by Hooman Majd
For ten days the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had been replayed over and over on television, reminding Iranians who watched that for all their post-revolution worries the revolution itself, the once popular concept of a religious democracy, was alive and well. The claim by secular and uninterested Iranians, and echoed by ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who was in the crowd the day I was, that thousands of people had been bused in by the government from other cities to bolster the numbers for the festivities was belied by the fact that in every other city in Iran, even smaller towns, huge numbers also showed up to celebrate their revolution—the evidence clear from nonstop television reports throughout the day.
I asked people gathered by a group of old, rusty municipal buses parked at a roundabout, well away from Azadi Street, where they had come from to join the rally, and all said that they had been picked up at various points in the city. Ali Khatami, a former top official himself, explained that buses were indeed provided by the government, but more as a traffic-control issue, to ferry marchers to the square from predesignated points across the city, than anything else. At any rate, no one present had been forced to attend, not even schoolchildren or government employees, as evidenced by the full restaurants and cafés and busy sidewalks far away from the rally in the northern parts of the city that I retreated to after my bruising encounter with fervent supporters of the Islamic Revolution. But every year the 22nd of Bahman, the tenth day of the Ten-Day Dawn, affirms for many Iranians their faith in their nation and their revolution, if not in their president, and in their own peculiar form of democracy, a form of democracy that celebrates majority rule but increasingly, and despite occasional setbacks, allows the minority to quietly ignore the masses. By skiing, by drinking, or by partying, as I did that very night at a high-rise apartment building in a duplex penthouse, where on one level an opium den had been set up in the library for the older men and a poker table and bar in the dining room for the younger men and women, who played, drank, and never once mentioned the Ten-Day Dawn or the Ayatollahs whose revolution it celebrates, a revolution that (with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron) will always be televised.
Perhaps the booze-soaked furloughed political prisoner from Evin, the man who insisted to me that 80 percent of those born after the revolution had to be killed if there were to be another revolution, had a point, perverse as the way he made it might have been. For many of those in the majority of the population with no memory of a pre–Islamic Republic Iran, perhaps even 80 percent, those for whom patriotism means allegiance to the only republic they’ve ever known, the revolution wasn’t just a revolution: it was the birth of their nation. The rally at Azadi Square is never an ordinary rally, yet another tedious propaganda affair in a country where the government is given to propaganda; and if we fear the black turbans who rule Iran, then surely we must fear those who rally too.
If patriotism, and perhaps only the false patriotism that Samuel Johnson may have been referring to, is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, then Iran is not bereft of scoundrels at the highest levels of government. They have their followers, sometimes many, but they are hardly as fearsome as they would like to think they are. A few months after the Ten-Day Dawn, on Friday, May 25, 2007, an interim prayer leader of Tehran, the archconservative cleric Hojjatoleslam Ahmad Khatami (no relation to former president Mohammad Khatami), gave a speech to the thousands gathered at the University of Tehran for Friday prayers. On Fridays, the Tehran prayers are where Iran’s clerical leaders, in the social and political section of the sermon, outline their views. “Interim prayer leader,” and there are a few of them, denotes that the official prayer leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not present that day, and of course he rarely is. Ahmad Khatami was giving an official response to continued statements in the spring of 2007 by U.S. officials regarding the possibility of the United States using force to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and in particular a response to Vice President Dick Cheney, who had recently made an aggressive anti-Iran speech aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, right on Iran’s doorstep. Khatami’s speech was translated and covered, as it always is, by IRNA (the official state-run Islamic Republic News Agency) exactly as follows (and I’ve left the English uncorrected, reflecting the government’s persistently defiant use of incorrect English):
Khatami reminded the worshipers of US Vice President Dick Cheney’s comment aboard a US warship in Persian Gulf, where he said that the presence of US warships in the Persian Gulf convey a clear message to United States friends and foes, adding, “We would not permit Iran to get access to nuclear arms, and in order to achieve that goal, all options are on the table.”
