Calamity of Intellectuals in Iran

Part 2, 1941- present

Glimpse of dawn

The allied invasion of Iran in 1941 put an abrupt end to the “murky night”1 of Reza Shah’s reign. Over the next twelve years hidden and imprisoned tallents resurfaced. A new generation of intellectuals were born full of the passion for life. It was to greet this dawn that the father of modern powtry Nima Yushij, now released from the fear of the night sang:

to the secrets flees the blind night

.....

dawn arives, the cock crows

This also is the time Sadegh Hedayat comes out of his cocoon and instead of the melancholia of The Blind Owl or the agonizing death of the Stray Dog 2 speaks about The water of life, attacks fascism in Velengari (carelessness) and writes about the evolution of life and human society. In the visual arts, Nushin found a new and innovative theatre with The Bluebird, Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Montessera and educates a huge wave of young artists in his artistic-intellectual school.

The intellectual of this time rides his or her boat on the wave of the mass-worker movement and rowing and dancing sings his3 way towards a horizon of joy. New ideas have space to expand. Creativity blooms everywhere. The intellectual climate, reminiscent of the warm days of the Constitutional Revolution, 4 but at a higher plane and from a more progressive vantage point, rediscovers its own destiny. The mass movement, now epitomised in the Tudeh Party, becomes the haven for progressive intellectuals of whatever variety and brings them all together under its wings. The intellectual create associations through and around this party and find a direct link with the people and are in turn influenced by them. These are years of creativity and the growth of art, culture and ideas. A new generation of intellectuals join those who were silenced in the Reza Shah and enter the scene. The intellectual of this era is essentially “left” and under the influence of progressive socialist views.

Historic dysjunction

Yet the intellectual movement of this era is also afflicted with a number of maladies: historic disjunction. A deep crater made by 20 years of dictatorship had separated the intellectual of this era from the history and experience of the constitutional movement. Attracted by new ideas, and even wallowing in them, made them alien to the ideas of previous Iranian thinkers. New ideas were copied hastilly and without deep thought encouraging an intellectual dependency. An intellectual dependency not just to crude borrowed concepts, but a fascination with foreign thinkers, became an infectious general malady. Moreover, the intermingled and chaotic thinking made dizzy our intellectuals, who came from different horizons and very varied social bonds. These all cause a crisis whose mal-consequences only surfaced much later.

With the growing movement for nationalising the oil industries in the late 1940’s 5 the intellectual movement takes on a new breadth and lustre. Yet, while it encouraged a new intellectual movemnet, it also sharpened the borders between Tudeh and nationalist thought.

Too much politics?

The intensity of events, and the rapidly evolving political scene in the 40’s meant that politics ruled intellectual life. While this had a positive aspect in that it brought the intellectual and the masses into closer contact. The influence was in both directions. It did, however, bring with it a problem. The intellectual was tainted with the blight of over-politicisation and a general diversion to trivialities. The the power of thought was to a large extent wasted on petty political conflicts or even in errors and deviations.

In any case this era of progress and refinement did not pass without its potholes. The first blow was the defeat of the democratic movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan 6 The more fragile of the intellectuals lose their optimism. When the second blow is delivered in February 1949, and the the Tudeh Party was banned after an assassination attempt on the life of the young Mohammad Reza Shah many more left the scene in dissapointment. The coup d’etat of August 1953 was the last and most effective blow. 7 A black veil of dictatorship once again descended on the political scene of the counrty. The thinking and cultural space of the country went into another phase of darkness.

The first blow which buried the Azerbaijan and Kurdistan autonomous republics also began the splits in the intellectual line-up. The clash and conflict of these groupings peaked during the movement to nationalise the oil industries where the nationalist and Tudeh party came into ever greater conflict. The bitter battles in politics and thought paralised a significant section of the intellectual life of the country. Some of those who left the Tudeh party is weakened somewhat or led along deviant paths. A notable example is the fate of Khalil Maleki. Having split from the Tudeh Party, he obstinantly wasted an enormous amount of energy responding to the political blows of that party. In the end, tired and alone he melts away.

Two years later the banning of the Tudeh party and the arrests that followed, forced many intellectuals to abandon real and living action to flee the country. These included Iraj Eskandari, Reza Radmanesh, Ehsan Tabari and many of Tudeh leaders. Many others lose hope in the new political atmpsphere and in one way or another become paralysed.

