The Islamic Republic in Iran is not only at war with the United States and Israel. For years, the country’s government has been waging war on Iranian culture. Music, poetry, storytelling, dogs, dancing, singing, art, dice and card games, romance, tolerance and the honouring of women are central to Persian culture and its ancient history. Yet under the Islamic Republic, these cherished expressions are banned or stigmatised, especially when pursued by women.
Their departure from the country they love is one of the most poignant brain drains in history
In the dark, dystopian times immediately following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, couples holding hands or a man so much as looking at a woman could lead to arrest, or worse. My mother was forced into hiding in the mid-1980s when she was 16 years old. Her only crime was to oppose the regime. My father, who witnessed teenage school friends hanged for protesting against the Islamic Revolution, wasn’t able to go to university in Iran because he refused to pretend he was religious.
The Islamic Revolution (or the Islamic Occupation to give it its more accurate name) was revenge of the peasant class against the elites and the middle classes. It was a vengeful usurpation of the illiterate and uneducated religious mafia against the subjects of their envy: those capable of enlightened thinking and eloquence. Families associated with the Shah’s inner circle were arrested, tortured and executed in the months that followed. One by one, the enlightened and the educated were murdered by the cult of envious and hateful clerics. Those who survived have spent the last 47 years fleeing Iran. Their departure from the country they love is one of the most poignant brain drains in history; some of the greatest minds and entrepreneurs in the world have been forced to leave a country ruled by a terrorist mafia of uneducated, debauched and depraved men of the cloth.
Persepolis, a Unesco site and the capital of the ancient Persian Empire built two-and-a-half millennia ago, exists today only because of the sheer courage of locals who stood in front of the bulldozers. Thank goodness that ancient Persian artefacts, like the Cyrus Cylinder, the first bill of human rights written in 539BC by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, following his liberation of the enslaved Jewish people from Babylon, is safely on display in the British Museum in London rather than in the hands of the Islamists. How apt it is that the Jews were freed by Cyrus 47 years after their deportation from Jerusalem, and now Israel is helping to liberate the Iranian people after 47 years of brutal Islamic suzerainty – on the eve of Purim no less, the Jewish festival celebrating the foiling of an anti-Jewish plot of a corrupt Persian aristocrat in the fourth century BC by Persian Emperor Xerxes and his beloved Jewish wife, Queen Esther.
As Israel has tried for years to free the Iranian people from the shackles of the Islamic Republic, the leaders of Muslim-majority nations have chosen instead to keep quiet on the evil and cruelty dished out by the Islamic Republic in the name of their religion. Now, the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf are paying the price as their luxury resorts, shopping centres and airports are being targeted by the Iranian regime.
The tentacles of the Islamic regime have spread far and wide. At the football World Cups in Brazil and Qatar, I was followed and received death threats for carrying the Lion and Sun flag; regime stooges tried to intimidate me into surrendering it. Even in Britain, Iranians are not safe: my parents were attacked in London by rock-throwing thugs during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022. I have no doubt that the perpetrators were Khamenei-supporting thugs.
But for all the threats and intimidation, Iran’s cruel leaders have failed. Islam tried and failed to erase the Persian language, culture and history during the First Islamic Occupation fourteen centuries ago; and it failed again after the Second Islamic Occupation in 1979.
Khamenei, who spent 36 years spewing hate and threatening war against the US and Israel, while arrogantly mocking his enemies and waging war against the Iranian people, did not even survive the first few hours of this conflict. If his hands were not stained with the blood of so many innocent Iranians and non-Iranians alike, including and especially Muslims, I would laugh at his spectacular failure. But the mullahs have done great damage to the country I love – and to which one day I seek to return.
In time, a democratic Iran will finalise the exact number and identities of the murdered and disappeared victims of the Islamic Occupation. But until then, Iranians, both in Iran and in the diaspora, will rejoice and fight on, as their struggle for freedom continues.
