In the words of the inestimable mad scientist, Dwayne Monroe, excelente!
Not wanting to hijack Yates' thread, I want to respond to Chuck's claims about the murder of a woman being somehow pivotal. Iran has plenty of blood on its hands already. I won't detail the history; it's available on Teh Goog (tm). I do want to quote some about Shirin Ebadi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_Ebadi) with whom Azadeh Moaveni co-wrote Shirin's memoirs -- the first round (the second is likely to recount the much more grim history she's lived).
It's not a story only about Shirin khanoum, but about the events surrounding her work with Moaveni just after the election of Imadickinajar. These events illustrate what was about to befall Iranians, especially women, as conservatism again overtook society after they'd struggled to bring a modicum of freedom to their lives: they'd been hoping to maintain this, which for Moaveni, is a world where it was no longer possible that Iranians would be told exactly what to wear, say, watch, and do by a perpetually divided theocracy.
I'm quoting a lot, mostly because it's hard to say it any better than Moaveni because she captures what is so difficult to capture. And her story reflects what is happening in Iran, simply through illustration. Consider the story of Dubai, which she partly tells below. What she is talking about is a bigger trend: the huge brain drain that has afflicted Iran for years. Young people from many walks of life simply leave Iran. The wealthy emigrate easily, the middling class do so with hardship. Some just chuck their educations and come to the West, throwing their fate to menial labor -- anything better than to stay behind. (If you want to compare: the entitled babies who think they're owed something are probably the ones who emigrated already. The people *in* Iran, who could otherwise leave, are there because they *love* their country and they really do want to make it better: the roads, the arts, the schooling, the buildings, the medicine, etc.)
In August 2005, Imadickinajar announced his selections to parliament, two of which were implicated in political killings. One was behind the 1998 slayings of Dariush and Paraveneh Forouhar. (http://www.pen.org/freedom/parvaneh.htm -- where you can read about her lifelong struggle against tyranny and the struggles of women in Iran. ) The Intelligence Ministry sent assassins to stab them into pieces in their home (She was stabbed 23 times, he 12), leaving their body parts to be discovered by their children. The daughter, Parstou, is a friend of Moaveni's. That evening, they dined together, along with Shirin khanoum who'd represented the family of the dissidents in court.
"When I look back on the early months of the Ahmadinejad era, my recollections of this evening are more vivid than any other, mostly because it was so tinged with fear. For Shirin and Parstou... these appointments were not simply a distressing shift toward radical governance but tantamount to a renewed death sentence. When a man you believe plotted and sought your death is put forth to head a government ministry, it is difficult not to consider this a license for him to return to his fatal agenda.
The government had assigned Shirin two security guards, allegedly out of fear of an attack on her life. Recently the guards had told her that the police had received credible information of an imminent threat, and had instructed her to begin wearing a bulletproof vest."
"Our debate went around in circles, and we concluded that one cannot properly assess the security prescriptions of a government that itself previously conspired to kill you."
...
(Later, when leaving), "[a] couple recognized Shirin khanoum... and stopped to greet her excitedly. With her work appearing less frequently in newspapers (cautious editors were likely trying to avoid storied that would get their papers banned), and with the online news site she wrote for now censored by the authorities, Shirin khanoum's presence in Iranian life had grow muted in recent months. Watching the shining faces of the couple who were speaking to here, I realized just how successful the state campaign had been. Even I, her co-author ... was guilty of forgetting just how much she meant to people."
She leaves to visit Dubai for a story.
"Along with hundreds of thousands of other Iranians in search of a freer life and superior business opportunities, they had moved to Dubai, which had become a sort of Persian satellite in the United Arab Emirates. ... Iranians had created out of Dubai and Iranian city; the distance lent itself to commuting, the government permitted unrestricted travel, inexpensive airlines, and a sprawling Iranian embassy facilitated all this coming and going making the emirate accessible to a hub of capital and culture. Painters we knew now regularly held gallery exhibitions in Dubai, and Homayoun, the musician son of Iran's foremost vocalist, Mohannad-Reza Sharjarian, had chosen to establish himself there.
