Stand By Me – In Persian And English
This moved me:
Here is the copy from the website:
“Stand by Me” On June 24, Iranian Superstar Andy Madadian went into an LA recording studio with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and American record producers Don Was and John Shanks to record a musical message of worldwide solidarity with the people of Iran. This version of the old Ben E. King classic is not for sale – it was not meant to be on the Billboard charts or even manufactured as a CD…..it’s intended to be downloaded and shared by the Iranian people…to give voice to the sentiment that all people of the world stand together….the handwritten Farsi sign in the video translates to “we are one”. If you know someone in Iran – or someone who knows someone in Iran – please share this link CREDITS: STAND BY ME Andy – Vocals Jon Bon Jovi – Vocals Richie Sambora – Electric Guitar and Vocals John Shanks – Acoustic Guitar Don Was – Bass Patrick Leonard – Keyboards Jeff Rothchild – Drums Tiffany Madadian and Nikki Lund – Background Vocals Produced by Don Was & John Shanks Recorded and Mixed by Jeff Rothchild at Henson Studio C, Hollywood, CA June 24, 2009 Thanks to Faryal Ganjehei Written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller Farsi lyric by Paksima Zakipour Video Edited by Gemma Corfield Mastered by Stephen Marcussen
More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman
It feels odd to be promoting myself and my work now, with everything that’s going on Iran, and in the context of everything I’ve been posting, but there is a good interview with me up on the blog More Babel,which is the editor’s blog for the online journal Babel Fruit. I answered questions about translation, classical Iranian literature, my own poetry and more.
One thing I said that I happen to like:
I also discovered that the most popular contemporary translations of classical Iranian poetry into English–those of Rumi by Coleman Barks and of Hafez by Daniel Ladinksi–were more concerned with spiritualizing the texts and writers they were translating than in rendering any but the most tenuous connection between their translations and the original texts, not to mention the culture in which those original texts were written and where they are still very much a living literature. It’s not that I think all translation must hew to a particular line in relation to the original text; nor do I think that either my personal dislike for Barks’ and Ladinsky’s work (neither moves me) or my objections to their motives and methods (about which more below) means that their work is bad in some absolute moral sense–though it does seem to me that it is false advertising to call Ladinsky’s work translations and that it would be more appropriate to call them “writings after Hafez,” or “versions of/improvisations on Hafez,” or some such thing. Rather, it’s that, given both the history of the translation of classical Iranian literature into English and my personal connection to that literature through my wife, my son and the many Iranian friends I have, I feel very strongly the degree to which past translations, including those of Barks and Ladinsky, have been very explicitly invested in misrepresenting Iran, its culture, its literature and, ultimately, its history. More to the point, this misrepresentation was not the misrepresentation of which all translation is guilty by definition; it was an almost willful–and sometimes fully willful–misrepresentation that grew out of the political or spiritual, non-literary agenda of the translator.
Torture in Iran: I Thought Three Times About Posting This
But I decided that, since the Iranian government has shut down just about every outlet by which people there could get there stories out, and since the Iranian government is trying so hard not only to take control of how events in Iran are shaped, but also to hide what is going on there–check out this article in particular–that it is more important to bear witness when we can and watching this video will be nothing if it is not bearing witness: not to sentimentalize the man being tortured in this video in the way that Neda has been sentimentalized, but because if we do not bear witness, then the people who perpetrated and the people who gave license to the perpetrators for this kind of thing will have won. (I will add that an Iranian friend of mine points out that the thugs in the video are speaking a language other than Persian.)
I will say it again: This video is very, very, very, very disturbing, and if you have triggers it will likely pull all of them.
A Letter From Iran: Obama Gets It Right
From The Huffington Post: 4:05 PM ET — Thanks to President Obama. The National Iranian American Council republishes a letter from an “ordinary Tehrani.”
Dear friend, if you have any contacts within the American Administration, please send them this message on behalf of us, ordinary Iranians in Iran (whose interests and concerns are very different from those of the exiled Iranians in the United States and in Europe who do not yet understand the mentality here and who have been cut off from the Iranian society for too long). Tell your contacts in the Administration that their point of view regarding Iran is by far the best position that an American Government has ever taken. We appreciate this and thank the President.
During the last two or three decades not one American president had “understood” Iran. All of them got caught in the traps of the mollahs, despite themselves having to play the bad cop .. but this time the intelligent president has decided not to join in their game, bravo.
