In the name of the Lord of soul and wisdom
The Sheikh and the Harlot
A sheikh said to a harlot: "You are drunk,
Every moment caught in another's snare."
She said: "O sheikh, whatever you say, I am;
But are you what you appear to be?"
Honorable Mr. Ahmadinejad,
With greetings and respect: I read your letter addressed to the President of the United States. It seemed a pity not to write these few lines. What a thing to do: to set one's own responsibilities aside, write letters to the presidents of the world and call them to account. I doubt, of course, that this is a commendable thing for someone sitting in the office of the presidency. But in any case, you have done it. You have put a lengthy list of questions before the President of the United States, especially about his conduct in other countries and toward the citizens of other nations. America's own journalists, of course, do this to their president every day, far more sharply and bluntly than you, questioning him from every angle. They have even printed this letter of yours. It is his duty and responsibility, and that of his administration, to answer their questions, or any question, and to defend his record before public opinion. But what you have done brings a very simple point to mind, which, with your permission, I will share with you as an Iranian citizen.
The matter of the President of America, or of any other country, concerns first and foremost the citizens of that country, and only then matters to others. For me too, as an Iranian, it is the question of Iran that matters first and foremost.
Honorable Mr. Ahmadinejad:
That simple point is this: put this lengthy list of questions before yourself and Mr. Khamenei, and ask Mr. Khamenei and yourself these questions about how the citizens of Iran and our own country are treated. Ask, for example:
1- The students who, as you yourself say, ask you about America and Israel: do they also have the right to ask about the conduct of the government and of the Leader? Or do the Basijis attack them, beat them black and blue in the name of "insulting the sacred," and then arrest them? This has happened many times.
2- Can one ask you and Mr. Khamenei, at the university or in the press, about financial aid to radical Palestinian groups? Can one ask about the money Iran has spent in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan or other parts of the world? Can one ask why the money of the oppressed nation of Iran is spent on terrorist operations all over the world? Once, during the campaign for the Tehran City Council elections, while I was in prison, friends outside put me forward as a candidate for mayor of Tehran. They printed my picture on five hundred posters, and on five hundred others they wrote this simple line: "Never mind Afghanistan and Bosnia and the rest; let us save Tehran." (They did not even dare to write Palestine.) They were arrested immediately. The posters were confiscated. In my own case file, too, a lengthy charge was brought over that electoral coalition, and they handed me a six-year prison sentence.
3- As an Iranian citizen, can one ask you and Mr. Khamenei why there is double, even multiple, discriminatory treatment in Iran? Why are people not equal before the law? Why, for example, are the newspaper Kayhan, which is under the Leader's control, and the newspaper Jomhouri-ye Eslami, whose former license-holder was the Leader himself, permitted to slander anyone and print any lie, while more than a hundred newspapers have so far been shut down and journalists thrown in prison? Or why, for example, does the clergy have its own special, separate court? Or why is someone in the Basij regarded as an insider (khodi, "one of us") with many doors open to him, while the rest of the country's young people must always dread how these same Basijis will treat them and, as the young say, fear being hassled by them? Why, for example, can the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) take part in many of the country's commercial dealings, especially the transfer of oil from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, while the country's merchants have no right to do so? The IRGC can smuggle in any goods, even alcoholic drinks, through its own private jetties on Qeshm and in other ports of the country (an operation monopolized by the IRGC's security branches), while others are barred from importing even black chador fabric? Why is the import of industrial sugar the monopoly of gentlemen such as Mesbah Yazdi and Makarem Shirazi, while the country's old and respected merchants are denied these rights? Why, in government offices and in hiring, are insiders, regime people and so-called "Hezbollahi kids" given priority, while the rest, especially non-Muslims, get nowhere? I could add hundreds of other cases to this list of multiple and discriminatory treatment, cases that are in fact institutionalized in our Constitution and statutory laws. The country's Constitution and statutory laws define four kinds of human beings with unequal rights. Clerics and non-clerics are unequal with respect to holding the country's offices. Men and women differ in political, social and economic rights. Shias and Sunnis differ with respect to civil and social laws. And Muslims and non-Muslims differ with respect to holding office in the country's affairs and how the laws treat them. These are the official, legal cases. Beyond them, there are all sorts of other discrimination in the country. Do you know that the apartheid regime in South Africa distinguished only between whites, blacks and coloureds? Whereas in Iran, as I have listed, we have at least four grades of citizens whose social and political rights differ, plus dozens of other forms of discrimination between the regime's insiders and outsiders, applied every day.
