophobic trend that is rampant in the air in France, and generally in Europe nowadays. Viviane Redding, the head of European Commission, called it an ‘outrage’ which is ‘unprecedented in Europe since WWII’. But that is obviously not true; in point of fact, there are too many precedents in Europe only from recent years (see below). As I said before, France has been doing this for years. The Roma are just the latest scapegoats in a series of farcical propaganda scenarios that Sarkozy‘s administration has resorted to to detract attention from its real problems: Sarkozy’s all-time record-low popularity, the wide-ranging opposition to the austerity measures his administration is trying to implement (such as raising the retirement age), the nationwide demonstrations and strikes that are going on these days in France, the recent financial scandals that his party has been involved in, the economic stagnation, etc.

The Roma are just the latest scapegoats in a series of farcical propaganda of Sarkozy‘s administration

But how long, if at all, such strategies can keep on hiding the obvious? Won’t they backfire? I would argue that this policy has indeed redounded to Sarkozy’s discredit. Many European heads of state and top officials reprimanded it (although most of their states quietly do the same with the Roma). It was the first time in the history of EU that a high-ranking European commissioner, such as Viviane Redding, lambasted France, one of the major founders of the EU, in such harsh terms. The most important European ally of France, Germany, condemned Sarkozy, when he, under severe criticism and in order to create some space to breathe in, said at a press conference that ‘Madame Merkel indicated to me her desire to proceed with the evacuation of camps in Germany.’ Germany categorically denied the existence of such camps, but did not obviously mention that this year they had put into effect a plan to oust 14,000 Roma and some other ethnic minorities from Germany, and send them back to Kosovo. The socialist opposition in France went amuck and hoped to gain some political ground from this story. Even some of Sarkozy’s long-time allies and fellow party members voiced discord and condemned the policy. These strategies are simply too superficial, not to mention outrageous, to hide what is happening on the ground in France. There are some surveys according to Spiegel which point to the problematic times Sarkozy is facing: two-thirds of the French population are determined that Sarkozy should not stay in the Elysee Palace for a second term. 55% of the French population, again according to Spiegel, want the center-left Socialist Party back in the saddle again.

But unfortunately this is not limited to France alone. Germany, as was mentioned above, is sending the Roma back to Kosovo where they risk facing severe persecution and discrimination. Berlusconi cracked down on the Roma in 2008. Belgium was found guilty of violating key provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights when it collectively expelled the Roma in 1999. Finland has already removed the Roma camps. Sweden deported the Roma and was accused of discrimination by Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. Denmark had a more severe scenario with the collective deportation of the “criminal Roma,” as some top Danish officials used the expression (mind the similarity in the choice of words to Sarkozy’s “war on crime”). In Hungary and Romania, discriminating against and attacking the Roma appear to be old news. Discrimination in the Czech educational system against Roma children is widespread: ‘Romani children are regularly segregated,’ according to Amnesty International, ‘in schools and classes as pupils with “mild mental disabilities”, where they receive an inferior education based on a limited curriculum’. And so forth and so on, with some other European countries.

The discrimination against the Roma should be addressed with immediate urgency

The discrimination against the Roma and such-like minorities is certainly a serious European human rights problem, and one that should be addressed with immediate urgency. And this is not only at the governmental level. People should wake up too. The very fact that there have been so few voices raised in opposition (and even those voices are nowhere near consistent) to the incessant discrimination against the Roma in Europe is yet another proof to the sad fact that Europe is experiencing yet once more a strong tide of xenophobia. The epidemic rise of far-right populist political parties in Europe (e.g., The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, England,…) which are glidingly surfing this xenophobic tide is only explicable, and indeed possible¬, at a time when such outrageous acts go almost unnoticed.

Our “We-ness” and “one-ness” are founded on a negativity: ‘I am whatever you are not;’ ‘I am French’ [a sedentary citizen with very healthy teeth, etc.], ergo, the Roma [who are homeless and who probably have toothaches] are to be expelled. Frenchness, Dutchness, or whateverness is this and that; whoever does not fall in the procrustean strata between this and that, is the Alien, the Enemy, the Punishable! In fact, with very few sparse and sporadic exceptions, the overwhelming majority of Western thought and philosophy (and more intensely so after the Enlightenment era) has been formed on and informed by the myths of ‘order’, ‘stability’, ‘eternity’, ‘reason’, etc. Whatever does not conform to the rigid requirements of these congealed mythological constructs is deemed ‘insane,’ ‘instable’, ‘transient’, ‘deviant’, etc. It follows, those with the latter attributes are to be expelled or scapegoated for not being ‘Us’, hence, the phenomena of ‘nationalism’, ‘esprit de corps,’ ‘racism’, ‘Apartheid,’ ‘Lebensraum,’ etc. which account for myriad horrendous crimes in human history.

We do need to wake up and remain open to other beings (human and otherwise) and new possibilities of becoming.

So let me call her by her first name this once. I was proud of Shahrnush because her guest appearance as the brothel’s boss in Neshat’s movie is a subtle middle finger directed at the Iranian regime, which banned Women without Men in the mid-1990s and put pressure on the author to desist from such writings. The success of Women without Men (1989) caused Parsipur to be arrested twice, and after a decade of political pressure from the Iranian government, she immigrated to the United States in the 1990s.

