Restoring Iran’s Vision: Sexuality, Women, and the Logos Incarnate

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When the spring rains melt the winter snows in South Bend, Indiana the St. Joseph River overflows its banks and becomes dangerous enough to kill you. On one of those spring days, I was walking across the LaSalle Street bridge when a black woman approached me from the west bank and asked if had had a cell phone. When I told her I didn’t, she replied by saying, “I need to call my momma because I’m gonna kill myself.” At that point, she hopped over the railing and stood on the ledge over the raging St. Joe River 40 feet below preparing to jump.

“Wait,” I said, “don’t jump. God has a plan for your life.”

With the help of a cop, a few bystanders, and a prayer, I eventually persuaded the woman to climb back off the ledge. The cop drove her away in his squad car, and I finished my walk. I never saw her again. I still don’t know her name.

What I said about God’s plan was true not in some general sense, but in a specific sense that could be calculated in hours and even minutes. If I had left the house that day ten minutes earlier or later, or if I had taken a different route for my walk, we would not have met, and she might have succeeded in killing herself.

The same this is true of this woman. The time of her departure and the route she took in her despair had been part of God’s plan for all eternity. We simply could not have arranged the meeting that saved her life, but once we met either one of us could have thwarted the purpose of that meeting because the outcome of the meeting that had been arranged from all eternity by God depended on her free will and mine. I could have kept on walking, and she could have ignored what I was saying and jumped. The outcome of our encounter was a combination of God’s eternal plan and our free will.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei

God has a plan for your life, but He also has a plan for human history. The name of that plan is Logos, or what Hegel called Vernunft, or what most people call reason. That plan took a dramatic turn in 1979 when simultaneous but unrelated uprisings against the regnant ideology of materialism took place in Iran and Poland.

If by Logos we mean the central tenets of Greek philosophy, Iran made formal contact with Logos at least one century before the Arab conquest. After the emperor Justinian ended its funding in 529 AD, the Platonic Academy moved from Athens to Ctesiphon, where it found patronage under the Sassanid King Khosrau I. Islamic philosophy was not Arabic in inspiration. The Arabic conquest of Persia, which took place from 640 to 642 AD, meant the imposition of Arabic as Persia’s liturgical language, but from the eighth or ninth century until about the fifteenth century “the greatest Mohammaden theologians, historians, philosophers, grammarians, lexicographers, and philologists who wrote in Arabic were of Persian origin.”Amanat’s history is predicated on a philosophical event which took place centuries before the events described at the beginning of his book, when al-Ashari published The Incoherence of the Philosophers, an event that has been characterized as the “closing of the Muslim mind,” which is another word for the derailment of Logos in Persia.

The Islamic Republic which came into being in 1979 was part of a dialectic which began with the Arabic conquest.  More specifically, the Islamic Republic came into being as the reverse engineering of the CIA inspired coup d’etat which brought the Shah to power in 1953. No matter how we view the two competing paradigms which have dominated the last century of Iranian history, both the Pahlavi desire to westernize Iran and the Islamic desire to undo that westernization derived from contesting strains that went all the way back to the Arabic conquest of Persia in the seventh century.

In 1979 the pendulum swung from the hegemony of the westernizers under the Shah to the hegemony of the Islamicists under the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was also part of a world-wide uprising against materialism. In February of 1979, two million Iranians greeted the Ayatollah Khomeini as their Supreme Leader, granting him the right to establish the Islamic Republic which has held power to this day. In June of 1979, one million Polish Catholics attended the Mass in Warsaw celebrated by Pope John Paul II, an event which inaugurated the Catholic uprising against Soviet materialism which was the exact counterpart to Khomeini’s uprising against American materialism in Iran. In both cases, religion triumphed over materialism in dramatic and unexpected ways.

Ten years later, the Catholic uprising against materialism succeeded in bringing about the end of communism when the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 led to the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. At this point, the United States should have disbanded NATO and brought its troops home after declaring victory in the Cold War. Instead, the same Jewish neocons who were busy looting Russia under the direction of Jeffrey Sachs expanded NATO ever eastward until finally, after they showed their determination to include Ukraine as a member state, they ignited World War III, which now rages on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The neoconservatives used Pope John Paul II as a human shield to expand NATO eastward in preparation for the attack on Russia which began in 2014 when Victoria Nuland overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine.

The disastrous war in the Ukraine is not part of part of God’s plan for human history any more than suicide is part of God’s plan for the black woman I met on the LaSalle Street bridge, which is why God sent me there to rescue that woman. We know that war is not part of God’s plan because God told Jeremiah, “I know the plans I have in mind for you—it is Yahweh who speaks—plans for peace, not disaster reserving a future full of hope for you” (Jeremiah 29:11).

Something similar to ending the Cold War should have happened in Iran, but instead of announcing that the Islamic revolution died with the Ayatollah Khomeini and interring it with him in his grave, the new Supreme Leader decided to follow the example which the Great Satan set in 1989 by extending the revolution into an era in which it had become obsolete.