It is normal that he is criticized vividly by most of the Los Angeles Iranians (and by most Republicans): since a long time they have been asking for just one thing : that America attack Iran and change the regime so that they get their possessions and their former jobs and privileges back, without wanting to know what today’s young Iranian wants here and now. It makes me think of the Cubans in Florida … they don’t consider the interests of their country but only what is due to them.
Why Are Iranians Dreaming Again?
[The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University who has asked bloggers to post this to their blogs.]
This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.
Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.
In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.
It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).
Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.
Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets…But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.
In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.
There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).
Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.
What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.
While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).
History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?
* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”
An Important Op-Ed Piece from a Student in Iran
You really should read this op-ed piece the NY Times, especially given the maybe-the-election-wasn’t-stolen-rhetoric coming from some sectors here in the US. An excerpt:
For instance, some American analysts assert that the demonstrations are taking place only in the sections of Tehran — in the north, around the university and Azadi Square — where the educated and well-off reside. Of course, those neighborhoods were home to the well-to-do … 30 years ago. The notion that these areas represent “the nice part of town” will come as a surprise to their residents, who endure the noise, congestion and pollution of living in the center of a megalopolis.
People who haven’t visited a city in decades are bound to give out bad directions. But their descriptions of where the protests are taking place, and why, also draw on pernicious myths of an iron correlation between religion and class, between location and voting tendency, in Iran.
This false geography imagines South Tehran and the countryside as home only to the poor, those natural allies of political Islam, while North Tehran embodies unbridled gharbzadegi (translated as “Weststruckness” or “Westernitis”) and is populated by people addicted to the Internet and vacations in Paris. It is as if political Islam withers north of Vanak Square and the only residents to be found are “liberals” who voted for the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi.
We must not assume that the engagement of members of society with their religion is uniform or that religious devotion equals automatic loyalty to a particular brand of politics. To do so is certainly to deny Iran’s poor the capacity to think for themselves, to deny that the politics of the past four years may have made their lives worse — and plays right into Mr. Ahmadinejad’s dubious claim to be the most authentic representative of the 1979 revolution. Mr. Moussavi was, let’s not forget, a favored son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a member of Iran’s original cohort of revolutionaries, and he remains a firm believer in the revolution and the framework of the Islamic Republic.
But the United States seems able to view our country only through anxieties left over from the 1979 revolution. In the “how did we lose Iran?” assessments after the overthrow of the shah, many American intelligence agents and policy makers decided that their great mistake was to spend too much time canoodling with the royal family and intellectual elites of the capital. Commentators now are worried that, by siding with the opposition today, the United States will once again fall into the trap of backing the losing side.
But the fact is, Tehran is not the Iranian anomaly it was 30 years ago. It has become more like the rest of the country. Internal migration, not just to Tehran but to other major cities, has accelerated, driven in part by the growth of universities in places like Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashad and Shiraz, and now nearly 70 percent of Iranians live in cities. The much vaunted rural vote represents not a decisive bloc for Mr. Ahmadinejad but a minimum, one that was easily swamped by the increased turnout of city dwellers, who normally sit elections out.
And, of course, Iran in 2009 — better yet, Iran on June 12, 2009 — is not the same as Iran in 1979. Just as Tehran’s neighborhoods cannot be fixed in time, the cultural lives of Iranians have greatly changed in the past 30 years. The postrevolutionary period has seen the expansion of education, the entry of women into the work force in large numbers, and changing patterns of marriage and even of divorce. These have all shaped Iranian society. The pseudo-sociology peddled by so many in the West would easily dissolve with a week’s visit.
Life Imitates Art: Iran’s Opposition and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Story of Zahhak and Kaveh)
Ferdowsi Square during an opposition rally
The connection between literature and politics is always a difficult one. Treating politics as if it were literature, politicizing literary texts, are strategies that people use to advance agendas that are fundamentally political, and often not progressive/egalitarian, in nature. Especially in connection with what is going on in Iran right now, when people are really dying and when the Iranian government is doing everything it can to isolate the entire nation of Iran so that it (the government) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repressive) order of things, to talk about life imitating art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own literature, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gratuitous intellectual exercise. Yet literature, and in this case specifically poetry, also helps people give meaning to their lives; it can inspire, and it can connect us to something larger than ourselves in ways that political feelings, not matter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often cannot. And so, precisely because people are really dying in Iran–because I really do believe, along with William Carlos Williams, that people die every day for lack of what is found in poetry–and precisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a culture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write. Perhaps connecting the unrest in Iran not only to the specific history of the Islamic Republic and the revolution out of which that republic was born–which most analysts, reasonably, are focusing on–but also to the Iranian culture that is larger and older than both the Republic and Islam, will make a difference. What that difference might be, and to whom, I have no way of knowing, but I just don’t think it is mere coincidence that the current unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for centuries: the tale of Kaveh and Zahhak from the poem commonly referred to as Iran’s national epic, Shahnameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of translating. I will include my translation at the end of this post.
