The very last time I celebrated St. Martin’s Day[1], a popular festival celebrated on the 11th November in some parts of East and West Flanders as well as in Germany, was actually in 1978 in Tehran. The German school I attended used to organize yearly marches for the elementary students who had spent several weeks in the art class prior to the event making beautiful little lanterns. The students, mainly Iranians with deep black hair, whose fathers had studied in Germany in the 1960ies, followed the blond teacher in neatly formed queues singing happily in chorus “Laterne, Laterne, Sonne Mond und Sterne…” oblivious of the events happening around them.
German School in Tehran Spring 1978
The political unrest in Iran had by November 1978 developed into a full-fledged revolution and all international schools closed their doors for months shortly after. Within a few months the memory of that last march through the streets became not only a surreal and distant event but a story that had to be kept secret. As revolutionary guards patrolled the streets they confiscated properties of the ‘oppressors’ (mustakberin), who in their eyes were traitors because of their ‘secular’ and westernized outlook. They also froze assets and closed companies who had ties to the West. Almost all German teachers and blond children in our school fled the country, leaving us black haired Iranian school children behind. For most of us, our parents were not quick enough to recognize the changes that were taking place and thought of them as passing events. Soon they regretted their misreading of the political situation as the new government from 1982 did not issue passports for several years to come and began a systematic purge of people labeled as secularists and hence as ‘exploiters of the country.’
My memories of my childhood between 1979 and the year 1986, from the age of 8 to 15 in other words, when I finally managed to flee to Germany, are filled with feelings of fear and shame. One of the main tasks of education in post-revolutionary Iran was to reverse the Manichean vision of a society between the oppressors and the oppressed and give them new moral meanings. This ideology had very concrete practices that aimed at producing a new vision of the ideal citizen while systematically marginalizing and shaming those who did not fit this new religious nationalism. The task of the new education system was to produce new moral norms to measure the loyalties of citizens to their country. Schools served as one of the main platforms to produce in the shortest time possible the ideal-typical citizen. This caricaturized citizen was the ultimate subaltern: he was deeply pious and incredibly poor. As class identity came to stand for piety, and as the underclass was represented as the most pious, the terms for state sponsored cultural capital shifted in the country. Schools became the avenue to teach these new values and to discipline those who held on to old cultural norms. Six days a week at sharp 7 am this multisensory re-disciplining project began its work.
The days began with the school director speaking about the moral values of the revolution for about 45 minutes as students had to stand still in straight queues with precisely an arm length distance from each other. At the sign from the director we would chant death to America, death to Zionism. I must admit I only learned what the word Zionism meant years later in history class in Germany, for the longest time I believed ‘Zionism’ was a country since we chanted death to America and I knew America was certainly a country. Many Iranians I met in the diaspora years later who did not go to high school in Germany still did not know what the word meant. But we had to chant, so we chanted.
The school director relied also on concrete examples to bring across the messages in her early morning speeches. She would regularly call on an ‘exemplary student’ – mainly one identified as oppressed (mustasaf) – and a ‘bad student’ – who she identified as ‘oppressor’ – up to the podium, where she praised or criticized accordingly. The exemplary student read the Quran with an Arabic accent, was helpful to his family and fellow students, and studied hard. She was also clearly coming from a more humble social background as her shoes and quality of her school uniform exposed. The ‘bad student,’ the oppressor, was considered superficial, selfish, and morally lose. She also wore sneakers and the fabric of her school uniform was thicker. The biggest fear among several students who had visited international schools was to be called on the podium. One dark day, after having watched all other schoolmates being shamed, my turn finally came. I walked up the podium as the school director looked at me in contempt, I was about 11 years old, she began to point fingers to my school uniform, then to my headscarf, then to the fact that I could not pronounce the Arabic words in the Quran properly. She assessed via the microphone to all other students that they should not be like me, that the reason why our society was corrupt was because of people like me, who came from families who had exploited the country and left it in shamble and who still made no effort to correct their past mistakes. My father, who had lost his company during the revolution, used to iron my school uniform and headscarf daily. After that traumatic event I warned him to better busy himself with other tasks at home beside trying to help me look clean and neat in school. We learned what was expected and unlearned old values on an hourly basis.
It was only decades later, when I was in graduate school, that I began to frame my own experiences as something more abstract and that I finally came to terms with it by understanding that the revolution was an anticolonial movement and that the ideas of Khomeini, the person I had until then held accountable for all the suffering most people endured in my circle, had some truth and values. I created a simple mantra then: ‘No St. Martin’s Day, no revolution.’
