by Adnan Qaiser 2 October 2022
Horace had once noted: “Brute force bereft of reason falls by its own weight.”
The unfortunate death of a hapless Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, 22, at the hands of Iran’s fanatic “morality police” on September 16, 2022 for not wearing a headscarf – followed by brutal repression of protesters causing 76 deaths and 1,200 arrests in 80 cities and town – should get the world out of slumber and take note about the grave human rights violations taking place in Iran.
In this age and time there is neither any room, nor any logic for any theocratic state to exist, stifle the voice of its people or to regulate their attire. For too long the Iranian clergy has befooled the Iranian populace in the name of religion and on the false pretext of Shiite exploitation at the hands of majority Sunnis.
It must be highlighted that the Shia-Sunni schism had, in fact, been more of a political “game of thrones” rather than any religious dissension. In her scholarship After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split, Lesley Hazleton records: “If you were a believer in fate, you might think that Ali was destined never to be Caliph, and that when he finally did accept the caliphate twenty-five years after Muhammad’s death, he was provoking fate and thus the tragedy [of his assassination on January 29, 661 AD] that would follow.”[1]
This is another story that while Sunnis took advantage by turning faith into “political Islam,” the Shiites too manipulated the “virtue of martyrdom, politically.”[2]
Meanwhile, Iran’s Ayatollah Marjas and Hojatoleslams have remained preoccupied with the survival of their Vilayet-e-Faqih and to enrich themselves from state resources – duly protected by the radical Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Quds Force and paramilitary Basij Force.
With reports of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s (83) ill-health circulating the power corridors, a succession tussle has already begun between the incumbent president Ebrahim Raisi and Khamenei’s heir Mojtaba Khamenei.
The theocratic Iranian regime has always been too hung up about morality issues since the Iranian Revolution of February 1979. Any connotation of liberal or westernized lifestyle has been seen by the clerics as threat to their power. Unsurprisingly, the recent anti-hijab campaign has been labelled as a “grand sedition” inviting state oppression and harsh prison sentences.
But strict hijab enforcement was a bomb waiting to explode since 2020. The way Iran’s morality police, called Hijab Watch, took hijab compliance to farcical level people had been sick and tired of being summoned for even travelling in their private cars bare head.
Most distressingly, denying it as “anarchy,” Iran’s supreme leader, through his shrewd machination to safeguard his rule, has pitted innocent Iranians against their fellow citizens. By provoking pro-government zealots against the protesting crowds to uphold the virtues of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei has allowed them to use violence and firearms against their own compatriots.
Unsurprisingly thus, the government doubled down its harsh response. Granting a free hand to the security forces while on one hand Iran’s judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei decreed “decisive action [against rioters] without leniency,” the government simultaneously took out public rallies in Enghelab (Revolution) Square supporting hijab and conservative values – stirring up the “martyrdom sentiment.” Opposing the discretionary wearing of hijab, media reported a demonstrator shouting “Martyrs died so that this hijab will be on our head.”
Another favourite expression of an (insecure) Iranian regime is “international conspiracy” against it. As the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell deplored the security forces’ heavy-handed response as “disproportionate … unjustifiable and unacceptable;” and Washington sanctioned Iran’s “morality police” for its abuse and violence against the Iranian women and demonstrators, not only Tehran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani hit back: “Washington is always trying to weaken Iran’s stability and security,” but the Foreign Ministry also summoned the British and Norwegian Ambassadors to hand over a demarche over what it said was interference and hostile media coverage.
The brutal killing of Mahsa Amini – with a head injury in police custody – revived the painful memories of Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, who was similarly killed through a skull fracture in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison under torture on July 11, 2003. Religion remains a force; Unleashed upon untamed minds results in turning them into evil monsters, who can go to any length of savagery and brutality to please their clerical masters.
While rights groups keep voicing their protestations at the indiscriminate use of state force in Iran, Canada has been raising this issue through its successive resolutions at the UN General Assembly since 2003. In its annual report of 2021, Human Rights Watch noted Iranian regime to be one of the “world’s leading implementers of death penalty.” The report chronicled that “in 2021 [alone] Iran had executed at least 254 people as of November 8, including at least seven people on alleged terrorism-related charges.”
While the international community procrastinated for good 43 years, it is time the Iranian regime is brought under harsh international sanctions. State repression may not fall under the four categories of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing under the 2005’s United Nations’ political commitment of Responsibility to Protect (R2P); yet the world must demand right to life and democratic equities for the Iranian people from the oppressive Iranian regime.[3]
The world must also ensure the Iranian clergy stops its political meddling into the internal affairs of neighbouring Iraq or to threaten any regional Arab state for that matter. Iran’s interference causing intra-Shiite political feud has reached a point of civil-war in Iraq. Moreover, Iran’s militia called Popular Mobilization Force (PMU) not only impaired Baghdad but also expelled the U.S. forces from Iraqi soil. Using Iraq as a staging battleground, Iran not only armed and funded the Shiite Houthis in Yemen but also stunned Saudi Arabia into silence through a swarm-drone attack at Saudi oil installations on September 14, 2019. A senior Iranian diplomat in Canada once confided to me: “Tehran can take control of Baghdad in less than an hour.”
