As a member of several women’s book clubs in Toronto, Parvin Najafi* enjoyed the get-togethers and discussions with her neighbors and friends. An immigrant to Canada from Iran in 1996, she joined one such club in 2003 when she heard they would be reading Azar Nafsi’s bestseller, “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”
     But during the discussion she found herself dismayed at her neighbors’ lack of knowledge about life in Iran under the shah, before the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979. “There was this view that everything was really rosy and beautiful in Iran before the ayatollahs took over,” she said in a recent phone interview. “They had an impression of the shah’s regime as almost enchanting. ‘What a beautiful queen the shah’s wife was!’ some would say, as if her beauty would do anything for anybody. But then all of a sudden these dark Islamic forces apparently descended on Iran and destroyed everything. They spoke as if the ayatollahs had just parachuted down from space.”
     Now in her early 50s, life in Toronto is not Najafi’s first exposure to western culture. In the early to mid-1970s, she was a student in the United States at Southern Illinois University (SIU)-Carbondale. I met Parvin there in 1974 while also a student. She was 20 years old and a recent refugee from a traditional arranged marriage in Iran. At that time, the SIU campus was home to a large Iranian student population, many of whom were actively engaged in opposing another form of tradition-the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Much of this opposition centered on campaigns in defense of the 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners Amnesty International estimated were then being held in Iran’s jails and torture centers.
     In Carbondale, Parvin and I with other students and SIU faculty organized a chapter of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI), a U.S.-based civil liberties group that was mounting highly visible campaigns in defense of such political prisoners as the poet Reza Baraheni and the sociologist Vida Tabrizi.
     Unlike the recent reception given Iran’s current president, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, Washington in those days regularly feted the shah and his empress wife on their U.S. visits. Such was the image of these “crowned cannibals,” as Baraheni once described them, that even New York high society and artists such as Andy Warhol considered the Pahlavi’s worthy of their gushing hypocrisy. Fittingly, the shah was one of the esteemed guests at the 1969 funeral of President Eisenhower, whose administration had orchestrated the funeral dirge for Mossadegh’s Iranian democracy.
     Groups like CAIFI and others countered the shah’s western image as a “civilized modernizer” by documenting and publicizing the regime’s record of human rights abuses. More important, within Iran itself the regime’s corruption and brutality were setting the stage within Iran for the massive popular revolt that would topple the shah from power in early 1979.
     What’s routinely ignored now in the U.S. media is the great, if aborted, opening for progressive social change the shah’s downfall offered. This was not simply because the shah was removed from power, but because of the way he was removed from power. For more than a year prior to the regime’s collapse, sustained and massive popular anti-government mobilizations had rocked the country. The protests reached a peak on Sept. 7, 1978 when an estimated 2 million people marched through the streets of Tehran demanding the shah’s abdication. In response, the shah declared martial law and ordered his army to fire on demonstrators. Two thousand people were killed that day.
     But the days when the shah could rely on raw force to subdue the people were over. In response, the nation’s 30,000 oil workers went on strike, effectively shutting down the entire Iranian oil industry. It was the beginning of the end for the Peacock throne. Even more factory, office, and school strikes were then set in motion, proving a mortal dagger to the shah’s ability to rule. It was a mosaic of protest that drew its inspiration from the rage, blood, and sorrow of generations of Iranian workers, students, women, slum dwellers, and soldiers.
 
