The Revolution and the Ancien Regime1
Ladies and Gentlemen,
You have come to this place to day,
most probably, to find some answers to certain questions you no doubt have
about my country, concerning its recent past and present conditions. I cannot
boast of any speciality I am afraid, but the friends who have organised this
colloquium have assured me that I may talk to you and present matters in a
personalised way. That is what I intend to do. Therefore, I address you simply
as an Iranian, as a woman and as a writer.
All these three capacities have been
denied me by the actual regime in
Therefore, I have every reason to be
grateful to you for giving me this opportunity to prove — at least to myself —
that I have not been stripped of all the essential attributes that make up my
existence.
I am an Iranian, but a very
perplexed one. As I have been brought up in a Persian cultural background,
nurtured on Persian literature and have imbibed Persian poetry, I can assure
you there is no trend in that culture, no passage in that literature and no
stanza in that poetry which is not anti-mullah. Don't you think I should be
perplexed, then, when I witness the people of
A thousand pities that most of you,
present here to day, do not know my mother tongue. Had you known it, you would
have appreciated the magnitude of my perplexity and the depth of my
bewilderment. Had you known it, I could have quoted verse after verse of poetry
full of sharp criticism of the clergy, page after page of caustic humour aimed
at the Moslem ecclesiastics. So, to give you a picture of what happened in
Once upon a starless
"Who?" they asked.
"You two!" answered the
owl.
The moles hurried away and told the
other creatures that the owl was the greatest and the wisest of all animals,
because he could see in the dark and answer any question.
"I'll see about that,"
said a bird, and called on the owl one night when it was again very dark.
"How many claws am I holding
up?" asked the bird.
"Two!" said the owl.
"Why does a lover call on his
love?" asked the bird.
"To woo!" said the owl.
The bird hastened back to report
that the owl was indeed the greatest and the wisest animal in the world,
because he could see in the dark and could answer any question.
"Can he see in the daytime
too?" asked a fox.
All the creatures laughed loudly at
this silly question, set upon the fox and his friends, and drove them out of
the region. They sent a messenger to the owl and asked him to become their
leader.
When the owl appeared among the
animals, it was high noon and the sun was shining brightly. He walked very
slowly, which gave him an appearance of great dignity, and peered about with
staring eyes, which gave him an air of great importance.
"He is God!" screamed a
hen and the others took up the cry: "He is God!"
So they followed him...till they
came to a concrete highway. There was a truck coming towards them at high speed.
The bird who saw it first and was very scared, asked the owl, "aren't you
afraid?"
The owl, who could not see the
truck, said, "Who?"
"He is God!" cried all the
creatures again, and were still crying, "He is God!" when the truck
hit them and ran them down.
Moral: You can fool too many people
too much of the time.
Too many Persians were indeed fooled
for too long a time to get themselves or others killed.
However, one question may be
pertinently asked: what made the Iranians think they needed a "leader"
to begin with? The reasons were abundant. I shall name a few at random:
The lack of vital individual
liberties;
The incredible intolerance of the
government
Its incomprehensible softness
towards the mortal enemies of the country;
The widespread corruption;
The massive migration of alienated
old peasants and village youths to the capital;
A huge surplus of money in an economy,
which could not absorb it all;
Sudden diminution of this flow of
cash;
Mistaking innovation for reform;
Finally, the out proportioned and
destructive criticism of the existing regime by intellectuals.
I am not going to ponder upon the
faults and shortcomings of what my friends here have chosen to call the
"ancien regime". I leave that task to all the ex's of that regime,
namely, ex — ambassadors, ex-special representatives, ex-ministers and even
ex-private secretaries to the Queen. I do advise you, however, to thumb through
their books — oh yes! They have all written books since what again my Harvard
friends call the "Revolution" — some in French, some in English, some
in Persian and some in all 3 languages. Look through them and come face to face
with a most morbid, ignorant, and tyrannical regime. Nevertheless, I do beg
you, while going through the pages to remember one thing that the authors
themselves seem to have completely forgotten, namely that they were all part
and parcel of that very regime which they attack so mercilessly.
