Speech at a Solidarity Event for Iran on 30 January 2023 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt
For the Yearning For a Normal Life
By Deniz Yücel
Madam Mayor,
ladies and gentlemen, good evening,
I welcome you to this event here in the Paulskirche and thank Ms. Eskandari-Grünberg for her invitation to say a few words on Iran, democracy, and women’s rights.
Some of you may be wondering why it should be me speaking on this subject – a man on the subject of women’s rights, a German-Turkish journalist with no family or professional ties to the country on the subject of Iran. Should it not be those directly affected who are heard?
Of course, people with similar biographical backgrounds can judge the same matter in very different ways, and biography does not automatically translate into insight. Yet it would indeed be strange if, say, at a panel discussion five men all by themselves were to deliberate on women’s rights, or if a symposium on Iran were held entirely without a speaker with an Iranian background. But that, as we see, is not the case here today.
But whoever interprets the legitimate demand that personally affected voices should also be heard in public debate to mean that only and exclusively the personally affected may and should speak is confining politics to a ghetto.
In other words: the disenfranchisement of women is not only a problem for women. And the murderous dictatorship in Iran is not only the concern of Iranians. It is about human rights. And human rights are not European or Western, they are universal and indivisible.
***
The people who have taken to the streets in Iran for months now, who confront an utterly ruthless state power unarmed, and who want nothing less than a revolution, deserve the greatest recognition and admiration. The current uprising builds on earlier protest movements, but has succeeded in spanning social, ethnic, and cultural boundaries to sweep across the entire country and to shake the mullah regime as nothing else has done in the 43 years of its rule. It is no longer about individual manifestations, about rigged elections or the price of gasoline, but about the whole.
Although different motives come together among the participants – otherwise such a mass uprising would be unthinkable – the origin of the protests nonetheless remains the situation of Iranian women. The violent death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – or, to call her by her Kurdish first name: Jîna Amini – at the hands of the morality police not only triggered these protests, but quickly turned them into a demand for revolution, for regime change. To the women, but also to their male fellow fighters, one may ascribe two insights:
First: where people are systematically oppressed, no one is free, not even those who seem to benefit from it. Second: the oppression, tutelage, and humiliation of women belong to the very essence of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whoever questions that is automatically questioning the system itself.
That demands for gender equality and sexual self-determination should stand at the center of a revolutionary uprising against an existing political and social order is likely without precedent. Regardless of how events develop in the near future, the people of Iran have already written world history.
Perhaps it is still too early to say whether a revolution is already under way in Iran, or whether it would be more accurate, with someone who knew a thing or two about it – namely Lenin – to speak of a »pre-revolutionary« situation, in which the ruled no longer want and the rulers can no longer rule in the same way. In addition to these »objective« factors, however, what would still be lacking is the »subjective« factor, namely the ability of the ruled to overthrow the existing power.
Or, rather than discussing the same question with Lenin – who, as we know, was more concerned with power than with freedom – let us do so with Hannah Arendt: for her, revolution entails a »double freedom«: on the one hand, the »negative freedom« of liberation from tyranny. The people of Iran are in the midst of this, even if they are paying a high price for it. But revolution, according to Arendt, also entails a second kind of freedom, a positive one: the creation of a »new public space«.
»Diese öffentliche Freiheit«, so schreibt Arendt, »ist eine handfeste lebensweltliche Realität, geschaffen von Menschen, um in der Öffentlichkeit gemeinsame Freude zu haben – um von anderen gesehen, gehört, erkannt und erinnert zu werden.« Wie weit die Iranerinnen und Iraner sich in diesem Sinne bereits in einer Revolution befinden sind, vermögen andere besser beurteilen als ich.
