Children of Paradise (67 page)

The Iranian nation wanted and deserved respect, Mousavi insisted. “A great nation doesn’t tolerate degraded elections with fixed results,” he said. “When a nation becomes great, its public servants can no longer tell the people what to eat, where to go, whom to elect and whom or what to trust.” Iranians wanted sound economic management. They did not want a state that attacked laborers for demanding wages or assaulted women for demanding rights. “
The majority of people here
like
one another,” he said. “They do not want to be divided into the Party of God and the Party of the Devil, nor into humans on one side and dirt and animals on the other.”

Mousavi called on the regime to release political prisoners, free the press, allow political parties and demonstrations, revise the country’s election laws, and make the president accountable. These demands became the Green Movement’s charter, and they defined the movement as a civil rights campaign. Five respected reformist intellectuals outside the country signed their names to Mousavi’s demands, appending additional calls for the independence of the universities, the seminaries, and the military from politics, and for an elected judiciary and elected leaders at all levels. The signatories included Akbar Ganji and Abdolkarim Soroush.

What Mousavi demanded of the regime was basic. What he demanded of his followers was transcendent.
In an October statement, Mousavi included a meditation on the dignity of the oppressed that deserves a place
in the global canon of resistance literature. The formal structures of the state, Mousavi reminded his followers, were but a small share of reality. The lives of Iranians gave those structures meaning and substance. Symbols could be forced on people, but meanings were inalienable.

“The superficial structures can arrest the children of this revolution and imprison them like criminals and dress them up in degraded clothing, but the people can look at those images and feel pride, and create heroes out of those very images,” Mousavi observed. “Who is the winner in this confrontation? . . . The superficial structures can sentence these families to isolation, and the people can embrace them. Truly, which of these will triumph?”

By the force of their moral and intellectual integrity, Iranians could correct the inner substance, if not the outer scaffold, of their country’s political life. And they had done so. Said Mousavi: “In the past few months, we have changed society not by breaking this external order but by changing its meaning. We have no need to break order when it is we who give it direction in every circumstance.” Because of this, Mousavi had hope for the future. “There are so many nations who do not choose to exercise this power, who choose to leave power in the hands of the powerful,” he noted. “They will not lead their societies, but we will.”

• • •

I
N
F
EBRUARY 2011
, the house on Pasteur Street where Mir Hossein Mousavi lived with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, became a prison, its doors and windows welded shut and floodlights, cameras, and surveillance devices installed around it.
According to a 2013 Reuters report, the authorities removed handles from the interior doors so that the couple had no privacy, and they confiscated personal papers, artwork, telephones, radios, and computers. Mousavi and Rahnavard were not permitted to read the newspaper or to access their own library except on rare occasions. They had so little fresh air that Rahnavard developed breathing problems and Mousavi broke a window with his fist.

Sources close to the Mousavi family told Reuters that the guards who
took up residence in the couple’s home were coarse and violent. Mousavi’s health was poor. He visited the hospital more than once for circulatory problems. He had lost twenty-six pounds by the spring of 2013; Rahnavard lost thirty-seven.

Mehdi Karroubi had no security in his home. In a 2010 interview he recounted, “
Recently, for five days in a row, there were rocks and grenades thrown at my house. Our neighbors have been frightened, their property burned and destroyed.” He had expected no less, he reflected. “But I am concerned about Islam, and I am afraid that these people who are attacking and harassing people in the name of Islam are doing serious damage to our religion in the eyes of the world.” He would not back down from his defense of Iran’s political prisoners. “I will say it clearly,” he insisted. “They raped people in detention in the early days of the movement, and they continue to torture dissidents in brutal ways in prison.”

By 2011, Karroubi was also under house arrest, in an intelligence ministry safe house in central Tehran; he, too, languished for want of fresh air. None of the three opposition leaders was ever charged with any crime, let alone sentenced by any court. But rumor held that they would not be released until they publicly repented.