Please do not get me wrong — most of
their harsh criticisms are well founded. The thing I find abject, however, is
that they kept quiet while they were having their share of the cake and voice
their objections now when there is no cake to share. At any rate too late —
much too late.
In this respect, I am reminded of a
story by one of our 14-century humorists and satirists: Obaid-e-Zakan. The
story is about a man marrying a young girl whom he believes to be a virgin. On
the nuptial night, however, he becomes, shall we say, wiser... The following
day the new bride is nowhere to be seen. After a thorough search, the groom
finally finds her in a shed sitting in front of a mirror serenely piercing her
ears. "Your sense of time and place is totally wrong my dear," the
groom says to her. "What you had plenty of time to pierce in your father's
house you are doing now and here, and what on the other hand, should have been
pierced here and now, was pierced long ago and elsewhere.»
Excuse the 14-century mentality of
this story but I think it very apt for our ex-high officials. Their senses of
time and place are indeed topsy-turvy! I personally would like to remind some
of them what Æsop had said in 550 B.C.: "Only cowards insult dying
majesty".
A little while ago, I mentioned that
the friends who have made our meeting to-day possible have chosen to call the
colloquium "The revolution and the ancien regime". To be quite
honest, if I wanted to stick strictly to this title I should not be talking
about the recent events in
To do so, I shall have to take you
back to the last decade of the l9 century and to the Royal Palace of
Nasser-eddin Shah, who after his return from yet another extensive and
expensive visit to Europe (on borrowed money from Russian Bankers by the way ),
is having a state banquet in Tehran.
Nasser-eddin Shah, who was more of a
minor poet than a major statesman, seated on the Peacock Throne, surrounded by
his courtiers and feeling perhaps in a poetical mood, asks his entourage:
"Why is it that we lag so far behind
"Your Majesty, the
"Nonsense!" says his
Imperial Majesty graciously, "What is law? Is it not I who is the law? »
"Aye Sire! Your Majesty is the
fountain of law. Nevertheless, perhaps some cool sprays from such a bountiful
flow of justice should be felt upon the tired faces of your Majesty's
worshipping subjects! »
The lyricism of the answer
apparently appeals to the Shah's sense of poetry. "Then go — all of you,
go and study the laws of
However, the so-called "handful of
people" the courtiers referred to did not actually want a "House of
Justice" whose "fountain of law" would be the King. They in fact
wanted a radical change; they wanted modern parliamentary democracy. They
worked hard to elaborate such a system, fought for it and finally won their
cause. Nasser-eddin Shah was dead and buried by then, and his son Mozafar-eddin
Shah was approaching the end of his reign. This was in 1906 and that was a
revolution.
That was a revolution in the sense
the term is used and understood today by the majority of people; namely, the
overthrow of an absolute dictatorship and its replacement by a parliamentary
democracy.
We have an excellent word with which
to describe the Iranian upheaval in 1979. The word is "Fetneh". "Fetneh" implies a concoction made up of sedition and
conspiracy leading to a calamity brewed with wickedness, revenge and horror.
If by "revolution" this
concoction is meant, then use it, by all means, to designate the 1979
catastrophe, use it copiously and generously with the Ayatollah’s benediction!
In this case, however, we must find,
or if need be, coin another word for what is currently referred to as English,
American or Persian constitutional revolutions. That would not be very
difficult, I assure you. After all, Adolphe Thiers, who wrote 23 volumes on the
French Revolution, after having witnessed the "Commune de Paris" in
1871, had second thoughts and decided that the word "people" should
be changed to the word "mob" wherever used in those 23-odd volumes!
Our task will be a lot easier, and more justified, I trust! Therefore, as long
as the word revolution is synonymous with liberty, equality and fraternity then
I'll continue to call the Ayatollah’s ascension to power a Fetneh or the mullahs' "coup d'État" .
Mullahs' "coup d'État" is
perhaps just as apt. And this brings us to "ancien regime". Are you
aware that in the 1906 revolution the single group whose losses were the
greatest was the clergy? In the "ancien regime", the real one, the
one prior to the 1906 revolution, the clergy was all-powerful, all influential.
