They can't control what's inside us

Thanks to Ferdowsi,the Iranians always had their language to unite them and keep them different from the outside world-and they also took pain to safeguard their cultural touchstones.Take the new year.Nowruz,a 13-day extravaganza during which everything shuts down and the people eat a lot,dance,recite poetry,and build fires that they jump back and forth over.It's a thankgiving of sorts,celebrated around the spring equinox,and a holdover holiday from Zoro-astrianism,at one time the state religion of the Persian.Zoroastrianism's teachings-good and evil,free will,final judgement,heaven and hell,one almightly God-have influenced many religions,including the world's three main faiths,Judaism,Christianity,and Islam.By the time the Arabs arrived,bringing what was for them the new idea of worshipping a single God,Persians had been doing it for more than a millennium.Oil was at the root of a 1953 event that is still a sore subject for many Iranians,the CIA-backed overthrow,instigated and supported by the British government,of Iran's elected and popular prime minister,Mohammad Mossadegh.Mossafegh had kick out the British after the Iranian oil industry,controlled through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company late BP,was nationalized,and the British had retaliated with an economic blockade.With the Cold war on and the Soviet bloc loacted just to the north,the U.S. feared that a Soviet-backed communism in Iran could shift the balance of world power and jeopardize Western interests in the region.The coup-Operation TP-Ajax-is believed to have been the CIA's first.Kermit Roosevet,Jr,Teddy's grandson,ran the show,and H.Norman Schwarzkopf,the father of the Persian Gulf war commander,was enlisted to coax the shah into playing his part.Its base of operation was the U.S. embassy in Tehran,the future nest of spies to the Iranians,where 52 U.S. hostages were taken in 1979.After ward,the shah,Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,was returned to power,commercial oil rights fell largely to British and U.S. oil companies,and Mossadegh was imprisoned and later placed under horse arrest until he died in 1967.To Iranians like Shabbam Rezaei,who has created the online magazine Persian Mirror to promote Iran's cultural identity,Operation TP-Ajax set the stage for later decades of oppression and Islamic fundamentalism.I think if we had been allowed to have a democratic government.she said we could have been the New York of the middle East-of all of Asia,frankly a center for finance,industry ,commerce,culture,and a modern way of thinking.The shah had his own uses for Persian identity.He was big on promoting Persepolis and Cyrus while at the same time pouring Western music.dress,behaviors,and business interests into Iran.One attempt to instill nationalistic pride,which backfired and helped turn public opinion against him,was the ostentatious celebration he staged in 1971 to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of Persian monarchy.It featured a luxurious tent city outside the entrance to Persepolis,VIP apartments with marble bathrooms,food flown in from Paris,and a guest list that included dignitaries from around the world but few Iranians.




To shah's vision apparently involved too much modernizing too fast,and many Iranians bristled.We were getting westernized,said Farin Zahedi,a drama professor at the university of Tehran.But it was superficial,because the public had no real understanding of Western culture.Iranians experienced it as a cultural attack and rebelled in the press and with street demonstrations.The more paranoid the shah became,the more heavy-handed were his secret police-Savak,created in 1957 with the help of America and Israeli advisers.At least hundred of poeple are believed to have been executed by SAVAK,many others were imprisoned,tortured,and exiled,and more than a thousand were killed by the army during demostrations.So when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spoke in late 1970's of liberating the people from this latest yoke,they were moved by his eloquence and moral rectitude,and for a time the reemergence of religion after the shah's relentless modernism felt like a cleansing.Yet many Iranians by nature are not particularly religious,in the sense of being mosque-goers and fasters.They have a powerful soul and spirit,said carpet salesman named Arsha,but that is not the same.There's a tendency to follow more of a Zoroastrian model from antiquity,with its disdain for rules and for the presumption that an intermediary,such as a mullah,is required to know Allah.The spiritual journey has tended to be more inward,in keeping with the Persian proverb knowledge of self is knowledge of God.So while Iranians at first were open to the idea of an increased role of Islam in public life,they weren't prepared for it to be forced on them with such rigor,especially given the Koran's specific instruction that there should be no compulsion in religion.They certainly didn't expect the clerics to take over commerce,government administration,the courts,and day to day life,down to and including how to go to the bathroom abd how to have sex.Punishments reminiscent of the Dark Ages-public stonings,hangings,the cutting off of fingers and limbs-were put into effect.The central government now discourages some of these archaic practices,but stubborn conservative mullahs out in the provinces cling to the old ways.Beneath it all is the spiritual aim to serve Allah and prepare for paradise.