Mousavi could no longer issue statements. What he did, at first, was recommend books. They were books that conveyed messages. First was
News of a Kidnapping
, Gabriel García Márquez’s account of a spate of celebrity abductions by Colombian drug cartels. The book quickly sold out in Iran as Mousavi’s followers plumbed it for relevant meanings. Second was an obscure but resonant book by Stefan Zweig, about a sixteenth-century theologian who challenged John Calvin. It was called
The Right to Heresy
.

Zweig, an Austrian Jew, fled Europe in 1934, shortly after Hitler rose to power. He published
The Right to Heresy
in 1936. Six years later he committed suicide with his wife in Brazil, “
the world of my own language having disappeared from me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself,” as he wrote in his suicide note. Among Zweig’s works
, The Right to Heresy
was little-known, having lapsed out of print in English almost
immediately. The author could little have imagined the book’s second life in Iran, which began when it was published in Persian in 1997.

The Right to Heresy
portrayed John Calvin as a cruel theocrat who imposed a joyless asceticism on Geneva, enforced slavish conformity to his own theology, and pursued personal vendettas with a cold, self-righteous fanaticism. The hero of Zweig’s book was a dissident theologian and humanist named Sebastian Castellio, who objected when Calvin burned an alleged heretic at the stake with his writings. The state had no dominion over the inner lives of men, Castellio insisted: “
To burn a man alive does not defend a doctrine, but slays a man.” Tolerance, and not persecution, was the proper Christian response to dissent. “
When I reflect on what a heretic really is,” Castellio wrote, “I can find no other criterion than that we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views.”

Calvin responded to criticism of his policy on heresy by trumping up charges of conspiracy and torturing political opposition leaders until they confessed to having plotted his overthrow. Castellio, who was not a politician but an intellectual, turned the other cheek as Calvin published calumnies against him. He died of natural causes before he could himself be burned as a heretic. “
The eternal tragedy of despots is that they continue to fear persons of independent mind even when these have been disarmed and gagged,” wrote Zweig. “The very fact that a crushed adversary says nothing, but refuses to enroll himself among the toadies and servants of the tyrant, makes his continued existence a source of irritation.”

• • •

I
N
A
UGUST 2009
, Ayatollah Khamenei denounced the social sciences. Speaking to university students and faculty, the Leader remarked that these fields of study produced doubt, uncertainty, and secularism: “
Many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings,” he asserted. Teaching such disciplines would lead to a loss of faith. Right-minded thinkers should review the country’s university curriculum.

Abdolkarim Soroush responded with an idea. “The theocrats expect
the human sciences to use concepts such as God’s will, spirit and other intra-religious teachings in their explanations about human beings and societies,” he explained, “and since the human sciences do not comply with these expectations, the theocrats and the
ulema
[Islamic scholars] view them with distaste.” This problem was as old as the Cultural Revolution, and Soroush knew it firsthand. Back then, the suspicion sprouted from ideological rigidity, ignorance, and fear of the purchase Marxism held on Iranian students. Now the call for Islamizing the humanities and social sciences had a more directly political cast. A secular political science, Soroush surmised, seemed to Khamenei “just a short step away from a secular politics.” Anyone who doubted this, Soroush referred to the show trial of Saeed Hajjarian.

The clergy’s effort to Islamize academic knowledge in the 1980s had ended in defeat. But if Khamenei wanted to try again to produce Islamic social sciences, Soroush suggested, Iran’s intellectuals should not stand in the way. Rather, they should encourage the Leader to assign his best minds to this project, and to steep those minds in the fields of knowledge as they existed, so that they might “witness the painful birth of knowledge from the womb of observation, mathematics, criticism, reflection, intuition, luck and good fortune, so that they do not go out on a limb or expect to pick the fruits before they have planted the tree.” Then, when their work was done, they should stack their ideas boldly next to those produced by secular rationality, the better to measure their success and so that these two forms of knowledge could “distill and refine one another.”

Soroush offered just a word of caution to his “science-sowing” friends. They would encounter an irresolvable circularity in their project, for the very tools they required in order to extract social sciences from the Quran were secular and worldly ones. For example, they could hardly study the history and culture of the Arabs without historical anthropology and sociology; and without understanding the Arabs, they would not understand the Quran. Far from being “futile and unproductive,” Soroush stressed, the secular human sciences were the “imperative, golden key for unlocking religious knowledge.”

This was not Soroush’s first word of advice to Khamenei since the election, but it was surely his most civil. Like many prominent Iranians in exile, he had watched events unfold in his native land with largely impotent grief and fury. He had addressed a series of letters, each more purple than the last, to the Supreme Leader, blasting him for turning tyrant, surrounding himself with sycophants, and brutalizing his critics. Religious despotism had burned itself out in Iran, Soroush observed, and when it fell, Soroush would be among the first to celebrate. “O God, be my witness: I, who have cared about religion all my life and who have taught religion, dissociate myself from this tyranny-worshipping system,” he wrote. “And if there was ever a day when, by some oversight or error, I assisted the oppressors, I beg for forgiveness and absolution.”

Khamenei might have prevented much had he freed the press and listened to his critics, Soroush lamented. The economic corruption the Leader claimed to condemn might have been exposed by reporters before sinking its roots. Khamenei might have been sobered before his hubris engulfed him. In any case, wrote Soroush, “Ruling over joyful, free, knowledgeable, nimble people is something to boast about; not over captive, grief-stricken serfs.”

Soroush was beyond reach, but his daughter, Kimia, and son-in-law, Hamed, who were neither public figures nor political activists, were not. Agents of the security establishment closed in on Hamed and held him naked in a freezing room all night long, threatening his life and attempting to force him to condemn his wife as a loose woman and divorce her, and to denounce his father-in-law as a foreign spy. Instead he fled with his wife to the United States.

• • •

M
OSTAFA
T
AJZADEH
, sentenced to six years in prison, wrote letters of his own. One, smuggled from prison, was an open letter to Khamenei. Most were to his wife.
She posted a loving exchange between them on her blog, in a public display of private intimacy that was itself an act of defiance in the conservative culture of Iran under the Islamic Republic.

“I have been anxious since yesterday when you told me that finally after
170 days you saw the sky and the moon,” she wrote in her letter. “How naïve I was. Every night I stared up at the grayish-blue sky of our city, looking for your eyes, thinking that your blindfold had been removed for your half-hour outdoor stroll and you too were staring into the sky.” Tajzadeh closed his reply by writing, “I am proud of you for being such a wonderful wife—more than what I deserved. . . . I wish I had all your letters here in prison, could enjoy reading them and show off to my friends in prison that this is my Fakhri! I kiss your beautiful face and wish you health and happiness. Your love, Your Mostafa.”

In the beginning, Tajzadeh studied his interrogators. Maybe, he thought, the long sessions of coercive questioning would furnish opportunities for debate. But the chasm that divided him from his captors was immense, and he and they shared not a spit of solid ground on which to grapple.
In an open letter smuggled from Evin in 2010, Tajzadeh enumerated all the ways his ideal political system differed from that of his interrogators, beginning with his desire for debate and theirs for forced confessions and repentance under duress. His interrogators, he understood, saw dissent as conspiracy. Every idea he held dear was, in their eyes, a threat to be quashed. And so their prisons were populated with the very people Tajzadeh thought most fit to rule the country.

That letter of Tajzadeh’s was a document of historic importance, not for its reflections on the present, but for its bold accounting for the influence of the past. Unlike Mousavi or virtually any other prominent reformist, Tajzadeh evinced no romantic illusions about the 1980s. Although he believed that the revolutionary decade had a positive legacy to offer, he also recognized it as a wellspring of violence and repression. The hard-liners, he charged, had built on the revolution’s mistakes instead of its achievements. But the reformists had to answer for their own role in institutionalizing violence. He and others on the Islamic Left had responded to the revolutionary courts with “consenting silence” even as the judiciary executed unknown numbers of political opponents, Tajzadeh lamented. “Thus,” he wrote, “we must confess, but not in show trials or in the way the interrogators want us to confess to offenses that we have not committed, but in front
of the nation and based on facts. The Revolution generation must confess, not for its current efforts to expand democracy and human rights” but for its past mistakes.