Of the political leaders Ghazi Mohammad, head of the Kurdistan Democatic Party and briefly president of the Mahabad Republic, is hanged (March 30, 1947). Later after the coup which overthrew the nationalist premiere Mossadegh (August 1993) Hossein Fatemi 8 who had been savagaly wounded when government thugs arrested him was executed on a stretcher (November 10, 1954) and Khosrow Ruzbeh was led to the firing squad leaning on a stick (May 11 1958)., weakened by the gunshot wounds inflicted during the chase which ended in his arrest.

Another long tarry night

And the long tarry night swallows up society and Forugh Farrokhzad sees how the intellectual:

in the dark panick-ridden street,

squashes underfoot

her heart

like something rotten 9

Such was the darkness that reigned that even if a light flickered in the distance, the poet doubtingly warned:

that bright spot,

is the eye of wild wolves

And the night was so cold and biting that it robbed sleep off the poet’s eyes. Sohrab Sepehri, who normally moved above the clouds, feels that in the desert of the silent and asleep

the night...

moves across the seconds

with the slowness of a lament

And the poet decidig on flight involuntarilly searched for his shoes wispering:

there is a smell of migration

my pillow is filled with the songs of swallows’ feathers.

The tragedy was that even those intellectuals who took to migration were becoming fossilised or rotting awy in their place of exile.

In this new murky night, now accompanied by a severe winter, and a cold that erodes life and reason not everyone has the legs for flight and exile. Those who stayed behind in the country are fearful. They avoid from one another, collars pulled up. The intellectual is sterile, dissilusioned, hopeless, and helpless. His mind frozen over and her cry snuffed in the throat. The intellectual either faces the firing squad, rots in prison or takes refuge in seclusion and opium:

Mohammad Hossein Shahyar, who once wrote victory choruses for the victors of Stalingrad, Fereidun Tavalloli who with his new and original satire had made fun of the whole apparatus of power, ad Akhavan Saless who wanted to write epics of the heroics and balads of the hopes, crawls from the bitter cold of the totalitarianism to the brazier and burns his life away if the crackles of opium: he writes laments and recites verses of fear. The poet, his only friend and companion his shaddow, faces one of only three alternatives:

The first, a road of drink, comfort and joy

soaked in shame, but facing garden, town and habitation.

Route two, half shame and half fame

if you raise your head, turmoil, and if you hold you breath peace.

The third, the road of no return, no end.10

Yet there are intellectuals who chose neither the road that leads to drink tainted with same nor had the courage to raise their head and face turmoil nor the legs that takes them to the perilous road of no return and without end.

Many of these went on to negate and reject their past. They cursed the lies and deceptions of the past, yet see nothing ahead but a mirage. Inevitably they make themselves, in the words of Akavan Saless “a guest of wine, opium and hashish”

The tragic tale of the intellectual in the era Mohammad Reza Shah’s autocratic rule does not always end in repentence, self-rejection, withdrawal, and intoxication. There aree others who make up for past privations when they followed progressive ideals now give their whole being to serve the despotic new order. Their attacks are more savage than the original elements of the autocracy. They vault, many steps at a time, up the stairs of social and political power.11

The confrontation, and resulting discord and hostility, between the two main currents of intellectual life in Iran - left and nationalist - wasted the intellectual energy of the country. This battle became even more capacious in the new era.

The newly reinstated autocracy attacks leftist and socialist thought with all its might while giving enough reign to liberal and nationalist thought not to pose any danger to itself. In turn, the nationalist, who blamed the defeat in the movement for nationalising the oil industry on the Tudeh Party uses up all its energy against the ghost of its old rival - ironically now totally thrown out of the political arena. Anti-leftism becomes a real current of thought right up to this day. This part of the intellectual force of the country, which should have pointed its arrows on the apparatus of despotism, is totally squandered, caught up as it is in a vulgar politicism and a long-lasting enmity and bitterness.

White revolution

The age of the imperial White Revolution 12 lasted for a decade. With a new aristocracy which controls everything and which plunders the national wealth new social forces raise their head. The nouvea-riche turn the sixties into a period of total sterility tainted by of intellectual pretentions and posturings. The apparatus of the autocrat, led by the Shah’s wife, Shahbanu, takes a number of new intellectuals looking for fame and fortune under its wings. There are numerous glittering state-sponsoned cultural and artistic events. The despotic court spreads a table full of new and coulourful western foods, and attracts a number of newborn intellectuals who have yet to learn to walk, with its colourful toys and papier-machets.

