Mousavi, Saint or Sinner?

As an Iranian growing up in a culture that is rooted strongly in cosmological dualism, I always took polarization as a given. It came quite natural that pop music stands opposed to classical music, new wave poetry to classical, the Theater of the Absurd to classical acting, and abstract painting to realist painting. Dualism was carried on to all aspects of life where the modern was counterposed to the traditional. It was quite natural when we placed two individuals in opposition to each other, no matter how fundamentally similar they were. However, our undemocratic political arena did not provide with grounds for such polarization of the political characters. We never had political figures to stand up against each other. We had one Dr. Mosaddeq standing alone by himself who was pushed back to exile by the Shah without finding a chance to compete with any real opposition. (If only the Shah had known this little, he would not have need the CIA’s help!)

If this trend went into hibernation during the first two decades of the Islamic Republic, it emerged fully in its third decade, though in a different guise and domain. It was when a popular personality such as Khatami emerged who charmed 22 million fans while some millions called him traitor, liar, etc. This duality of character was soon carried over to the reformists in general, and then to the reform movement itself. A movement that appeared to many to be the way to salvation was considered an intentional device to perpetuate the Islamic Republic’s tyranny.
Mousavi, an old-timer politician, reentered the political arena as a reformist candidate. Once the fundamentalist prime minister of the reign of terror, when Islamic Republic sought its survival in war, mass executions, and serial murders, boasting about supporting terrorists, suicide bombers, murderers and extremists, suddenly emerged a born again peace lover and supporter of human rights and became the candidate of reform movement, and, later a central figure in the leadership of the Green Movement.
His first speech upon his nomination stunned many of us. He said a fundamentalist in essence is nothing but a reformist and a reformist in essence must be a fundamentalist. This speech should have given us a clue as what to expect; instead it made some of us giggle, while his staunch supporters thought of it as genius.
His double messages soon multiplied. His constant deference to Imam Khomeini, the sublimity of the Revolution’s unfulfilled goals, and his commitment to the regime, the Supreme Leader, and the Islamic Regime’s ideals alarmed many of us. But for a variety of reasons, chief of which being President Khatami’s backing, he stayed immune from the scrutiny of potential voters and so came ahead of Karoubi in the polls taken during the campaign and later on in election.
It was only after the fraudulent election that he found himself in the spotlight in need of something more significant to say besides those election attacks or appeals to his wartime government record, which little by little turned into a liability for him. He was criticized more and more as the upheaval continued. Above all, the mass executions of 1988 turned out to be his Achilles’ heel.
However, the most serious damage done to Mousavi did not result from his alleged involvement in the Islamic Republic’s crimes during his term as prime minister, but from the most certain and widely-witnessed matter, namely his speeches, written and recorded. It was in this domain that he became most vulnerable.
His ambiguity, imprecision, sweeping generalizations, contradictory statements, false assumptions, taking stands on behalf of the people whom he very openly admits are not subject to his leadership, and finally flip-flopping and twisting statements became his trademark. These problems appeared in his messages to the people or the authorities, causing them to require as much interpretation as the oracles of the sibyls of Delphi. Oddly enough, those who had come to his help, mostly his journalist and blogger friends, not only failed to clarify his words, but added to their ambiguity and therefore to people’s frustration by declaring them to be pearls of wisdom.
Pages in Facebook are crowded with comments referring to Mousavi as Gandhi, a hero, a genius, a phenomenal politician, a superb manager of the wartime economy, and a political savior. He is also referred to as a murderer, a traitor, a terrorist, pawn of the regime, a liar, a cheat, and an incompetent. Although, it is not too difficult to make a bridge between savior and a murderer (as in To Kill a Mockingbird), but seeing all these contradictory characters in one person is a little incongruous to many Iranians. Sometimes I think Mousavi, being the collection of opposites, is either a bad book that is not worth a read, or is like a laboratory culture that has everything in it from extreme good to extreme evil and is therefore a good breeding ground for whatever we wish to cultivate, one of which might be democracy. Sometimes I think the man who has passed through horror very likely knows how to survival better than those who have no such experience. After all, the Islamic Republic’s style of repression is so unique to itself that only its architects know how to access its facilities. But, sometimes I think, more likely, he is a religious man who simply modeled himself after a monotheistic God who is capable of good and evil simultaneously as the situation requires, a God who punishes severely and rewards generously in this little earthly life with impatience, as if there is no after life as He has promised in the Holy Book.
Mousavi has repeatedly issued statements of his unshaken loyalty to Khomeini (who has long lost his esteemed aura among Iranians), his idealization of his premiership (based on his eight years of office in wartime), his commitment to combining theocracy with democracy, and his definition of freedom based on Khomeini’s “the people’s vote is the criteria”, as well as his constant references to “the regime’s interest.” Oddly enough, none of these, with their contradiction to his promises of reform, has become a serious topic of discussion within his camp, as if they all are political and social norms. The absence of analysis, explanation or any sort of dialogue regarding these issues has added to the fog and mist of ambiguity around him. We are all awaiting that miracle to come and clear it up.
Being ambiguous might have been part of Mousavi’s nature. It may be part of his style to be so mysterious, as many artists like to be. It may be the political nature of our country that calls for his statesmen to not be so revealing. It may very well be his way of being clever. It may be an old-fashion style of leadership modeled after Khomeini, who did not believe in dialogue or criticism. He might be a bit more modern than his model in his communications, but only in technological terms. After all, Khomeini’s idea of communicating with his followers was through a one-sided flow of cassettes from him to them. Mousavi may even think of himself as a Khomeini’s legitimate heir, in spite of his humble mode of speech. He may not even believe in being challenged. He may even be the very simple pious man he appears to be. Or, he may be an old-fashioned politician on the verge of an early retirement who was enticed to return to politics and did not refuse out of politeness.
His words, spoken (very rarely) or written, could lead us to all the above. But ultimately, Mousavi remains as unknown to us as his fate is at this stage of the game. A man who came from a fog, brought with him a fog, continues living in fog and promises even more fog. If paradise is this foggy, he is surely an angel, but if what appears to us as fog is nothing but a thin smoke, I think he is the Prince of Darkness coming from Hell. I pray for him to be the former.
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A Woman by Her Own Rights

