The following essay is an excerpt from the acknowledgments (xix-xlii) shared in the book Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, published on January 20, 2020. It serves to offer a sense of the personal and historical origins in a sociological imagination of the book and more generally of its author’s research in the historical context of Western neocolonial interventions in Iran’s cultural, political, and economic social life.
The essay addresses issues that are still deeply relevant 5 years past its publication in 2020, which must be evident for anyone reading it. However, it must also be considered in the context of the earlier time it had been written and submitted for publication in 2019.
This essay was written before the author’s mother, Tayyebeh Tamjidi, to whom acknowledgment was being made, passed away on the last day (December 31) of 2020, having been born on March 20, 1928 (the last day of the Persian solar calendar year 1306).
Adam’s descendants are in frame from one strand,
While in their creation aim as one soul stand.
If a member is in stress from the time’s scar
Others become restless, nearby and afar.
If you’re about others’ griefs and pains carefree
You don’t deserve the name of humanity.
— Sa’di Shirazi (Tamdgidi translation)
If the reader wishes to know the deepest reason why this book and the broader series of which it is a part came about (including another companion series of mine forthcoming in Khayyami studies [post-publication note: this 12-book series titled Omar Khayyam’s Secret, was completed in 2025]), I can say without hesitation that its roots go back to my mother’s lifelong search for happiness, despite the enormous obstacles she faced growing up.
This is the work of a girl born in Tabriz, Iran, who was deprived of formal education simply because she was deemed (at the time she grew up), as a girl and future mother, to be not in need of going to school—although she was practically very intelligent and learned her Quran diligently and knew many Azeri Shi’ite mourning songs by heart, including also many folklore Azeri love poems that only became known to me for the first time as she receded amid her Alzheimer’s to her youth living in Tabriz. Enigmatically, as her Alzheimer’s progressed, for a period of several years she became a poetess of love beyond reciting the religious ones (which also speak of spiritual love) I had heard her sing all her life. She began singing old Azeri love quatrains, ones which I had never heard her sing before. And she did so with great enthusiasm and drama, dancing at times, like a traveling bard or Ashegh (in Persian and Azeri, meaning “lover”) trying to pass on an important old story.
This series and all my research, really, is an expression of her search for happiness, for true love, and for finding ways to cope with the long, long, periods, year after year, decade after decade, of loneliness—ones she endured because of emotional and physical separation from her beloved husband and cousin brought on by the cultural conflicts of East and West, as he traveled West in search of work and business, while I, her only son, did the same also, leaving Iran for education in the U.S. when I was eighteen, to try to fulfill as best as I could her dream of raising me well.
This is despite my doing my best to keep in touch, to visit her and stay with her often, to bring her to the U.S. for visits, to make her happy, to keep her company, and now to manage her round-the-clock nursing in old-age (increasingly, mine too), with best nurses taking care of her, giving her full love and attention, past her husband’s passing. I was always overjoyed to witness the happiness with which she greeted me each time at her door in Iran, and shared with her the sorrow she felt each time I departed back to the U.S. Those who live in the same community for generations can never feel the experience migrants go through, especially those who leave loved ones behind, living an inner life at once fragmented and spread-out worldwide. But, then, the same experience has also provided me with new insights to appreciate her and Iran more.
Now, my mother does not mentally recognize me as her son; but, when holding hands and hugging me, I know she does in her kind heart. Alzheimer’s can make the expression of one’s love and longing for another quite enigmatic. At times, she told me in person (while sitting next to her by her bedside in Iran) how much she misses her dear son back in the U.S., wondering when he would be coming back next to visit her again. Her nurse recently sent me a video clip, where my mother is hugging and kissing her pillow repeatedly, whom she calls Behrooz (my nick name), talking to him sincerely, begging it to understand how much she loves and misses him, and asking for reassurance that he loves her too. In the clip, other than talking with her pillow, she speaks with a clear mind and in full sentences, as if she has no Alzheimer’s at all. She is in her usual, kind, self. For a while, until recently, I found myself enigmatically overjoyed and laughing in sadness, when I found myself superposed (in quite quantum ways I must call it now), being addressed by her, depending on the time of the day, as one of her three (late) brothers, as her son, and at times her (late) husband. Sometimes, she addressed me as her mother and father (or uncle, Adash, my father’s dad). Even Alzheimer’s is quantum; like all sticks, it also has two ends, an entanglement of both sadness and happiness at once.