At the expense of being called naive, I also came to the conclusion that the rift in prerevolutionary Iranian society was not so much a divide between Islamists and secularists, or between the advocates of tradition versus modernity, as most secularists did continue to engage in religious practices but they framed them as ‘culture.’ As much as the daily life of us westernized so-called secularists was filled with performing modernity, our lives were equally saturated with religious practices that dotted the rhythm of the months and the year.
The divide was on one level larger than the local Iranian context: in the era of Third Worldism and anti-colonial struggles, in the era when postcolonial states went into extremes with nativism, in an era when the support for the liberation of Palestine became an emblem for the degree of commitment to decolonization, the Pahlavi regime’s westernization project with its open support for Israel could not possibly have survived the strong local anti-colonial wave. It is as if the Shah of Iran was also holding a lantern singing obliviously as the reality in the region was chanting something else. And my parents, and millions of others who were following the Shah blindly, equated westernization with modernization and modernization with progress and progress with increased social coherence and national unity. Their westernization, this uncritical appropriation of colonial assumptions, did not in my view touch on religious values. Instead it was much more about class anxieties. Westernization was about performance of class identity rather than a proper understanding or insistence of secularism as a form of governance. In other words, idiosyncrasy was at the heart of being middle class Iranian in the 1970s. It was a chaotic project full of ruptures and contradictions. It created the space for children of Iranians with aspirations for upward mobility in a third world country to celebrate St. Martin’s Day and then come home to a grandmother who wore the chador and prayed five times a day.
The Pahlavi regime did not ride the wave of decolonization on a state-level and left a vacuum that was filled by the religious establishment and the leftists who defined decolonization merely as a political project concerned with party ideology and state and regional politics. The Iranian revolution and the takeover of the state institutions by Islamists from 1982 initiated, inspired, and supported the creation of many Islamist movements in the region with anticolonial and religious purity discourse. The marriage between their legitimate concerns and claims and their authoritarian and militant practices is a product of the commitment of earlier political leaders in the region, who believed the colonial story of creating a causal link between religion and progress. Islamists in Iran took happily over the prerevolutionary discursive categorization that divided the society along secular and religious citizens, a divide that did not necessarily reflect the differences in prevalent religious practices in daily life. Ironically, Islamists also took over the progress discourse, only reversed these categories and began to present pious Muslims as modern. The religious establishment sought to bring coherence into a deeply politically and class divided society by using narrowly defined piety politics as a disciplinary mechanism to homogenize the society. As much as the Pahlavi regime lived a caricaturized version of being Western, the current regime in Iran is staging a caricaturized version of being non-Western. Both pre and post-revolutionary leaders have struggled with the unequal power relations that defined the relation between the colonizer and the culturally colonized and none came to a meaningful way out of this historically ambivalent and often involuntary engagement.
A young Iranian girl holding a lantern at age seven in Tehran singing in German ‘Laterne Laterne’ is proof that many in the third world could not recognize that the colonial story of progress was indeed more about Europe’s anxieties with its own history than about deficiencies in the local cultural practices in the region.
That story was also relegating massive social and economic inequalities and structural deficiencies to this vague category of culture. Similarly, shaming an 11 year old girl publically as standing for all the poverty in a country is also proof that anti-colonial resistance is often reactive and revengeful and that it is directed towards damaging its own citizens who in their view stand as emblems of colonial legacy. It shows that anti-colonial movements also have not yet found a meaningful way out of colonial hegemony, since turning the categories upside down is still engaging with the West on its own terms.
Until the recent revolution in Iran in 2022, decolonization remained a distant dream, one that could not break out of the compensatory attitude to produce and invent traditions of authenticity often combined with resorting to violence. In my view, this new revolution in Iran however is addressing decolonization not merely as a narrowly defined party politics and political project but as one that is concerned with giving voice to the subalterns in a meaningful way: from LGBTQIA+ groups to Afghani refugees, from environmental issues to protecting stray dogs. When the school director now chants death to America in the morning high school students chant back ‘death to dictator.’ The slogans and demands of this new revolution go beyond merely forming identities around piety and class and are more comfortable with facing identities as disorderly and intersectional as it actually is in real life.
[1] St. Martin’s Day (Sankt Martinsdag) is celebrated on the 11th of November and is a popular festival among children in Germany where they walk in the evening with self-made lanterns through the streets and sing this song: Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und Sterne – Sankt Martin Lied | Laternenlieder | Kinderlieder deutsch – YouTube
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