Neda and Now Mahsa

We remember Neda Agha Soltan, assassinated by the goons of the abominable Islamic Republic of Iran, in June 2009. She was that young woman shot on the street while participating in a demonstration, one more, peacefully requesting more liberty from a regime that has repeatedly shown it not only despises the concept but considers it a crime. By the shock wave it sent through the world, Neda’s murder was the first major nail in the unspeakable Islamic Republic of Iran’s coffin. 

It is our fervent hope that Mahsa Amini’s brutal death three days ago will finally nail that coffin shut. The young visitor to the capital had just arrived from her home in Kurdistan, accompanied by her brother, when the public morality police spotted her, in all the beauty of her youth, hair not covered up enough, a terrible danger to the Islamic men around, instantly aroused and hating her for it. 

Women are tolerated in the Islamic Republic when they abide by the rules. These were defined fourteen hundred years ago by Saudi merchants on their camels peddling their wares and their morals to populations as ignorant and brutal as themselves. Part of their noble teaching was that men are allowed multiple wives. Also, that starting at age 6, women are nothing but a hole in which to relieve oneself. Arouse me at your peril. I choose when I do it, how I do it. If you provoke me, I’ll kill you.

But Iran is far from those times and those deserts. It is home to a population of 88 million people, with 60 percent of working age of which 22 percent very young. That youth is vibrant, articulate, active in all branches of work and public life, also very gifted as demonstrated with a multitude of artists in all disciplines–art, cinema or music–winning prizes and awards in international festivals and expanding their chosen fields. What’s more, it’s a highly educated population as the present regime of primitive religious scholars has not been able to shut down the innumerable pre-1979 revolution schools, universities and higher education centers, nor replace them all with institutions dedicated solely to the teachings of the Coran. 

In such ferment, the Islamic Republic has to constantly reinforce its base, push the holy writings down the throat of the population which, except for the truncheon-wielding thugs and the handmaids with their head-to-toe black chadors, remains at best recalcitrant to the teachings and the rules enforced by a detested regime, at worst defiant.   

The consolation, if any, in all this is that Neda, Mahsa, and all the other victimized young people who threatened no one and asked nothing but to live their life in the glory of their young years now cut short will live on and be remembered and honored when the Islamic Republic, hated and vilified as it is, will be only more dust to be blown away by time and history.

What I lost forty two years ago : the idea of a country

The Islamic revolution took place forty-two years ago today, February 12, 1979. I was in Paris at the time, Paris where I had first traveled when I was five years old, to which I came back often, where I obtained my degree at the Sorbonne and had now been living for a number of years. Born in a French-speaking family with complicated roots and history, I was of French culture and felt so. But I was an Iranian national and I equally felt so. 

The revolution occurred not long after the return to Iran of Khomeiny from the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château from where he had spread his revolutionary messages to Iran, reflecting the wisdom and serenity of a new Gandhi. Or so he was perceived by the West, always a pushover for imported spirituality. The riots of the cadets of an air base were the last nails in the coffin of the Shah’s fallen regime, after months of troubles. The street followed, with a nonstop flood of unfamiliar characters, dishevelled, spewing hatred, their fists tight as they  chanted slogans about revenge and promised those brighter tomorrows that become the first line of any discourse in times of power grabs and upheavals. The government, already shaky, fell. Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister appointed by the Shah, went into hiding ; blood started flowing that would never stop.