Our Copenhagen physicists may say, “well, such superposed states, even if you call them that, happen exceptionally because of Alzheimer’s,” since in their view macroscopic things are supposed to follow either/or logical rules. Here is the mother, there is the son, brother, mother, or husband, like billiard balls. I say, no, you are wrong. Your enigmatic reactions are brought on by your own disciplinary habits of thinking. We, in sociology, at least those of us more attuned to George Herbert Mead’s notion of self and society being twin-born, have long understood that you cannot have a social relation without its being at once a self relation. My mother, or any of us, relate to others as son, brother, or husband, because we have internalized selves in us through socialization that represent others symbolically. I cannot relate to you without at once relating to a self in me that represents you. So, always, and not just amid Alzheimer’s, we have a twin-bornness of self and society going on, provided that we have the eye to see and observe it as such. If we do not, it is a defect in our own observational lens that sees thing as chunky. All Alzheimer’s does is to make such superposed states evident and more directly visible in exaggerated form. I am and have always been a part of her. Now she speaks more directly to that self in her, in this case represented by a pillow nearby, than the one being signified by it.
Alzheimer’s progress can also be, sadly, wonderful. She has forgotten much of the pains of loneliness and longing for her son, ones she had felt for decades, her phone calls reaching out to others being the main ways she let others know how much she wished to enjoy their company. With her Alzheimer’s progress, she also remembered her youth more vividly. An older cousin of mine, whose ill mother (my mother’s sister) died young while at our house, once came to visit us in Tehran a few years ago. My mother was still conversant then, imagined living in Tabriz, and telling minute details even of specific neighborhood addresses and folks’ names in her neighborhood, Sheshgilan, of Tabriz, in Iran’s Azerbaijan, where she grew up. She spoke of such and such a store in the neighborhood, the bathhouse, the bakery, this or that person, as if she visited or met them yesterday. I asked my cousin, who also grew up in Tabriz and knows it well, to judge how accurate the addresses and people’s names and identities as reported by my mother were. He was astonished. They were accurate to the T.
I was so happy and fortunate, “thanks” to her Alzheimer’s, to experience, in my own later years, my mother’s youth so vividly, witnessing her happily sing her love songs. Perhaps she still sang them in solitude throughout her life, without any of us even knowing it; for, how else could she remember them, singing them so well? Many of these poems are of the “bayati” style, quatrains sung in Azeri dialect. At some point, I wondered where they all came from. Did she compose these herself, or did she pick them from her culture? Thanks to the internet these days, I searched and there they were. I found them actually among a long list of old Azeri love songs. But, she seemed to have given her own twists to the lines depending on her age as she continued singing them. Her choices of poems themselves were meaningful.
As I listened to them, ones I had never heard her sing before, they at first seemed to be a scattered, random set. However, in making her selections, at times revising them, she seemed to have stamped on them her own authorship. As I tried to learn and sing the poems along with her, it became apparent that they were not disjointed chunks and pieces, but in fact pieces of a longer single poem she had stitched together to tell her life’s story.
My mother, having been deprived of proper formal education in childhood, always wished to write her own life’s story. But this did not happen in the way one would “predictably” expect. Enigmatically, I became her pen of life. I began to realize as I listened to the songs she was repeatedly singing that these were it—her long-wished-for book, now being delivered spoken in poetic nutshell, just before her memory faded away forever. Amid her Alzheimer’s she had finally ‘published’ her book in the most succinct way. Oddly, I noticed an order among the poems I was hearing her sing. Translated superposed in her son’s pen of mind and heart and tears, the book of songs she selected and stitched together went like this:
As the head of a tree desires fruit,
My heart desires a pomegranate.
I used to be a child before;
Now, I desire a lover.
They pick a rose made of gold,
And adorn it with a velvet cloth.
How fortunate is the girl
Who is wed to a man she herself loves.
I am a golden rose! Pick me.
Adorn a velvet cloth with me.
For God’s sake, look, be kind!
I am still young, wed me.
Aras is surrounded with forests.
Bring a handkerchief and spread it,
So I can set roses in its middle,
All surrounded by violets.