Shahrnush Parsipur

The Islamic Republic has forbidden Shahrnush to be an Iranian woman speaking her mind and living in her home country, but in Neshat’s movie – which is dedicated to all those who have struggled for Iran’s freedom – she takes revenge. First, she plays the role of the kind of woman the Iranian regime is afraid of, because they only tolerate women who show no desire to break free from their cage. Second, Parsipur becomes part of the story she has written two decades ago, allowing her to make an imaginary return to her country, and isn’t imagination for any writer just as powerful as reality?

After having watched Neshat’s enchantingly poetic version of Women without Men, I decided to read Parsipur’s novel for the second time. Again, I was blown away by how relevant this story still is today. Munis, Faezeh, Zarrinkolah, Mahdokht and Farrokhlagha are five Tehrani women belonging to different social classes, but they have one thing in common: they suffer from the male-dominated society they are living in. Munis is a prisoner in the house she shares with her tyrannical brother, who kills her for refusing to obey him. Faezeh is in love with Munis’ brother, Amir, and hopes that one day she will marry him. He however is too busy with politics to bother with Faezeh’s desperate cry for love and marriage. Zarrinkolah is a prostitute who worries that she is going crazy when all her clients turn into headless monsters. After witnessing an illicit sexual encounter, Mahdokht is so disgusted that she decides to become a tree. Farrokhlagha, finally, is the wealthy wife of a general who constantly humiliates her. She punches him in the stomach one day, causing him to fall down the stairs and die. She then buys a house in Karaj, just outside Tehran, where the lives of these five women intertwine. They all end up in Farrokhlagha’s garden, which becomes a sort of feminine utopia, a refuge for those fleeing the suffocating atmosphere of patriarchal Tehran.

Even twenty years after its publication, this novel has lost nothing of its relevance. First, it is still highly topical in its daring treatment of the position of women in Iranian society. Parsipur’s characters speak without any restraint about their sexual oppression and express their resistance to Iran’s male-dominated culture. Virginity and chastity are ridiculed in a subtle but marvelous way, making contemporary readers think of how the regime is today even more backward than it was two decades ago. When Munis is shocked to find out that ‘virginity is a hole, not a curtain’, I thought of the raging ayatollah Kazem Sadeghi, who told the world a couple of months ago that women who dress inappropriately can cause earthquakes.

The Iranian regime wants the entire population to be one homogeneous mass that obeys their inhumane rules

Another aspect of Women without Men that makes it a book we should reread is the subtle but all the more powerful message that is conveyed at the ending of the story. The garden that Munis, Faezeh, Zarrinkolah, Mahdokht and Farrokhlagha live in does not turn out to be paradisiacal after all: cracks are beginning to appear very soon. These five women seemed to be the same when they were living in a society that defined them by their gender. Being together in a ‘female utopia’ however causes their differences to appear, but that is exactly the reason why they can acquire what they want. It is an important point that Parsipur makes: only when we acknowledge the differences between people can they become individuals. And isn’t it exactly these differences that the Iranian regime refuses to acknowledge? They want the entire Iranian population to be one homogeneous mass that obeys their inhumane rules. Today, both Iranian women and men know what it is to be Munis, Faezeh, Zarrinkolah, Mahdokht or Farrokhlagha. They are all yearning for a place and time that allows them to be individuals.

The last reason why I can recommend Women without Men – a title alluding to Ernest Hemingway’s Men without Women (1927) – is the wonderful transformation of Mahdokht, the most powerful character of the book. Having witnessed an illicit sexual encounter which fills her with disgust, she decides that her ‘virginity is like a tree’. She plants her feet in the ground and becomes a tree, being able to use her own seed to reproduce while maintaining her sexual purity. Still, though she does not need the seed of a man, it is only with the help of the gardener that she manages to give birth to a lily. It is the gardener who then gives her milk, turning her into a marvelous green tree that transforms into a sea of seeds traveling around the world. She is now free at last.

It is this subtle message that all Iranian women and men struggling for freedom should remember after reading this book: that women can’t do it without men, and that men can’t do it without women.

I will never forget the day after Ahmadinejad’s victory when one of my friends came to university dressed in black and said: ‘Shafagh, we have hard years ahead’. I asked him ‘Why do you say this? Is there any darker color than black (an Iranian proverb)?’ But it seems that he was right. Darker than ‘black’ is the ‘black’ that is ruining people’s lives.

These five years are different years for everyone in Iran. I myself only get out of home for buying a newspaper or finding a new book that I’m interested in. But empty newsstands, book showcases full of dust, the rusty faces of booksellers who are complaining about the cost of papers and less readers every single day are the scenes that I see whenever I visit a bookshop.

The 2nd of Khordad (1) wasn’t just a political event but a Big Bang that created a new world in Iranian society. In all fields, we were reborn again. Happiness welled in our hearts and people dared to show their feelings for the first time after the Revolution. Our football team went to the World Cup games. Newspapers were born and the book market thrived. The colors of our clothes got lighter and happier. All people learn to enjoy and relax. In one word: we could breathe. You could feel that people were getting sensitive about their destiny. Political meetings were held and political parties were getting strong. A kind of excitement and sensation were flowing between people.

