SaveYourself By Telling the Truth

Camelia -- Save Yourself By Telling the Truth is a personal memoir of Camelia Entekhabifard, an Iranian journalist who suffered persecution and imprisonment in her homeland in 1999. As a Bahá’í, I am accustomed to hearing heroic and self-sacrificing accounts of persection and martyrdom in Iran, true martyrdom in which souls stand up for what they believe and face the consequences joyfully and without fear. But the author is by her own admission a spoiled little rich girl whose family had enjoyed privilege in the time of the Shah and were habituated to European vacations. Whatever historical background she gives are relevant only as the orbit to her own unexemplary life. Typically, when the family heard of the announcement of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, her mother became hysterical and beat her for no reason she could fathom, and she freely admits: “To me, the first important thing that happened to me was that the schools were closed for a week and the final exams were postponed.”

Yes, she endured the wrath of the new regime in the form of fundamentalist vigilantes in school and on the streets as a child and as an adult and a journalist was imprisoned and interrogated for 70 days without justification, as a “spy for Israel.” Her account of her interrogator is not within the context of justice, but in the absurd context of her falling in love with her abuser, though neither sees each other’s face. And when she is given a list of sixty-seven men she has allegedly had relations with, which include several close relatives, she begins to lie and lie and lie, with the view of saving her own skin, since that is what everyone is Iran does, according to her. A typical reply was, “I wasn’t educated properly, I wasn’t a good Muslim, I was addicted to sex. I’m so full of sin you should punish me however you decide.” She also recounts her tawdry love affair with the nation’s most famous soccer player which, after the initial flush of not love but notoriety, fizzles unceremoniously out since neither of their expectations works out – she wants life in the fast lane, the jet set, while he wants a wife who will cook him several meals a day. How banal!

The subtitle of the book is misleading, inasmuch as it suggests clinging to the truth as one’s weapon against corruption, injustice, and tyranny, and with that weapon one would prevail, either in this world or the next. We find, however, that these words were addressed to her by her interrogator, and “the truth” was far from the intention of either of them. His was extracting from her the confessions his superiors wanted to hear, and hers was to secure her freedom with as little pain and as soon as possible, by any means necessary. She attempts to impress us with her clever prevarication in her quest for her own freedom, her ability to survive and thrive, which is her prerogative as a memoirist, but if we’re looking for a bona fide heroine here, we are bound to be disappointed by this self-absorption.

She achieves national attention as a young poet – even this under false pretences, as she reads a love poem which she misrepresents as being inspired by and directed towards the Ayatollah. In her book, she resorts to a non-chronological narrative, juxtaposing her halcyon youth with her barbaric treatment at the hands of her jailers. This writer hopes he is not being unfair, and though himself having escaped a totalitarian regime under dramatic circumstances, has never been subjected to intense personal persecution. Still, this book compares quite unfavourably with Azar Nafizi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, which was told in the context of a love of beauty in literature, or certainly with the heroic episodes of such accounts as The Dawn-Breakers, which are still unfortunately little-known outside of Bahá’í readership, but which nevertheless I believe will before long sweep the world.

The book is not without virtues, even if incidentally. To North Americans, and even to Bahá’ís at large, Iran is seen as a monolithic, backward culture of Islamic fundamentalists, and their leaders are demonized as such in the media. Accounts such as this give us at least a glimpse of the complexity and diversity of Iranian society, its class clashes, its struggles between tradition and modernity, its shifting patchwork of religion and politics, and its pride in its glorious heritage. For this little girl, perhaps the greatest shock outside her sometimes petty personal concerns is the aggressive replacement of the Persian culture of her family and ancestry by the foreign values of the Ayatollah’s theocracy.

Another element is her relationship with her interrogator, with whom she says she falls in love, but manipulates to fall in love with her in order to win her freedom, and their love/fear/power struggle relationship continues after her release in an ugly and indecent affair. This seems like a microcosm of the relationship Middle Easterners tend to have with their leaders, bizarre as it may jangle in Western ears.

She mentions the Bahá’ís twice, briefly. On page 154, her mother’s words: “. . . this Nava is a Bahá’í and unclean . . .” On page 179, while she was incarcerated: “I was given religious books from the prison library to read. One of the books was about the candle stuffing of the Bahá’ís by Amir Kabir. The book told how he persecuted them and would stuff all the orifices of their bodies with lit candles and parade them around the city in a ghastly spectacle. My stomach churned, and I shut the book in disgust. It was horrifying.” This disgust doesn’t seem to have translated into any subsequent journalistic search after truth on her part. Her most scandalous piece, never published, was on the prostitutes (wives for a day) in the clerical city of Qom. I submit that to write of the plight of the Iranian Bahá’ís who sacrifice themselves with no personal thought but rather for the spiritual regeneration of the entire human civilization would be a more worthy enterprise. This link would be a good place to begin: www.kdkfactory.com/quench/

The Great Need of the Hour

In a speech delivered in a church in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 20, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama, addressed the congregation with words echoing Dr. Martin Luther King: “Unity is the great need of the hour.”