There are others join this oppulent and colourful table, without content, knowing full well what they do. They gurgling and regurgitate half-digested Western thoughts which they had swallowed uncooked. This is an era of deception, of treachery and there are many like Raviz Nikkhah who while encouraging the modern corrupt and hollow imperial culture organise the campaign to ridicule progressive thought and culture. 13

There were others who mistook cafes such as Riviera in the capital’s fashionable Naderi Street for Montparnasse and Saint Germain. There they spent hours in interminable discussions, over a glass of beer, on “art for arts sake” or other spontaneously thrown up cultural and artistic school. There weer many small cultural or artistic circles, usually around a well known guru, which discovered a new genius every second and persented their brillinat creation to society. This was how the intellectual movement of Iran became a mere intellectual game and snobism became its main characteristc.

The religious intellectual

A new creature - the “religious intellectual” - stepped into this chaotic mess. He rapidly grew and drew trength because of the carelessness, and also the deliberate connivance, of the dictator. The dependent autocrat still felt that the real danger to his rule came from the progressive ideas of man, including Marxism and socialist tendencies. He therefore turned a relatively blind eye to this new development. After all the religious intellectual might be able to slow or prevent the spread of these leftist thoughts. Religious reaction used this opening to send out its forces.

Gradually hatred for the autocrat and the new classes he had created and fattened became strong among the people and in particular among the mass of educated youth. Yet the Shah had savagely repressed the progressive intellectual and vanguard movement, and at the other end of the spectrum a corrupt movement, pretending to intellectualism, was serving the apparatus of power. One of the faces of this hatred for the despot, therefore, took on an opposition to the culture and civilistation of the West and to intellectuals and intellectualism. They called on the anti-Tudeh nationalist intellectual to take their side. At the same time reactionary religious circles send out their forces with an xenophobic and anti-progressive bent.

They combined in their more acute and extreme form to create two currents born of the same blood: against westernisation and for religious reform. They found an enthusiatic audience among the generation of youth who were against imperialism and the dependent-capitalist dictatorship. The spokesman of the first, Jalal Al Ahmad, had been at various times a Tudeh member, a nationalist-Third Forcer,14 the born-again Shi’ite convert. The other was led by Ali Shariati the new theorist for religious renewal who called the Iranian intellectual a fake copy of their European counterpart, acting as a “guide” to neo-colonialism.

This current occupied a section of the intellectual space of the country for less than a decade. Al Ahmad and Shariati both drew swords on intellectuals and intellectualism and exhorted enmity with the West and all the achievements of human civilisation. They preached a return to the reactionary past. Our religious “intellectual”, the advocates of a return to the past, tries to brighten up his mouldy commodity by using statements from some disgruntled and disillusioned Western intellectual or some of the backward new Third World thinkers, either writhing under racist humiliation or in an anti-colonial struggle which has yet to shed its initial rawness and immaturity.

Thus a large part of a new generation which entered the realm of thought, revolting against the neo-colonial rulers, sickened by the phony glitter of the dictatorship and angered by the intellectual snob, went astray and followed the wolf mistaking it for sheep.

The existing intellectual vacuum led another group of the younger generation to search for progressive thought in any hole. They fell prey to those who sold brass for gold. Many freaks and deformed creatures came out of these schools.

Suring this decade pseudo-modernism and snobism at one level, intellectual reaction at another and pure charaltanism masquerading as empty progressiveness at a third level encircled the unofficial intellectual atmosphere of the country.

The disstareous effects and consequences of this murky night and severe winter and the scene settings of this endless emptiness on the world of the intellectual was described in many poems and writings. A few years before her premature death in 1967 Forugh Farrokhzad wrote:

the sun was dead...

all the same life panted in secret. And some

....instead of flowers in the earth in their gardens

sewed machine guns and granades

and some

cover up

their tiled ponds

and the tiled pond

without wishing it

are secret stores of gunpowder

and children .... fill

their school satchels

with tiny bombs 15

Cracks

And suddenly the wall of political autocracy, and reactionary and modernist thinking cracks. The guerilla movement announces a new era in the life of intellectualism in Iran in the eve of the 1970’s. A wave of intellectuals line up in its defence.