4- Can the press and the ordinary citizens of Iran ask you and Mr. Khamenei by what right, really, you have plunged the country into such crisis and trouble over a backward, second-rate, imported technology for enriching uranium? Surely you know that the press has been notified by the Supreme National Security Council that it has no right to write anything of its own about the nuclear story and may only reproduce the government's official commentary and the news agency's reports. Presumably you and Mr. Khamenei know that what was bought second-hand, via Libya, from a profiteering Pakistani scientist named Abdul Qadeer Khan under the label of uranium enrichment technology, and on which billions of dollars of the country's money have been spent, is the most backward technology among the five common methods of uranium enrichment in the world. It is in no way scientific progress, nor will it bring the country any economic return.
Presumably you know that, even up to this point, this approach of yours and Mr. Khamenei's, manufacturing crises to cover up the country's disarray, has caused an economic recession in Iran and cost the country billions of dollars. Woe to the day the country is also hit by economic sanctions. Can one ask you and Mr. Khamenei to put such a mistaken policy to a popular vote? In other words, to ask the real owner of the house, the nation, whether it is willing to endure poverty, hunger and misery for the sake of building an atomic bomb in Iran, a bomb ultimately seen as a means of preserving the existing regime and keeping Mr. Khamenei in power?
Honorable Mr. Ahmadinejad,
Like you, I studied engineering. But I have also had the chance to study history. As it happens, for a short period I even taught the history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe, until they barred me from the university. The greatest scandal in the history of the Church is the trial of Galileo. Believe me, the Church's conduct in that trial was far more reasonable and humane than the treatment Dr. Aghajari received from Mr. Khamenei and his courts. Hashem Aghajari, merely for a criticism he had made of Mr. Khamenei, and in private at that, was sentenced to death on the charge of insulting the Prophet. Later, when the country's universities erupted and they were forced to retreat, they sentenced him to prison instead. A university professor spent several years of his life in prison, ostensibly for a speech and in reality for a criticism. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, debate on and criticism of religious and doctrinal foundations went on. Never, even in the darkest years of the Middle Ages, was there anything like the treatment Dr. Soroush has received in Iran for his theological and religious arguments. In this respect, the record of the clergy that came to power in Iran is one of the darkest records of any clergy in all of history. Even now, the likes of Mr. Mesbah Yazdi will not give up this practice. May one ask you why you follow a cleric like Mr. Mesbah Yazdi, who is an enemy of the modern humanities? Why do you insinuate that the world is blocking scientific research? Science went global long ago. Take a look at the internet, if, that is, you can get past the filters of that country's intelligence agencies. Then you will see that thousands of research centres around the world are doing scientific research day and night and making their findings available to others. In America more than one hundred thousand scientific studies are completed and published every year. In the large European countries, whose populations are roughly equal to Iran's, the figure is about twenty thousand a year. Do you know that Iran's share is about three hundred a year, and that most of these are done by Iranians living abroad? If you doubt that science and knowledge have withered in Iran and that its lively scholarly atmosphere has died away, just look at the sad state of the humanities in that land. The government cannot tolerate even an opinion poll. Not to mention the tragic assassination of people like Dr. Tafazzoli, or the slandering of people like Dr. Zarrinkoub, and dozens, indeed hundreds, of other examples one could cite of how that country treats its university professors, researchers, translators and people of culture.
Honorable Mr. Ahmadinejad,
I too believe in the one God and in the prophethood of the men of truth. I believe that every religion speaks the truth in its own language, and that the world and its people, whether they like it or not, are moving toward the oneness of all being. As Hatef put it:
That He is One, and there is nothing but He;
He alone, there is no god but He.
Allow me to use your own language of calling the prophets to witness, and to raise some questions specifically about Iran:
1- In your view, if all the divine prophets, and the noble Prophet of Islam in whom you and I believe, were in Iran, would they have agreed to execute four thousand one hundred and forty-eight prisoners in Iran's prisons in less than 45 days? This was done, fortunately or unfortunately, on the direct order of Mr. Khomeini himself in the summer of 1367 (1988), and when his deputy, Mr. Montazeri, objected, he was dismissed. The victims were buried in mass graves in Khavaran and elsewhere. To this very day, 18 years later, their survivors still do not know where their loved ones are buried. Worse still, if they try to hold a ceremony for them, they are still beaten by government agents. One of the three men who organized this crime against humanity, Mr. Pourmohammadi, has been appointed by you as Minister of the Interior. He in turn has made several prison wardens provincial governors, to make it clear to the Iranian nation that Iran is one big prison.