According to Political Desk reporter of IRNA, Hojjatoleslam Khatami added, “We tell this notorious and extremely corrupt individual you have repeated such words so often that one feels like vomiting when one hears them uttered anew, so why don’t you try to say something new now?”
The interim Friday prayer leader of Tehran, addressing the US officials, added, “Just as you bully, uttering such nonsense, you should be aware that the Iranian nation, too, has all options on the table for punching the United States on the mouth.”
He reiterated, “It is truly befitting to tell these narrow minded wretched figures, ‘O little fly! The high peaks where eagles build nests are far above your flight altitude. You are just ruining your own reputation, yet, not really troubling us, either.’”
Friday preacher of Tehran this week added, “Thanks Allah, this nation is a weathered one, and you (Americans), too, are not competent for committing such mischief, because you have not forgotten having received severe blows on the mouth from this nation continually for eight straight years.”
Ta’arouf? Certainly not, and really more along the lines of “Who’s your daddy?” sentiments, albeit without the implied sexual-dominance innuendo. The less-than-comely Ahmad (who is probably fearsome only in the disquieting context of a sexual encounter with him) was in fact engaging in the opposite of ta’arouf, but a companion to it in Persian public discourse: fiery rhetoric and flowery, often poetic, insults that lie to the other extreme of politesse are packed with gholov, and may be intended to be fearsome but rarely are. Shias have long been taught to not provoke their enemies, who in olden days were the Sunni majority surrounding them, and, as discussed before, taghiyeh, the permitted dissimulation or even outward lying to protect the person and the faith, is an example of Shia concerns with avoiding conflict that could mean the annihilation of the minority sect.
Although anonymity excuses the Persian from ta’arouf, and public speaking is the antithesis of anonymous behavior, Ahmad Khatami and others who make such speeches are speaking on behalf of the nation (or the clerical establishment) and against another nation, and the collective “we” makes them impersonal outbursts that some Iranian politicians today, with a sense of power that Shias haven’t felt in centuries, believe appeal to the masses of their supporters who are more accustomed to being the downtrodden and oppressed majority of society than a people that can strike back against any injustice. Punching or smacking the mouth, tou-dahany, is a Persian threat (really more insult) extraordinaire, one that IRNA seemed uninterested in giving an English equivalent for, as the speech was intended for a domestic audience exclusively, but it is not usually a literal expression of a desire to physically harm; it is more a form of braggadocio suggesting that there are ways of shutting a mouth that has uttered an insult or threat itself. Although the cleric’s pronouncement that the United States has “received severe blows on the mouth from this nation continually for eight [a mistranslation: it should have read twenty-eight] straight years” could be viewed by the more sinister-minded as an admission that Iran has physically harmed the United States, perhaps through terrorist proxies in Lebanon, for example, or in Africa and Saudi Arabia and more recently in Iraq, and a veiled threat that it can do so again, it in reality harks back to the days of the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous statement, met with incr
edulity by many at the time, that the United States “cannot do a damn thing.”
What Ahmad Khatami was saying, in effect, was that Iran has weathered years of threats from and hostile behavior by the United States and, despite a stated desire on America’s part to see the Islamic Republic fall, has been, and, more important, will continue to be, able to withstand any pressure from the world’s greatest superpower. Who’s your daddy?
The turbaned elite have, of course, if not punched America in the mouth, then certainly thumbed their noses at the country ever since the first days of the hostage crisis of 1979, and seemingly with impunity. Short of an all-out war, which the experience of Iraq seems to have told us and the Iranians by no means guarantees victory to a vastly superior military force, it appears that the almost-thirty-year hostile attitude and lack of meaningful relations between Iran and the United States (which have brought little advantage to either nation) are destined to continue for some time unless there are fundamental shifts in both American and Iranian foreign policy.