In any case, the uprising – and perhaps already the revolution – shows that another revolution has failed: the mullahs did not only seek to seize political power and shape the economy according to their own designs. They also wanted to create a new human being in their sense, an »Islamic« human, and to change the thinking, feeling, and desires of their subjects permanently in an explicitly anti-Western, anti-individualist, anti-democratic sense. For a time, this may have succeeded, through the use of violence and under the shadow of the war with Iraq, but it has by now failed. This power will not be able to reconstitute itself, even if they should once again succeed in violently crushing the protest.
At the same time, the uprising in Iran demonstrates far more powerfully what we have repeatedly observed over the past ten years: in religiously tinged autocratic or dictatorial regimes – and today this most often means Muslim-religiously tinged ones – women are not only objects of a specific oppression, they can also be subjects of resistance. This was the case in the »Arab Spring« in Egypt and Tunisia, in the Gezi uprising in Turkey, and in the Kurds’ fight against ISIS. To be oppressed is not the same as to be weak.
An uprising that no one has planned and that takes everyone by surprise, even those taking part, never comes out of nowhere; before people intervene spontaneously and effectively in the public-political space, they pass through processes in the pre-political sphere – until the discrepancy between the freedoms of the private sphere and the lack of freedom in the public one becomes unbearable. In short: women in Muslim countries – perhaps in Iran more than anywhere else – are oppressed, but not weak. They are in need of solidarity, not pity.
***
I do not want to tell you things that my fellow speakers and many of you know better than I, from your own experience. Instead, I would like to set out some reflections on the uprising in Iran – and begin with the question: what is the relationship between what is happening in Iran and the academic fashion called »postcolonialism«?
To take a step back: the great progressive upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries – the workers’ movement, women’s emancipation, anti-racism, the gay movement, the anti-colonial uprisings in the Third World – always proceeded in a similar way: they compared the »Western modernity«, the ideal of the Enlightenment, with the reality of the Western world – and only rarely did this comparison turn out in favor of reality.
At least in their dominant currents, these movements did not reject liberty, equality, fraternity; they demanded them. They were not enemies of the Enlightenment; rather, they extended it to its own blind spots. Or, to put it in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied: »Well, I think it would be a good idea.«
A look at the history of Iran likewise offers no reason to glorify the Western world; the fatal role played by the United States and Britain in 1953 in the overthrow of the progressive Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh has long since been established. The dictatorship of the Shah not only discredited the Western world in the eyes of many Iranians, it also laid the groundwork and created the precondition for the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution.
The West has therefore always offered ample reason to turn its practice critically back upon itself. Yet some critics went further and cast suspicion on the very ideas of modernity, Enlightenment, and emancipation. Frantz Fanon, for example, the leading thinker of the anti-colonial struggle for liberation in Algeria and beyond, regarded references to the rights of women as a trick of the colonial rulers, by which they sought to legitimize their domination and break resistance.
And Michel Foucault, the grand thinker of poststructuralism, was, incidentally, of the same opinion as Carl Schmitt: that behind every claim to justice lies only a concealed claim to power. But if there is no right without power, then there can be no women’s rights, no human rights, nothing that stands outside power and can claim universal validity.
It was therefore not without a certain logic that, on the eve of the Islamist revolution, Foucault traveled to Iran and did not see in the emerging mullah regime a particularly drastic example of his own theorems of the »disciplinary society« and of »biopower«, but was instead utterly enchanted by this revolt, which seemed to promise a »third way« between capitalism and socialism and, unlike the Marxist-influenced resistance movements, radically rejected the entire project of Enlightenment and modernity.
In its wake, a »postcolonialism« developed in Western academia, devoted entirely to the task of branding the West and the Enlightenment as »colonialist« – to be sure – »deconstructing« them. However prestigious the professorships of the intellectual pioneers of this »postcolonialism« may be at universities in the United States or Britain, its political spokesmen and leaders today are named Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Ali Khamenei. They are the ones who denounce gender equality or LGBT rights as »cultural imperialism«.