2- In your view, would the divine prophets, or the men of truth, or indeed any ordinary person with even a little honor and decency, agree to stand at the head of a government in whose prisons people's daughters and wives are raped? Do not say no such thing happens. In the first decade of the revolution, when I was busy with the affairs of the country, I too, whenever I heard such things, would say they were untrue, counter-revolutionary rumors. It was beyond my imagination that in the prisons of the Islamic Republic some would not spare even married women. Thank God I ended up in prison, fell ill from a hunger strike and was able to come abroad for treatment as a dissident. As a result, on this trip, opponents of the regime trusted me, came to me and told me their stories. They recounted the crimes committed against them and the rapes they had suffered in prison. If you have doubts, I will ask my dear friend Mr. Reza Allamehzadeh to send you a copy of the films he recorded in interviews with a number of these women, with their husbands' permission. Do not say these things belong to the past. Just last summer, during your own presidency as it happens, it happened again in Kurdistan. If my dear sister to whom this calamity happened, who has brought her trembling, exhausted body abroad, and her husband had given me permission, I would mention her name. But you can ask your security apparatus; presumably they will tell you.
Mr. Ahmadinejad,
Outside Iran I have sat and listened to the heartache of dozens of people whose loved ones were killed in prison, who were themselves tortured to the brink of death, who have endured the taste of displacement, misery and exile, and whose families in Iran are still under pressure. Yet they proudly call themselves Iranian, defend that land and even grieve for the reputation of the country's leaders. Truly, why should such free-spirited and dignified citizens be driven from their country? I do not know whether you have seen the other side of the Islamic Republic's coin, or whether you are busy only with the Leadership, the Majlis and the ministers. The other side of the coin of the current regime is suffering, torture, exile, misery and execution.
I do not know how you and Mr. Khamenei can stand at the head of such a government. For my own part, for the decade in which I worked with this system, even though it was mostly in the industrial sectors, I have many times sat alone with my God, repented, wept, cursed revolutionism and its violence, and asked the victims of that violence to forgive me. Yet my heart is still not at peace. My only hope is in God's pardon and mercy.
3- In your view, if men of God were ruling Iran, would they have agreed to carry out more than 300 assassinations inside and outside Iran? When the Commander of the Faithful, Ali (peace be upon him), allowed even his most sworn enemies, the Kharijites of Nahrawan, to criticize him and even disrupt his pulpit and his gatherings, and did not take up arms until they took up arms, do you and Mr. Khamenei have the right to assassinate your political opponents? In that country and abroad, everyone from writers to bazaar merchants, from singers to actors, from political activists to cultural researchers, has been targeted for assassination. There is a lengthy list of the Iranian regime's terrorism around the world, not only against Iranians but against citizens of other countries as well. Akbar Ganji spent years in prison for exposing part of this information, and the shadow of prison still hangs over him. Nasser Zarafshan is still in prison for defending the rights of the families of the victims of the chain murders. The case of the assassination at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin is still only half-finished. Those who carried it out are in prison, but the case against those who ordered it, Messrs. Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Velayati and Fallahian, is still open. The cases of the bombings in Beirut, Saudi Arabia and Somalia have not even been taken up.
One could keep adding to this list of questions until it filled several books. I think this is enough as a sample of the whole. But at the end of this letter, allow me to write a little about liberalism and democracy, whose time, in your view, is over.
Honorable Mr. Ahmadinejad,
Do you know that the essence of liberalism is the sovereignty of reason? Have you seen the sentence in Kant's essay "On Enlightenment," which he quotes from Horace, the ancient Greek poet: "Dare to know"? That sentence is the very essence of liberalism: having the courage to know. Do you know that the fatwa of jurists such as Ayatollah Montazeri is that, in the era of the Occultation of the Imam of the Age (peace be upon him), the people's vote is authoritative, and that God in fact wills that the affairs of government be conducted by the people and through their vote? Do you know that great Islamic thinkers such as Iqbal Lahori and Dr. Soroush hold that the finality of the Prophet of Islam means humankind has entered the age of reason, and that in this age the principle is for human affairs to be settled through the sovereignty of human reason? So I beg you, do not spend God and religion to discredit reason in the government of the velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist). At the very least, study the rationalist readings in the history of Islam, from the Mu'tazila to the present. Then you will realize that one can hold a reading of religion that opens the way to the essence of the modern world, modern reason, and lets the light of that jewel illuminate humanity's path. The secret of the survival and flourishing of Western civilization, too, lies in keeping the lamp of reason and rationality lit. This civilization criticizes not only its officials and those in charge but even its own most basic foundations. From the experience of my own life I tell you: if any person, any government or any institution, in any way and under any title, be it religion, velayat-e faqih, sect or organization, asks people to switch off their reason and hand their reins to someone else, there is something crooked about it, something is wrong somewhere, and there is surely a trick involved. The first thing God created was reason, and He has given mankind no jewel more precious than reason. Do not, in the name of God and His religion, seek to shut reason down.
