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Popular Culture Review
Babylon, longingly observing it; and that the distribution of national wealth was
unfairly arbitrary, it being accumulated in the hands of the Pahlavis and the
closed circle of the “notables” that ingratiatingly hobnobbed with the court.
Even more significant than that, the primarily decadent social freedoms that
were promoted by the Pahlavi regime were meant, in a manner, to substitute for
the absent and much-demanded political freedoms that were supposed to be
predicated upon the “human” and “constitutional” rights of the Iranian citizens.
Therefore, such decadence not only did not lead to national entente, but also
emphasized the class/economic line.
In fact, it was by taking advantage of this predicament that the
Islamists, through employing leftist-sounding inflammatory terminology such as
“Mostaz’a f ’ (poor) and “Mostakber” (rich), embarked upon scorching the
Pahlavis and the monarchists; and, after the revolution, following the same
strategy, unleashed arbitrary suppression on the Mostakbers in particular and
anything that smacked of them or their “behavior” in general; in effect cracking
down on any rudimentary individual and social freedom imaginable. Thus,
similar to what had happened in Germany around half a century before, from the
heart of the decadent apathy of the final years of the monarchy in Iran rose a
harshly puritanical movement that, in the long run, not only did not help to
create or develop the formerly absent or latent political freedoms, but also swept
across the formerly present social freedoms. In the meantime, the Islamists and
the Leftists, by putting forward “libertinism” as “liberalism” in the context of an
“Islamic country,” uninhibitedly trampled the liberal ideals like civil society,
democracy, and republic. For the sake of political expediency, nobody
remembered then that the most fundamental and ethical achievements of
democracy in contemporary Iran had been the fruit of the liberal thinkers and
activists’ efforts.
As it happens, even today a number of Iranian exiles in Europe and the
United Sates, who do not necessarily have anything to do with the monarchists,
somehow in a similar manner confuse democracy with decadence. A famous
instance of this phenomenon is the recent wave of publicized nudity that,
following the example of the Egyptian girl, Olia Majeda A1 Mahdi, has broken
loose among the Iranian community “abroad” in the name of defending
democracy in Iran. Truth is, in a democratic society everyone, as long as he/she
keeps to his/her constitutional rights and does not breach those of others, has a
“right” to display or to “cover” his/her body, and nobody has absolutely any
right to accost him/her. In such a society, being nude or covered will not be
mandatory, but voluntary, and all have—or must have—a right to choose what
suits their attitude and taste best. However, naively presenting the “freedom to
discard the dress” as outright “democracy,” as if the essence of freedom is
nudity beyond which naught is needed, is a fatal mistake. In this respect, perhaps
it sounds ironic that even such a radical feminist as the late Andrea Dworkin
should regard the stark display of the body as dehumanizing. As such, amidst