Following her death in September, Mahsa Amini became the face which ignited massive protests in Iran over that government’s dress code. Over the course of the next few weeks, Amini became a feminist icon in Iran. Like all icons, Amini had little to say about how her image was venerated. The woman in charge of putting words into her mouth was Masih Alinejad, a frizzy haired harridan who lives in New York city and is an employee of Voice of America Persian, which is “part of an international network of propaganda-producing organizations originally created by the CIA.”1

Alinejad is part of the Iranian diaspora which has become the driving force behind attempts to overthrow the government. Many Americans and government agencies in America look to Iranian emigrants as their experts on the situation in Iran. Members of the Iranian diaspora in many Western countries have much more in common with the West than with Iran. They’re the Westoxification Iranians (Gharbzadegi which Persian writer Jalal Al Ahmade referred to), in other words, Voice of America Persians like Masih Aledinejad. They’re also the Persians in affluent neighborhoods of Northern Tehran and major cities in Iran. They’re secular. They typically didn’t participate in defending their country against the Iraqi invasion, and many chose to flee or hide. But there is another Iran with millions who still support the Islamic regime and have died for it and will continue to die for the cause. This Persian group is typically very religious, and they believe in the hijab. They listen to the propaganda by the regime and are very suspicious of the influence of the alphabet soup agencies based in Washington, UK, and Israel. The Iranian regime has been exploiting U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan to tell its citizens that following policies from the U.S. is destructive. The Iranians see what uprisings in Syria and Libya did for those nations, so they are very hesitant to join the so-called women’s uprising, especially because many of the demonstrations are mixed with supporters of autonomy for Kurdistan and Sistan/Baluchestan provinces. Most Iranians will tolerate a dictator who holds the country together over a democratic government that won’t stand up against the separatists. With Mahsa Amini being Kurdish and Sunni, many of the Shi’ite Persian majority in Iran are suspicious of the current uprising. Especially because they know that the U.S. and Western policy regarding Iran has traditionally been based on three pillars: 1) Talks resulting in “change in behavior” by Iranian regime; 2) Regime Change, and 3) Military action against Iran.

U.S.A "Solidarity Rallies" Protesting Iran's Regime

With what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., no one in the U.S. thinks that there is a military solution against Iran. This is especially true after the start of the Ukraine conflict and the conflict just over the horizon with China. The only people who think there should be a military solution against Iran are the Israelis, and their Wahhabi friends in the Persian Gulf, who would love to have U.S. boys and girls fight their battle with Iran for them. So, with the U.S. congress not allowing a renewal of the JCPOA “nuclear deal,” the only remaining solution for the U.S. to pursue is regime change. Hence, what is going on with Masih Alinejad? This movement is doomed to fail, just like the Green Movement. It is incredible that people in Washington are still using the past playbooks after the whole world changed when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russians or the Chinese for that matter will never again sign off on more UN security council resolutions for sanctions against Iran. That means the Iranians won’t have to think about changing their behavior. As such, the current uprising was doomed to fail from the beginning just like the coup d’etat in Turkey during Obama’s term.

History continues to repeat itself in Iran, if for no other reason than because the CIA is still using the same playbook they created at the dawn of the era of psychological warfare, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh in 1953 and placed Shah Reza Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. The Shah remained on that throne for the next 26 years, until the Ayatollah Khomeini reverse engineered the CIA playbook and orchestrated his own revolution in 1979. Revolution followed by counter-revolution is the not-so-hidden grammar of political life in modern Iran, which is particularly vulnerable to revolutionary change because it is divided between a pro-Westernizer Party and an Islamic reactionist party. Yale Professor Abbas Amanat’s recent history of modern Iran makes this clear. Then as now, the main focus of protests is Iran’s universities. This is not surprising because the universities epitomize Iran’s divided soul.