Looking at the gulf's placid waters, i was stuck by the peculiar twists of the region's history. Today, all these Iranians had fled the repressive Islamic rule of their homeland for an Arab state, while in the seventh century, it was the Arab conquest of Persia that had delivered Islam to Iranians in the first place. Stripped of their ancient religion, their literature, and their history, the Persians sought to preserve vestiges of their old traditions over centuries, crafting poetry and myth around their epic kings and resisting the invaders by simultaneously adapting and Persianizing their faith and language. Fourteen centuries later, it was Dubai, an Arab outpost the size of Rhode Island, that was hosting Iranian painting and music, while homegrown Islamic theocrats labeled the Persian fine arts "Western garbage."
Talking with an artist about life in Dubai for her story, they discuss the prospects, post-election.
"The only truly annoying thing actually happened to me this morning on the way to the airport," I said. (At the women's security check) "a female security guard took me aside.
"Too short," she barked. "Sleeves, manteau, jeans. All too short."
That summer, the police had announced they would "deal in a serious manner" with women who flouted "proper" Islamic dress codes. They had made the pronouncement every summer for the past seven years, and not once had the rules actually been enforced in a "serious manner." Women continued wearing short coats and pushed back veils, treating the announcement like the toothless paternalistic griping they had been subjected to as teenagers on the way out the door. That year, the judiciary and another branch of the police had even contradicted the police department's warnings in newspaper interviews, insisting the country's security forces were focused on financial corruption and serious moral issues, such as prostitution.
"I'm accustomed to traveling in this manteau, and frankly, it's not that objectionable," I told the guard. Compared to what young women wore about the streets of Tehran, it was positively demure.
"Don't you read the newspaper?" she said.
"Yes, don't you? The head of the judiciary contradicted the police warning."
"Well, you're just going to have to take something long-sleeved out of your luggage and change."
"I'm going to miss my flight, and I don't have time for this," I said curtly.
When I first arrived in Iran, fresh and green from northern California, I had obeyed like a schoolgirl in such situations, naively deferential to authority, certain the worst could not happen to me, of all people Only when the worse (arrest, near arrest, public humiliations, and so forth) befell me, repeatedly, as a result of my submissiveness, did I learn to respond like the Iranian young people of my generation: with loud, shrill confrontation. This was the rather simple trick by which most young Iranians managed to evade the bullying ways of the Islamic system: shouting down the enforcers, daring them to engage in hostile, full-fledged confrontation. it sounds counterintuitive, but it was actually effective. Very often the authority figure in question was either too young, cowed, bored, or poorly paid to deal with an angry female whose shrieks typically gained her the solidarity of passers-by.
I described this kind of resistance in my first book as the culture of "as if," a mode that involved behaving "as if" most of the rules did not exist. Although it was technically illegal to reveal locks of hair, listen to music, read censored books, and consort with members o the opposite sex, Iranian young people rendered these restrictions meaningless by ignoring them. In pushing back this way, they had reasserted some control over their daily lives. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that it meant that the authorities would never again be able to impose their harshest codes, that the day of telling Iranians exactly what to wear, say, watch, and do were over. The mullahs could not, after all, do battle against an entire generation, I thought.
The rebelliousness of Iranian youth often led outside observers to conclude that they were willing to confront authority over more meaningful , or more overtly political, ways. But I never found this to be the case. Every few months an editor at Time would ask whether we could do an "Iranian youth at boiling point" story, and I would explain that Iranian youth weren't even heating up yet. that they were willing to shout down a police officer or flirt during a public Islamic ritual meant mostly that they were concerned with freedom in their immediate ten-foot radius. Beyond that, the risks involves in rebellion swiftly outgrew the rewards. ...
At the airport, on my way to Dubai, the guard let me pass through the gate, through she first made me sign a ta'ahod promising not to repeat my offense. Certain she would toss it out without a glance, I signed it Googoosh, the name of a famous Iranian pop diva...."
She goes on to argue to her friends that the incident wasn't worrisome. It had been, after all, the airport of the Revolutionary Guards, Imam Khomeini airport (IKIA). It represented the "heavy-handedness one should expect of an establishment run by the Revolutionary Guards."
she also argues that an important detail is likely to mean that the incident was isolated. This is because, she thinks, "Ahmadinejad himself doesn't support this kind of harassment" since he had "said in a public speech that the country's problem is not the hejab, which I think made him look quite sensible."
She continues: "At the time, I believe Ahmadinejad. I thought his approach to hejab... was a cunning way to win over educated, urban Iranians who would be wary of his hard-line religious views."
"Like so many people at the time, reluctant to brace for the worst, I looked everywhere for hopeful signs that under this new president perhaps our lives would not change so dramatically." (from Honeymoon in Tehran, pp 91-8)
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws