Persian Discontent

THE SATANIC VERSES was published by Penguin Viking on September 26, 1988. India was the first country to ban it. Khushwant Singh, otherwise a proponent of freedom of expression, advised Penguin India not to risk publishing a text bound to excite communal passions. Indeed, the novel, when those capable of reading it began, at times with the help of English-known interlocuters, to understand its implications, ignited the wrath of the faithful.

Thirteen years later, on September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorists hijacked four passenger planes, smashing two of them into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Centre, New York. The third plane was crashed into the Pentagon, while the fourth fell into a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people died, over 25,000 were injured and billions of dollars of damage resulted from these strikes by religious extremists.

VS Naipaul, Nobel laureate, and the other literary genius spawned by the subcontinental diaspora, who had tasked himself with tracking the rise of radical Islam, had failed to predict the catastrophe of 9/11. He was looking among the converts, perhaps rightly so, having covered Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia “among the believers.” But that the real danger lurked at the heart of the homeland of Islam, Saudi Arabia, was something he had not been able to foresee.

A decade before 9/11, Rushdie, his life already dangerously deranged by the fatwa, tried to defend his Satanic Verses by contending that its central theme is not to be found in the so-called blasphemous passages against the Islamic religion or its prophet as his outraged critics allege. The novel is actually about migration, cultural mixing, and globalisation: “The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves,” (Imaginary Homelands).

It is amazing how major academic careers have been merely footnotes to great literature. The noted post-colonial critic and Harvard don, Homi Bhabha, for instance, takes up the same question, “How does newness enter the world?” also answering it in a very Rushdiesque manner. Bhabha extends Rushdie’s notion of erratic emergence in his celebrated essay which also lent his volume, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1984), its title. However, neither Rushdie’s essay, ‘In Good Faith’, let alone The Satanic Verses, are mentioned. Perhaps, Bhabha wanted to avoid the associations, finding them politically damaging. Others might say that it a serious omission in acknowledging sources.

Cut to the 43-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran, which issued the death sentence on Rushdie, whose after-effects resulted in a murderous assault on him earlier this year. A massive repression is underway in Iran against the nationwide protests and demonstrations that have followed the September custodial death of Mahsa Amini. Amini was allegedly tortured and brutalised because her hijab or headscarf showed a couple of inches of hair. That she was Kurdish was considered the additional reason for her excessive punishment, incarceration, and subsequent death.

Nor is this the first wave of protests against the fundamentalist Shiite regime. Since 2015, a series of pushbacks against the Islamist theocracy has erupted across the country. Civil disobedience and demonstrations have been supported, with increasing effectiveness, by online and social media activism. Whether over low wages, unemployment, corruption, water scarcity, or inflation, that there is widespread disaffection in Iran, especially among the youth, cannot be denied. Despite harsh crackdowns, the recent demonstrations have been gathering strength after the nationwide, even worldwide, outrage.

Being cut off for so long, a once-prosperous nation now has substandard quality of life for the vast majority. Persian nationalism and nativism, a sense of cultural cohesion and superiority, and rejection of all things western as being inherently evil are no longer convincing. Will a second revolution and regime suddenly overtake Iran?

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The situation has now taken, what many observers call, a critical turn. The state is using heavy weaponry, including helicopters, against its own citizens. Since September, over 300 people have been killed, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), including 40 children. The Shiite fundamentalist regime has retaliated by mounting an iron-fisted suppression of the popular revolt.

The crushing of protests in the Kurdish areas is so severe that videos emerging from Bukan and Mahabad are reminiscent of an ongoing war, with troops travelling in trucks with mounted machine guns. In Javanrud, armed forces are seen firing assault rifles in deserted city streets filled with wreckage and rubbish. From the capital Tehran itself, footage on social media shows women burning their veils, cutting their hair, and even random passersby knocking off the turbans of clerics. Without question, this is the boldest challenge that the Islamist regime has faced since its inception.

A charismatic leader, the updated counterpart of Ayatollah Khomeini who led the Islamic revolution against the Shah of Iran in 1979, is, however, yet to emerge. Such a leader, along with a set of strong supporters, is essential as a rallying point. In addition, the armed forces and the police must turn away from the regime, which seems far from happening at present. But there is a growing if underground groundswell of a determined and organised faction which wishes to overthrow the current regime. It is this screened, if not secret, frontline, that is channelling whatever discontent is present in society against the regime.

Regardless of the actual prospects of a revolution, young people in Iran generally dislike the theocracy, the moral, in addition to the criminal police, the widespread hypocrisy and corruption in the ruling elites, and the anti-Western, often irrationalist tinge of the dominant version of Islamism. They also long for a normalisation of relations with the rest of the world and the enjoyment of international goods, services, and items of consumption.

Being cut off for so long, a once-prosperous nation now has substandard quality of life for the vast majority. Persian nationalism and nativism, a sense of cultural cohesion and superiority, and rejection of all things Western as being inherently evil are no longer convincing. Iranian exceptionalism and isolation no longer seem as attractive as they once were.

I visited Iran 20 years back as a member of India’s cultural delegation in the “Dialogue of Civilizations” initiated by President Mohammad Khatami during his first term. His culture minister, Sayyid Ata’ollah Mohajerani, whom we met, was considered a liberal and a reformist. Indeed, during our visit, the Tehran Philharmonic and the Tehran Ballet were opened once again. Although the latter featured fully-clad female dancers in body tights and leotards performing behind a thin muslin screen, while the male dancers were in the forefront.

The intellectuals I interacted with me said very proudly, “We are not barbarians—nor are we Arabs,” and then with a wry smile, “We didn’t slaughter the American hostages.” But the buildings and cars were run down, the hotels were of the state socialist pattern, with restricted food and beverages, the shops had subpar products, and the only fizzy drink you could buy was “Zam Zam Cola”. There was scruffiness and dissatisfaction in the air. A friend joked when we waited to wade through the chaotic traffic at a pedestrian crossing, “Be careful; if you are run over, your wife will get only one-fourth the compensation of a Muslim.”

To return to Rushdie, we might ask, “how does newness enter the world” with the specific identification of this question with a regime change in Iran. Changes steal upon us, says Rushdie, taking us by surprise: “Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Imaginary Homelands).

Fully grasping Rushdie’s migrant ontology, Bhabha echoes his exaltation of hybridity. More apropos futures thinking, Bhabha avers that newness “has to be discovered in medias res” because the future is “not part of the ‘progressivist’ division between past and present, or the archaic and the modern; nor is it a ‘newness’ that can be contained in the mimesis of ‘original and copy’” (The Location of Culture).

Bhabha seems to reject altogether the idea that newness is either evolutionary, a property that comes out of the past, nor a mutation of what was already inherent in something. He also rejects the idea of newness as a form of cloning or copying. Newness, to him, is ultimately to be discovered, all of a sudden, not in breaks between the past and the present, nor in divisions between historical or chronological periods in medias res.

“In medias res” implies discovering something in the middle of its formation, when it is neither what it was in the past, nor something entirely new. In Bhabha’s notion of newness, there is a fluidity, an indeterminacy even. In its sudden, in-between presence, newness resembles the “emergentism” of evolutionary biologists. Emergentists hold that complex entities display properties that are absent in their lower-order, individual constituents.

Will a second revolution and regime suddenly overtake Iran in the complex, chaotic, and unpredictable fashion that Rushdie prophesied and Bhabha elaborated? Could Bhabha, with his Iranian-Zoroastrian ancestry, and Rushdie, the renegade apostate, ex-Muslim, together have given us a hint of things to come?

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Makarand R Paranjape

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