Comment on an Article by Vali Nasr in the New Republic
In his review of Shirin Ebadi's autobiography, Professor Nast finds her “perplexed”; this is an interesting adjective for the first Iranian, and the first Muslim woman, to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Without necessarily questioning her accomplishments, I should have chosen others.
How about opportunistic or pandering?
Soon after getting the Nobel prize for her work in Iran, Ms. Ebadi followed through with a lecture tour of the United States denouncing the latter's warmongering, Israel's use of force in combatting suicide-bombers, and extolling a beatific, “peaceful” and utterly fantastical interpretation of Islam. Not a word about Iran, though. And here we thought she had got the Nobel prize because of her work there, rather than her geopolitical insight into regional politics.
Meanwhile, in her home country Ms. Ebadi fiddled while her friends were imprisoned and tortured for criticising the regime. Indeed, she played her solicitous game so well that but for a short stint in jail (and alleged death threats), she has been left alone. Her brother was, of course, a close adviser to President Khatami – that might explain why she has been unmolested; it might also explain why she is so shy of really challenging the revolution. But that is a slur, I know, and so I would avoid making it expressly.
Other adjectives: pompous and inarticulate.
A year ago I had the misfortune of listening to one of her incoherent speeches in a very intimate setting. Disclaimer: I am perhaps miffed because of the thirty or so in attendance, I was the only Iranian, the only lawyer, the only published activist, the only … and yet she managed to ignore me completely, despite being introduced twice. Be that as it may …
The speech was supposed to be about human rights in Iran; instead, delivered in a halting staccato style, the message was all about Shirin Ebadi.
In what must be a unique feat, one after another of her sentences began with “I”. Let me explain: in Persian, much like in Italian and Spanish, the personal pronoun is never used except for emphasis. And so, the Persian version of the speech was all about the “I” of Ms. Ebadi rather than the situation of human rights in Iran. As she rambled on, I recalled her former colleague and prison mate – and now, exile and presumably persona non grata – Mehrangiz Kar and how, in an article chronlicling her torture in Evin Prison, Ms. Kar managed entirely to avoid using the first person singular … Ms. Kar does not have a brother, however, who worked for the President of Iran. Ach, that slur again. Forgive me.
“Perplexed”? No, and not even perplexing.
She belongs to that class of middle class intellectuals who, sadly for Iran and for the world, managed to find in Khomeini the “dignity” that they did not even think they had lost. (Ah, so many academics and army officers and writers and artists in my family; and all blathered the same platitude. Now I, a uniquely disengaged child of twelve, was “perplexed”: “But you work in the Royal Court; how dare you oppose the Shah?”, I blurted out once, impolitely, to a revolutionary uncle.) Much like, I might add, the millions in the streets who saw the image of the Ayatollah in the moon: both groups deluded, searching for a chimera; the one finding it in the moon, the other in an intellectual moonlight. Given what transpired, lunatics all ….
This was an excellent piece by Mr. Nasr. I suggest that the answer to the two central questions posed in this article is to be found in Paris. (Well, when in doubt, blame the French, n'est-ce pas?)
The first question is the why of Ms. Ebadi and her ilk: what happened that someone apparently as intelligent as she is – and assuming away her other, less-than-glowing characteristics – would be so besotted by the idea of a revolution? And the second is, what happened? How come the Iranian youth is no longer interested? Why have Iranians dropped out, tuned out?
As to the first, we should recall that most of Iran's intellectocracy that helped undermine the legitimacy of the Shah was educated in Paris, and mostly in the 60s. Many of these had even experienced, first hand, the riots of '68. This was a world in which the French intellectual class could barely raise itself out of slumber to denounce the slaughter of the millions in the USSR and China, where Ho Chi Minh was a hero, where Sartre could say that a few thousand killed in the cause of revolution is no big shakes. French intellectuals were the crème de la crème of Western civilisation and of revolutionary thought.
Pol Pot returns from Paris and puts three million to the sword: it's a wonder that Khomeini, who also came back from Paris (along with a host of early revolutionaries), managed to kill only in the tens of thousand.
With the West so deeply mired in a pathetic self-hatred of its own liberal ideas and ideals, why should Eastern/Iranian intellectuals profess much love for these? Infected by la Revolution and Napoleon in equal measure; seduced by the murderous and amoral existentialism of French intellectuals; blinded by burning passions and idealism, Iranian intellectuals came back, invented new words and concepts with which to assert their own helplessness (“Westoxification”), and while protesting their own victimhoom, brought about the ruin of that which had sent them to Paris to be educated, given them academic posts, appointed them as judges.
Ms. Ebadi found a dignity she did not even know she had lost, by overthrowing, upheaving, destroying the social order she did have; she bartered a monarchical heritage of millennia for an idea; thousands perished in the first wave, millions in the war that ensued, and millions more are destitute. It is the poor observer who is perplexed by the bargain.
Well, if it is all so bad, then what about now? Whither the erstwhile revolutionary fervour?
If I have no love nor a speck of respect for the pre-revolution intellos who lost my country, let me assert a profound admiration for the youth – the passive, unpolitical, fun-loving, mystical youth – whose language I do not know, whose passions I do not share, and whose religion I do not understand. I can have no love for a people I no longer know, but what I have come to know, from afar, of Iranians in the last ten years, gives me no end of pride.
It is the poor reader who is now perplexed. No longer. Yes, they made and unmade Khatami and his reforms; they elected a holocaust-denying jackass as their president; they demonstrate traces of religious lunacy in their devotionals to Hussein and the Mahdi. But, by the gods, they are become a wise people.
Iranians have learned the single most important lesson of the last two hundred years, something no other people of consequence has done: revolutions don't work. The French are still at it; the Russians return to it in fits of amnesia. But not Iran. They do not want revolution and I think I know why: having been forced to look at themselves in the polished mirror of a revolutionary society, Iranians realised they did much like what they beheld. Their souls are tired, not of change – else, why do so many look to leave Iran – but of revolt, of violence, of death, of executions, of tortures, of destruction, of having to rebuild what they have undone.
Yes, they want stability – but so do we, in the West. And what is wrong with that? I have often said that the tragedy of Palestine and the Palestinians is that Nike and Levis and Sony and XBox have not penetrated the youth market deeply enough. Give the Palestinian youth the dignity of a job and enough money for a pair of designer sunglasses, and he will stop throwing rocks. (I am being simplistic, perhaps, but I think the essence of the point is true.) The Iranian youth – a lot of them at any rate – has got a taste of Western clothing and Western culture and coffeehouses and dating … do we blame them if they would rather hold hands furtively in the parks than wave fists in the face of armed paramilitary guards? This is a people who has taken to heart as an article of faith St. Augustine's prayer. If only the pre-Revolution generation had had the serenity to consider the Shah's regime as unchangeable!
Ms. Ebadi does not speak to me. She will be a footnote long after the resilience of the Iranian soul has broken the back of these latest invaders, as we did the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Seljuks, the Ottomans, the British, the Soviets …