Ecclesiastics had the monopoly of the educational system and the judicial
apparatus. They could make and unmake Vizirs. They could elevate or abase
Kings. They had banned women from society and forbidden them even to learn how
to write. Women were allowed magnanimously, however, to read, provided they only
read the Koran. They were not permitted to be seen or heard in public. Polygamy
was widely practised; fathers, brothers and husbands were encouraged to do away
with any of their women-folk who dared to have an independent mind or a healthy
constitution and a youthful heart.
What do you see in
Who, you may ask, gave them this
opportunity? I believe at least three distinct groups: (a) the intellectual
demagogues, (b) the extreme left, (c) the multitude of uprooted peasants — each
group, needless to say, with its own different motives and goals.
Let me first tackle the
intellectuals whom I always refer to in inverted commas, these
"cauliflowers" that Mark Twain would have seen as "nothing but
cabbages with a college education". Being anti-Shah and anti-regime had
become so terribly fashionable and such a short-cut to fame, that it was enough
for any-one with a runty artistic talent to write an article, or better still a
book, composed of a string of ambiguous slogans and nonsensical symbols to
become a celebrity. He or she would even become a national hero if through the
stupidity of censorship or SAVAK— and both these institutions showed great
aptitude for stupidity — the book was banned for a while or the author arrested
for a few days.
This was true not only of writers,
but applied equally well to film directors, painters, translators, poets,
lawyers and even hosts or hostesses of literary "salons". In short,
to be considered an intellectual, one had to be in opposition. Most of our
so-called intellectuals had become, first and foremost, professional opponents.
Hence, when the mullahs started their opposition to Shah, the first group to
join them and the most vociferous was this one. These demagogues were shouting
their heads off, knowing well that it is a general popular error to imagine the
loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare. They
became ardent Moslems overnight. They were so busy turning their rosaries and
paying homage to the clergy that they failed or chose not to grasp the excellent
opportunity offered to them for a profound reform most Persians had wanted for
a long time, namely the appointment of Shapoor Bakhtiar as prime minister. They
remained true to their character: a bunch of professional opponents! They
thought themselves perhaps too clever for the Shah, but they certainly proved
themselves too naive for Ayatollah Khomeini.
Nothing can give you a better
understanding of the situation than yet another fable by my beloved James
Thurber. This one is called "The Fairly Intelligent Fly". Allow me to
read it to you:
A large spider in an old house built
a beautiful web in which to catch flies. Every time a fly landed on the web and
it was entangled in it, the spider devoured him so that when another fly came
along he would think the web was a safe and quiet place in which to rest.
One day a fairly intelligent fly
buzzed around above the web so long without alighting that the spider appeared
and said, "Come on down."
But the fly was too clever for him
and said, "I never alight where I don't see other flies and I don't see
any other flies in your house."
So he flew away until he came to a
place where there were a great many other flies. He was about to settle down
among them when a bee buzzed up and said, "Hold it, stupid! That is flypaper.
All those flies are trapped."
"Don't be silly," said the
fly, "they're dancing." So he settled down and became stuck to the
flypaper with all the other flies.
Moral: There is no safety in
numbers, or in anything else for that matter.
The other flies in whose number our
"Fairly Intellectuals" sought safety were, as I have mentioned
before, the uprooted peasants and villagers and the extreme left.
I am not going to give you an
account of the land reform in
To stir up trouble, the extreme left
could not have wished for an easier prey or a better hotbed than the
aforementioned groups. They went to work double quick. If Lewis Carrol had
wanted to describe their activities, he would have said, "madly squeezing
a right-hand foot, into a left-hand shoe". And this is what emerged from
it: a strange and dangerous mixture of a religious-minded group, indoctrinated
with Marxist-Leninist ideology, i.e. the Mojahedin. Nothing was left out in
their training: they became excellent terrorists, glib talkers, and brilliant
propagandists. They still are. God only knows how many innocent youths they
attracted to their fuzzy ideals and how many they sent to their premature
deaths, both as the pillars and founders of the Islamic Republic and later – when denied their expected share of power by
the mullahs – as the advocates of the
Democratic Islamic Republic.
Of course, they do not like to be
reminded of the invaluable help they gave Khomeini at the beginning. When they
are, they answer like Burgess, the author of the "Purple Cow":
"Ah, yes! I wrote the "Purple cow" / I am sorry now I wrote it /
But I can tell you anyhow/ I'll kill you if you quote it!"
