Hiro on Iran

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Jul 18 23:48:23 PDT 1999


Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> said:


> [When I interviewed Hiro last night, he emphasized the class conflict
> between the young Westernized bourgeois of North Tehran and the
> religious poor and working class residents of South Tehran.]

And in his Wall Street Journal article, Hiro said:


> Equally important is to understand the class context of the fighting
> between students and vigilantes. The latter are from the
> working-class neighborhoods of South Tehran, while most university
> students are from prosperous North Tehran. It is the underlying
> social antagonism between these groups that plays out as political
> violence.

There is a pretty good article in the July 19th Nation by Afshin Molavi ("Letter from Iran," almost certainly written before the unrest) that gives a very different spin on the working class neighborhoods of South Teheran:

<quote>

"I'm tired of high prices. I'm tired of all of this unemployment. I'm tired of someone telling me I can't dance or can't read this book or watch that movie. It's gone too far, and I'm ready to fight back," said Ali, a defiant 18-year-old with long, meticulously coifed black hair and blazing blue eyes. Ali, it should be noted, is from South Teheran, site of Iran's teeming slums and the *mostazafin* (the oppressed), in whose name the revolution was fought.

In the early days of the revolution, someone of Ali's class would have seen the revolution as empowering, a validation of his Islamic identity, a chance to share in the nation's bounty, which the rich and "cultivated" North Teheranis were enjoying. But today, Ali and his South Teheran friends just want the right to dance. In a public park during a massive outdoor picnic celebrating a pre-Islamic Zoroastrian holidy, Ali and his friends sang banned Iranian pop songs from Los Angeles, widely available on the Teheran black market, and invited giggling girls to dance with them.

"O beautiful girl, like a flower, please come to my side," Ali crooned, mimicking one of those songs, much to that delight of a large crowd that encircled him, clapping their hands to the beat. "One girl to dance with, that's all we need," Ali exhorted, continuing to push the bounds of "propriety" and, indeed, law, in the severe Islamic Republic of Iran, which punishes such public displays of gaiety.

Finally, one brave young girl, her brown scarf displaying dangerously large amounts of her chestnut-colored hair, accepted Ali's exhortations and joined the circle of boys dancing. It was a defiant moment, its importance not underestimated by the crowd, who gave the girl a rousing cheer for her courage. After all, Iran's morals police, the komiteh, could punish the offending dancers harshly for the sin of dancing in public and mixing with members of the opposite sex.

But these days, Iranians are are displaying a resurgent sense of defiance. They are being led by the country's youth (60 percent of the population is under 21), who are proving to be its harshest critics, and most important, noted Teheran-based political analyst Siamak Namazi, they "have grown up with the language of the revolution and are adept at using that same language to counter conservative arguments."

<endquote>

Molavi's article makes it sound as if the generation gap were more important than the class gap. It puts the student events in a larger context with signs of real hope. Hiro comes off by contrast sounding a bit like a grumbly old-Lefter on the eve of the New Left (if one can imagine a New Left fighting for "bourgeois freedoms.") But I'm personally not equiped to judge between them.

Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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