I was a child in those days but I remember that when my mother wanted to go out for work, she put money on the television set for three newspapers with a notice telling me this: ‘Shafagh, don’t forget the newspapers’. I had to hurry, it was unbelievable, if you arrived late, all newspapers were gone. Then you had to ask your neighbor to lend it to you. In the street you could see that young people were sitting on the stairs of houses and reading morning newspapers and discussing. At the barber, in the shops: there were intense political discussions everywhere. One morning I woke up weltering in my bed and suddenly remembered that maybe the newspapers would all be sold out. I put on my clothes and rode my bicycle as quickly as I could to go and buy my favorite newspaper. After a while, I befriended the owner of the newsstand. He kept the newspaper for me, so that I wasn’t worried anymore about my favorite paper having disappeared.

2nd of Khordad touched stable ground with ‘Jame’e’ newspaper. A weighty newspaper that was professional in all views. One book after the other got its publishing license. Newspapers were published uninterruptedly and all of them had their own new content. Although I was a child and didn’t understand much about politics, I read all of the papers. I couldn’t understand the meaning of ‘reform’ but I felt that society was reviving. I was happy. On my bicycle I was dreaming about wearing short pants in the street and going to the same school with girls and listening to any music I liked.

This happiness didn’t last for more than two years. Newspaper issues were closed in one night and arrests intensified. In the next six years, we never again experienced those two first years of Mohammad Khatami’s presidential period, but at least, we had had some years to be happy with.

Last week when I was looking at the newsstand, I only saw government newspapers and yellow magazines. A passer-by, who was also looking at the newspapers, shook his head in sorrow and said: ‘Do you know what? Nowadays the best newspaper is ‘Keyhan’! (2) Read all of it from the first to the last pages and vice versa. In this way you can reach the truth!’ I looked at his face and saw the same sadness that I feel when I think about many banned newspapers. I said: ‘You’re right, at least we know there is recent news in it and no one censors it, even though everything in it is totally wrong.

You have the same situation in the bookshop. When I go inside, the answer to my daily question ‘what new book do you have?’ is the same: ‘nothing’. It doesn’t mean that really no book is published. But they ban good books and those that are published are censored so much that when they are published nothing is left of the original. I know many writers and poets whose books are at the Ministry for Culture for months, where they fuss about some ‘mistakes’ in them. For example, they recognize an obscene word in it or some perverse content. All these changes damage the freshness of the writer and poet and cause them to lose their motivation. Until one, two years ago, only books that were republished had no problem and could be found easily, but recently those books should go to the Ministry of Culture for ‘re-editing’ too.

In those years I didn’t have any cheer except ‘Tehran International Book Fair’. Since my childhood, I saved the money that I got on Nowrooz (Iranian New Year) to go to the book fair in Ordibehesht with my parents and buy books. That day was the best day of the year. My pockets were full of money and I was surrounded by books. I entered the pavilions and bought many books. Their heavy load didn’t bother me. I went and visited my favorite writers and asked them to sign their books for me. But since Ahmadinejad came, they moved the book fair to ‘Mosalla’ – a place that is built for praying, not for exhibitions! Now we boycott the book fair and we lost our greatest joy of the year.

I would like to be a bookseller and have a bookshop full of books and new colorful magazines. I would talk with the boys and girls who enter my store and sit at the edge of the table and tell them: do you know that what a master piece that poem is and read it for them…

These days I think about Gholamhosein Sa’edi, a powerful writer who was being forced to leave Iran after the Revolution and go to France. In France he got so depressed and isolated and at last homesickness caused his death. Here, in Iran, we may have the name of ‘fatherland’, but we feel too lonely as well.

(1) the date of President Mohammad Khatami’s 1997 landslide election victory in the Iranian Calendar
(2) an influential newspaper in Iran. Directly under the supervision of the Office of the Supreme Leader, it is regarded to be the most conservative Iranian newspaper.

I’m talking about the picture of ‘president’ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looking at the Cyrus cylinder that has been loaned to Iran’s National Museum and was put on display on Saturday during a ceremony attended by Iranian experts. I could not lay eyes on Ahmadinejad’s self-satisfied grin for more than five seconds. Any longer would have made me so angry that both my computer screen and my right hand would have been the innocent victims of my indignation.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I saw another picture of Saturday’s ceremony. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad puts a chafieh, the scarf traditionally worn by Basiji members, on the shoulders of an actor who is performing the role of King Cyrus the Great.

I clenched my ten fingers to two fists and watched my knuckles getting red.

And I heard King Cyrus turn in his grave.

For the first time after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the British Museum has loaned the famous Cyrus the Great cylinder to Iran. It was brought to the National Museum in Tehran where it will remain for four months. The cylinder was scheduled to be given on loan in September 2009 but the British Museum refused, citing Iran’s post-election uprising. Tehran had earlier threatened it would cease cooperation with the British Museum until the cylinder would be loaned to the National Museum.

