Why Iranians don’t smile

It is, for example, as Islamic as one can get. Yet, its strong Shia identity stands out as a quiet defiance of much of Sunni Islam, which is the faith of a majority of the world’s Muslims. (It is perhaps the only country where you can find images of Islam’s several revered religious figures sold freely in shops and wayside carts.) Again, is it Islamic Iran or Persian Iran? For in which other Muslim country do you still have Parsi-sounding names like Darioush, Parwaneh and Parastu, alongside Mohammed and Hossein?

After Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, chador (the long head-to-toes black covering that every woman must compulsorily wear outdoors) became ubiquitous. But if she is an educated and working woman (Iranian women are better educated and more economically active than their counterparts in most other Muslim countries), she is more likely than not to rebelliously cast her chador away at the first opportunity once she enters the safety of her domestic space.

Beauty and melancholy are twins in much of Iran’s art and history. One of its greatest rulers in the post-Islamic era, Shah Abbas I, established the magnificent city of Isfahan in the 17th century. But he also killed his eldest son and gouged the eyes of his second son. In revenge, the blinded son murdered his own little daughter. Iranian cities still have huge hoardings and wall murals proclaiming ‘Death to America’. Yet, a large number of educated Iranians harbour an undisguised admiration for America, because they lack freedoms that America offers to its citizens.

Fourth example: Collective grieving for Imam Hussein, the greatest martyr of Shia Islam, is a finely choreographed ritual in Iran, something that left me entranced when I observed it in Tehran and Shiraz during my first visit to Iran over a decade ago. Yet, Iran’s history tells us that grief is what it seems to inflict upon itself over and over again. So is the Muharram-time ritual of self-flagellation more than a ritual? Is grief Iran’s self-willed destiny? Has Iran come to ‘‘relish grief’’, as Christopher de Bellaigue, author of In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, suggests in his book? Is that why, as he asks in the book’s opening sentence, ‘‘Iranians don’t smile’’?

Reading de Bellaigue’s book is to be reminded that martyrdom is both the leitmotif of Iran and also a pointer to its perennial search for its true harmonised identity, in which it can live without having to sacrifice its people’s blood again and again. De Bellaigue, a Tehran-based correspondent of The Economist, is a Britisher who fell in love first with Persian history and art as a student and later, as a journalist visiting Iran, with an Iranian woman whom he married. Although he calls his book ‘A Memoir of Iran’, it is more his own personal memoirs through which he has woven the elegiac story of a land with captivating natural beauty and a proud people blessed with rich cultural and spiritual heritage. It is a story that contains snapshots of all the mournful milestones in Iran’s history—right from the martyrdom of Imam Hossein (youngest son of Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law and fourth Caliph, Imam Ali, who was also the founder of Shia Islam) in Karbala more than 1,300 years ago, to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s which claimed nearly a million lives.

Many Iranians would say that even Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in February 1979 was a tragedy. However, history is yet to pass a definitive judgment on it. Bloody it certainly was. Several thousand activists of Marxist and other non-Islamic groups, who had earlier made common cause with Khomeini’s supporters in overthrowing the Shah’s hated regime, were executed once the latter seized power. Perhaps an equal number of those associated with similar cruelties in the Shah’s rule were tortured and put to death. Nevertheless, de Bellaigue’s book, while being critical of the Islamic revolution, provides useful insights into why the Shah’s ouster had become inevitable and also why, nearly three decades later and despite having dashed the hopes that Iranians had from it, it is not about to collapse.

These insights explain some aspects of the present stand-off between America’s ruling establishment and Iran. Thinking Americans often ask themselves: ‘‘Why do Muslims hate the West so much?’’ Part of the answer can be had in de Bellaigue’s description of the despotic regimes of Reza Pahlavi (1925-41) and his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979). Both believed, like Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, that modernisation meant westernisation. Also, their ‘‘assault on the clergy was as ferocious as Ataturk’s’’. Quoting a historian, de Bellaigue says, ‘‘The sixteen years of Reza’s rule can fairly be described as a period of intense hostility to Islamic culture and institutions; what Western authors have approvingly called ‘reform’ and ‘modernisation’ was experienced by many—if not most—Iranians as a brutal assault on their culture, traditions and identity.’’

