We should be pleased. And be wary at the same time. The demonstrations in Paris, as in other capitals, in support of Sakineh, the young Iranian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery—with the other trial for complicity in the murder of her husband nearing completion—indicate a fascination that is as sudden as it is suspicious for the defense of human rights. Suspicious because these same capitals have sometimes been more hesitant on the subject.
The fact that it involves the Islamic Republic of Iran, engaged in a race for nuclear weapons, certainly weighs on this mobilization, as Tehran asserts: the international community seems determined to multiply all kinds of pressures to force the mullah regime to better intentions. Sakineh has become a symbol. But this is forgetting Neda before her, a young Iranian victim of the “green wave” demonstrations that were bloodily repressed. Just like her hundreds of compatriots who were murdered and thousands of others who are still imprisoned today, without much official reaction at that point from countries that now want to appear as paragons of democratic virtue. Not to mention Bibi Sanubar, the Afghan widow condemned by the Taliban to receive two hundred lashes before being executed in public for becoming pregnant, and Aisha, an eighteen-year-old girl whose nose was cut off for fleeing her in-laws. Let us certainly not scorn the international initiative, but let’s not be deceived by it either.
Summer wanderings in the Middle East also provided the author of these lines the opportunity to talk about it extensively with young Iranians. Interestingly, these young individuals hold “cultural traditions,” deemed “archaic,” of Persia as responsible. The mullahs’ regime, these barely post-adolescent military service members explained to me, “relies on these ancestral customs to reinforce and justify Islamic behavioral prescriptions”. Indeed, my interlocutors were not from the northern neighborhoods of Tehran: in these areas, from Shemiran to Shahrak-e Gharb, the frenzied and alcohol-soaked nights of the golden youth persist thanks to regular bribes given to local Islamic committees. They agree to turn a deaf ear to the western music that manages to penetrate the high walls of sumptuous residences. One of these young members of the Sepah-e Pasdaran—the Revolutionary Guards Corps—told me, “we must make a ‘historical leap’ to find a ‘way to change mindsets’”. “If 75% of the popular youth in Iran still supports someone like President Ahmadinejad,” an Iranian couple, merchants stationed on Vali Asr Avenue in central Tehran, lamented another day, “it’s because of the constraints of their upbringing that distance them from modernity”. Between the permits for leaving the country granted sparingly to the younger ones and the meager financial incomes of many others, the work of civilizational encystment continues its course.
A rather tense discussion between two of these young people was, in this regard, revealing: one had bought a map of the Levant region he wished to offer to one of his friends upon returning to Iran. All mentions related to the existence of Israel were crossed out with a kind of homemade correction fluid, and the young Iranian was trying, by scratching, to make the missing names and labels reappear. The other opposed these efforts because the friend to whom this gift was intended was fiercely anti-Israeli. They exchanged arguments, sometimes about respecting beliefs and sufferings, sometimes about denying reality and the necessities of education.
And one of the young men questioned the other: “will you tell your mother when you return that you drank alcohol and went out with a girl?” The first one was discreetly embarrassed. The second modestly triumphant. The discreet sadness of the author of this editorial.
