Cross-posted from Street Prophets
On Saturday, June 20 the world was shocked to witness the senseless and gruesome death of a 27 year old Iranian philosophy student, Neda Agha Soltan as she walked arm in arm with her father through the streets of Tehran. She, like many of the young and well educated of Iran, was demonstrating her support for the disenfranchised reformists and their candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, in the fraudulent and much contested presidential election of June 12.
Words can not describe the horror of this event.
Forget what we think we may know of Iranians and particularly Iranian women. Neda seems to have been complex beyond our as yet limited insight. The photos collected from Tweets out of Iran since Saturday suggest a young woman who beneath her veil longed to feel the breeze flow through her hair. Neda is said to mean "the calling" or "the voice", and she died before us with her eyes wide open starring into ours, her voice silenced, literally by her own blood, moments before she passed. The entire event, captured by fate by another demonstrator documenting the protests on her cell phone, clearly shows Neda and her father just moments before and after her shooting. Her eyes passively go blank as they seem to stare questioningly into ours. It is a gruesome document of the moment of an innocents death which I tried personally to avoid watching until, finally, after realizing the effect her death was having among her own people, I forced myself to witness. I must advise others to carefully consider their own choice in viewing this video now making the rounds on the net.
Neda's remains were committed to the ground the following day, the haste toward burial extremely unusual as are the current events in Iran at this particular moment in time. Iran's authoritarian regime has issued a ban on collective prayers for this young victim, sending out a circular to all mosques. They have good reason to be afraid now with her death.
From Robin Wright of Time:
The cycles of mourning in Shi'ite Islam would actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shi'ite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran's rich history. During the revolution,
Shi'ite mourning is not simply a time to react with sadness. Particularly in times of conflict, it is also an opportunity for renewal. The commemorations for Neda and the others killed this weekend are still to come. Neda is already being hailed as a martyr, a second important concept in Shi'ism. With the reported deaths of 19 people on June 20, martyrdom provides a potent force that could further deepen public anger at Iran's regime.
Martyrdom is central to modern Iranian politics driven by this Persian brand of Shi'ite tradition
Most major Iranian cities have a martyrs' museum or a martyrs' cemetery, as martyrdom was a driving force motivating the people through-out the long and bloody Iran-Iraq War from 1980–1988 where more than 1,000,000 Iranians lost their lives.
The first Shi'ite martyr was Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. He believed it was better to die fighting injustice than to live with injustice under what he believed was illegitimate rule.
Fourteen centuries later, Hussein's tomb in Karbala is one of the two holiest Shi'ite shrines — millions of Iranians make pilgrimages there every year. Just as Christians re-enact Jesus' procession bearing the cross past the 14 stops to Calvary before his crucifixion, so, too, do Shi'ites every year re-enact Hussein's martyrdom in an Islamic passion play during the holy period of Ashura.
Because of Hussein, revolt against tyranny became part of Shi'ite tradition. Indeed, protest and martyrdom are widely considered duties to God. And nowhere is the practice more honored than in Iran, the world's largest Shi'ite country.
The election so many Iranians had pinned their hopes for change upon had been arrogantly, clearly, and unapologetically stolen from them with the peoples eyes wide open to the complete disregard for populist sentiment, their voice also was being drowned by the authoritarian and despotic theocratic regime. This Twittered image of Neda, as gruesome as it is to see, is the collective image in which these protesters see themselves. They may have started out as the frustrated children of the revolution (nearly 70 percent of all Iranians were born after the revolution while well over 50 per cent are 25 or younger) but now their frustration has turned to outrage.
This sense of collective identity among the highly educated, Tweating and affluent students across Iran has expanded to include the working class (garbage men were some of the first to spontaneously walk off their jobs and join the reformists protests in Tehran even before Neda's murder). Even some of the Basij officers, who are the backbone of support for the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his personally selected President, Mahmoud Adhmadinejad, have been reported to have pleaded with demonstrators, "Please, I have a wife and daughters, I am a father. Do not make me beat my children."
As the rest of the world braces for what might turn into another Tiananmen Square like protest of 1989 or looks forward to a nation wide strike as was so effective during the 1979 protests (or both), there is certainly cause to pray for the safety of all Iranians as they find they way through this mess.
The young, educated and hopeful women of Iran are proving to be as motivated and thirsty for change, socially and politically, and now, with the entire movement recognizing Neda as their martyr for hope in change, Neda lives on.
Let us hope that the current theocratic regime remembers that they were essentially given their power by the young students who took control of the American Embassy in 1979 during their revolution and that they live up to their word that all Muslim lives are sacred. Let us hope and pray that they give way to the change that is as unavoidable as the movement of hands across the face of a clock marking the passage of time itself.
Neda, and the people of Iran, called for that change peacefully while embracing their faith in G-d, His mercy and His justice. Let their clerics show such faith as well.
"Allah-o-Akbar!" G-d is great, reverberates across the cities each night. From rooftop to rooftop it is the peoples voice, a calling forth of divine justice from the collective mouth of one they now call "The Angel of Freedom" silenced no longer by death.
She has overcome the silence of the grave.
G-d is great.
We support the voice of the Iranian people crying out to be taken to heart as it is to be taken seriously once again.