Instead of admitting that fact, the mullahs decided to continue the revolution just as the neocons decided to continued NATO. The result was war in the Ukraine and the Hijab crisis in Iran, where the CIA has unleashed covert cultural warfare using Iran’s women as its proxy warriors.

In 1980 Iran was still in the grip of the 1979 revolution. At this point the new Islamic political establishment began to speak of a cultural revolution of the sort that almost destroyed China in the mid-1960s. On April 18, 1980, the Ayatollah Khomeini launched an attack on the universities beginning with the Phalangist takeover of the Teacher Training College of Tehran. On June 4, all universities were shut down and would not reopen for two years.

Amanat claims that “the Iranian version” of Mao’s cultural revolution “was far tamer, less bloody, and largely concerned with control of the educational levers at all levels. It was nevertheless deeply damaging to the fabric of Iranian education, professional fields, technological skills, and most of all, branches of the humanities.” The Iranian cultural revolution began with the closure of all of the country’s universities on June 4, 1980, followed by Khomeini’s ratification of that act and the need “to systematically cull undesirable elements,”3 by which the mullahs meant supporters of the Pahlavi policy of westernization. Within a year, the cultural revolution was in full swing, as “mobs in Tehran and other provinces randomly attacked university campuses, beating up and injuring students, driving out the left from their offices and paramilitary bases, and in turn occupying campuses.”4 The Iranian cultural revolution may have been “far tamer” and “less bloody” than its Chinese counterpart, but it had catastrophic consequences for literature and philosophy, which the Iranian clergy had always viewed with suspicion. Now at the moment when philosophical detachment was needed the most, the philosophers were deliberately banned from the discussion, leading to the excesses of revolutionary figures like Sadeq Khalkhali, the hanging judge in charge of the revolutionary tribunals who set out to purge the nascent Islamic republic of anyone found guilty of “corrupting the earth and combating God.” This category, unsurprisingly, encompassed a large group of people including nationalists of the secular and ethnic variety as well as leftists of all shades and nonpolitical groups like the Baha’is (a sect to which Amanat belongs). Before long, it became clear that Khalkhali was invoking Islam as a way of declaring war on Iranian history: 

In his vast catalog of corrupters of the earth, he reserved a place for rulers of Iran’s pre-Islamic past. He wrote an essay condemning Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire of the fifth century BCE, accusing him not only of being a despot and liar but also of being a sexual pervert. In the early days of the revolution, Khalkhali intended to bulldoze Persepolis and other ancient Iranian monuments of the pre-Islamic era. His campaign was stopped, miraculously, because of local resistance. Reportedly, even Ferdowsi’s tomb made it onto Khalkhali’s demolition wish list.

On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, prompting Khomeini to say, “This war is a gift from God” because it unified a nation that was tired of revolutionary chaos and because it focused Iran’s attention on an external enemy. At this point the MKO (Mojahedin-e Khalgh, a left-wing terrorist organization sometimes known as the MEK) volunteered to help Khomeini destroy his enemies. The short lived alliance between the MKO and the mullahs disintegrated shortly thereafter, proving once again that every successful revolution leads to a civil war…

 

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

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Endnotes

1. Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers. 
2. Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow.
3. Robert Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, [pdf].
4. Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg, “British Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations,” Executive Intelligence Review, November 30, 2001. 
5.  Peter Goodgame, “Globalists and the Islamists.”
6. Waller R. Newell, “Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left.” The Weekly Standard, Novemver 11, 2001. 
7. “Ideology of Terror,” Encyclopædia Britannica. 
8. Pierre Beaudry, “The Algeria Paradox: Will Bush or Kerry Learn a Lesson from Charles de Gaulle?” Executive Intelligence Review, June 18, 2004. 
9. Dean Henderson, “The Shah of Iran and David Rockefeller,” excerpted from Geopolitics: The Global Economy of Big Oil, Weapons and Drugs.
10. Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.”
11. David Lee Preston, “Hitler’s Swiss Connection,” Philadelphia Inquirer. January.
12. John Coleman, The Committee of 300, “Tavistock Institute Of Human Relations.” 
13. Dave Emory, Lecture: “Islamism, Fascism and the GOP.”
14. Mike Evans, Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos: A Carter/Obama Plan That Will Not Work.
15. Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.
16. Carol Quigley, Tragedy & Hope.
17. Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception, & The Other Side of Deception.
18. James A. Billington, Fire on the Minds of Men.
19. Mehrdad Amanat, Jewish Identities in Iran: Resistance and Conversion to Islam and the Baha’i. 
20. Martin Heidegger, Black Notebooks.
21. Ari Ben Menashe, Profits of War, Inside the Secret US Israeli Arms Network.
22. Marvin S Antelman, To Eliminate the Opiate. 
23. Webster Tarpley, 911 Synthetic Terror.
24. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance & The Lost Hegemon.
25. David Astle, Babylonian Woe.
26. Alinaghi Alikhani, Memoirs.
27. Houshang Nahavandi, The last Shah.
28. Meir Ezri, Memoirs. Memories of the Last Israel Ambassador in Iran.
29. Jeff Gates, Guilt by Association.
30. Laurent Guyenot, From Yahweh to Zion.