Written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi in the 10th century, Shahnameh tells the story of the Iranian nation by telling the story of its kings, from the nation’s mythical beginnings right up to the moment of the Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE. One of the themes that runs through the poem is the question of how to respond to an unjust ruler. The tale of Zahhak and Kaveh is one of the narratives that explores this theme. First, though, some backstory: Zahhak is Shahnameh’s first evil king. Son of an Arab monarch named Merdas, Zahhak is seduced by Eblis (the devil in these stories) into killing his father to assume the throne, and he is eventually cursed by Eblis with a serpent growing out of each shoulder, to which he must feed one human brain per night. In other words, he must kill two people a day in order to keep the serpents fed. so, as you might imagine, Zahhak does not turn out to be a benevolent ruler, and when he conquers Iran–whose previous king, Jamshid, made himself vulnerable when he declared himself a god and so lost the “real” god’s favor–Zahhak’s cruelty kicks into high gear.
The statue of Ferdowsi in Ferdowsi Square, bedecked in green, during a rally, June 18
One night, Zahhak has a dream that disturbs him. When he asks his advisors to interpret it, they say that the dream foretells his destruction by a man named Feraydoun, who will kill him and assume the throne. Zahhak goes on a killing rampage trying to hunt Feraydoun down, and though he is unsuccessful, he does manage to kill Feraydoun’s father. Finally, out of a kind of desperation–and here is where, if you have not seen parallels to what is going on in Iran until now, the parallels start to get obvious–Zahhak summons the prince of each province in his kingdom and asks them to sign their names to a proclamation asserting that he, as their leader, has only ever been concerned with justice, righteousness and spoken only the truth. He wants this public acknowledgment so that he can raise an army with which to defeat the nemesis who is coming to challenge him. The heads of the provinces, knowing that their leader will kill them if they refuse to sign the proclamation, sign. It is at this point that Kaveh walks in, and from here I am going to let the poem speak for itself, because I think the parallels to today’s situation–a ruler afraid he will lose power, a rigged statement of approval, a (failed) attempt to appease the citizenry and opposition marches–while not exact, need no further explanation. (The poem will appear in an upcoming issue of The Dirty Goat Magazine.)
A Campaign Ad From Iran’s Election
Got this from Andrew Sullivan, where it is attributed to Karroubi, one of the opposition candidates in Iran’s recent election:
Here’s the translation:
1 (Girl in street): Defending civil rights
2 (Boy next to old man): Counterbalancing poverty/deprivation
3 (Boy pushing away donation box): Nationalizing oil income
4 (Man standing on rooftop): Reducing tension in international affairs
5 (Boy sitting next to satellite dishes): Free access to information
6 (Girl sitting besides her mother): Supporting single mothers
7 (Girl with cast): Knock down violence against women
8 (Boy): Education for all
9 (Boy infront of man locking car): Increasing public safety
10 (Girl on rooftop): Ethnic and religious minority rights
11 (Man on rooftop): Supporting NGOs
12 (Girl in front of wall): Public involvement
13 (Boy and girl): We have come for change
14: Change for Iran
Now, a campaign ad is a campaign ad, and it’s very easy to be cynical about them. Just imagine for a minute, though, in the context of Iran, how chutzpadik–it’s a Yiddish word meaning audacious, ballsy, and it’s the only one that fit my response to seeing the ad–it was for an Iranian politician to say he wants to accomplish these things; and notice as well the prominence given to two issues related specifically to women’s status.
Get The Word Out
One more addition before I have to get to work: Multiply this video–which is very graphic and disturbing, so viewer beware–many times over, and you’ll have a sense of what is going on and what is at stake:
Edited to add: Iran’s government has made it virtually impossible for foreign media–or any media other than its own, actually–to cover the demonstrations, making it even more important that people who can do what they can to help Iranians get the word out about what’s going on there. Today will be an important day. The government has scheduled a pro-Ahmadinejad rally (which means they bus in loads of people from wherever they can find them) to coincide, more or less, with the opposition ally scheduled for today. They, the government, I am sure, is hoping that there will be violence between the two groups which they can use as an excuse to step in with even more violence; and if there is no violence, I am sure the government will find a way to try an manufacture some. This is from the link to Reuters above:
TEHRAN, June 16 (Reuters) – Iran on Tuesday banned foreign media journalists from leaving their offices to cover protests on the streets of Tehran following the country’s disputed presidential elections.