Why, many Americans wonder, do the black turbans and the many Iranians who support them hate the United States so much? Analysts point to the 1953 CIA-engineered coup that replaced the democratically elected prime minister, Mossadeq, under a constitutional and weak monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had fled the country for Rome, with an absolute dictatorship under that very same monarch. True, the Iranian people have long resented American interference in their affairs and the Ayatollahs have played on that sentiment, and every Iranian can tell you the story of the infamous CIA coup (that the British were only able to convince President Eisenhower was necessary because of a communist threat), but the United States has conspired in coups d’état and supported tyrants elsewhere to the eventual forgiveness of the people and the patching up of relations. Why are Iranians different in that regard, say, from Chileans? Iranians are often adroitly reminded by their leaders that when their soon-to-be-deposed prime minister Mossadeq nationalized the Iranian oil industry, in effect demanding their right to the profits from their own oil, the British responded publicly, and at the UN no less, that Iran’s exercise of its right was a “threat to the security of the world,” words that have been repeated by the United States in response to Iran exercising its right, haq, as far as Iranians are concerned, to produce nuclear fuel.
To Iranians, since the eighteenth century, Western empires (and Russia) have simply refused to stop considering Iran theirs to play with as they like, rewarding it for supplication and punishing it for disobedience. And the United States, which has long taken over from Britain as the world’s greatest power, is by definition the one power that is most likely to dictate to Iran and exploit its resources to the detriment of its people. Their country having never been a colony, Iranians have had to constantly wonder about the intentions of greater powers with respect to their affairs, and, having had to slowly assert their rights as a sovereign nation in the face of resistance from the West, they are notoriously conspiracy-minded when it comes to international relations. Iranians never made the black-and-white choices between “colonized” and “independent” that other Third World countries have had to, and as such they live in a constant state of worry that their nation can, almost without their knowing it, revert to its long and shameful role as vassal to a greater power in all but name. And the clerics take every opportunity to remind their people that without them, patriotic Iranians guarding Shia, and therefore Iranian, Islam and their haq, their fear is likely to come true. Great Britain long figured as the power that most worried Iranians, and in fact today many Iranians still believe that the English are behind everything, good or bad, in Iran, but the United States looms large, even more so since the demise of the Soviet Union, as the world power that most covets the “Persian prize.” The Ayatollahs and Hojjatoleslams, some of whose turbaned forefathers the British knew well and used to great advantage in their manipulation of Persian politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, may cleverly stoke the inherent paranoia of their citizens, but they have received some (perhaps unintended) assistance from various U.S. administrations, particularly that of George W. Bush.
If in the American popular imagination it is believed, as it usually is, that politicians will sometimes lie to their own people, then one has to try to imagine how Iranians generally view American political discourse on Iran. Lies, the Ayatollahs, and often other politicians, will tell them, all lies. And a perfect recent example of those lies, at least to Iranians, was the announcements in late 2006 and early 2007 by the U.S. military in Iraq that roadside bombs and other munitions used to kill Americans were manufactured in Iran. Little proof was offered, except for at one press conference where unexploded bombs and shells were displayed with markings, in a perfect English lacking even on unfortunate Iranian road signs, that allegedly showed they were made in Iran.2 Except the dates of manufacture stenciled onto the bombs were not only in English but in the American form—that is, month, day, year—rather than in the Iranian (and rest of the world’s) standard format of day, month, year. That the Iranians would be sending weapons into Iraq conveniently and obligingly labeled not only with their country of origin in English but also with the date of manufacture designed so as not to confuse the Americans (who, one supposes, the Iranians know are short on Farsi interpreters) beggars belief, as Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the UN at the time, told me he had complained in one of his speeches. But few American analysts, and even fewer reporters, including those with experience in the Middle East, questioned out loud this apparently clumsily manufactured evidence, leaving many Iranians to wonder yet again about real U.S. intentions with respect to their country.