One year later, the British Museum has given in. How can one of the world’s greatest museums be so blind? Do they not realize that they offend Iranians all over the world in letting the Iranian regime touch the Cyrus cylinder with even one finger? The British Museum says in it press release that ‘although political relations between Iran and the UK are at the moment difficult, the Trustees take the view that it is all the more important to maintain the cultural links which have been so carefully built up over a period of years and which could in themselves lead to a better relationship based on dialogue, tolerance and understanding.’

Meaningless blah-blah. I think even the British Museum does not believe one word of what they are saying. Iran’s National Museum is in the hands of a regime that is utterly hostile to the country’s pre-Islamic history and especially to the historical figure of Cyrus the Great. The British Museum could have given a powerful sign of protest by refusing to loan this historical artifact to a regime that despises Cyrus the Great. They could have used this occasion to point their finger at the crimes the Iranian regime has committed against pre-Islamic history.

The British Museum could have given a powerful sign of protest

Just a look at the recent past gives us some striking examples of the regime’s disrespect for ancient Persian history. The construction of the Sivand Dam northwest of Shiraz caused great damage to archeologically rich areas. Besides the certain flooding of 130 archaeological sites, larger concern has been levied at the dam’s effect on nearby World Heritage Sites, particularly Pasargadae, an ancient capital of the Persian Empire built by Cyrus the Great and the site of his tomb. Archaeologists believe that the reservoir created by the dam will raise humidity, and as a result also place the Pasargadae complex at risk.
Another tragic example is that the tomb of Emperor Xerxes at ‘Naqsh-e Rostam’ historical site is at risk of breaking in two because of the construction of the Shiraz-Esfahan railway track, with trains passing at only 500 meters distance from the ancient site. In January 2010, an expert study showed that the level of the earth has sunk five centimeters at the foot of the ancient bas-reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam. Some of the experts believe that the Shiraz-Esfahan railway line passing at a distance of one kilometer from Naqsh-e Rostam is the reason behind the problem, which might have been induced as a result of vibration caused by passing trains.

Need I say more? It is an offense to Persian history, which is also a very big part of our world history, that the British Museum is willing to loan the Cyrus cylinder to a regime that has no respect whatsoever for ancient Persia and Cyrus the Great. This fanatic Islamic regime even hates Cyrus, because he represents everything that they have no respect for. Take a look at the Cyrus cylinder itself. The object’s inscription describes how Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539BC and captured the last Babylonian king. It also tells of how he restored shrines dedicated to different gods, freed many people held captive by the Babylonians and arranged for them to return to their homelands. It does not mention the Jews brought to Babylon as slaves by Nebuchadnezzar, but their freedom was also part of that policy. The Cyrus cylinder is often called the world’s oldest human rights document. It is valued by as a symbol of tolerance and respect for different peoples and different faiths.

Tolerance. Respect. Human rights. These words are alien to the current Iranian regime. I do not believe, as many Iranians fear, that the regime might cause damage to the cylinder or even destroy it. That is not what worries me. What worries me is that a European country once again misses an opportunity to powerfully condemn the wrongdoings of the Islamic Republic. It makes the sanctions of the European Union look ridiculous. What worries me is that the British once again offend the Iranian people by giving the Cyrus cylinder to a regime that is trying to erase ancient Persian history, as this history proves that the country is now more backward than it was 2500 years ago.

© Pieter-Jan De Pue

When I visited the tomb of Cyrus the Great last year, I felt both happy and sad. I had the honor of greeting the father of the Iranian nation, but I saw how the site of his tomb sums up the tragedy of Iran today. The guard of the tomb sat smiling in a garden chair under a colorful and broken umbrella. The cobblestone ground surrounding the tomb was full of weeds. Sitting there, with his worn-out shoes and uniform, on a rusty chair under a faded umbrella in front of the tomb of King Cyrus, he united the past and present of this land in a single image. Persia, of the renowned, glorious past; Iran, of the battered, damaged present. I see the same tragedy in the picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad putting a Basiji scarf on the shoulders of an actor playing Cyrus the Great. It is a symbol of cruelty on the shoulders of a man who was known as an honest, generous and benevolent leader. It infuriates me that the present can cause so much damage to the past.

Nevertheless, there might be hope in this tragedy. The Cyrus cylinder played an important role in the imperial propaganda of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who in 1971 used it as symbol of the celebration the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy. The shah’s megalomaniacal identification of himself with Cyrus caused him to speak the following words before his tomb, which were offensive to most Iranians: O Cyrus, great King, King of Kings, Achaemenian King, King of the land of Persia. I, the Shahanshah of Persia, offer these salutations from myself and from my nation. Cyrus! Great King, King of Kings, Noblest of the Noble, hero of the history of Iran and the world! Rest in peace, for we are awake, and we will always stay awake

As we know, the shah did remain awake for a very long time after these remarks. Let’s hope and believe that the short stay of the Cyrus cylinder in Iran heralds the death of a regime that is much more tyrannical than that of the man who dared to call himself shahanshah of Persia.