Convinced that institutions like the universities had been corrupted under the Pahlavis, the Ayatollah Khomeini unleashed the Persian version of Mao’s cultural revolution to purify them. Amanat claims that “the Iranian version 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.”2 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.”5 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.6

Like Shi’a Islam, Persian poetry became an acceptable way to protest the Arabic suppression of Logos in Persia. One of the main protagonists in that battle was Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi, or simply Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, a work universally recognized as the national epic of Persia:

Completed in the early 11th Century, the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) is not only a literary masterpiece, but also a book that has for centuries helped define Iranian identity, as well as safeguarding the existence of the Persian language. Consisting of more than 50,000 rhyming couplets, it is the longest poem ever written by a single author. It is not an epic about a single defining event, a fantastical voyage, or a particular pair or star-crossed lovers or arch-rivals, as is the case with many national epics. Although certainly brimming with the aforementioned, the Shahnameh is an epic centred around the very essence and soul of Iran; and, while ancient Iran is its chief object, the book’s messages are timeless, and in many cases may well have been written for humanity as a whole.7

Like Shi’a Islam, which was based on the tragic death of Husain, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh found its culmination when Rostam unwittingly killed his own son Sohrab. Rostam was defending Iran against Turan, which is a fictional country that is the enemy of Iran. Turan is not an identifiable historical country. Because Rostam was from Zabul, southeast of Iran, Turan is suspected to be enemies of Iran from Turkish tribes of central Asia, not the Arabs. But since there has never been a war between Iran and the Turkic tribes bordering the northeastern territories of central Asia, many Persians believe that the Turan could be a reference to Arabs, even if Ferdowsi didn’t want to say they were Arabs out of fear of getting in trouble with Arab rulers. The miracle of the Shahnameh is that not one single Arabic word was used in it. So, Ferdowsi is very deliberate in protecting the Persian language and culture from the tongue of the Arab invaders.

Over a millennium after Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh, the Ayatollah Shahroudi was still mourning his death by attacking the Saudis, years after Sadeq Khalkhali, a member of the same revolution, had done his best to efface Ferdowsi’s memory. Anyone who is unaware of this contradiction will find it impossible to understand the current situation in Iran.

After close to 1,500 years, the Arabian conquest of Persia has created a conflict between Persian culture and Arabic religion which continues to act as a fault line dividing Iranian culture. Iran was one of the few countries conquered by Islam which refused to substitute Arabic for its native language. Like the Berbers of North Africa, Iran “did not succumb to the predominance of the Arabic language. Nor did it ever entirely abandon its pre-Islamic cultural memories. It preserved not only its endogenous solar calendar along with the Islamic lunar calendar but also its pre-Islamic rites such as the Persian New Year festival of Nowruz at the vernal equinox.”8

Language as the Vehicle of Culture

Amanat establishes the importance of language as the vehicle and repository of Persian culture early in his history. The Persian language, in all of its historical forms, was:

an enduring and yet adaptable means of communication, source of literary efflorescence, and repository of collective memories and shared symbols. Belonging to the Indo-Iranian linguistic family (a branch of Indo-European languages), over the course of three millennia Persian evolved from the ancient tongue of Achaemenid times, known as the Old Persian, to the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) of late antiquity, and eventually to “Modern” Persian (Farsi) of today’s Iran (and with minor variances, Dari of Afghanistan and Tajik of Central Asia). Presumably rooted in the court parlance (Dari) of the Sasanian period, Modern Persian first developed as a literary medium in the early ninth century CE, only to become, in the following centuries, the lingua franca of the Persianate world, including Iran proper, and is in use from India to Central Asia.9

Farsi was the main bulwark against Arabic cultural hegemony, and it preserved Iranian cultural identity largely through the poetry written in that tongue “despite Islamic disapproval, and even prohibition, and in the face of outcries from the religious establishment.”10 The history of Iran, as Amanat portrays it in his book, has been an ongoing conflict between the Persian id, celebrating wine, women, and song in its poetry, and the Islamic superego, which:

Greek Vase Depicting Persian Woman on Horseback Combating an Undressed Greek Warrior

emphatically prohibited playing or listening to music for leisure and reproducing any images of humans and living things in any form; it denounced any preservation and celebration of “pagan” myths and festivals of the pre-Islamic past; and even more intrusively, it banned, at least in theory, social practices such as wine drinking, singing, mixing of the sexes, same-sex affection, recitation of lyrical poetry, and most, if not all, forms of social leisure. Despite political defeat and the relatively swift conversion to Islam, it can be argued that Iran never was fully won over by the predominant culture of normative Islam, perhaps less even than Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia. It converted to Islam at its own pace and on its own terms, and with paradigms and practices it improvised along the way.11

If what Amanat says about the Persian/Islamic fault line in Iranian culture is true, then the Iran we have known for the past 43 years is an aberration based on a category mistake which deliberately mistook the part for the whole. 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 reverse 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.

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…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the December 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)