Democracy, or the lack of it, is in Iran inextricably intertwined with Iran’s external relations. Suspicion of foreigners is nothing new, but the mullahs have exploited that suspicion better than any of their predecessor Shahs, who were, by contrast, seen as mere tools of the great powers. In Iran, the turn to Islam as a political system stemmed partly from the notion that Western political systems, liberal democracies and communism, were less than desirable within the country’s own culture, a culture that is, it’s true, proud beyond the comprehension of most Westerners. Most Persians at the time, and with encouragement from their Ayatollahs, desired a political and social life that was dominated neither by an imported Judeo-Christian tradition (America and Europe) nor by an atheistic tradition (Marxism), and many Iranians, particularly the religious, had long felt that the socialism that was viewed as a significantly better and fairer form of communism was in fact the Islamic political tradition, at least in its Shia form, abandoned by the rulers of Muslim nations.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a clear rejection of non-Iranian political concepts, and although rage and animosity toward the United States in its aftermath were consequences of this, it was hardly understood that the real fear of Iranians at the time was that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, would simply not allow a political system to develop that didn’t mirror its own. What the Iranians were saying, in effect, was: “Leave us alone, and if you don’t, we’ll find ways to make your life miserable.” Almost thirty years later, the Iranians, although seemingly far more “moderate” in the eyes of the West, are still saying the same thing. When Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize winner, rejects foreign interference in the affairs of her country and refuses to denounce Islam, some in the West are alarmed or believe that she is afraid of being jailed. Ms. Ebadi is hardly afraid of jail, having spent time there, but she probably understands that what the West wants Muslim so-called moderates to say and to promote is merely a vision of a secular culture imported from the West, a vision that doesn’t carry much weight with a people that is moving, albeit very slowly, toward a democracy that is self-defined and that may not be recognizable to Westerners, accustomed to defining democracy as either liberal or not a democracy at all. But given that Iran has, even within its power structure, many who are working toward the goal of a more democ
ratic political system, those who push for sudden, drastic change or change encouraged by foreign powers have little chance of garnering much support from ordinary Iranians. The last Shah of Iran tried everything to discredit Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he had exiled way back in 1963, and the other mullahs who resisted his autocratic rule. The one accusation that he could not make with any credibility, and the one that would have had the most effect in discrediting the Ayatollahs, was that they were tools or agents of foreigners looking to gain influence over Persia.
When Akbar Ganji, perhaps the most famous Iranian dissident, traveled to Europe and America on an extended trip upon his release from prison, he refused, on more than one occasion, an invitation to the White House. It was not, as some might think, a personal snub of George Bush; had even Dennis Kucinich been improbably in residence, Ganji would have refused him too. And his refusal to meet with any American officials was not because he feared being imprisoned by the state when he returned home; rather, he feared that the people, whom every dissident claims to speak for, would forever brand him as an illegitimate tool of the foreigners.
When I arrived in Tehran in the summer of 2005, the hunger-striking Ganji had been moved from his cell in Evin prison to a hospital, and his condition appeared to be critical. As a journalist who had dared reveal the government’s hand in the murders of five writers and intellectuals in 1998, he had been arrested in 2000 after he attended a conference in Berlin on political and social reform in Iran, and in 2001 he was sentenced to six years for writing about matters of “national security” and spreading propaganda against the Islamic system. The political murders of 1998 had always been assumed by the public to be the work of government agents, but when Ganji first publicly exposed the connection, at a time when Khatami and his reform government had enabled press freedoms unknown in Iran under the Shahs or the mullahs, the Intelligence Ministry claimed that the murderers were “rogue agents.” Ganji’s exposé, however, detailed more than a few “rogue agents” acting on their own, and his finger pointed all the way up to the extremely powerful former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pillar of the Islamic regime. Embarrassing as Ganji’s writings were to Rafsanjani personally, the conservatives were far more concerned with the stability of Islamic rule, and they moved quickly to curtail press freedoms over the objections of Khatami and other reformists (whose weakness in the face of the hard-liners’ pressures contributed to the eventual public dissatisfaction with the reform camp).