     A Country of Contradictions
     With news of the collapse of the shah’s government, Parvin had returned to Iran within days, excited and hopeful for her country’s future. As a feminist, she was one of the organizers of the first International Women’s Day march in Tehran on March 8, 1979. Tens of thousands of women joined that march, the focus of which was opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini’s just declared edict that women must observe hejab, the Islamic code governing dress in public. From the speaker’s platform that day, Parvin challenged Iran’s new leaders to support women’s demands for equality in every area of society. Without it, she said, the Iranian revolution will remain incomplete, a limited and ultimately failed experiment in liberation.
     But in a country where a woman’s word in legal proceedings was worth only half a man’s, the sight of thousands of women marching for equality, for the right to dress as they please, was infuriating to Iran’s clerics and fundamentalist followers. Indeed, gangs of angry men had menaced the march that day. The years of American support for Iran’s dictatorship had also taken a heavy toll on organized political opposition. There were no mass secular political or labor parties of any significance capable of decisively challenging Ayatollah Khomeini and the religious clerics for leadership. The latter through the nation’s extensive network of mosques had been the one independent organization to survive more or less intact the shah’s crushing repression.
     In the aftermath of the shah’s departure, Iran was a country of contradictions. Mostly, it was a nation in flux. At first it was as if the entire nation were waking from a long, paralyzing coma. In the swell of freedom that followed the shah’s overthrow, dozens of new or formerly underground political parties began to openly organize. The largest opposition group in the country was the Mojahedeen Khanegh (People’s Majority), an Islamic socialist group that had played a role in mobilizing resistance to the shah. In the first months following the shah’s departure, the group’s newspaper, Mojahed, saw its daily circulation climb to 600,000.
     The political and social fervor was such that one government minister complained that constant political discussions in the workplace were hurting the economy. But this freedom would prove short-lived. Within a year, the Khomeini government began to crack down on independent politics and grassroots activism. On a single night in June 1981, hundreds of members of Mojahedeen Khanegh were reportedly executed after government troops broke up a Tehran demonstration organized by the group. Thousands more were imprisoned.
     Parvin herself found her life in danger twice. She had joined a small socialist group, Hezb-e Kargaran-e Socialist (HKS), and moved to Isfahan to work as a political organizer. But life was more circumscribed outside Tehran. In July 1979, the group’s office was surrounded by an armed gang operating under the unofficial sanction of the government’s Committees of the Islamic Revolution. Parvin and others in the private home they used as an office narrowly escaped assault, saved only by the attention of curious neighbors who had gathered in the street.
     Apprehensive, she and five other HKS members met a week later in a quiet park in the village of Lenjan, about 25 miles from Isfahan to discuss what to do. They had met for only a few minutes when a Committee security vehicle pulled up and they were arrested. Ironically, the police did not know anything about their socialist beliefs. They were being arrested because the park groundskeeper had reported a lone woman sitting in public with five young men.
     The group was transported to Isfahan and held for several hours. Later, they were put on a mini-bus with two armed guards and told they were being returned to the security office in Lenjan. But in reality their trip had another purpose. As they exited the security building through a back alley, they were shocked to see dozens of men lingering in the alley, armed with machetes, chains, knives, and brass knuckles. As their bus turned onto the road, the men climbed in pick-up trucks and on motorbikes and began to follow.
     “I realized of course that they wanted to kill us,” says Parvin. “I’d heard that two members of Mojahedeen Khanegh in Isfahan had recently been killed this way, just taken to some place outside the city and murdered, hacked to death. I was sure this would also be our destiny.”
 
     What Would Mohammed Do?
     But then something extraordinary occurred. As they drove the main road between Isfahan and Lenjan, Parvin searched the faces of the two guards. In desperation, she thought perhaps there was some way to appeal to the conscience of these young men. One of the guards had a more sympathetic look about him, so Parvin decided she would try to talk to him. She asked his name. Muktari, he responded.
     “Muktari, do you consider yourself a true believer of Islam?”
     “Of course,” he responded. “What kind of question is that?’
     “What about Imam Ali [the first Shiite Imam]? Is he your role model?”
     “Of course. Why do you ask this?”
     “‘The prophet Mohammed, do you take him as your role model?” Again, yes.
     “Muktari, do you remember the story we learned as children in mosque about the Jewish woman who every morning would throw ashes and dirt at the Prophet Mohammed, mistreat him? But when she got sick how Prophet Mohammed went to her house with flowers asking after her health? Do you know this was how Prophet Mohammed treated people who believe differently?”
     The guard did not answer. Parvin thought she better keep talking. “Do you remember how Imam Ali as caliph had sent instructions to all his generals and governors that if he heard that any of them had taken even a ring off the hand of a Jewish woman or a Christian woman because they were not of the same faith, how he would dismiss them and tell them that they were not of his faith?”
     Muktari nodded his head. Yes, he knew the story. Parvin thought it was time to ask the question that was really on her mind. “Muktari, do you think Prophet Mohammed would agree with these people who want to kill us? They say we think differently, but we have not even being tried or convicted of any crime. Would Prophet Mohammed agree we should be killed just because they say we are infidels?”
     What happened next Parvin says will remain forever burned in her memory. “I was so nervous. This guard was averting my gaze, so I wasn’t sure what he was thinking. But then he just turned toward me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are right. I am not going to let them touch you. I swear to you I will not.’ Then he yelled to the driver to stop the bus. I’m sure the vigilantes thought now they were going to get their hands on us. But Muktari opened the door of the bus and from the steps loudly ordered the men to leave. We were his prisoners, he declared, and he was not going to allow them to touch us.”
      The thugs were not easily dissuaded. “They started arguing with him, insisting he hand us over,” Parvin recalls. “They tried bargaining, saying they were just going to kill one of the men and myself. But Muktari was absolutely adamant now that they leave. Some of them protested loudly that the agreement was to hand us over. Muktari shouted that he would shoot anyone who made a move toward the bus. Then he cocked his weapon to fire. I looked over at the other guard, worried that he would oppose Muktari. But he just looked confused and made no move. Then Muktari ordered the driver to go. So we took off again with this gang following us. Fortunately, we made it safely to the security office in Lenjan where we were told to call someone to come for us. Some of the vigilantes were still outside the Committee headquarters. So Muktari went up on the building’s flat roof and again threatened to shoot anyone who didn’t leave immediately. Finally, they left.”
 