I recall a fading photograph of my mother in a 1930s fashion dress with a little pretty hat along with some thirty other women dressed more or less in the same fashion with heads high and eyes bright, proud as if looking forward to a splendid promised land ahead.
That photograph, attached to the front page of our family album, with so many women whom we did not know, seemed totally out of place. We never asked my mother about the relevance of that photo in the family album, not when we were little kids and not when we finished our college and university education in which each of us had accumulated a dozen such photographs each year, none of which ever found its way into the family album.
The women were posed in the same order as we did in our school photographs, in three rows, the front row being sitting on chairs and the two rows standing behind them, the tallest standing in the back row. My mother looked younger than the rest by some fifteen years. The white chiffon collar several of them wore gave me the impression that it was taken at some educational occasion.
There was a small box which my mother collected all her other photos in. It was like a treasure chest to me. There was a photo of her first classroom in an open-air school with some dozen students of all ages and classes sitting on some wooden benches in rows along two sides of a long table with their textbooks and notebooks, a tambourine and a violin lying in front of my half brother and half sister next to their note books. Apparently her classes were held quite casually. During the long breaks when my mother would attend to the kitchen across from the garden, my siblings would keep the students busy by their performances.
There were plenty of pictures of my mother with her students at the same open-air school and later on at a formal school she built with my father’s and some friends’ help. Then there were pictures of her visiting classes as a head mistress of the school and some more at the annual graduations, giving awards to the best students. There were plenty of pictures of my mother attending politicians’ funerals or marches celebrating some national holidays, or taken with some celebrities here and there whom I‘m sure she has just met them and more likely they did not know her from Eve.
There were also plenty of photos of my mother with a fawn, varieties of chickens, a few with goats, sheep, geese, and turkeys. Except the fawn which my father had bought for her when he married her and brought her home from her tribe, she had bred the rest of them. She always talked very proudly about each of them, how and when she matched various colors and breeds to produce the desired result. She always talked about them as if they were her children; sometimes she even remembered their birth. I’m not sure whether what I recall now is the photographs or the stories related about them, recounted again and again and are now imprinted in my memory.
Some of these photos were really remarkable. One showed my mother with a long snake. (She claimed it was about 18 feet long, a claim much evidence confirmed.) It showed her pulling the snake out of a room on the ground floor with a wooden pike. In that photo only part of the snake showed. It had formed a big V as she dragged it away from the door. This one was not one of my mother’s master hybrids. It was among the creatures left behind in a horrifying flood in the camp that had found its way to one of our grand floor rooms. My mother was courageous enough to catch it and kill it and bury the body.
One of the pictures was of a one legged frog. Of course in the photograph one could see something in my mother’s hand, but we had heard the story so many times that we would see it as real. Once, while strolling in her cherry orchard, she heard a noise as if something had fallen into water. She saw an snake has crept into the steam to grab a large frog there. My mother, very heavy in her last days of pregnancy, without thinking, bent and grabbed the frog, but the snake wouldn’t let go of one of the frog’s legs. In a forceful match between my mother and the snake, my mother won, but the poor frog lost a leg. Apparently, she took care of the frog and kept it like a pet somewhere in the back yard so she could watch after it until it died of old age. The story had become one of humorous legends among her circle of friends.
Her cherry orchard, which still yields the largest and the most delicious sour cherries and was dedicated to the coal miners working in the nearby coal mine when we left the camp, was a point of pride for her. Hundreds of photographs in all seasons, almost with every visitor in the camp, were taken in every part of it. She would talk about it with the same passion the Rothchilds do of their vineyards.