Merged with this »postcolonialism« are broad sectors of an academic feminism that seems to know only one field of activity: language, to which it devotes itself with all energy and often enough with furor. Meanwhile, in postcolonial jargon, compulsory veiling is volubly redefined as an emancipatory accessory, and criticism of the tutelage of women is denounced as the »colonial gaze« – as was the case in the loud criticism of an event at Frankfurt’s Goethe University on the subject of the headscarf, which was defamed by some students as »racist«.
And even where solidarity with the women in Iran is expressed, people sometimes strain to uphold their own worldview. To illustrate this with a recent and particularly drastic case from Iran: Masooumeh was 14 years old and lived with her family in a poor suburb of Tehran. In December, at school, she removed her headscarf in protest, was identified through cameras, and later arrested. In police custody she was raped, and later admitted to a hospital with a severe vaginal rupture, where she died.
Such a hypocritical regime, which, invoking Islam – or rather: their interpretation of Islam – establishes its rule through a delusional control of female sexuality and systematically punishes violations of its sexual morality with rape, is not merely the country-specific expression of a »global patriarchy« that allegedly exists just the same in Germany; the struggle of Iranians against a regime with so many Masooumehs on its conscience is not part of an »international struggle« for »gender-sensitive language« or against »glass ceilings in blue-chip boardrooms«. Here runs not a fine but a very thick line between solidarity and appropriation, between empathy and trivialization.
***
The fate of Iran will be decided in the West, one often hears from the political diaspora. But this notion – common also among exiles from other countries – is above all one thing: the result of a bad conscience, of the pain of no longer being there but here, of a sense of powerlessness at not being part of events oneself but condemned to mere spectatorship, and thus of exaggerating the place of exile into the true stage; the place to be, where in the end the decisive decisions would be made, which one as an exile seeks to influence.
Humanly speaking, this feeling is understandable. But it remains an illusion. The West is by no means so all-powerful. And if there is one country that in recent decades has defied the half-childish, half-conspiratorial assumption that not even a bird could fly anywhere in the world without the approval of the Pentagon (of Wall Street, of the West, etc.), it is Iran.
The future of Iran will be decided in Iran; it will be decided by the question of whether the people who for months now – and with interruptions since 2017 – have been in the streets, prove capable of turning protest into revolution. Whether they succeed in posing the question of power – and answering it in their own sense.
The West cannot bring about the revolutionary transformation of Iranian society. But that does not mean that the Western world can do nothing at all. There is one thing it very much can and must do: it can, and must, renounce all complicity with the Iranian regime.
What German and European politics seem to have agreed upon since the death of Jîna Mahsa Amini was by no means a consensus in previous years. Instead – especially in your party, Madam Mayor – policy relied on »dialogue«, an idea to which German foreign policy has been almost infatuated since the 1970s.
»Change through trade« was the motto, one that had indeed proven successful during the Cold War. One could, of course, argue at length about how much rapprochement policy actually contributed to the collapse of the Eastern bloc. One could also stress that this policy of rapprochement included the adoption of the Helsinki Final Act, which not only recognized the postwar order and postwar borders, but also, with its chapter on the »respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms«, provided dissidents in Eastern Europe with a handle on which they could base their claims.
The so-called dialogue with Russia, China, or Iran has produced nothing comparable – not even an attempt. Here the reality has been trade instead of change; here »dialogue« has turned out to be endless, pointless, and consequence-free blather, serving merely to dress up dubious deals with dictators around the world – and, incidentally, doing nothing to deter the rulers in Iran from their grasp for the atomic bomb.
Even now, there is resistance to measures that are rightly demanded again and again, especially by the Iranian diaspora. First and foremost: placing the Revolutionary Guards, the key power factor of the Iranian regime, on the EU list of terrorist organizations and sanctioning their members and institutions accordingly. Whether out of fear of the threatened reprisals, or from the absurd assumption that this would deprive them of levers of influence which exist mainly in the imagination of Western intelligence agencies – this restraint toward the Revolutionary Guards is inappropriate.