Democracy, for its part, is nothing but a particular method of government founded on respect for the reason of the people and the sovereignty of collective wisdom. Its most important feature is that the majority of the people can freely choose their rulers. The minority, however small, has the right to speak and to criticize, and whenever that minority becomes the majority, it can remove the rulers legally, without conflict or bloodshed. The easier, more open and more practicable this mechanism for criticizing and removing rulers is, the more democratic that government is. In America itself, this very Mr. Bush whom you imagine you have showered with criticism is questioned and criticized every day dozens of times more than in what you wrote, and with sound, precise arguments and serious, expert questions, citing dozens of facts and figures, on everything from the smallest details to the broadest policies. Your very remarks about September 11 and its unanswered questions have been depicted far more thoroughly in a documentary film. Its director won an Oscar, and the film was shown in every cinema. Go to any of the democratic Western countries and you will find that journalists are the voice of the nation and nail their rulers to the wall every day. Not like Iran, where more than a hundred newspapers have so far been banned and journalists put in chains, and some, like Zahra Kazemi, tortured and raped in prison and then killed. In America itself, the electoral fraud of a president like Nixon was exposed by two journalists, and when the matter went to court and the fraud was proven, the president resigned, humbly bowed out and went home. In Iran, when one of the candidates, such as Mr. Karroubi, protests that there has been fraud, or when dozens of candidates are disqualified by the Guardian Council, a body that sees itself as the guardian of the people and regards the people as minors and wards, nobody even bats an eye. Mr. Ahmadinejad, in this letter I wrestled with myself a great deal over whether to address you as President. But neither my hand nor my heart would go along with it. I have heard again and again from those who ran the elections at the Interior Ministry that only 16 million people took part in the last presidential election, that is, 25 percent of eligible voters. Raising that to 27 million was done through fraud, and boosting your vote from 8 million to 17 million was also the result of fraud. In other words, through fraud an absolute minority rules over the majority of the people, and the people have no way to protest. The situation of Mr. Khamenei, the real ruler, who sits in the seat of the country's Leadership for life, is even worse. Only 5 percent of eligible voters in Tehran voted in the last Assembly of Experts election, and he is confirmed by Experts who have all been hand-picked by himself. The people have no way to complain about the Leader's performance, criticize him or remove him. They can only pray that he dies, or resort to rebellion and revolution. Come, be honest with yourself for a moment. If the people's vote really matters to you and Mr. Khamenei, and you believe your performance must ultimately bring the people welfare, comfort and justice and win their approval, then put yourselves to the people's vote in a free election under impartial international supervision, in competition with the people's real candidates. Or better still, let the people vote again on the Islamic Republic in a yes-or-no referendum. Now, after 27 years, it is clear what is inside the Islamic Republic, and the people have the right to say yes or no to it. Above all, ask Mr. Khamenei to put himself and the system of the Islamic Republic to the free vote of the people. You too fall under his heading, and the verdict on him will settle your fate as well. In my view, a free vote of the people would hand Mr. Khamenei a fate worse than Mr. Rafsanjani's in the elections for the Sixth Majlis. Don't you think this is exactly the Leader's nightmare: the fear of turning to public opinion and letting the people judge?
Honorable Mr. Ahmadinejad:
Modern democracy is one of humanity's most important discoveries of the modern age. It has helped humankind give up the temptation of rule by infallible, superhuman people and accept that government is the work of ordinary, fallible human beings. Democracy is nothing more than devising suitable methods for keeping those who govern in check. Rather than threatening democracy, you would do better to accept that government is a matter of reason, and that God has willed that the business of government be managed by human beings themselves, with the help of their reason. Do not spend God and the Prophet on behalf of despotism in the form of rule by the jurists in Iran.
These Western leaders, whatever and whoever they may be, and whatever crimes or good deeds they commit, at least fear their own people at home and respect their public opinion. They are compelled to bow to the people's will and to work well for their own countries. Their citizens live in welfare and comfort in their own countries and do not live in daily fear of the government and those who govern. You would do better, instead of writing prescriptions for others and posing as the champion of other countries' peoples, to think of our own people. Keep the promises you made to the people. Find a remedy for rising prices. Solve the problem of unemployment. Cut off the hands of the thieves and smugglers of the IRGC and other bodies from the oil and other economic affairs of the country. Find a remedy for the trafficking of Iran's innocent and poor girls to the sheikhdoms. Find a way to solve the devastating problem of addiction among the country's young people, and attend to the country's dozens of problems, small and large, minor and major. Now that, by whatever means and whatever method, you have ended up at the head of the country's executive branch, instead of swaggering and lecturing the world's leaders, do something for our own people. Mind your own business and put aside these childish games. Your image in the world has come to resemble Idi Amin's. At least think of the country's reputation.
And my success is only through God.
Mohammad Mohsen Sazegara
23 Ordibehesht 1385