A Tale of One/Two People

I have to admit that it is increasingly difficult for me to write about the recent disparities of my Iranian society since I understand that I have no right to “inject the poison of disappointment to the society,” as a dear person once reminded me. But writing in this English-language blog who has less than fifteen subscribers, it is easier for me to speak of parts of my concerns over the direction of the Iranian society that we (most of us, probably) tend to not speak of, to save face somehow.

After the bloody months of post-election revolts and the increasing distrust people have towards the governmental structures of the society I feel more and more that a situation of internal hostility (and not usual conflicts and disagreements) is becoming more and more definitive to the period of Iranian history we are beginning to approach. A society divided in half, an unbridged binary opposition between two groups of society each considering the other as literally the ontological Other,  and the corrupt structure of a political establishment glorifying one section of the society and demonizing and humiliating the Other (following a standard colonial policy) are more and more encouraging this society to depart from the ideal unity, or sociopolitical Tawhid, the ideologues of the Islamic Revolutionary such as Sharia’ti had in mind.

For me, nothing is more symbolizing of such an internal hostility than the burning of the figure of Ghirtii (the Gucci) in the Qods Day demonstrations in Tehran along with the flags of the U.S. and Israel and such symbols typically considered external.

P.S.

More than thirty years after his martyrdom, Sharia’ti’s theo-mystic approach still provides us with a decent explanation of the dynamics of such a social partitioning: when the divinely-inspired consciousness of Man (not Man in the Western humanist sense but Man in the Islamic-Iranian mystic context as the true heir to the divine) is forgotten, Sharia’ti points out, then “earthly” identities such as race, religion, gender, etc.- “based” identities gain prominence.  Is the same true of a society in which “the faith of the people have disappeared beneath the high towers,” as Haj Rouzbeh used to say in ” One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest?”