If I may insert a parenthesis here: the belief that contacts with a terrorist organization are in themselves of value and open up avenues of influence seems especially common among German intelligence services. Perhaps here in Hesse this reminds you of something. In any case, it reminds me of how a state domestic intelligence service maintained useless contacts until they were actually present when Halit Yozgat was shot dead in an internet café in Kassel – and later mountains of files had to be destroyed, because they had made themselves complicit also in the legal-criminal sense.
Parenthesis closed, and back to Iran: it is time to treat them for what they are: an organization that operates in Syria and Iraq in Iran’s interest, that supports the Russian army in its war against Ukraine, that dreams of the annihilation of Israel, and above all subjugates its own population with state terror.
Yet should the mullahs succeed once again in restoring that cemetery quiet upon which their dictatorship rests, it will likely not be long before someone comes knocking – the Federation of Foreign Trade, perhaps, a dialogue expert from the ministerial bureaucracy, or a specialist from the Institute of Expertology – arguing for the loosening of sanctions and thereby for the stabilization of the regime.
As unimaginable as such a betrayal of the opposition in Iran may seem at present – in the autumn of 2014, during the siege of Kobane, when the Kurds were defending not only their land but all of Europe against a barbarian band called the »Islamic State«, the betrayal that the West – namely the United States under President Trump – would commit against the Kurds a few years later, after the victory over ISIS, would likewise have seemed unimaginable.
***
Another measure that can be taken in Europe is this: to do everything possible to make entry and admission easier for Iranians who see no other prospect than to leave their country – just as so many of their compatriots have done before them at different times.
But this has so far not been the case, at least not to any significant extent. That is why, at PEN Berlin, when asked whether requests for help from Iranian colleagues have already reached us, we can only reply: »Not so far – and the best thing would be if it stayed that way.«
Especially in progressive milieus in this country, in every international crisis the focus turns quite quickly – in my view, too quickly – to the issue of solidarity with refugees. As well-intentioned as that may be, there is also something unpleasant in it: a certain self-satisfaction in seeing people as needy victims and oneself as their benefactor.
Conversely, people find it disturbing when others are prepared to give their lives for their freedom; when young people, who have once more savored the experience of a first great love, confront a ruthless state power and know full well that they may lose their eyesight, their freedom, their lives.
This reflex was evident after the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the willingness of the German government as well as German civil society to provide humanitarian aid was encouragingly great, but it took a long time for those in power to arrive at a simple realization: symbolic as well as practical solidarity is needed not only by those who flee, but also by those who fight. The same holds true for Iran.
We will and must concern ourselves with a new wave of refugees from Iran if that becomes necessary. But there is still hope that it will not come to that – that the revolution will not be crushed, but will triumph.
***
»Baraye hazrate jek zendegiye maamuli« – »For the yearning for a normal life« is how it goes in the song »Baraye«, whose lyrics the musician Shervin Hajipour pieced together from Twitter comments by demonstrators describing their reasons for joining the protests. In this powerful song, which quickly became the anthem of the uprising, this line strikes me as the strongest of all.
For what at first glance may appear modest and unpretentious, perhaps even apolitical, is in truth the exact opposite: I want to lead a normal life! And I want it not only for myself, I want it for everyone. Normal not in the sense of conforming to a norm, but as the yearning for a life with all the rights and freedoms that elsewhere are lived as a matter of course.
Precisely because it is so concrete, the demand for private, modest happiness – and the despair at its impossibility – carries the greatest revolutionary force, because it is so radical, so uncompromising. Sooner or later this desire will sweep away the mullah regime, however long and bloody its struggle for survival may still be. For dictatorships are, unfortunately, usually more tenacious than democrats might wish. But no dictatorship is made for eternity, however much dictators may believe it. Sooner or later, every one of them falls. And the Iranian one is close to that point.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadî!
* Deniz Yücel, born in 1973, author and journalist with the Welt Group, spokesperson of PEN Berlin since June 2022