12 September, the date of the referendum, is not chosen coincidentally. It marks the 30th anniversary of the military coup in 1980. In that year civil society was shattered, 14,000 people were stripped of their citizenship, 30,000 people fled the country, an estimated 17,000 extrajudicial killings occurred mainly in the Kurdish southeast, thousands were tortured, 50 people were executed and tens of thousands were sacked from their jobs. The date of the referendum was chosen as a reminder that the current constitution was dictated in 1982 by the leaders of the military coup to underpin their authoritarian political system. Since then, two thirds of the constitution has changed as the parliament approved amendments in the past two decades, mainly to meet the conditions to Turkey’s entrance in the European Union. However, the authoritarian core of the constitution remained unchanged so that the military and the Constitutional Court retained the power to intervene in political affairs as the ‘defenders of the secular character of the republic.’

Turkey is an important point of reference for political thought in Iran

After the 1980 coup Turkey’s army, in alliance with the Constitutional Court, has intervened regularly in politics in al. In 1997 the army forced prime minister Erbakan from the Islamist Welfare Party to step down and the Constitutional Court banned his party in 1998. Moderate Islamists created the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is socially conservative and has a neoliberal economic agenda – in many ways resembling the Christian Democrats in Germany or the Tories in Great Brittan. The AKP won 34 percent of the votes in the 2002 elections and its leader Erdogan became prime minister. The judiciary immediately started a case to ban the AKP on charges of undermining the ‘secular principle of the constitution’ by striving to create a religious state. In 2007 the military leadership published an e-memorandum that opposed the candidacy of Abdullah Gül of the AKP, one of the reason’s being that his wife wears a headscarf. The memorandum also stated that ‘Those who are opposed to Great Leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s understanding ‘How happy is the one who says I am a Turk’ are enemies of the Republic of Turkey and will remain so.’ This warning was meant to stir up fanatical nationalism and targeted the AKP’s attempts to come to a political solution for the conflict in the Kurdish areas and on Cyprus. For an increasing number of Turks, the undemocratic nature of the interventions of the Court and the military were becoming visible and the attacks on religious symbols in a country where the majority is Muslim (but not Islamist), added to the AKP’s popularity. When the AKP called for early elections in July 2007 in reaction to the e-memorandum, it won almost 50 percent of the votes. The worries about the undemocratic role of the army further increased after the police discovered a terrorist network of ultra-nationalists with ties with the military, the secret service and the media, the so called Ergenekon.

After the 2007 elections the conflict between the AKP and the old military and bureaucratic elite continued. During the elections the AKP had promised to write a new democratic constitution. It appointed a committee of academics and jurists, but it dropped the whole project after it was met with severe opposition from the minority in parliament and the Constitutional Court. Instead, the AKP amended the constitution in 2008 to lift the ban on headscarves for university students, while still keeping it for professors and school students. While it should be the right of women to decide whether or not to wear the headscarf, the proposal that was passed by 411 of the 550 deputies in parliament was struck down by the Constitutional Court that again postured to defend ‘secularism’.

The political conflict that seems to center on ‘secularism’ has re-emerged in the referendum campaign. The ‘no’ camp is led by the Kemalist social-democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). In important sentiment in the ‘no’ camp is that the amendments are proposed by an ‘Islamic government’ and that ‘Islam is reactionary’, hence any proposals coming from the government should be opposed. Some on the left, like the Communist Party of Turkey, echo this argument but also oppose the amendments because they do not go far enough. Others on the left acknowledge correctly that the whole constitution should be changed, but argue that a ‘no’ vote leaves the old constitution in place, while a ‘yes’ vote paves the road for more changes. Their campaign under the slogan ‘Not enough, but yes’ has gained huge popularity under secular democrats. Also well known intellectuals and writers, like the Nobel-prize winning Orhan Pamuk, have called for a ‘yes’ vote.

Secularism has become a shield for the old Turkish elite to defend its position

What are the amendments to constitution really about? They loosen the grip of the old elite on the Constitutional Court by adding more judges to it, limiting their terms in office and giving the parliament and the president the main role in their selection. The political influence of the military is decreased by prohibiting the trial of civilians in military courts and by allowing civilian courts to try military officers. One amendment repeals the article that bans the prosecution of the generals who staged the 1980 coup. Other amendments enhance the position of women and children, give civilians the right to information and free travelling and give some employers more rights in collective bargaining.

As this list shows, the amendments represent further steps towards democratization, but they are framed by the old elite as an assault on secularism. In fact their conflict with the AKP is not so much about ‘secularism’, as it is about power struggle. The roots of the old elite go back to the 1920’s and 1930’s when Atatürk created an authoritarian state to modernize Turkey from above. This authoritarian project was based on a ideology (Kemalism) with three main components: the promotion of Turkish nationalism and the repression of ethnic and religious minorities like Kurds, Armenians and Alevis; ‘modernization’, which in reality was ‘Westernization’ as the state enforced Western cultural aspects and banned for instance traditional clothes and music; the principle of ‘secularism’, which for the Kemalists did not simply mean the separation of state and religion, but the intervention of the state in the public sphere against religious expressions and state control over religious institutions. The Kemalist ideology cemented the elite that formed the military, judiciary and bureaucratic leadership. It also found a popular base among the Westernized middle classes in large urban centers. Since the 1980’s, the old elite has been confronted with the emergence of a new Islamic bourgeoisie and middle class, which form the backbone of the AKP. The AKP also finds support among the rural and urban lower classes. ‘Secularism’ has become a shield for the old elite to defend its position in the state bureaucracy and business community against its AKP rivals.

