What is happening in Iran cannot be reduced to a story of politics or power, nor understood only in terms of words and actions. The change that is underway is also taking place at a deeper level of sensibility and emotion - felt by many millions but only rarely expressed in ways that easily translate into the public arena.
There are valuable ways of acquiring a surface feel for this change. One is to access some of the wealth of visual images and other communication networks that are a central feature of the Iranian protest-movement that has grown since the contested presidential election of June 2009.
On 16 February 2010, for example - the week of the anniversary of the revolution of 1979, marked by a huge official demonstration in Tehran - an anonymous video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan on 20 June 2009 was given the prestigious Polk award. John Darnton, curator of the Polk awards described this record of the shooting of an innocent young student passer-by as the “iconic image of the Iranian resistance”. He added: “This award celebrates the fact that, in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social-networking sites to deliver news.”
A few days earlier, the award for the World Press Photo of 2009 was given to an intimate photograph taken (by Pietro Masturzo) on one of the boiling nights that following the election, when residents of Tehran would climb to their rooftops and voice their dissent in cries of Allah-o-Akbar.
Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, the chair of the jury that chose the photo, said that the photo had touched her “both visually and emotionally". Indeed, Iran’s pro-democracy movement has been the source of many such poignant images. Another such, unforgettable for many people inside Iran is one of a young man called Sohrab Arabi. It was taken on the day that he was to disappear.
The photo shows the 19-year-old Sohrab sitting beside his mother, wearing the sort of comfortably safe demeanour that boys from the ages of 4 to 40 adopt when around their mothers. She is holding a poster of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the reformist candidate who millions of Iranians believe was the true winner of the presidential elections. Her expression mixes a furrowed brow with a gleam of hope; the overall impression is of is determination. Parvin Fahimi was later to write: “I lost my son on Monday 15 June during a peaceful rally held to protest the election results. The crowds were estimated at a minimum of 3 million. We wanted nothing but peace, tranquility and a freedom of thought”.
The power of fear
Sohrab, like Neda, has become a symbol of something larger than himself: of Iran’s young people, of the resistance to oppression and deception, even of Iran itself. In his case it is his very name that reinforces this almost mystic sense of potency and goodness. It would be hard to find an Iranian over the age of 5 who doesn’t know the story of Rostam and Sohrab, from Ferdowsi’s renowned 10th-century work the Shahnameh (Epic of Kings). The ruler Rostam kills the valiant challenger Sohrab only to find out that the latter is his long-lost son; what makes the event more bitter is that Rostam himself narrowly escaped death thanks to Sohrab’s virtue. The “laws of honour” must prevail, says the Shahnameh, such that “he who brings down a valiant man for the first time should not destroy him, but preserve him for a second battle ".
Many Sohrabs have been slain in the history of patriarchal Iran. Yet to this day Iranians are reared to treasure the honourable rules of combat that the ancient Sohrab adhered to, and to despise those who flout them. Near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 a column of tanks ceded to a lone protester; in Iran in 2009 footage taken on a videophone shows a police-truck trample back and forth over a young protester. China today is one of Iran’s best “friends”, though Tehran has neither the ideological unity among the elite nor the growth economy for the masses that could offer equivalent protection - it has only brute power.
Since Sohrab was lost to his mother on 15 June 2009, many Iranians have been killed, attacked and imprisoned; many homes similar to the one in Pietro Masturzo’s photo have been invaded and its inhabitants detained for committing the sin of chanting Allah-o-Akbar in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet, astonishingly, many persist in using all available means to defend their Iran and show it to the world. Even during the 11 February 2010 events, the drenching official censorship was unable to prevent films of the protests being circulated on Youtube within minutes.
What comes across most forcibly is the enormous security at this “celebration”, with endless rows of military personnel, anti-riot police, and their vehicles. Another videophone film highlights the scale of the military presence, in menacing scenes that were never replicated even during eight years of war against an invading enemy. If the rulers of revolutionary Iran thus reveal fear of their own people, it is in part because they are aware of how far they have breached the “laws of honour”; how many Sohrabs there are.
The films, images, tweets and blogs that are cast out like messages-in-bottles across the cyber-waves are a central part of people’s struggle to narrate their own stories and present its case for justice. Much of the western media views the issue at stake in terms of a test of strength, and sees the “successful” security clampdown of 11 February 2010 as a decisive thwarting of the opposition. But this struggle is not about street-combat and the toppling of dictators. It is about the coming of age of a generation whose rightful non-violent fight for civil rights is both as ancient and as new as Sohrab.