The Culture Ministry said journalists could continue to work from their offices but that it was cancelling press accreditation for all foreign media.
“No journalist has permission to report or film or take pictures in the city,” a Culture Ministry official told Reuters.
The announcement came after three days of streets protests against Iran’s election results, during which at least seven people were reported to have been killed.
The demonstrations have riveted world attention on the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter which is locked in a nuclear dispute with the West.
Defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi cancelled a planned rally on Tuesday in a move he said aimed to protect his supporters’ lives. Backers of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned a counter rally at the same site.
I am posting again about Iran because I heard on NPR this morning that Iran’s state-run news agency has reported that the “leaders” of the protests that have been going on since the election “results” were announced have been arrested with guns and explosives. Almost certainly, this is an attempt to discredit the protesters, Moussavi and all the others involved. It is very difficult for Iranians to get word out about what is actually happening in the country, and it is very difficult for them to get news of what the world outside Iran is saying/doing about the situation in Iran. Support for the protesters seems to be spreading. University professors have been resigning; I have read or seen a video (it’s hard to keep track of which) that sanitation workers have joined the protests. And here is a video of hospital workers demonstrating because the baseej–paramilitary police–have been shooting and killing people. (My wife and I listened to an interview with one woman who alleged that she the baseej put a gun in a young man’s mouth and pull the trigger. Would not surprise me if it’s true.)
If you’re on Facebook, check out this man’s profile, and here is a Facebook photo album you should see. And I want to post again a link to the Huffington Post liveblog, the most recent posting at which demonstrates that I was correct about the tack a President McCain would have taken in response to what’s going on there (because of course he knows far better than the Iranians and other experts who have been advising the Obama administration on how to deal with Iran). What’s objectionable here is not that he wants to speak out about, say, the violence that we’ve all seen on TV, but rather his insistence that “America leads,” even when we are being told by the people with the most at stake that it is precisely a time for America not to lead:
SENATOR JOHN McCAIN: Well, we lead; we condemn the sham, corrupt election. We do what we have done throughout the Cold War and afterwards, we speak up for the people of Tehran and Iran and all the cities all over that country who have been deprived of one of their fundamental rights. We speak out forcefully, and we make sure that the world knows that America leads – and including increased funding for part of the Farda, Iranian free radio.
Finally, something else I found on The Huffington Post, that I don’t have the technical knowledge to fully understand, but I am assuming there are people who read here do: Given the extent to which the Iranian government has blocked Internet access, people have been setting up proxies for Iranians to use to get the word out about what’s going on in their country. Here are two sites with instructions for how to go about setting up a safe proxy for such use. I have no idea what risks are involved, and I have no idea what technical issues are involved. If I were running Windows, and I could do it, I would do it. I am posting it here in the event that anyone reading is so inclined.
Post-Election Violence In Iran
So my wife and I spent a few hours this evening glued to our computer screens reading and watching the news coming out of Iran about the post-election protests and violence that took place throughout the country after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “victory” was announced. (If you’re on Facebook this page is a good place to start looking, and there are also, of course, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and all the other major news outlets.) My wife talked to her brother in Tehran, who told us that protests went on well into early morning hours; there was gunfire in the area of Tehran where he lives–and it’s important to note that the protests spread to other cities as well: Shiraz, Mashhad, Rasht, Tabriz (which was under curfew last I heard), and I read that Ahvaz was under curfew as well–and one of my Facebook friends posted that an Iranian blogger she knows claims 50 people are dead. One guy on Twitter said his father had a truckload of ballots slated for burning; another said his uncle, a cop, told him they had orders to burn ballots; and everyone is saying the streets of Iran have not seen this kind of unrest since the Revolution in 1979. This image is from TehranBureau
And here is a YouTube video that you can find on TehranBureau’s page of videos:
I have seen pictures of buildings set on fire; people using twitter to report violence at universities, the rumored resignation of the faculty from one university and more; and of course we can never know just how many of these individual reports are accurate, but I have read some interesting, initial political analysis. Here is an excerpt from Juan Cole’s brief piece on TehranBureau:
Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen
1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.