More than a century ago, despite the critics of philosophers, men saw the prospect of relief in the rising sun of modernity. Today, despite its enormous benefits on a global level, it is clear that, divorced from moral principles, the merely instrumental power to dominate, control and to shape things is meaningless unless it is accompanied by a consciousness of moral ends. More than a century ago, religions could offer to the multitude the comfort of consolation in the hereafter for the injustices and inconveniences of human life, in our time, not only techno-science has extinguished the lights of heaven, but it is in the conditions of immediate ideologization of religious traditions that release is found.

Could we get to the conclusion that the general temper of the world is one of profound and widespread disorientation? Could we say that the present generation seems to have lost its scheme of values? Is it true that certainty has been replaced by cynicism and hope has given room to despair? Anyone who begins to consider the problems of our time through such questions as these will find it difficult not to conclude like Mahatma Gandhi did hundred years ago in his pamphlet Hind Swaraj that what is basically lacking in the modern civilization is any sense of morality, religiosity, duty and self-restraint as a quality of soul. When asked about his view of Western civilization, Gandhi famously replied: ‘It would be a good idea’. We might not agree with Gandhi, but his reply reminds us one thing: that civilization is a final acquisition and a secure possession but a fragile dynamic and an ever-renewable experience for humanity.

This is particularly true of our global civilization where practically the entire world is now connected by thousands of political, economic and communication networks. We are all aware of another and we have thousands of common aims and modes of behavior. It seems to me that the global civilization is not a historically and geographically defined civilization. Unlike the old civilizations which had no idea that others existed, in the global civilization we are forced to live closer and to share our economic, political and cultural problems. But here a caution is imperative. Even if we talk about the emerging global civilization which is single, it only exists in the plural. Here, one should also not forget that, the status of Western modernity and its civilizing ‘effects’ does not change the fact that the differences between individual cultures or spheres of civilization in the globalized world are playing an ever greater role.
This is to say that our civilization is a multi-layered fabric composed of tensional layers. This multi-dimensionality of features can be transferred from the Western context to other major cultures in the emerging global arena. Now that the unnatural bipolar system imposed upon the world has collapsed, it seems as if the solution is simple and obvious: that is the rapid universalisation of the ideas of democracy and human rights. Yet even if these ideas appear to Europeans and North Americans as the best and the only possible solution, they have left much of the world unsatisfied.

People in many parts of the world are of two minds

People in many parts of the world are of two minds. On the one hand, they follow the path of the Western Dream; on the other, they reject it as the work of the devil. Muslims have responded to Western-style modernity in a variety of ways. Extremists like the young perpetrators who hijacked American airliners and crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and those who were behind the bombings in Madrid and London and many other places since 2001 violently reject it. As a matter of fact, in the last 20 years, the ideological interpretation of Islam has claimed more lives among fellow Muslims than non-Muslims. In other words, the wrath of Islamic fanaticism is more directed against those who are considered as ‘corrupt’ or ‘westernized’. The question, therefore, is what are the roots of all this fanaticism and madness?, and whether democratic culture and pluralistic values can help us to change it? Caught in the midst of a massive identity crisis due to their encounter with globalized modernity, fanatic Muslims have fallen back on their religious identity. Some may call this a revolt against modernity and a resistance to Western values. Others may see it as a return to the Middle Ages.

The culture of death springs from the death of culture

The truth is, however, that the problem is not necessarily with Islam. The revival of ideological Islam puts before us the reality of the death of culture in our world. The culture of death, which takes form today among the young Muslim suicide bombers or even among the urban rioters in France, springs from the death of culture. We live in the world today in a social environment of hybridity and cultural mélange of constantly transforming identities which puts into question any kind of movement towards the more perfect, larger, newer and more developed. The contemporary world, as one may call it, steers perfectly clear of any context of progress, growth or evolution. In such a context the world is based on no metaphysical comfort, because exchanges are unbounded and unsecured. This means that in the politics of the contemporary the political is no more a vision of society since it appears as an anti-political politics. This is the politics of abandoned lives, the politics of those who are under the humdrum conditions of “everydayness”. In such a world there is no moral barrier against violence. The doors stand wide open for the irrational and the suicide bombers or the urban rioters become the heroes of a world where responsibility and true sacrifice become senseless. Patocka once wrote that a life not willing to sacrifice itself for what makes its meaning is not worth living. The rise of the culture of death that we are witnessing today in our societies is an infallible sign that many in the West and elsewhere have given up the project to think and to feel responsible toward the concept of “humanity” which transcends them or even to sacrifice, in the extreme, life itself to that which makes life meaningful. In short, I cannot overcome the impression that Western culture is threatened far more by itself than by Islamic fundamentalism. Not only the West seems unable to formulate shared understandings of what ought to be done, but whatever shared formulations of the good western societies once had have come apart at the seams. A moral relativism and an unbounded multiculturalism have replaced shared formulations of the good. In truth, religious fundamentalism is an attempt to fill the moral vacuum which is left over by the absence of the shared formulations of the good.

