Under the Veil

Is the drama unraveling in Egypt today a sequel to the one that began in Iran in 1979?

This is the question of the hour. In article after article, interview after interview, the experts list their reasons why Egypt is following a script of its own. They reassure the audiences by pointing to everything that distinguishes the unfolding uprising from its regional predecessor. But what goes unmentioned is that Iran’s 1979 revolution appears decidedly theocratic only from the vantage point of thirty years. At the time, when religious and secular, villagers and urbanites, educated and illiterate, all equally angrily, were throwing their fists into the air and demanding the removal of the Shah, Iran’s future was as unknowable then as Egypt’s future is today.

The most important WikiLeaks revelation on Iran is that there hardly is one. It is reassuring to learn that while the public is not privy to classified information, it’s not lagging too far behind senior officials on the subject. The secret documents tell us, for the most part, what we already know — that Arab leaders are concerned about Iran’s nuclear ambitions but want the US to be the one to do something about it, that the US Embassy in Baghdad was worried about Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, and that Tehran’s crusader-in-chief is desperate for a war with the US, as Ahmadinejad entrusted to an Arab leader: “We beat the Americans in Iraq; the final battle will be in Iran.”

The annual Ahmadinejad circus has cleared out of NYC. Like all its predecessors, the 2010 performance was not staged for the sake of Iran’s citizenry, but rather for the downtrodden in the Muslim world whom the Iranian president yearns to enlist — the ones his mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, anointed and ceaselessly serenaded as the “mostazafin” (pronounced mos-taz-AA-FEEN) some thirty years ago.

Ahmadinejad rarely represents the trends inside his own country, yet he, the avid student of regional miseries and deficiencies, does well at setting new trends, be it by denying the Holocaust or implicating the United States itself in 9/11. A week after he made his 9/11 assertion, the Persian service of Deutsche Welle (Germany’s answer to BBC and VOA) conducted a poll that found 70 percent of listeners agreed with the president’s claim.

Before the UN, EU, or White House draft a new proposal on Iran, they should master the details of the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old woman on death/stoning row. What makes Sakineh’s case worth the policymakers’ time is more than the usual human rights argument against befriending governments that engage in medieval practices such as stoning (though why not?), but the way Iran’s regime has defined, then redefined (in light of international pressure), Sakineh’s charges — essentially rewriting the rules of their own game.

The complete story has thus far eluded coverage in part because of poor access to the main characters but in greater part because of the usual Western flaws in covering Iran’s domestic affairs, where the real story is always eclipsed by something deceivingly larger. The notoriety of the hundreds who have signed Sakineh’s petition, or Brazil’s offer of asylum to her, or the valiant defenses of the Koran by those who insist that so brutal a punishment as stoning does not exist in its text, have received far more attention than the details of the story itself.

A year has passed since the 2009 elections in Iran, but the regime has not. Nor is this the same regime of pre -2009. A certain democratic mask, which many pundits once saw as the true face of an authentic Islamic — albeit imperfect — democracy, fell off Tehran’s face. The waves of assault on and executions of activists have all but ended whatever illusions had existed about Tehran’s brutality. As the global Christian community unanimously and justifiably pillories the Vatican over sexual abuse by their clergy, some even calling for the resignation of the pope for bygone cases, scores of young Iranian men and women activists were raped in Iranian prisons in recent months while the supreme leader, the pope of the Shiite world, looked on and continues to rule without a challenge from the global Islamic community (click here).

At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, the eyes of the actress, Juliet Binoche, were luminous with her quintessential innocence as she rested her award on the podium to hold up the name of the imprisoned Iranian film director and Green Movement sympathizer, Jafar Pahani, to plead for his freedom.

The festival had hardly ended when Panahi was released on $200,000 bail, and I realized that perhaps hope shines as brightly as innocence. While Binoche cannot singlehandedly be credited with Panahi’s release, she surely deserves co-directorial title. My hat goes off to her!

A former senior intelligence officer at Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence once described to me Tehran’s diplomatic style with the West as “tractor-trailer diplomacy.”

“Give us what we demand, or we’ll blow up something of yours with a truck-full of explosives, or take a hostage, or whatever else it might take,” said the former officer, now a defector living in Germany. Then he went on to list the instances where the West had relented against Iran’s misconduct, dropped charges, deported individuals accused or guilty of crimes in Europe to the custody of Iran — in essence, rewarded the rogue behavior.