Yes, she had photos of her grape yards as well, and of her herb gardens. Apparently she was a great talent in gardening and agriculture; but this talent came to her so naturally and effortlessly that we all took it for granted and did not notice how knowledgeable she was. As a result, not only was she left unacknowledged but we never felt how painful it must have been for her to leave them all behind and move to Tehran, to a totally different city life. So no one was even surprised at how quickly she adjusted to it all.
She never had a formal education. She was an orphan from a tribe in Luristan married to my father, who had traveled there on a disarmament mission, primarily to be sent away from her tribe, so the line of leadership of the tribe would not be transfered from her uncle, who, as her custodian, was the chief of the tribe, to her fiancé, who was her cousin. It seems my father had arrived just in time. No wonder her tribe was the only tribe that he could disarm them without a fight! He returned home with plenty of guns and a pretty young bride only two years older than his daughter from his first marriage.
In Parchin, the military camp we lived in, she noticed that she has entered a fantasy land, somewhere unknown to her, people whose language she did not even speak. With my father’s personal tutoring and another hired tutor, she was qualified to take the exam to become teacher within two years. And again with my father‘s help, she made the first school in the open air there. Later on, she established a full-fledged school up to nine grades, with a dozen teachers hired from neighboring areas. She taught there until we moved to Tehran, where she had five children of her own to take care of.
A healthy, cheerful, energetic, women; a wonderful capable mother; a devoted loving wife and an amazing friend and partner to my very difficult father; a great compassionate step mother, she was truly loved by all of us including my half brothers and sisters who considered her as their own biological mother. But for me,the greatest of all her talent was her exceptional wisdom in treating us; she taught us something, that still we have a hard time understanding how she did it. She taught us to live a life free of guilt and free of regret, to be free and yet voluntarily set restrictions on ourselves. She never forbade us from doing something she thought inappropriate and never forced us to do something that we did not want to do. However, I do not recall ever doing anything the she would not approve of or making any effort to do something against my will to please her. Heaven knows that her wisdom is still my guide.
Even her sudden untimely death was like nothing on earth. She died one afternoon, in the home of my older brother (whom she loved the best, of course with no apology) while performing her evening prayer. She finished her prayers and, when she performed her final prostrating (sojood), she died. When my brother, alarmed by her delay, approached her, saying, “How long does a sojood take, Mom?” and touched her, she rolled on his arm, as if she was gone already to Heaven, from the prayer mat to my brothers bosom, the places she loved the most.
All is gone now, my mother, the house we lived in, the school she built, the gardens and chickens and goats and ducks and all. What are left are only some pictures and some anecdotes, all printed and reprinted in the darkroom of my memory. The only souvenirs I have from her are her prayer mat, the clay disk she died prostrating herself on, and an antique copy of a poetry book of her favorite poet, Vahshi Bafghi. But here is something else from her in my mind that remains forever vivid, that fading picture of hers, among the strangers, in our family album. I think finally this year in the turmoil we all went through, in the beating of our hearts for our friends in prisons, those beaten up, those who lost their lives as a witness to this dark part of out history, and then suddenly March 8th reminded us that we exist and that we should celebrate our existence, I realized what that picture meant to her after all. Yes, on International Woman’s Day, that posture, that figure, that raised chin, that glamor, and that pride under that yellow dust all emerged as meaningful.
I think that photo (the date of that which must be shortly after 17, 10, 1314 [January 8, 1936]) was my mother’s birth certificate, a license to life and a permission to bring up the best in her. That was a key to her hidden treasures, the key to open up something that would have remained alien were it not for the removal of that shroud from her being. She found an identity on that night when she walked arm in arm with her husband, beautiful, majestic and radiant in public and enjoyed being seen and admired by everyone, also, when she looked at others with admiration and awe. She did not need to say how she felt free, that night, like a bird, like a tribal girl, free of all rules and artificial codes of piety and modesty; everything was there in that single photo. That was the day of her life, of my life and our lives; for that alone I can say God bless the great dictator, may he rest in peace and may God reward him in Heaven. To read the rest, click here.