They're forcing heaven on me!Ali said,sat in a circle and confided how awful it was to be trapped in an environment of fear and secrecy,not knowing if a friends or a loved one has been put in a position to make reports on what you're thinking and saying and doing.The ayatollahs and the ordinary people-everyone has to pretend,said a sofe-spoken locksmith with a huge mustache name Minister D.You don't know who is telling the truth,you don't know who is really religious and who isn't.The Persians have a saying.The walls have mice,and the mice have ears.You can't trust your own eyes,Ali said,If you breathe in or breathe out,Master D said they know.As for the revolution's effect on Persian identity?A typically Iranian thing seems to have happened.For ten years the doors to the West were closed,and conservative clerics running the government went about trying to minimize any cultural identification that was pre-Islamic,a period refered to in much of the Muslim world as Jahiliya,age of ignorance.In offical documents,where possible,references to Iran were replaced with references to IsIamic.Zoroastrian symbols were replaced with Islamic symbols,streets were renamed,and references to the Persian Empire disappeared from schoolbooks.For a time it seemed that Ferdowsi's tomb-a big,pale-stone mausoleum ousside the holy city of Mashhad,with a beautiful reflecting pool leading up to it and chirping birds racing about the columns-might be destoryed.Even Persepolis was in danger of being razed.But they realized this would unite the people against them Ali said,and they had to give up.



The people had welcome the removal of cultural junk from the West,said Farin,the drama professor,as we sipped tea in her tasteful Tehran apartment.But we soon realized that the identity the government was introducing also was not exactly who we were.In the cultural confusion.elements of the old culture-traditional music,Persian paintings,reading from Ferdowsi-were rekindled.We call it the forgotten empire.A young underground Persian rap singer named Yas joined us then,He had black spiky hair,stylishly long sideburns,handsome eyebrows shaped like two black bananas,and around his neck he wore a silver fracahar,the Zoroastrian winged disk that signifies the soul's upward progress through good thoughts,words,and deeds.He's part of the Generation of the Revolution,who grew up after 1979 and account for more than tow-thirds of the country's 70 million people.Variously described as jaded and lacking belief in their futures-a burned generation,as Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi put it-they are increasingly leaving for Europe and elsewhere.Some have a rich consciousness of their Persian past while at the same time supporting the idea of Islamic unity,some feel only Persian or only Islamic,and others immerse themselves in Western culture through television programming received on illegal satellite dishes.Farin said They are schizophrenic.Yas raps about Persian poets,grandparents,and the history of Iran.One of his most popular cut,My identity,was in response to the movie 300,about the famous battle at Thermopylae between the Spartans of Greece and the so-called Persian immortals.The Greeks were portrayed as heroic,innocent,and civilized,Yas said.The Persian were shown as ugly savages with a method of fighting that was unfair.The movie set off a tirade from Iranians here and abroad,who experienced it as a cultural attack.In defense,Yas rapped about Persepolis and Cyrus but also chastised his fellow citizens for resting on the laureals of greatness past.



An irony is that the Islamic revolution-at times refered to here as the second Arab invasion-appears to have strengthened the very ties to antiquity that it tried so hard to sever,it has roused that part of the national identity that remains connected to the idea,memorialized in places like Persepolos and Pasargadae,of Iranians as direct descendants of some of the world's most ancient continuous people.A civil engineer named Hashem told me of a recent impromptu celebration at Cyrus's tomb.People text messaged each other on their cell phones,and a couple of thousand coincidentally showed up,buying multiple entrance tickets to support restoration of the tomb.The celebration was informal.No speeches,no ceremony.Just to honor Cyrus and show solidarity.As farin put it,shaking her lowered head with an air of world-weariness,there has been this constant onslaught on our identity,and the reaction has always has been to return to that deepest identity.Inside every Iranian there is an emperor or an empress.That is for sure.