Five young Iranian Kurds were executed last Sunday in summary trials reminiscent of the era that immediately followed the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Even according to government-backed press, the victims had been kept incommunicado for most of their imprisonment and had little or no access to lawyers — a violation of Iran’s own laws. Gone are the regime’s efforts at keeping up pretenses, at casting itself as the authentic but misunderstood regional democracy. The evolutionary clock, which the West briefly believed to have been ticking in Tehran, positively wound down last week. Tehran’s Neanderthals bared themselves to reveal their ancestral constitution, acting precisely according to the dictates of their immutable, reform-defying DNA, and resumed bloodletting. Iranians who remember waking up in late February and March of 1979 to the startling images in their morning papers of bare-chested corpses with unzipped trousers — executed atop the roof of Ayatollah Khomeini’s residence the night before — recognize the biological references of the last few lines.

Roya Hakakian will be on book leave to complete her manuscript: The Assassins of the Turquoise Palace to be published by Grove/Atlantic Press. Her next blog will appear at the end of the month.

The subject heading of one of the e-mails in my inbox this morning read, “What did you think of Obama’s Nowruz message?” And because the note was from a friend who is a leading American foreign policy expert, I felt compelled to watch the video message.

It has the expected references to the recent unrests and homage to the sacrifices of ordinary Iranians since the last elections in June. But the main theme, the one on which it begins and ends, is an invitation for engagement with Tehran. What is missing from this message is, ironically, captured in the proposition President Obama puts to Iran’s regime: We know what you are against. Now tell us what you are for.

Once upon a time, goes the tale in the Old Testament, God made a bargain with Abraham: Find ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah and I’ll spare the two cities from destruction. Abraham’s failure at the mission was a boon for literature. The tale survived the centuries, inspiring and spawning primordial images, like the pillar of salt, and archetypes, like the female stuck on the past.

Today, the Jewish state has cast itself in the part of the Almighty, and its wrath threatens to consume another ancient place—Iran. And I, the poorest possible replica for Abraham, went to Israel last month hoping to find ten Jewish politicians who truly understood Iran.

My search began at the 2010 Herzliya Conference. The Who’s Who of Israel was in attendance, and the range included the usual cocktail of junior politicians and intelligence agents to the prime minister and the president. At every panel, Iran was the elephant in the middle of the debate. Most speeches directly took it on. The few that did not, alluded to it.

He walks the streets of Stuttgart dressed in an indistinct plaid shirt and a pair of denims, which are further obscured by the long black winter coat men of all stripes hide themselves in against the cold. He would have entirely blended in the urban landscape as just another pedestrian were it not for the silvery hair that set him almost aglow, framing his deeply-tanned skin and dark mustache, giving him the appearance of someone more respectable than the rest. The impression is further accentuated by the way he walks so attentively beside the woman at his arm, his wife of 40 years whom he treats like a bride of four days. Nothing else distinguishes this nearly unknown German who seems like an existential speck in the routine life of this old city—the very same man who is a towering, yet unknown figure in the history of Iran’s democratic movement.

Among the incidental virtues of tyrannies is the way in which the small stuff of life simply fall away in their shadow, to intensify the value of the big—love, art, pleasure, relationships. Oppression, like magic mushrooms, has been heightening the senses of urban Iranians for years. Inside the homes, in the safety of “drawing rooms,” the clock is always set to that Austenian hour, when art is as sacred as religion and life is largely defined in the symbiotic relationship with it, each informing the other. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, for instance, was the rage in the days following the 1979 revolution, a piece which perfectly mirrored the national turbulence. Now it seems that Iran’s last three decades have ended by the very same notes they had begun with, just like Orff’s masterpiece.

February 11,2010 did not turn out to be the end of the regime in Tehran. But in time, it may prove to have been the end of something even more important for Iranians, and perhaps, for the Shiite culture. It was the end of an ancient love affair with death. It was the end of blind sacrifice—of martyrdom.

We Iranians have always cherished blood. If there were no fresh supplies to stir us, the old were reliably in our memory. Year after year, the Ashura mourners, grieving the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 AD, passed through the streets, beating their chests—the clinking of their chains ominously echoing in the air. The few euphoric among them would strike their own heads with daggers. Anyone who drew blood was applauded. The view of the sacred crimson shade dared and inspired others to follow suit. The emergency rooms were always flooded during the holiday.

1. According to an internal poll of a random sample of some 900
Iranians, the opposition leader whom the nation trusts the most is:

a. Mir Hossein Moussavi

b. Mehdi Karroubi

c. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

d. Zahra Rahnavard

2. That the color of the movement is green shows:

a. It’s a fundamentalist Islamic movement

b. Sometimes a color is just a color

c. Since secular Iranians were already on board, the choice of green was a strategic move by the activists to appeal to the faithful and erode Ahmadinejad’s base

3. The fact that Iranians chant “Allahu akbar” from the rooftops means:

a. This is yet another mullah-driven movement

b. The movement is appropriating the old 1979 revolutionary icons to strip the mullahs of what they claim to be exclusively theirs

c. Fresh air and a bit of prayer does a body good