The apparatus of autocratic power sets out to crack brains with even greater ferocity. Prisons fill up, particularly with the younger generation of intellectuals and artists. Many of the nascent intellectuals are destroyed even before they can stand on their own feet. Others meet an early death by a variety of means.

Parviz Puyan and Hamid Mo’meni die in street gunfights, Mohammad Hanif Nejad and Khosrow Gol-Sorkhi are executed by firing squad, Bijan Jazani and his fellow prisoners are murdered in secret. 16 New prisons are being built, and embraces those who write without permission of the neo-colonial autocracy. Within these physical and mental torture is permanent. A significant section of progressive intellectual force of the country is spent in either organising or justifying the armed struggle. The weapon takes the place of thought.

On its side reactionary religious forces also become more active against modernism, and the bourgeois imperialist reforms of the ruling order. Yet the Shah’s apparatus of power, while dealing even more savagely with the radical revolutionaries, turns a blind eye to a large part of these forces, and even at times enlists them as allies against the revolutionaries.

Revolution

In these circumstances the advance guard of the revolution emerges on the horizon. The apparatus of the dicatator bargains in panic with religious circles and the leftover fossils of nationalism in order to stop the radicalisation of the revolution. When the revolution ultimately arrives, the radical revolutionary forces are sidestepped in the transfere of power. This was not surprising as over the years the birds of dawn had been slaughtered while vampire bats were allowed to live and grow.

A new era, one of religious reaction, followed the revolution of 1979. It was an era of darkness and mediaeval ignorance. The mass democratic revolution is baptised as the Islamic revolution and gives birth to a bastard child named the Islamic Republic of Iran. Those intellectuals who had in one way or other survived the bleak winter of absolutism were the victims of black-shirted “hezbollah” and “jondolah” 17 even before they could find themselves.

Attacks by the religious fascism started with book-burning, closed the universities in the so-called cultural revolution and rapidly spread to closure of newspapers of all kinds, and imprisonment and murder of any independent thinker who dared to move.

The country witnessed an extension and development of the imperial autocrat’s individual and mass murders to mass slaughter of intellectuals, political activists and opponents and even opponents of the Islamic Republic in thought alone. An exodus unknown in Iranian history began. The educated and intellectuals in their thousands and thousands left for Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and anywher else that would take them. According to one estimate in the first five years of the revolution 7,400 academics left the country. The intellectual who for whatever reason stayed behind feels the sword of Domocles on his/her neck even when asleep.

The question is not over intellectualism, progress or modernism. The very act of thinking or pretending to think carries the death penalty. Representing the creator of the world, the velayet faghih 18 “thinks” for everyone and in place of everyone. And the and pasdaran of Islam (revolutionary guards) search the deepest receses of ones homes in case a glow worm had hidden itself there. To think and to love are haram (forbidden) and the words thinking and love are the words of kofr (heresy):

they smell your breath

in case you had uttered I love you;

and the poet who should cry out love

at every cross road

and light beakons on hights

warns with a fearful whisper

“hide love and light in the closet of your home” 19

A prolonged exile, and dispersion afflicts the intellectual community with a variety of maladies. Many tire and become downhearted. Others spend their time on trivialities. Some survive by grinding their teeth at fellow exiles. A group kneel at the alter of their conscience and pass their time lamenting and asking for forgiveness for past deeds. Some sophistically whisper reconcilliation with the wardens of ignorance and darkness ruling Iran today into the ears of others. Some sink into sufism and mysticism, while others slowly melt into the cultural and scientific community of the host countries. Finally there are those who seek the decayed bones of their Arian ancestry in the dust bowls of time.

Only a handful persist in singing battle hymns, without any assurance that they are being heard by the addressees. Even fewer are those who are reconstructing themselves without any assurance that their intellectual stores are up to the task of responding in time to the needs of Iranian society today and tomorrow.