Moreover, while Iran’s true ambitions behind obtaining nuclear technology – i.e. making a nuclear bomb – has already dawned upon the U.S. and its reluctant European allies, all efforts must be made to stop the eccentric regime in its nuclear tracks.[4] Recent reports have emerged about Iran not only pursuing nuclear device making capability through uranium enrichment but also by processing plutonium. Experts have warned Tehran’s nuclear program has already crossed a reversible threshold needing a credible threat of force to stop. The world cannot afford another impetuous North Korea!
Iran is an ancient civilization; its people must not be allowed to be held hostage by a group of clerics only interested in prolonging their power, perks and privileges at state expense.
The ensuing nationwide demonstrations in the Iranian streets, though repressed iron-handedly, show Iranians have had enough of the dose of religion and Taliban-style Sharia. The Comite-he Gasht and the squads of Amr-bil Ma’ruf va Nahi Anil Munker must be reined-in and stop interfering into the private lives of people – faith and its rituals being one of them. However, that being amounting to death knell for the Ayatollahs, calling the protesters as “enemies it would confront” even the Iranian Army has declared its willingness to go to any length of repression with live ammunition issued.
Bizarrely, the Iranian regime sees the 1983’s hijab-wearing law as a fundamental pillar of the Islamic Republic without which the political and societal order might wreck. Whereas, according to an independent survey an overwhelming 72 percent majority rejects mandatory hijab observance – which incidentally is also not obligatory in the Islamic faith, except modest attire.
Despite having been emotionally and religiously brainwashed by the Islamist clerics for their own influence into the Iranian polity – like the messianic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (died 1989) –the moderate Muslims of Iran generally aspired to walk in sync with the modern world toward prosperity and personal liberty.
It had been Iranian clergy’s political machination that led to the failure of King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s “White Revolution” of 1963, which the New York Times had historically noted as a ‘gush taking Iran out of 2,500 years of archaic stagnation.’
Praveen Swami wrote in The Print: “Eleven years after he coronated himself in December 1924, Iran’s King of Kings Reza Shah Pahlavi, the son of a conservative small landowner, ordered his women subjects to remove the hijab. The Kashf-e-hijab decree was a critical moment in his effort to remake the country into a modern nation with a modern military, modern railways, modern banks, modern schools—and men in European-style caps.” That era of women emancipation and liberalization had since been impeded and reversed by the Islamic Revolution.
The Iranian regime is already on a wane. The Vilaet-e-Faqih’s inner dissensions, distrusts and disputes have already begun to erode its very foundations. Meanwhile, Iranian population, especially the youth, are fed up by living a life cut-off from the civilized world. The Iranian people out protesting in the streets should be helped in getting rid of a theocratic regime that has muffled their voices, seized their democratic rights and choked their human aspirations for the past four decades.
Similar to the end of “papal’s power” in the Roman Church, it is time the “power of pulpit” is also cut to size in the Islamic world – especially Iran – and the abuse of religion in the name of politics be brought to an end. The fourteen hundred year old political feud between Shia-Sunni sects and a cold-war between Islam’s self-proclaimed paterfamilias for hegemony in the Middle East – and beyond to Muslim countries – must cease now.[5]
In the death of Mahsa Amini, Henry Kissinger must have received the answer to his refrain, “whether [Iran] wants to be a nation or a cause.” With Iranian regime’s penchant for martyrdom, the death of innocent Mahsa Amini must not go in vain; it must bring down the brutal and tyrant theocratic regime too.
Adnan Qaiser is an international affairs expert having had a distinguished career in the armed forces as well as international diplomacy. He can be reached at: [email protected] and Tweets @adnanqaiser01. Views are personal and do not represent any institutional thought.
Notes
[1] Lezley Hazleton, “After the Prophet: The Epic Story of Shia-Sunni Split,” Anchor Books (Random House), New York (2009, p. 69
https://www.amazon.com/After-Prophet-Story-Shia-Sunni-Split/dp/0385523947
[2] Adel Hashemi, “The Making of Martyrdom in Modern Twelver Shi’ism: From Protesters and Revolutionaries to Shrine Defenders,” I.B. Taurus (2002), pp. 224
[3] “Constructing the Responsibility to Protect: Contestation and Consolidation,” Edited by Charles T. Hunt and Phil Orchard, Routledge, 2020, pp. 194
[4] Adnan Qaiser (Author), “The Iranian Nuclear Bomb,” South Asia Journal (USA), Aug 6, 2022
https://southasiajournal.net/the-iranian-nuclear-bomb/
[5] Adnan Qaiser (Author), “Middle East Conundrum: Saudi Jitteriness – Sanctifying Sectarianism,” Conference of Defence Associations Institute, Canada, Jul 12, 2017
http://cdainstitute.ca/qaiser-middle-east-conundrum-saudi-jitteriness-sanctifying-sectarianism/