They were in fact very much the
"Snowballs" of George Orwell's masterpiece "Animal Farm".
The resemblance of the characters of
the book to the major actors of the Islamic Republic does not stop here, and is
indeed striking:
We had our "Mr. Jones of Manor
Farm", who locked the hen houses for the night but was too drunk to
remember to shut the pop-holes. Moreover, when the animal rebellion started he
fled and spent most of his time sitting in a taproom of the Red Lion at
Willington, complaining to anyone who would listen of the monstrous injustice
he had suffered in being turned out of his property by a pack of
good-for-nothing animals.
We also witnessed other farmers
sympathising in principle, but at heart, each of them was secretly wondering
whether he could not somehow turn Jones's misfortune to his own advantage.
We, of course, had our own
"Napoleon", the one and only pig, who after having got rid of
"Snowball", the only other rival pig, became the undisputed and
implicit leader of Animal Farm.
We had a few people resembling
"Boxer" and "Clover", those 2 carthorses, most faithful and
obedient disciples.
We even had our own cat that would
vanish when there was work to be done to reappear at meal times, always having
such excellent excuses and purring so affectionately that it was impossible not
to believe in her good intention.
We also had many "Mollies"
who very soon got sick and tired of a land where no sugar and no coloured
ribbon were to be found and got the hell out.
We too had our "Minimus"
who did nothing but create new glorious titles for the leader.
We had the exact duplicates of the
"trained dogs" who were ever ready to jump at the throat and rip to
pieces or slaughter any chicken, duck or piglet who had not said
"hurrah" in time.
We had our own brand of
"sheep" in thousands, who would be only too happy to interrupt any
speech or gathering by their interminable marches and indefatigable bleating
"four legs good, two legs bad!"
We had our "hens" too, who
were the only group who raised a terrible outcry when they first heard the pigs
were going to take their eggs away from them and made a determined effort to
thwart Napoleon's wishes.
Finally, we had our
"Squealers" whose duty was to go around and scare the underfed,
tired, miserable animals out of their skins by telling them that Jones would
come back if ever they complained.
Of course, there are some minor
differences between the book and events in
The first harvest in Animal Farm
after the departure of Mr. Jones was the biggest and with very little wastage,
whereas in
The pigs at the end of the book
start imitating human beings in order to bargain with them but in
For someone who is not a Persian and
who has not lived that grotesque tragedy of the "revolution" and
wishes to grasp the situation, to read Animal Farm is a must. To understand
what is happening today another masterpiece by the same author "Nineteen
Eighty-Four", can prove of great help. To complete your reading list,
perhaps it would not be a bad idea to add the "True Believer" by Eric
Hoffer.
Well, the time allotted to me is
almost up. I am perfectly aware that my speech has been, to say the least,
unconventional. If I have called upon certain delightful satirists to help me
draw a picture of the Greek tragedy of my country, it is because, as
Beaumarchais has said, "Je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d'être
obligé d'en pleurer". (I force myself to laugh at every thing, for fear of
being compelled to weep.) We Iranians have had enough of weeping, enough of
"sentence first, verdict afterwards", enough of religious rigour,
enough of Islamic fervour.
My conclusion will be just as
unconventional as the rest of my talk: it shall not deal with either «yesterday»
or «today» of
Something is sure and irreversible
about this future: the life of any theocratic government, be it of the existing
sort, or the softer or harsher shades which may come out of the actual regime,
or that in exile with a word Democratic attached to it, has come to an end
forever. It has been proved, once and for all, that the ecclesiastics, with or
without turbans, despise the profane virtues of sincerity and moderation. This
kind of regime may survive for a while by sheer use of force. The use of force,
however, is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove
the necessity of subduing again — and a nation is not governed which is
perpetually to be conquered. Another thing is also certain about our tomorrow,
namely, that the future can never be planned by the past but it must be built
by avoiding at all costs the mistakes of the past. What Samuel Johnson says is
true and beautiful — I shall finish by quoting him: "Whatever makes the
past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advance us in
the dignity of thinking beings".
The Iranians are in search of that
"whatever".
Thank you.
1This lecture was given
at the