Religious intellectual

But inside the country, hatred for the religious Islamic government grows as each day goes by, despite the killings and the pressures. People are falling out not only with its policies, but even with its convictions - which are no other than Islamic instructions. It is in this bedlam that a phenomenon called “religious intellectual” surfaces to save Islam and attracts a section of the younger generation for whom the world of progressive thought has been closed and who has been denied any chance to think freely. This phenomenon is embraced even more avidly as it is vehemently opposed by the ruling ultra-reactionaries. Where the velayate faghih rules, even a Muslim cannot think, criticise or express any views.

A new danger, the “religious intellectual”, therefore threatens the newly reborn intellectual society of Iran. It is here that the role of the progressive thinker inside the country becomes difficult and complex. The true intellectual, for whome the constant threat of death has not been removed, will continue to defend the idea of free expression of all ideas (including the free activity of the religious reformist). Yet he or she must, with a particular delicacy, to oppose those religious teaching with a misleading message. We must not allow the Iranian intellectual society to once again find itself disarmed by such vulgar schools of thought as “westoxification” and “progressive Islam”. 20

The other danger facing the progresive intellectual is to run away from ideology. This has become fashionable among some of our secular intellectuals, drived there by the presence of a religous government in Iran, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socio-political developments in some socialist countries. Disillusioned by the official socialist ideas, some now label as ideological all Islamic religious deliberations and beliefs. By ariving at a negation of all ideologies, they unconsciously disarm themselves, and others, in the battle of ideas.

New resistance

There is another side to the rising schools of religious reform and their confrontation of the executive and cultural appartus of the Islamic Republic. They demonstrate the complete bankruptsy of the present regime’s policy of attacking culture and intellectualism.

The non-religious intellectual is also braving the very real dangers to poke their heads out of their shell. Critical critical views are openly being expressed, often dressed in a variety of guises, and widely disseminated. They are struggling to erect cultural-intellectual institutions. There are an increasing number of ndependent publicatins precariously expressing theri opostion to the reactionary and autocratic cultural and intellectual policies of the regime. Newspapers published abroads are being accessed inside the countrydespite the difficulties. Even more interstingly some of the banned books published abroad are being reproduced in substantial numbers inside the country and are secretly distributed and passed around from hand to hand. All these sow the seeds of hope.

It looks as if a new era of intellectual resistance has begun. Its fundamental characteristic is a serious struggle against religious thinking in all aspects of intellectual social and political relations. During the run-up to the Constitutional Revolution at the beginnig of the century and in the years of the absolutist rule of dependent capitalism the problem for the intellectual was the existence of political absolutism. They therefore ignored the negative role of religion, or did not think a serious struggle with it neccessary. At times, the intellectuals recruited the religious elements in their battle against the dictator.

Today, the actual opponent of the intellectual is the clergy and Shi’ite religious thought. And today’s struggling thinker or writer is well aware of past damages on Iranian society, and its intellectuals, by such superficially attractive theses as westoxification, and “religious reform and revival”.

The real intellectual in today’s Iran is strictly secular and favours the institution of a civil order. While loving his/her country and nation, s/he opposes false- and ultra-nationalism, which ominously also stands to grow in its opposition to religion. He is anti imperialist and anti-monarchist because he has tasted the bitter taste of both. Being global she remains Iranian, and will use mankind’s progressive achievements in thought and culture, without any obligation or dependency to the various global intellectual power centres, to raise the level of thought and culture among her own people.

Regardless of his own view, he is scrupulously democratic and believes in dialogue and criticism because s/he has learnt from all the experience that thought can only exist in a free and democratic space allowing criticism and dialogue among opposing beliefs. Being a democrat also means that our intellectual also retains a critical view to the political and intellectual power which rules, even if elected by his/her choice.

Today’s real intellectual does not gladden the heart of reaction and imperialism by an anti-left fever and hatred. He or she will understand that no intellectual judgement or deduction is possible outside, and un-influenced by, an ideology. Therefore, s/he will only not oppose ideology but, accepting as a principle that all intellectual anxioms are relative and changeable, will rely on ideology to guide him-her in the exchange and challenges of thought.

Most importantly the intellectual in whatever political line-up they occupy tries to digest the distant and recent past history of iran, avoiding the prejudices of any politics or school of thought. It is only in this way that the historical fissure which rules the intellectual society of our country can be bridged. They will step into the future and higher planes by using past experience. We can be sure that if intellectuals of this calibre prepare their war against the religious fascism ruling Iran without doubt in the end light will conquer darkness and reason ignorance.

8.8.1375