In this very long valley,
O shepherd, bring back my lamb,
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen
The face of my playful beloved.
I’m a rose, but no more with rosewater.
I’m a velvet cloth, but no longer with plush.
For all this life’s troubles endured,
My body no longer has much tolerance.
I went to the top of the mountain.
And wrote on its stones what’s to be written,
So all those who come and go can read
What troubles befell me in life.
I wandered all mountains, and returned.
I set all their stones straight, and returned.
I found my lover not committed,
So, I washed my hands from it all, and returned.
Leave the window wide open,
So, my eye can see who will come
And how they’ll lay the gravestone
On the one who died in search of love.
Go, go, for I am coming with you.
I’m still picking roses to gather in my cloth.
Open your arms and make room for me.
Since it’s cold here and I am dying.
I will leave, but I will return again.
Even a non-believer will return a believer.
Even if I live a hundred year’s jail,
When it ends, I will return again.
My mother is now 92 [post-publication note: Tayyebeh passed away on the last day of December 2020, and the above poem, in Azeri original, adorns her gravestone in Tehran’s cemetery, Behesht Zahra, bloc 19; some of the original poems in Azeri Turkish now adorning her grave will be shared at the end of this essay with their Persian translations]. As I am telling her story, which is also mine, at times I pause when it comes to my verbs. Is she an “is” or is she a “was”? She is not singing the poems most of the times now, but her voice is still melodic at times, as if she is singing them in tune, but without decipherable words. But then, some days she suddenly remembers and sings one or another poem. Is her singing a “was,” or is it still an “is”? Is my mother still alive, or has she “passed”? Schrödinger, looking for his “normal” “dead or alive cat,” would never understand such quantum states of being and loving in their and/both states, for he regards such states in the macroscopic world “absurd” and belonging only to the quantum world. They are not “absurd.” All it takes is to tune in to, to observe, what goes on around us, and inside us. We think we are this or that, but that is only in our minds, and even there it is not, when we consider it more carefully. My mother is, and is not, with me now. She sings her love songs, and not. She lives, but has also passed.
This is she, writing this book. I would not be writing this book, if it was and is not for her, and for the troubles she went through raising me and sending her lamb away for further nourishment. She and I are not, as Newtonian physics would have it, separate chunks of reality. I am her, and she is me, in a quantum way, where things, selves, can be at once in different places and times. She may be forgetting herself, but I am not. I am now, more than ever, her mind, heart, and senses. This series is, superposing me and her, deep down, a fruit of her soul. Her mind, now afflicted with Alzheimer’s, going fainter and fainter like a candle every time I visit her in person or online, refuses to forget who she was/is through me; this is she, still trying to understand herself through the mind, heart, and sensibilities of her son, the sense and meaning of existence, and the whereabouts of happiness, in the best way she can. Her search is transcontinuing, through me. The “discontinuity” is an illusion, really, for we are inseparable. The continuity just takes a different form; that is all. This work is her soul’s trying to link her personal troubles to the world-historical public issue of human alienation and its enigmas. And doing so, I am sure, it tells of a search in any human soul, yours included, for why we are here, where we come from, and where to we are going—as our beloved Omar Khayyam put it.
I recall once on a bus with Tayyebeh (meaning “pure” in Arabic), we were heading for Neyshabour from Mashhad, the latter being where she had bought a “sorrow’s nest” apartment of her own to come closer to her God and to the shrine of Imam Reza, a descendent of the prophet of Islam. I found her staring at her hand for a long time, deep in thought. I asked her why she was doing that. She turned to me and said, “I am just in awe of this wonder, my hand, how could this be? What a wonder God has created?” That was her enigma, one that we should all be (also) enigmatized about—but often are not; our Copenhagen Interpreters tell us that, supposedly, only what goes on in the subatomic world “below” is enigmatic, not what we find “above.” Nowadays we find online clips of the robots we have engineered doing amazing things, enigmatically. Yet we click away, unimpressed, from a gymnast doing even more amazing things. What we find enigmatic, or not, has also a lot to do with who is observing and how we make our observations. With the same hand she gave me, I held hers then and hold her hands now imaginally, and with the same hand and mind she gave me, I am writing these lines. Can anything be more enigmatic?
