We must learn from the bitter experiences of the past, if we are to avoid history repeating itself
Iran is a land of recurrence. In the Middle East, it is a unique country. In 1905, Iran was the first country in the region where a revolution for democracy and freedom, the constitutional revolution, took place. Yet, in the aftermath of that revolution, we Iranians came to face a new breed of dictatorship.
Following the ensuing era of suppression and oppression, we again revolted and we were again repressed. In 1953, through a coup d’etat orchestrated by the United States, the shah deposed our elected prime minister and champion of nationalising the country’s oil industry, and we lost the greatest opportunity to become versed in democracy. The coup d’etat was followed by a new era of repression and executions. And, of course, in the years that followed we had other uprisings, which were also quashed.
Soon, the best and the brightest of our university students joined opposition groups and guerrilla factions, and many were executed. Then we arrived at the 1979 Islamic revolution. We knew what we didn’t want, but we didn’t know what we did want. During the shah’s regime, we didn’t suffer severe economic issues – we simply wanted freedom.
We therefore revolted and changed the regime. But freedom was just a word to us, a slogan that we liked. We had no real concept of freedom. Soon, hundreds of political parties proclaimed their existence and, because we did not fully comprehend democracy, each was quick to accuse the other of affiliations with foreign governments. None of these political factions had a plan for the future. In tandem, hundreds of politically oriented magazines and newspapers were founded, each of which would publish articles in opposition to another publication or political party. It all escalated to the point at which opportunists grabbed control of power. And it all became what it all became.
Today, history is again repeating itself in Iran. My generation, all of whom are over 50, have witnessed our dreams falling by the wayside one by one. Now, the next generation bravely demonstrates in the streets. They are beaten up, arrested and tortured, and, when they are killed during police attacks, the government does not easily release their bodies to their families, who are often banned from holding funerals for their children.
The problem we Iranians have is that there has always been a gap, a great divide, between our generations. The new generation does not learn from the bitter experiences of the older generation and only winds up repeating them.
Perhaps the reason for this repetition is the severe censorship that has taken root in Iran. To erase people’s memories of their history, each regime that has come to power has immediately set out to change the history books taught in schools and universities. They have banned previously published books from being reprinted and have gone as far as changing the names of streets that the previous regime had named after notable people and important events. Perhaps the reason for this repetition is that independent journals and newspapers have been banned and the older generation cannot convey its own experiences to the next generation.
Perhaps the reason for this repetition is that Iranians read very little – despite a population of more than 70 million, the print run of books published in Iran by independent publishers has dwindled to 700 copies. We seem to have regressed to pre-Gutenberg times. Perhaps the reason for this repetition is that we cling to our past and rarely look to the future. We are forever proud of our glorious ancient history and are satisfied by it. We have adopted only a thin veneer of modernity. We drive the latest models of Mercedes and BMWs down our avenues. We use postmodern architectural designs in the construction of our homes, shopping centres and boutiques. Yet many of us still have a culture of religious zeal and fanaticism in our blood. And perhaps the reason for this repetition is also that Iran has not experienced a renaissance.
Today, another movement is under way in Iran. The country’s riot police, armed with the most modern paraphernalia purchased from European countries, stifle and subdue Iranian protesters. With the aid of one of the most advanced kinds of software, also bought from the west, thousands of websites and weblogs are filtered. Internet speed has been deliberately reduced, and as a result news is spread mostly by word of mouth in a country that boasts the greatest number of blogs in the Middle East. Iranian literature, which despite censorship had flourished during the 1980s and 1990s, has been afflicted by asphyxiation and hopelessness during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, because censorship is being practised in a most senseless and severe fashion.
Iran has the potential of being one of the wealthiest and most cultured countries. But today, according to government statistics, more than half its population lives below the poverty level, and I suspect the actual figure is even greater than this.
Consequently, Iranians are angry. For almost 30 years, political, social, and economic pressures have been imposed on them. They have not even had the freedom to choose their own manner of dress. Many work two shifts a day to earn a pittance for their family to get by on. It is no surprise that they now demonstrate in the streets. The problem, however, is that they lack an earnest leader, something they have always needed. Most of those who could, under these circumstances, lead this movement have been assassinated or crushed in solitary confinement, or have grown old in isolation in the corner of their homes. It is for these reasons that I believe history in Iran will again repeat itself. Let us assume that the Iranian people succeed in changing or reforming the current regime – what then? What do we want to do next? And there is no answer to this question.
These nights Iranians shout “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and “Death to the dictator” from their rooftops. These are the same phrases repeated on the nights of the revolution against the shah’s rule. However, a new and encouraging twist in this new uprising, whether it succeeds or is again quashed, is that in street demonstrations they walk in silence. There is no sign of those clenched fists and shouts of death to this and that. And in this silence lies a secret, which at some time in the future Iran, with all its paradoxes, will reveal to the world.