Bahman 22, The Day We Learned Politics

Shortly after Bahman 22, we all, as if woken up from a sweet dream to a brutal reality, turned to the analysts, bloggers, writers, journalists , intellectuals, satirists, facebook and twitter subscribers, to make sense of what happened on that day. The variety of assessment of the success or failure of the event appeared on sites and other publications; though Google beat them all, on the grounds of realism, by sending satellite photos and films of the rather vacant Azadi Square, at least considering the bus trails which transported the rent-a-crowd from the provinces to the capital.

The first comment came right on Bahman 22, around 4:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (Tehran time was almost 2:00 am Bahman 23) from the Rah-e Sabz, a site affiliated with the Mousavi-Karoubi camp. The article blamed the Iranian opposition living abroad for trying to radicalize the movement, disregarding conditions in Iran, and urging the movement to demand what is unattainable, unconcerned with the limited options available to the people.



This article was consistent with a series of articles which appeared before, and even after, Bahman 22 in various blogs and sites affiliated with the Mousavi-Karoubi in which they had urged the outside opposition to stop meddling in the Green Movement’s affairs even by expressing their encouragement. Indeed, these articles all were in support of Mousavi’s conciliatory message to the Supreme Leader after the successful Ashura rally. The five conditions proposed in the letter were all weaker versions of the articles of the Islamic Republic’s constitution that has been deliberately violated by the regime through the years, including the period in which Mousavi was prime minister.
It was interesting that so little attention was paid that how irrelevant and unjustified was their objection; obviously, a call for radicalization could not have resulted in dispersion and divergence manifested in Bahman 22.
The day after, “lack of organization and managements” entered the language of some of the commentators very cautiously. They thought Bahman 22 was a mandate for Mousavi to be firm in assuming the “leadership.” Abbas Abdi, the theoretician of the reform movement during the Khatamee’s administrations, suggested “millions cannot go to the street to protest without a leader to tell them when and where to stop. Today people were in the street but when they noticed they were surrounded by the armies of bassijis and police, they had no leader to tell them what to do.”
Even few fair-minded comments reminded us that it was the high expectation from a single day affair, induced by the outsiders who wished to overthrow the regime that caused the disappointment that followed; otherwise the event was as good as any other previous demonstrations.
It was just two days later that Google satellite pictures revealed that indeed not so many had shown up in Azadi Square, where the regime supporters were supposed to gather, or anywhere nearby. And so the analysts tried to explain why those millions who were in the streets on Qods day and Ashoura preferred to stay home behind their computer desk or went their way to the Caspian Sea.
Among the articles there were a few which tried to give a realistic assessment of the situation. Masoud Irani wrote in Rah-e Sabz that people had not adjusted themselves to the so-called leadership’s goals and tactics; that the Green Movement in principal is a social, cultural, political, and intellectual movement and its main place to be developed and put into effect is not the streets but in groups, institutions, families and other social networks. He suggested, therefore, that the movement,  coordinating its behavior with its leaders’ will, they should take their protests off the streets to home, small family or friendly gatherings, and to exchange visits with them.
Soon a series of articles appeared all questioning if streets are good places for the reform movement and if the Green Movement is better off thinking up a new strategy to reach its goals and demands, such as assigning the responsibility of negotiation to the leaders. These articles implicitly referred to Mousavi and Karoubi as the leaders of the movement, and some even very explicitly advised Mousavi that it is one thing to say, “I’m not a leader” as a sign of modesty and another just to leave the movement leaderless.
It seems that what started as a people’s movement, demanding with passion their lost civil rights, is being turned craftily into a plain backdrop to be used in a showdown between the two powers in the regimes, reformists vs. fundamentalists. The passionate and energetic voices of people and their demands is directed gradually into become what is desired, in form and content, by the movement’s leaders, useful in the familiar war of real Islam and Khomeini’s noble ideals promised early in the revolution, and the diverted version of Islam practices by those in high positions in the regime.
While everyone boasts of the uniquely spontaneous nature of the movements, its unprecedented character, its exceptional vibrancy and freshness, there is also a great effort to deny and push aside whatever is in the nature of this movement and reduce it to a parody of itself, resembling more an improved version of what was once desired by the reform movement.
Thanks to the sixty years-plus years old leaders of the movement who are tied and committed to the Islamic Republic, and a chorus of affiliated bloggers and journalists, the movement at its infancy is offered a dress incongruous to the image it wanted to portray. What was intended to be a joyful and exciting carnival is lead artfully to become a mourning procession. And what originated as a dream of liberation is waking up, little by little, to a nightmare of sluggish movements of those walking with heavy chains on their feet.
Here, on the sideline, we the bystanders, watching the scene, as much as it is available to us, trying to say something, to give the signal, to wake everyone up, to shed some light; though, being in absolute dark and absolute stiffness, we just write and place words next to each other. We try to make sense of what we see and what we hear, make them coherent and give them a meaning. We try to shed light while projecting our observations and trying not to obscure it further, with the hope that this momentary silence of the Green Movement is just a conscious deliberation and a wise reflection on the situation before setting up the next step. I pray for their courage, and I pray for them to choose with the good mind the way they want to step in. The road ahead is very hazardous indeed. To read the rest, click here.