Shah Senior suffered from such an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Westerners that he once ordered ‘‘all men to wear brimmed, European-style hats’’. His ludicrous defense of such Westernising reforms was: ‘‘All I am trying to do is for us to look like the Europeans so they would not laugh at us.’’ When a crowd gathered in the holy city of Mashhad to protest against this decree, ‘‘Reza’s troops mounted machine guns on the roofs overlooking the courtyard and opened fire, killing more than hundred people. Troops who refused to fire were themselves shot.’’

History’s verdict on his son is unlikely to be as harsh. Under him Iran prospered. However, much of that wealth was cornered by his cronies. Also, he adopted a flagrantly pro-US approach that made many Iranians fear that their country was becoming an outpost of West culturally. He ruptured many centuries-old religious traditions and encouraged ‘Persian Iran’ to dominate over ‘Islamic Iran’. If you add to this the CIA-inspired overthrow of nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 (he earned the wrath of America and Britain for nationalising Iran’s oil industry), you know why distrust towards America’s rulers is entrenched in Iran’s national consciousness.

Sadly, the US has done little in the past three decades to atone for its mistakes. Indeed, Washington tacitly backed Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran in 1980 and looked the other way when he used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Iranians. Much of de Bellaigue’s book is about the Iran-Iraq war, which not only derailed the Islamic revolution but left many active participants in the revolution deeply disillusioned. Iran had won the war within the first eighteen months and succeeded in recovering almost all the Iranian territory that Saddam’s troops had grabbed. What accounted for Iran’s success was entirely the revolutionary zeal of its soldiers and rag-tag civilian recruits, whose wllingness to become martyrs proved mightier than Iraq’s superior arms and ammunition.

Yet, the same success turned into an interminable and blood-guzzling stalemate when Khomeini refused to accept a ceasefire and decided to prolong the war until Saddam Hussein was toppled. Ultimately, in 1988 Iran had to end the war on nearly the same terms that it could have secured six years earlier. Khomeini likened the compromise to ‘‘drinking poison from a chalice’’. By then, Iran had paid a very heavy price for its leader’s inflexibility. A riveting part of the book deals with the exploits of Hossein Kharrazi, a legendary military commander from Isfahan (which has honoured its war heroes by naming one of its parks as the Rose Garden of the Martyrs). Kharrazi had motivated thousands of young soldiers with slogans such as ‘‘No drop of liquid is more popular with God than the drop of blood that is shed for him’’. But just before he died in an ill-conceived military operation (which he had opposed, but had to carry it out since somebody higher up in the political leadership had ordered it), he had come to the conclusion that ‘‘a fruitless death in war didn’t count as martyrdom’’.

The end of the war and Khomeini’s death in 1989 were followed by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency, which saw a steep rise in corruption and rapid widening of economic inequality. The president’s own family became the country’s richest. This made Iranians rally behind Mohammed Khatami who rode on a highly popular ‘‘reformist’’ agenda to serve as the president for two terms. However, at the end of his eight years (1997-2005), even his staunch followers were frustrated that his promises remained unfulfilled. State-sponsored attacks on pro-reform intellectuals and journalists continued.

The book explores two cases that caught international attention. One is the murder of Darioush and Parwaneh Farouhar, noted participants in the revolution who later fell out with the clerical establishment because of their secular advocacy that ‘‘mullahs should have no role in governance’’. Parastu, their intrepid daughter who is also an eminent artiste, is now campaigning to seek justice. The second case is about the arrest of Akbar Ganji, a journalist who exposed sensational cases of corruption and criminality involving several big names in Tehran’s ruling establishment. Iranians’ sense of helplessness is accentuated by the knowledge that Khatami’s democratic reforms were subverted by the clergy who continue to wield enormous power in a system where the highest authority is still the unelected and unremovable ‘Supreme Leader’ of the Islamic Republic—Ayatollah Khameini, who was appointed by Ayatollah as his successor. Another reason why Iranians don’t smile.

The book came out just before a cynical and sullen electorate chose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a maverick politician with populist appeal, as Iran’s next president last year. Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad has already given ample reasons for thinking Iranians not to feel very sanguine about their country’s future. They can at the most feel an odd kind of pride in seeing in him proof of what de Bellaigue calls ‘‘Iran’s sole perceptible gain of the past quarter of a century: the liberty to take important decisions without having to consult a superpower.’’