Despite my familiarity with her deep sense of faith and wonder about the miraculous, I was often struck by the depth of her feelings of wonder and puzzlement about existence. Over the years and decades, the more I reflected on her unique sense of devotion to God in search of happiness, the more I appreciated the fundamental ways in which she taught me as my first and best teacher about the meaning of life, about maintaining a deep sense of wonder, as well as a genuine moral sense of empathy with those wronged in life. This was best expressed in her deeply heartfelt sense of love for the faith of Islam, for the prophet and his family, and especially the tragic story of the murder of his grandson, Imam Hussein, and the massacre and imprisonment of many in his household and relatives, and the murders of the prophet’s descendents as told and remembered in the collective memory of the Shi’ites.
There was obviously a religious side to her feelings, as expressed in her deeply felt and beautifully recited mourning songs in Azeri dialect, reciting the stories of how Imam Hussein and his relatives resisted oppression to safeguard their faith and principles, and were brutally massacred. For those versed in the Shi’ite belief system and tradition, my mother’s feelings may appear routine and standard. But they were not so as I observed and experienced them, sitting by her side often and listening to her stories of what happened more than fourteen hundred years before, as if they happened yesterday. These were my first classes and schooling in life, offered by my first teacher, whose tears for people she had not even met flooded my soul.
Set aside the religious aspect for a moment. Can you see how enigmatic it is that someone, fourteen hundred and plus years later, cares for, cries for, folks who suffered as if they were her own folks, folks she never met?
Shi’ism is not just a religious faith. It is an expression of a way of living that cares for the oppressed. With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, the entire region, and in time the world, underwent a change that could not be ignored by anyone, whether or not subjected directly to the Islamic expansion. Pre-Islamic Iran was not an exception. Shi’ism is a specific way those living in the Iranian region absorbed the shock. As it happened often, Iranians (those living in the region we now call Iran) absorbed over the course of centuries what was worthwhile, while resisting and discarding the rest. Some may say Iranians discarded an earlier Persian culture for an invading one. But that is a chunky, Newtonian way, of looking at it. The reality was more complex, involving a transcontinuity amid apparent discontinuity. In the process, not only Iran became Islamized, but also Islam became Iranized. Shi’ism is an expression of this hybridization of a regional spiritual identity. Iran could not be the same anymore, nor was Islam the same; Iran had to adapt to new realities, and it did so, in my view, in a very intelligent and humane way. My mother’s caring for Imam Hussein and his household is an expression of such an essentially Iranian spirit of adaptation to Islam.
I invite those in the West not familiar with the Shi’ite views and tradition to consider this “thought experiment.” Imagine Jesus had a daughter married to his cousin, bearing grandchildren, and descendents across twelve generations, who were one way or another, in groups or individually, one after another, at varying points in their lives, abused, beheaded, poisoned, killed, and imprisoned. Shi’ites believe the original humanist message of Islam was represented best by the lives and examples of such direct descendants of the prophet, distinguishing their legacy from the often expansionist and colonialist legacy of the leaders of the more extremely conservative and literalist branches of Islam, some of whose worst examples we have witnessed recently in the Middle East with the rise of Al-Qaeda, Daesh (ISIS), and the Wahabi sects in Islam, often aided covertly (or not) by those Arab rulers in the region who have traditionally been local allies of the West, especially of the UK and the US (and now being courted by, and courting, Israel).
Westerners suffering from extremist Islam would never be able to understand the phenomenon without appreciating the extent to which the West, especially the US and the UK, for their imperial and economic interests deeply embedded in a Newtonian way of thinking that divides the world to rule it in chunky ways, have supported and overdeveloped the most conservative and literalist interpretations of Islam in recent decades, whose brain-children, now armed with Western weapons and resources, have roamed the Middle East in recent times committing untold atrocities against innocents. In other words, the West and its regional allies have ideologically, politically, and militarily fed or helped maintain (thanks to oil interests), directly or by proxy, the terrorist tendencies in Islam (tendencies that can also be found in any faith, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on); yet, they accuse other progressive Islamic forces who actually suffer more directly from such onslaught and are fighting them, as being terroristic.
