Bellies and Brains

The simultaneous appearance of two video clips on two websites belonging to Fars news agency and the Islamic Republic Document Center is a moving image of what is taking place in our homeland these days. It is the story of “brains” that are not tolerated and “bellies” that remind one of the times of barbarians.

The first video clip was a short piece showing the confessions of dissident cleric Ayatollah Boroujerdi. Some say that he is opposed to the intermarriage of religion and politics, while the film’s directors – those who extracted the confessions – say that he is a spy and a treacherous agent of “International Zionism” and “Imperialist America.”

In these confessions, which have not been aired on the state television yet, Boroujerdi says, “Now, I think that when it comes to faith, knowledge and wisdom, I am bereft of all three. I can’t even read the Koran or Mafatih al-Jenan (a religious text) correctly. I ask God for forgiveness for my mistakes: resisting arrest, writing letters to foreign leaders, speaking to the foreign press. I accept tricking hundreds of people and my family into darkness, and ask for repentance.”

His story has a plot similar to the story of many people in Iran since the 1979 revolution: Ayatollah Shariatmadari, leaders and members of leftist groups, nationalists, Haleh Esfandiari, Ramin Jahanbegloo, and everyone else whose film clips can be found at the archives of the Islamic Republic Document Center, which is run by the likes of Ruhollah Hosseinian, a force behind the massacre of dissident intellectuals in the 1990s by the Ministry of Intelligence.

Whether we agree with it or not, they are the “brains” that are not tolerated by the official structure of the Islamic Republic.

Meanwhile, the semi-official Fars news agency broadcast a video clip of scores of people looting a “Shahrvand” supermarket at Tehran’s underprivileged Hakimiyeh neighborhood. More than anything else, the images bring to mind a land under occupation and subject to anarchy.

Perhaps, as Tehran’s prosecutor general, Saeed Mortazavi, says, the looters are “thugs and gangsters.” But, with a little thought, one can seek the root of the problem somewhere else. One must fear a political system that oppresses the brain and is not even capable of taking care of the belly. Intellectuals do not believe in violence; but a person who needs to fill up his belly knows no way other than violence. They do not know the famous intellectuals and dissidents, but they all know what rice and bread is. When the former is missing, their protests may not be loud enough; but when the latter is missing – when that time comes – they will even renounce their religion.

We have to fearful! We must fear the day when scores of hungry people see no way other than to revolt.