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And so I sit comfortably in my adopted country, unable to shake the images of the shocked and disbelieving faces after the "results" were announced; of the demonstrators—mature and orderly and, above all, dignified—with a belief in their own inalienable rights; not privileges doled out from time-to-time to release pressure but rights inalienable; rights theirs by virtue of their humanity. I see those faces attacked by the club-wielding, knife-slashing Islamic Basij blackshirts. I see the woman in front of Tehran University's main gate—always in front of the university—pivoting on her right heal and giving a left-footed kick to a thug three times her size. I see the other young woman who, by the virtue of a single grainy video of her death, has become a symbol of the end of some sort of innocence, bleeding on her hijab—that damned forced hijab, that true symbol of political Islam—as her pupils fixate upward in death. I see those I met and befriended during my trips—the young café owner with his hopes and his girlfriend; the cherry-seller with his complaints; the old taxi driver with his frustrations and expletives—and hang on to the fast-fading hope that this is, by some miracle, a zag in the road to democracy. But I also fear, deep down, that Iran is headed towards a military dictatorship, ruthless, its veil of legitimacy lifted for all to see, and with nothing to lose.
Iraj Isaac Rahmim is working on a novel set in Dubai and a book of memoirs. His recent essays and fiction have appeared in Antioch Review, Commentary, Commonweal, and Rosebud.
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