Much of this speech dealt with political matters on which I am not qualified to speak, and included much Civil Rights jargon which, as a Canadian, I simply cannot relate to with the fervour that stirs Americans. The part which grabbed my attention was the apparent realization that unity is the key to solving the nation’s (and, by extension, the world’s) insoluble problems. There is a widespread unexamined notion that unity is something we will achieve at the end of our efforts to put humanity on the right track for the future, after we have confronted and triumphed over the myriad social, ecological, political, moral, technological, and economic challenges of our age, whereas Bahá’ís proceed on the assumption that unity must come first, and is in fact the essential element without which progress is stalled in the quagmire we find ourselves in as humanity’s ills only deepen and the wisest of the wise are struck dumb with helplessness. Perhaps the most oft-quoted passage in the Bahá’í Writings is: “The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.” This is emphatic and unequivocal.

Please let it be clear that I am not endorsing any candidate and have not an iota of interest in partisan politics, merely the hope of the paradigm shift, the idea whose time has come, aided by those who have the ear of the multitudes. Here are the relevant nuggets from Senator Obama’s remarks, to mull in our own hearts, irrespective of politics:

“Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

“I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

“I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

“All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.

“But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes - a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.

“We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don't think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

“So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others - all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face - war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down.

“The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country's ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.”

Divine and Human

In 1900 Leo Tolstoy was not only a world-famous writer, but arguably the most famous person in the world. Spiritual crises tormented him relentlessly from an early age right up until his death; he had an intense desire for the ascetic life to search for the ultimate meaning of life, but his wife would have none of it. His struggles led him into the study of Oriental religions and got him excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church for blasphemy. As early as 1855 Tolstoy wrote in his diary plans to create a new religion “cleansed of faith and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth.” He sought religion with social justice without prejudice and superstition. In the twilight of his life he encountered the Bahá’í Faith, which fit the bill of his searching. We have on record a number of references he made to the Faith: speaking of the eternal enigma called life, and deploring the fact that we spend our entire earth allotment of time trying to solve the riddle, he goes on to add: “But there is a Persian prophet who holds the key.” His most explicit endorsement: “The teaching of the Bábís have great future before them....I therefore sympathize the Bábísm with all my heart, inasmuch as it teaches people brotherhood and equality and sacrifice of material life for service to God....The teachings of the Bábís which come to us out of Islám have through Bahá'u'lláh's teachings been gradually developed, and now present us with the highest and purest form of religious teaching.” The year after his death, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was in London, where he said, “I received a letter from Tolstoy, and in it he said that he wished to write a book upon Bahá'u'lláh.”

Alas, he did not leave such a work to posterity. But recently I perused a newly-translated sampling of his later short stories under the title Divine and Human, and looked for tell-tale signs of Bahá’í influence on his writing. I did find about a half-dozen passages which it seemed to me couldn’t have been written without this influence, but this is nevertheless speculation on my part. However, one of the stories, A Coffeehouse in the City of Surat, could well have been told by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá himself. A Persian scholar studied the essence of God all his life, but in the end became confused, and the king exiled him. So in this coffeehouse in India, he has a conversation with his slave about God, which attracts the interest of a number of travelers who happen to be there at the time. In turns a Brahmin priest, a Jewish moneychanger, an Italian Catholic, a Protestant pastor, and a Turkish customs officer expounded on the nature of the one true God from their own limited perspectives, and a great commotion ensued where everyone argued. All participated in the melee but one Chinaman who sat quietly in the corner. Observing this, they stopped their arguing and asked the Confucian to arbitrate. Instead of choosing any one of them as a victor, he told a parable about traveling all over the world and listening to people argue childishly about the nature of the sun, each claiming the sun for themselves. Finally the skipper of the ship, who had seen the sun in all these various regions set them all straight. Tolstoy has the Chinaman wrap up the story thus:

“And tell me now, whose temple can compare with that which was created by God himself when he wanted to unite all people into one faith? All human temples are copies of this temple—that is, the world created by God. All temples have domes and ceilings, all temples have lanterns, icons, images, inscriptions, books of laws, sacrifices, altars, and priests. Which temple has a bath as great as the world’s oceans, or a dome as high as the heavenly dome, or lanterns like the sun, moon, and stars; or images such as people living together, loving and helping each other? Are there any mere inscriptions about the love of God that are more easily understood than the blessings God gives us for our happiness? Where is the book of law more easily understood than the law of love, which is written on our hearts? Where are the sacrifices equal to the ones people give every day to those they love? Where is the altar that compares with the heart of a kind person in which God himself receives the sacrifice?

“The more one tries to understand God, the closer one will come to him, reflecting God’s goodness, mercy and love to everyone.

“Let him who sees the whole light of the sun that fills the world not despise the superstitious man who sees only one ray of this very same sun in his idol. Let him also not despise the unbeliever, who is blind and cannot see any light at all.”

When the Chinese man had said this, all the people in the coffeehouse ceased their arguments about whose religion was the best.