Martin Amis’s Iran fantasia
Amis’s understanding of Iran is shallow and his take on Islamism superficial. Is this the best western liberalism has to offer?
Some 20-odd years ago, not out of any sense of patriotism or self-defence, young Iranians with bombs strapped to them dived under advancing Iraqi tanks. Khomeini promised them a few dozen virgins you see. Now, as Martin Amis tells us today, that evil genius’s followers, hungrier than ever, are combining apocalyptic zeal with advanced nuclear engineering to usher in the Messiah, destroy western civilisation, and kill every remaining Iranian who isn’t a mullah or mindless fanatic.
The myth that madness has motivated Muslims throughout 1,400 years of history and continues to drive political Islam today is a pretty old one, and I must say it is getting rather boring, so it’s especially hard to understand how a figure as prolific as Martin Amis can still make a good living out of it. Nonetheless, it seems that Amis is again ready to wear the fashionable Islam expert hat, this time gracing us with his profound insights on Iran, which even if dead wrong are at least momentarily entertaining.
Amis obviously shouldn’t take up political forecasting as a second career. Consider his phrase ” … what we seem to be witnessing in Iran is the first spasm of the death agony of the Islamic Republic.” But haven’t we had this “first spasm” before? When the Mujahideen-e Khalq blew up the offices of the Islamic Republican party taking out the entirety of Khomeini’s vanguard? Or when the old fellow finally died? Or the student protests in 1999? No, really, this is it. Rafsanjani is leading prayers alongside Mousavi – it will all be over soon.
Amis makes the same mistake as countless others have done about the nature of the mysterious Mousavi: “Had Mousavi won, Obama would have rewarded Iran.” Is that the same Mousavi who before the election answered “the west should stop asking for the impossible” in response to a question about halting Iran’s nuclear energy programme? The same Mousavi whose website’s header boasts a portrait of Khomeini and whose every communiqué calls for a reclamation of the Islamic revolution?
Amis’s historical naivety is also noteworthy: “The 1979 revolution wasn’t an Islamic revolution until it was over … it was a full-spectrum mass movement, an avalanche of demonstrations and riots.” True, but it is rather curious, then, that decades of communist and nationalist resistance, not to mention the thousands abducted and murdered by the Shah’s secret police only drew out the masses after the megalomaniac sent his forces to the dusty city of Qom to beat up a few kids at a religious school and then kicked an old cleric out of the country.
Among the more sinister schemes in Amis’s essay is his narrative history of the soul of “one of the most venerable civilisations on earth … divided between Xerxes and Muhammad.” Nothing could sound worse than an English writer in the 21st century defining the essence of a foreign people in this monolithic way. With the same impulse for reduction and sheer negligence he manages to completely mistake Khomeini’s participation in a centuries-old Sufi poetic tradition that analogises spiritual ecstasy with material intoxication for some kind of repressed Persian angst. Even my own undergraduate students don’t make that mistake.
But more troubling than the follies of a novelist turned pundit is that Amis’s hyperbole represents the sad way in which the liberal intellectual tradition reacts to the challenge of a viable alternative to its secular humanist hegemony. In that vein, Amis’s comments on Iran must be seen as part of a growing intellectual reaction that in the face of decades of rising Muslim political power seems capable only of producing stomach-churning multicultural apologists or Islamophobic ideologues.
Finding the real explanations to the events in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, where political-religious experiments unfold in dozens of contexts daily, requires first interrogating our own myths and superstitions. Reason, democracy, independent thinking, and human rights – timeless universals or complex socio-historical constructions? Only then one might proceed to understand the ways in which secularism and religion, reason and insanity, modernity and Islam have all been partners locked in step on the road to the present day. There is no mystery as to why secular fundamentalists like Amis look at Islamism through the lens of the Protestant reformation – the sight of a religiously-inspired alternative to secular materialism would make a mockery of the last few hundred years of European history.
Any attempt at getting it right would also require recognising that Muslim projects in Islamism are being carried out not by medieval zombies turned contemporary robots but by real, breathing people who happen to be motivated by the same feelings of fear, dignity, rage, and hope that stir the rest of humanity. I, perhaps naively, ask at least this minimum from anyone in a position of influence who wants to talk seriously about Islam and the Muslim world.
That Amis shares the paranoid alarmism of Netanyahu and his foreign minister and is one of many suppliers of the discursive fodder needed for 21st century Euro-American imperialism is not the truly disturbing issue here. Nor is the fact that Amis has given us nothing more than false consciousness with which to understand the truly frightening world around us. More troublesome is that at this profound juncture in human history, one of liberalism’s greatest sons can do no better than to respond in this fearful, superficial way.