Heard enough
It’s high time we turned a deaf ear to those
who misled the nation for quarter of a century
May 29, 2003
The Iranian
[The following is part of a debate on "Donkeys
Party" mailing list moderated by Abdee Kalantari in New
York City. The debate started with comments on a
picture of Ayatollah Hakim kissing an Iraqi boy. Roya Hakakian
is a poet in New York and Mahmoud Sadri is a sociologist at Texas
Women's University. Read Sadri's reply here.]
Dear Mahmoud,
Very few people come as highly recommended as you do. But more
than the positive reviews of your intellect what convinces me of
your good nature is the cantankerous nature of those who recommend
you. Anyone who can make Abdee and Saba laugh is surely a saint.
To this opening allow me to also add that I’ve been less
than a perfectly vigilant donkey and thus remiss at following all
the stable-related exchanges. Which is an oblique way of saying
that I’ve not read all of your emails. Hell, until a few days
ago I didn’t even know that there were two Sadris [Mahmoud,
and his identical twin
Ahmad, a sociologist at Lake Forest College].
But as I’ve been asked by the top donkey to fan the flames
of debate, I have jotted a few aar-o-teez below. To do so, I’ve
denied you your Mahmoud Sadriness, what uniquely makes you, you.
(I highly suggest that you never forgive me for it.)
For the purposes of this particular conversation, you’re
not Mahmoud but a MIRI, a personal patent not likely to be registered,
but an invention nonetheless: Male Iranian Religious Intellectual.
Why reduce you to an acronym, you’re wondering. Well, it’s
the only way we can distance ourselves from our individualities
and immediate realities and put what we have and are still undergoing
into historical perspective.
As a MIRI, you’re ultimately the heir to the 1979 revolution.
Surely you’re displeased with it retrospectively and abhor
the supreme leader as much as the next guy. But what revolution
ever went the way that made those who initially designed it ultimately
happy? I find you trying to benevolently explain what flusters some
of the rest of us. You try to bridge, surely out of good will, our
separate universes.
But given the scope of the atrocities, aren’t these universes
better off in separate orbits? You didn’t wish for truckloads
of Bahais to be hauled away from their dinner parties, never to
return home; for the infrastructure of the Iranian Jewish community,
formerly only second to Israel in all of Middle East, to be so irretrievably
dismantled; for women to go without the right to travel and divorce
and suffer as they did; for every other atrocity to have taken place
since 1979. But they did. The mullahs are the face of those atrocities.
And they are the people you want to help me understand.
How can you be certain that you understand them yourself, since
you’re not pleased with what they wreaked? What makes you
certain that you know what drives them to things they do, like kiss
little boys on the lips? Or what those kisses or touches mean to
our culture? Shouldn’t you be instead lying in bed sleepless
at night wondering about your certainties and actively casting doubt
upon them?
Haven’t the mullahs, or the culture you’re eager to
shed light on, been unpredictable even to you? Isn’t it your
historical mandate to ponder the wisdom of the rest of us? Isn’t
the authority with which you explain these kisses a function of
the social power you’ve enjoyed in the past 25 years? You
always remind others such as me how often you frequent Iran.
What you obviously cite to further prove your credibility as a
reporter, to someone like me who cannot travel to Iran, could indeed
be not a measure of your familiarity but mere flaunting of your
power. Could your sunny positions on issues be the product of the
power you have enjoy as opposed to superior insight?
Let’s not beat around the bush. I’m a type too. I’m
the non-Moslem Iranian woman who got the major shaft. Even in this
particular instance of kiss, you are the one who was ultimately
unscathed “fingering” and I, the less lucky one. Naturally
what informs your positive intellectual disposition on Iran is your
lot of power and good fortune.
What informs mine is my bleak lot. From where I stand, a long overdue
democratic movement is on the rise and I’d like it to go where
those who have been voiceless in Iran can be the ones to dictate
and interpret the culture for a change. I’d like for this
to be my time now. I’d like to hear as little as possible
about why the mullahs do things the way they do. Why rush to make
amends, to reach an understanding?
Let’s have our turn at our version of “truth commission”
first. The mullahs could indeed be pedophiles you know. And what
you so certainly declare to be non-erotic gestures could prove much
more complex than your cheerful interpretations allow. Need I point
to the recent crisis in the Catholic Church?
As far as I’m concerned, the MIRIs and any of their social
derivatives had their chance. Why let them tell us how to see things
even now? Why not remove them from power by booting them out of
intellectual office, by casting doubt on every insight they offer.
It’s high time we turned a deaf ear to those who misled the
nation for quarter of a century. What do they know anyway, given
the national pits? I want to hear from them as much as women in
America wanted to hear from men at the turn of the last century
and that is precisely as much as American Blacks wanted to hear
from Whites.
I hope that life gets -- peacefully and respectfully so -- uncomfortable
for the MIRIs as it did for WASPs in America. MIRIs should exercise
silence, reflect more than explain, introspect more than preach
for a good long time.
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