     Another World is Possible
     Parvin says she still reflects often about the incident in Isfahan. “We were saved by the humanity of this young man who was our guard. I tell everyone I owe my life to Muktari.” Notably, the same circumstances a year later would almost certainly have found them dead, she says. In time idealistic people like Muktari would be purged from the security ranks. As the Islamic Republic consolidated its power, it would become far less likely that an individual would act on his own conscience in such circumstances. Parvin adds that she never saw Muktari again.
     As a young activist, Parvin believes she made many mistakes, most of which involved underestimating how difficult a path would confront anyone advocating feminist and socialist ideas in post-shah Iran. But she wants people to remember the 1979 revolution was about more than the rise of Khomeini or the taking of U.S. hostages by his supporters.
     “The rule of Ayatollah Khomeini, the birth of the Islamic Republic, was not a foregone conclusion,” she says. “When the shah fell, there were many different political groups vying for influence. There was a great spontaneous democracy that erupted in which everybody had a shot at trying to win popular support. In the first few elections, there were socialists and other progressives on the ballot. Left-wing opponents of Khomeini advertised and were reported on in the major newspapers. But none of the left groups were elected to parliament. In reality, they were mostly on the fringe, with few roots in the country. As the fervor of the early days after the shah’s overthrow began to wane, the ayatollahs realized they didn’t have to put up with these people. They could dispense with them. That was their thought. But at the beginning, they weren’t sure whether they could move against the secular left and progressives. They weren’t sure of their power.”
     As in 1979, Iran today remains a country oppressed by contradictions. Poverty and class inequality remain. Women are still subject to blatant legal discrimination. Democratic liberties are violated with regularity. Evin prison remains. But what also stands unchanged is a U.S. foreign policy that for decades has considered whether democrats or dictators govern Iran as secondary to whether Iran functions as a friendly client state of American foreign policy.
     In a sense, the rise of the Islamic Republic represents the historical blowback of decades of U.S. support to a “westernizing” tyrant who systematically crushed all expressions of secular and progressive dissent. Consider as well that Saddam Hussein’s military assault on Iran in 1980 was not opposed by the Carter administration and was later actively supported by the Reagan administration. The consequent war climate only further enabled Iran’s clerics in their campaign to crush independent politics and democratic dissent.
     Now in 2007 the American public is expected not to think about the long-term impact of U.S. foreign policy on Iran. Instead, we’re supposed to live in the here and now of duplicitous White House saber rattling about the “Iran threat.” In the world of Fox News, it is as if the ayatollahs did indeed just parachute down from outer space. It is a political framework in which not only historical illusion, but irony abounds. Thus, the U.S. Senate sees fit to deem Iran’s Revolutionary Guard organization a “terrorist” group guilty of interfering in Iraq, while this same Senate continues to fund the overwhelming interference of 160,000 U.S. troops in the affairs of Iraq.
     Meanwhile, talk media hawks such as CNN’s Glen Beck and Fox News host Sean Hannity issue nightly bombast about how Ahmadinejad must be stopped before he attacks Israel or develops nuclear weapons. Never mind that any serious Iran analyst knows Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rhetoric is just regurgitated Khomeini rhetoric from the 1980s. Anti-Zionist, yes. A call for war, no. But what if it turns out Iran is secretly developing uranium enrichment for weapons purposes? Would this be the action of “crazy” people, or a strategic defense undertaken by a country situated between two nations recently invaded by the United States, and which itself is branded by the invader nation as a member of a global “Axis of Evil?” With Israel widely believed to be nuclear armed, would it be incomprehensible if Iran’s leaders did choose to develop such weapons? Such is the inexorable, maddening logic of modern global conflict. Is it any wonder now that so many thinking people are left weary with cynicism and hopelessness at the violent state of world affairs?
     Myself, I’ll take some heart from the story of Parvin and Muktari. In the drama of their meeting, they remind us of a world beyond corrupt shahs and reactionary ayatollahs, neo-con lunatics and war-mongering talk show hosts. This is the more humble world of ordinary people who define their lives not for opportunistic political reasons or love of power or because they have a lucrative media contract, but because they believe in basic justice.
     This is the world of the ordinary Iranians who six years ago held a moment of silence for the victims of September 11. It is the world of Americans who marched on October 27 to bring American troops home from Iraq. It is the world of both Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis who want both foreign troops out of their country and an end to sectarian violence. And it is the world now of people who have the power to stop a new war with Iran.
     This is not a world a man like Dick Cheney understands. But as Parvin did on a long-ago summer night, it is a world we catch glimpses of now and then. It remains a world worth believing in.
 
• Parvin Najafi is a pseudonym.
 
 
 
 

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