Zahra Rahnavard, Intellectual

When Foreign Policy announced the name of one hundred women thinkers and intellectuals with Zahra Rahnavard as third on the list, I said well! A few lines further I noticed that she is the number one thinker and intellectual in Iran too. Well, that was something else, I said, "Well, well." I scratched my head, I cleared my throat, and again scratched my head. No, nothing helped. I left a message on Facebook and asked my friends on how this happened. Alas, no help. A few friends, Green friends, were as surprised and as puzzled as I was. A few days later Radio Farda had an interview with the editor of Foreign Policy. No, she did not help either. Colorful geometrical big handbag and floral headscarves under her conventional black chador were all that the editor could come up with to justify her choice. Oh yes, I think she said something that I think we should call an argument. If I’m not mistaken it goes like this:

Every movement needs a leader and even though in this Green Movement the people are the leaders, it seems Mousavi is the leader and therefore his wife, who appears with him in public everywhere, even though she got involved in the race very late, should have had an undeniable share in his success.
Wow! Am I convinced? NO, I’m not. This is unlike me; I do give in so easily, but never to a bad argument.
God bless google.com. I started my research. First the resume: BA, MA, and Ph.D. (disputed by Ahmadinejad, who claimed that she got into the university without passing an entrance exam. Dismissed! Ahmadinejad is not a good judge when it comes to honesty.) Plenty of floral headscarves, almost in every single piece, plenty of walking hand in hand with her husband (actually it happened only once), sitting next to him, shaking hands with another women in public, and talking to the crowd of some 12,000 in Azadi Stadium. And finally, references to her paintings and fifteen books, the three daughters she raised, and the sculptures by her stuck here and there around in the city.
Well, educated women in Iran are not such rare entities, neither are women artists or mothers or academics, or those articulate enough to address more than twelve thousand. I press my mind to recall something about her. Nothing comes but a vague rumor of her and her husband’s associations with Hamas or Hezbolah or both. And a statue she carved to the occasion of Mother’s Day in Iran, which is not the universal Mother’s Day in Iran but the birthday of the Prophet’s daughter Fatemeh Zahra. The first time I looked at it I thought what is the Virgin Mary doing in the middle of a square in Tehran.
I ran across an interview with Safinaz Kazem, an Egyptian activist. I think this single interview would expose some of Ms. Rahnavard’s ideas and philosophies.
I need not go any further to discuss her views, her ideas and her convictions. I should give her credit for making it very easy for us all to see her inside and out.
However, I need to say that the interview is dated 1987 when her husband was the prime minister of Iran. It is very likely that Ms. Rahnavard’s political, and philosophical ideas, have evolved, changed and developed since. It is quite possible that during these past twenty years she developed a little love for Iran and Iranians (the names she never referred to in this interview.) It is quite possible then, as the wife of the prime minister of an Islamic country, that she might have exaggerated her religiosity. But it is quite possible that none of this have happened and she, like many, has remained unaffected by the course of life.
But whether she is changed or not, surely by 1987, during the years her husband was prime minister, the Islamic Republic of Iran committed quite a number of murders. It seems in those early years that she was not even touched by all those massacres, executions, unlawful arrests and imprisonments. It seems that in those days she thought Iran was a quasi-paradise on earth. Otherwise she could have mentioned at least one of those unfortunate events, just in case.
I happened to watch a clip of a documentary film by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad made just shortly before the June 2009 election. The documentary focused on women activists and their demands from the presidential candidates. Off and on, the camera would move to show the audience, limited to the presidential candidates and their companions, to catch a glimpse of their reactions.
The reaction and the body language were remarkable. It seems it was the first time they had been confronted with “women issues.” “Yes women issues are very serious, indeed we have to do a lot about them.” “Yes, of course women have lots of problem.” “Yes the women…”
All through the film, even when the discussion started, Ms. Rahnavard had bent her head to her chest, giving the impression of taking a nap. Though, I thought she was just thinking. It seemed she had either skipped through all the process or was trying to gather herself together and get ready for a new role she had to play. Or maybe she was simply recalling her past images that she portrayed as a zealous woman of faith, suitable to the politics of the early revolution. Maybe she was trying to find a way to stitch her past to the present. But wow! She should try hard! Noushin Ahmadi and Shadi Sadr and Mansoureh Shojaii are not exactly Ms. Dabbagh or Safinaz Kazem!
I was wondering what she had in mind when she told Safinaz: “Egypt should be proud of Islambouli,” Sadat’s assassin? That it is “heroic to kill?” Could it be that she was just thinking about her association with terrorist groups? The rumour so strong that she volunteered to explain without being asked “as American and Zionist’s plot who wanted to destroy Islamic Republic by attacking the Prime Minister’s wife.” [sic] Could she give the same explanation to these women in the film? These very women who have been in jail so many times, even when her husband was the prime minister. I’m sure she needed more time to ponder.
She came to herself and said: “Yes, women’s issue should be dealt with from all angles. It is like a massive mountain that must be exploded with dynamite from every side.”
Ms. Rahnavard did not even mention one of the issues discussed by the women activists as something that should be given priority; neither did she give her own preferences of the issues which must be dealt with. She could have mentioned at least what she had said recently in one of her recent speeches (shortly prior to the election) urging people to vote. She said that Mousavi’s government “will not have political and student prisoners” and would “remove discriminatory laws against women.”
“Men and women are like “two wings,” she told the Tabriz University crowd at a rally on Tuesday. “A bird can’t fly with one wing or with a broken wing.” But she didn’t. Very likely she remembered that the quotation is from a forbidden Bahai text:
“The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly. Until womankind reaches the same degree as man, until she enjoys the same arena of activity, extraordinary attainment for humanity will not be realized; humanity cannot wing its way to heights of real attainment.”
No, she could not possibly admit that she had read the text even as a passing curiosity.
Indeed, as the author of some not-so-feminist poetry, she could not possibly have mentioned anything more specific. In Tehran’s feminist’s camp one of her poems was blasted by the activists:

If the father is death
His gun is still left behind.
If the tribesmen are death,
The sons are sleeping in wooden cribs.

Yes, if men die, the mother should wait for her son to grew. It takes only some twenty years! Any problem?
Of course, she was not obliged to answer any of these questions, and her response was not worse than the others’, but I think the editor of Foreign Policy had rushed a little to announce her as the most intellectual women in Iran.
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