Cultural activities in the global world of are prismatic, exotopic and interdependent and they involve configurations of knowledge and discourse that are about proper modes of living and sharing together. What the civilizational dialogue teaches us is that every culture is involved in a process of transformation that is related to a certain measure of cross-cultural learning. In light of these factors, democratic universalism does not share the ideology of global sameness which ignores the reality of diverse historical- cultural diversities, but rather focuses on the distinctive debates that shape the appropriation of means of democratic universality. As a matter of fact, we all get to play with universality as long as we are cultural flaneurs of a world in which the growing consensus on the universality of democracy reflects clearly the rise of a new ethos of global citizenship. However, given its fatal incorrigibility, humanity probably will have to go through many more cultures of death before it understands how unbelievably shortsighted a human being can be who, according to the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, “has no time for man”.

There is no doubt that the most complicated aspect of Iranian politics is the issue of balance of power. Since the death of the Islamic Republic’s grand architect ayatollah Khomeini two decades ago, confusion about this balance of power has become even bigger. The quite simple question is: who is in power when it comes to important national and international state affairs? And related to this: who has the final responsibility for which decision? With whom is it useful to talk? And who has to be addressed?

Of course, it is also possible in the case of Iran to make a schematic draft showing the names of the different councils, institutions and positions, and to draw all sort of arrows in between telling who is depending on whom. But such a simplified, formalistic and schematic way of thinking about the balance of power in Iran is nothing but self-deception.

The most complicated aspect of Iranian politics is the issue of balance of power

These questions have not only driven Washington’s Iran desk to despair for years already. Also many political analysts in Iran are in the dark. To make the situation more concrete: the average Iranian lawyer of prisoners of conscience who has to find out by whom his client has been arrested, why and in which prison he is, regularly needs two weeks to only find out which one of the many parallel functioning security and intelligence services has imprisoned his client. Iran (and so also the judicial system) has many dizzying parallel structures; non-transparent networks of power and forms of patronage.

There is a chronic lack of transparency and a dizzying complexity of power relations within the Iranian state. This labyrinthine form of networks that together make up Iranian politics is in my view no coincidence. But at the same time, this structure is not the well-considered product of an elaborated philosophy on a specific structure of power.

Ayatollah Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic Republic, was without any doubt a fearless, charismatic and if necessary sly leader who did not wince when offering thousands of lives for the creation and continued existence of his great dream. But he was not known as a very meticulous mason of a new state. He also had no confidence whatsoever in those intellectuals who could elaborate his ideas, nor in the necessary training, knowledge or expertise. He was just a mullah (a cleric), be it a very learned one, famous for his sharp-witted view on theological affairs and his curiosity about earthly matters. But still, he was just a mullah. As you cannot expect a professor in biotechnology to necessarily know something about building a state, you cannot expect a learned mullah to have gained a deep knowledge of politics during years of studying Shia theology, which in itself is already complicated enough.

When we take a look at the background of his disciples, we can see that his own students made up the majority – so more mullahs. In those singular cases where he really confided in a non-cleric with an academic background – as in the case of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the current leader of Iran’s opposition and the prime minister in Khomeini’s time – we can see that they were individuals coming from mullah circles, raised in families that had provided society with many clerics.

Upon what then were Khomeini’s ideas about the state based if he had nor knowledge nor faith in those with knowledge about how to create a state? I believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran is like an iceberg, which only shows us a tiny part of its structures of power in its formally established political documents. This state is formal, but above all informal, organized on the basis of Khomeini’s intuition and that of his disciples. They have organized things as they were used to organizing their formal and informal life. In other words, they have done what they considered ‘normal’. They have followed their intuition, which was grounded in the specific ‘corporate culture’ they grew up in, that of the Shia clerics.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Dealing with things intuitively and giving content to normality is – as sociologists and even more so anthropologists have shown us time and again – a very particular matter. That is, it is based on a specific culture. The ultimate and diverse cultural manifestations are what those individuals belonging to that specific culture do ‘automatically’; manifestations which they find normal.

The intuition of Khomeini and his disciples, and that of many people belonging to the power base of Iranian politics, is based on the specific culture of the subculture of mullahs, which we know as ‘Rohaniat’ in Shia Islam. That is the accumulation of Shia clerics and their formal and informal arrangements, relations, traditions, habits and manners. It is right to speak about a very crystallized cultural entity. Rohaniat is a closed circle of individuals who discern themselves from other individuals in their clothing, rhetoric utterance and manners; they discern themselves from those ordinary citizens from countries like Iran, Iraq, Lebanon or wherever you can find large Shia communities.

Between the ages of 12 and 15 and at least until they are 25, these clerics are instructed in theological seminaries, within institutions where everything is focused on the codes of this religious entity. The most important centers are the cities of Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq. The seminaries of these cities are the biggest suppliers of Shia clerics – thus also of the current people in power in Iran. Just like Oxford and Cambridge or the modern version of Berkeley in the US, these cities exist thanks to their professors and students, the difference being that in Qom and Najaf, everything is centered on religion and the way of living and thinking of the mullahs.