2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)
3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.
4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.
5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.
6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.
I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.
But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.
As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.
The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.
They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.
This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.
The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.
This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.
I have been reading this and reading through all the material I can find because of course I feel personally involved. I worry for the safety of my in-laws who are in Tehran; I think about the Iranians I know and the aspirations they have for the country they were, most of them, forced by the Islamic Revolution to leave, either because their lives were in danger, or their parents' lives were in danger, or because they just couldn't take living under a totalitarian theocracy anymore; and I think as well about how a McCain administration might have reacted to what is going on in Iran now, and I am grateful I don't have to find out how close what I think would come to the truth; and I think about how the circumstances of this election in Iran leaves President Obama with no good choices in terms of how to proceed with his agenda for engaging that country, and of the cynicism of the people here who were hoping for an Ahmadinejad victory precisely because they wanted to see Obama's strategy of engagement scuttled. I think about all this and I really don't know what to say about it that hasn't already been said, and yet I feel like I have to say something.
While my wife and I were eating dinner, she said that she hopes this time does not turn out to be like other times, when there were a couple of days of protest and then everything went back to the status quo, and I suggested that will depend on what the leadership of the opposition does. If they find a way to keep the pressure on the regime, it seems to me, people will be willing to keep coming out into the streets. If Moussavi caves in, however, what purpose would be served by continuing to protest? And while we were talking about this, I remembered something I read in the Introduction to A. Hart Edwards' 1911 translation of Saadi's Bustan. On page 16, Edwards writes:
Although Persian is only yet in the process of readjusting her ideas of government and the prerogatives of rulers, principles more advanced than seem compatible with despotism have been for many centuries current among her people in theory, at least, if not in practice. Muhammad said that a little practice with much knowledge was better than much practice with little knowledge. On that ground Persia has defence [sic], for the knowledge certainly was there. What could better describe the true relationship between king and people that Sadi’s thirteenth-century epigram?
Subjects are as the root and the king is as the tree,
And the tree, O son, gains strength from the root.Not many months ago the autocratic tree at Teheran [sic] was rudely severed from its root; perchance the successors of Abu Bakr [Saadi's patron and ruler] were not of those to whom “the words of Sadi are agreeable” [a phrase that occurs at various times throughout Bustan].
Edwards was referring to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, which was going on while he was making his translation, and he was saying that many of the values that drive resistance to autocratic government have been part of Iran’s culture for centuries, even though Iran’s rulers had rarely acted on them. More specifically, though, Edwards was making the point that Saadi is one of the poets in the Iranian canon for whom those values are most central to his writing. I have written elsewhere about Saadi’s most famous lines, and how they need to be understood not merely as important liberal sentiment, but as a speaking of truth to power:
All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.
These lines, however, are about a philosophy, not a practice, and Saadi was also concerned with saying something about the practical aspects of ruling. The poem from which Edwards took the couplet he quoted, for example, is the first in the chapter called “Justice.” It is a poem the lesson of which the Islamic Republic has shown, in this election, that it has not yet learned. Here is the first strophe:
I’ve heard that with his dying breaths Nushirvan
advised his son Hormuz on how to rule:
“Guarantee the poor their peace of mind.
Do not allow your privilege to bind you.
None who call your kingdom home will be
at peace if privilege is all you live for.
No judge will find a shepherd innocent
who slept and let the wolf among the sheep.
Go! Stand guard! Protect their impoverished lives.
The crown you wear would not exist without them.
A tree, my son, is nourished through its roots.
Just so, a monarch draws his kingdom’s strength
through those he rules. Do not betray their trust
unless you have to; you’ll find yourself rootless.
Nushirvan was a king known for his compassion and sense of justice; Hormuz, on the other hand, was known as cruel and unjust.
It’s hard sitting here in the United States to take as seriously as Iran would like me to its assertion that it is a democracy. Even had there been no electoral fraud, it is difficult to see, from the perspective of a country where there is a separation of church and state, and where there is no ideological body that approves the religious integrity of political candidates before they run, how a country where such a body exists, where only the governmentally approved candidates are allowed to run for president, can be called a democracy. Nonetheless, the people of Iran chose in this election to endorse that process by turning out to vote in record numbers. This time, for them, it was personal. The Iranian government betrayed them personally and was, at least for a day and a night, as rootless as Saadi predicted it would be. Hopefully, those roots will not allow themselves to be forced back into the same old soil, but will find instead fertile new ground.
