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.
In 1978, red handprints dotted the walls of Tehran. And what it conveyed to a nation that was on the verge of erupting was far more powerful than any words or slogans. That year, every shirt imbrued with blood was held above the heads of the demonstrating crowds not simply as a flag, but a talisman. We have always worshipped blood.
It was this quality that Ayatollah Khomeini exploited to drag on the war with Iraq, long after Iran had driven Saddam’s army from the territories it had initially captured. “Our leader is that thirteen-year-old boy who straps grenades around his waist and throws himself in the way of the Iraqi tanks,” he declared before the audience that was always weeping in his presence. The leader’s endorsement, and a plastic key to open the gates of paradise, was all that droves of young men needed to step on their own death by rushing headlong into the Iraqi minefields.
Even secular and Marxist groups were bent on this kind of blind sacrifice. In the early 1980s, several of them, a Maoist group named Sarbedaran among them, staged doomed uprisings throughout Iran that could only lead to their imminent deaths and executions, as they did. In busy bazaars and bus terminals in those early years, members of the Islamic opposition group, the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, also staged random, singular acts of protest by shouting anti-ayatollah slogans, then followed with swallowing cyanide pills and dying before the stunned public. Freud must have been looking down upon Iran, pointing to us as “Exhibit A” in his defense of Thanatos.
The national drive for death is a tradition that predates Ayatollah Khomeini. Sacrifice is that primordial mud in which the Iranian psyche was cast. It has been the cornerstone of our literature. The self, the material body, have always been shunned. To annihilate them is, what our best poets suggest, the way to reach the light, the beloved, and, according to some, God. It’s the untranslatable in our celebrated poetry. It’s only the grains of love, not the death that flow through the strainer of translation. It’s that filtered verse with which English speakers are so enamored.
I’ve long contended that Persian, with its hundred ways of expressing the tired Anglo-Saxon I love you, is the language of affection. But what goes unsaid is that 99 of those ways either meander or cut through the idea of death—of dying for the sake of the beloved. This comingling is why the Persian brand of love is so intense, so rife with all the enchanting marks of legends and fairytales. The sheer focus on the other, the readiness to deny the self for the sake of the other, accounts for some of what makes Iranians so lovable, yet so unprepared for the 21st century.
What is ingrained in the American psyche, the a priori of this culture, was something I finally grasped 10 years after coming to America –that to live life required one to embrace life, not death; that one’s material existence as manifested in one’s body was to be celebrated; that the self was not something to be ashamed of; that the pronoun “I” had a rightful place in one’s prose. On the eleventh year, I applied for U.S. citizenship. On the twelfth, I began to vote. To extend the Descartesian principle: I arrived at self, therefore I arrived at democracy.
Last Thursday, the regime had armed itself to the teeth, unleashed its thugs onto the streets, and bused in thousands more protesting day-laborers from the far-flung corners of the country into the capital. Tehran was under siege by strangers. They outnumbered and out-powered the peaceful activists. Instead of coming out and protesting, and clearly rushing to their own death as their national inner circuitry would have charged them to, the Green demonstrators kept inert. After all, the migrants would have to return home. And between the births and deaths of the 12 imams—which Iranians celebrate as steadfastly as the pagan events on the calendar—there were numerous reasons to take to the streets again in the near future.
When it comes to the Green Movement, there are the grand signs –a million people’s march on the street—that need no interpreting. But there are also the subtler, the subterranean ones that do. What’s most promising about the Green Movement is its desire to be bloodless, to self-preserve, and its wish to live for a cause, not die for it. This isn’t to say that the movement isn’t facing obstacles—the greatest being its inability to communicate with its leaders and foot soldiers. Yet despite all the odds, the restraint, the composure by which the Green activists have conducted themselves thus far is both admirable and unprecedented. This surely is no consolation to those who are consumed by the more immediate threats of Iran’s regime. But for those less intoxicated by “yellowcake,” last Thursday revealed signs of a different kind of promise –of the birth of self, the will to live, the longstanding morbid drive disappearing —the stuff that enduring peace is made of.
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