It is in these cities that a specific cultural form has been practiced for decades, one that has been cultivated by those who left these cities and returned to their own region, family and friends, where this cultural form had its influence on their intimate environment. It is this group, the mullahs and those people who have been indoctrinated by their thoughts and deeds, which have made up Iran’s political elite for 31 years now. Whether you talk about reformists, old conservatives or neo-conservatives; the key figures in the centre of Iranian politics today, both those in power and the main opposition leaders, come from this subculture or at least strongly identify with it. Iran’s conservative supreme leader Khamenei, reformist icon Khatami, opposition leader Karroubi who is so popular among students: they are all mullahs. And both the neo-conservative president Ahmadinejad and his opponent Mousavi are very similar to clerics in their way of speaking and their behavior, and they explicitly look for the legitimization of their thoughts and deeds among clerics.

So to see, it is the Rohaniat culture that has shaped political power in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. Decoding this culture could be the key to a sharper analysis and a more accurate prediction of developments in the Islamic Republic. I believe that trying to understand the culture of Rohaniat is only possible by learning to think and, even more important, to live like Shia clerics, so that you can really get under their skin and experience their culture in its deepest meaning. This is what is known in social sciences as participating observation – to take part and gaining knowledge in doing so.

It is the Rohaniat culture that has shaped political power in Iran since the 1979 Revolution

Contrary to what many Iranians and those interested in Iran think, Rohaniat as we know it today is not an age-old social institution. It is only two and a half centuries old, and its genesis goes back to the time of the decline of the Safavid dynasty in 1722. The Safavid dynasty rose to power in the 16th century, and it political mission was to turn Iran into a Shia state. Their main drive was the necessity to distinguish them and claim their very own position against their big competitor, the Sunni Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans saw themselves as the legitimate rulers of the world of Islam in the Near East, and they had accomplished this mission in a big part of the Middle East. Cultivating the Shia character of Iran gave a moral and ideological impulse to the resistance of the population against the advancing Ottomans.

The Safavid dynasty lasted for two and a half centuries, during which the Safavids had to attract Shia mullahs from all corners of the Islamic world, in order to realize a crystallized Shia jurisprudence for their Shia state and to ‘educate’ the people and learn them how to live according to these laws. Contrary to nowadays, Shia Islam was not the religion of the majority in Iran (there was actually no religious majority in Iran, many Shia and Sunni sects were living in a very multiform society, alongside Alawi, Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians) and the most popular form of Shia Islam was not based on an elaborate theological doctrine; it was rather a religious practice with an inclination to mysticism. The mullahs were under the direct command of the Safavids and belonged to the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The religious class was made up of the court mullahs of the Safavids, nothing more, and nothing less.

When in 1722 the Safavid dynasty was defeated by Sunni Afghans (and also later on when king Nader, who did not like Shia Islam much and hated mullahs) the court mullahs opted for a way-out to the most sacred (i.e. also safest) Shia cities: Najaf (burial ground of the first Imam Ali) and Karbala (where his son Hossein became a martyr). It was only in these cities that Rohaniat started to get its own shape as a separate organization, group and culture.

Although Najaf and Karbala belonged to the territory of the Sunni Ottoman Empire, their importance as a Shia site of pilgrimage made them in some sense autonomous Shia city states, where clerics had a lot of autonomy. It was here that mullahs – forced to do so by circumstances – had to learn to make ends meet. The competition between learned clerics was regulated; agreements were being made about collecting religious taxes from the worldwide Shia Ummah. This was the money that had to guarantee the continued existence of Rohaniat, because contrary to Shia kings in Iran, the Sunni Ottomans did not give one cent to these mullahs. In their eyes, Najaf and Karbala were dusty, uninteresting cities in the eastern remote corner of their empire, which were neither commercially nor geopolitically of any interest.

It was in Najaf and Karbala that for the very first time, a large-scale educational project trained young people to become mullahs, which really got its impetus in the 19th century. The bloom of these theological entities brought about more commerce and a thriving pilgrimage industry, which in its turn lead to the emergence of a strong and rich group of business men, who knew all too well that their prosperity and the success of Rohaniat were intertwined. That is how these cities came to be dominantly colored by Rohaniat. Especially Najaf knew how to safeguard this position and established itself as the heart of the Shia universe.

The rise of Qom in Iran in the 20th century meant great competition for Najaf. Still, I believe that the old Shia character of the Rohaniat culture that we need to know is first and foremost to be found in Najaf. The Islamic Revolution caused Rohaniat to be incorporated in the Iranian political institutions. Just like in the time of the Safavids, the Iranian mullahs of this day and age – at least a majority – are servants of the state who depend on a state income and live according to state guidelines. In that sense, they much more resemble the Safavid mullahs than the autonomous Rohaniat of Qom in the era before the Islamic Revolution. Now that Saddam Hossein’s yoke on the Shia community has disappeared, Najaf is in its prime, partly thanks to a group of self-conscious learned clerics, ayatollah Sistanie being the most important one. They do interfere in society and politics but refuse to take part in the state itself.

Ironically, it is in Najaf and not in Iran that you can find the cultural origins of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is here that you can find the culture on which the foundations of the Islamic Republic are built, and the logic with which the Islamic Republic goes about its business. If you want to understand politics in Tehran, you have to poke around in Najaf for a while.