The way I experienced Islam through stories told by my mother was different. She inculcated in me a moral sense of search for justice, for fairness, and an enduring sense of caring for those wronged and oppressed in life. Those critical of religion, of Islam, particularly in the context of Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary turmoil, may judge such sentiments in terms of a dualism of ancient Persian and Arab/Islamic cultures. But, such a dualism is not how my mother, and I, learning from her by example, experienced being Islamic, Shi’ite, and Iranian/Persian/Azeri. Being Muslim or Shi’ite for us was not just about a religious faith, but about being human, about being empathetic, being in awe of existence, being always, always, on the side of the oppressed and the deprived and those who suffer, since all humankind are supposed to be equal in the eye of the Creator. That, in essence, was and is for my mother and me the heart of Islam.
Iran as a multi-ethnic society has had a great opportunity and gift to learn and practice a sense of transethnic empathy, even though there is still much to be learned and practiced to realize that end, especially in the context of broader imperial policies and interests who have sought in recent centuries to fuel animosities among Iranian ethnic groups through Newtonian-modeled, “divide and rule” policies advanced for colonial gains. Unfortunately, some in opposition today still see Iran in a very narrow and outdated nationalistic lens. Iran cannot be understood and managed in isolation from a world-system of which it is an intricate part. It is pure ideological falsehood to assume Iran can survive on its own without paying close attention to the realities of the region and the world. Ignoring that is what led to past failures. There is scientifically good reason for Iran to care for its fate and security as much within as outside its borders, regionally and globally.
I am ethnically Azeri, but grew up Persian, and never ever saw them as separate identities. They were superposed aspects of my experience and identity as an Iranian. Newtonian mentalities feeding imperial interests seek to tear us apart into pieces, as if we can separate these aspects of our identities like billiard balls. But such identities were always superposed sentiments and values for my mother, and through her, for me. Caring about those massacred among Arabs more than fourteen hundred years ago may seem irrelevant to what those like my mother, as Iranians of Azeri or Persian descent (or of other ethnic backgrounds populating Iran), should feel. But the way I see it, having such equal empathy toward non-Persians, toward Arabs wronged by other Arabs, is precisely what makes people like my mother not only human, but also genuinely Azeri, Persian, and Iranian. Iranians, among them a multiplicity of ethnic and religious identities—Persians, Azeris, Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, Turkomans, Lurs, Bakhtiaris, Gilakis, Mazandaranis, Armenians, Assyrians, Jewish, and so on—have learned to be both this and the other, to be both and all at once Iranians. Some wish to separate us into separate chunks, and some have legitimate grievances because of historical conditions domestically born or imposed on Iran from without; but, ultimately, it would be a grave mistake to not cherish an opportunity and a test Iran’s history has offered its people to experiment with living united in peace while respecting and celebrating their diversities. Iran provides its people with a microcosm of regional community learning to live together in unity amid diversity; and this will not come about automatically and blindly. It takes conscious effort.
Iranians genuinely feel empathy for the other, and their deep sense of hospitality, putting the best and all they have for their guests, is simply a recreative expression of that deep sentiment. It is no wonder that the walls of Persepolis were adorned by depictions of celebratory gift-giving and-receiving, and not violence-and-conquering. It is the same living spirit in Cyrus the Great (in Persian mythology, Jamsheed) caring for the captive Jews in Babylon that today cares for the oppressed Arabs, especially in Palestine, today. There is no dualism here, but a transcontinuity of feeling empathy deeply for the other. Those who wish to invoke a dualism are only obfuscating their own ideological interests, trying to ahistorically contrast a past that is completely at odds with the present. If you name a street in Quds (or Jerusalem) after Cyrus because he liberated your ancestors from captivity, you should not forget that the street you have built is on an occupied land, around which you keep its historical inhabitants captive. You are doing, in other words, the exact opposite of what you cherish in the legacy of Cyrus the Great, and since he is mentioned in your holy book, you are disrespecting that holy legacy as celebrated therein. To be respectful of the legacy of Cyrus, to celebrate it, you are supposed to liberate Palestinians from your captivity, not continue holding them captive in your apartheid state. To be true to the spirit of Cyrus, you should be freeing your captives, and do so not as an act of benevolence, but one of necessity—since this is also, at once, about liberating your own soul. Keeping them captive, you are enslaving your soul to an oppressive identity that is alien to your own biblical tradition.
Iran’s sense of caring deeply for the plight of Palestinians today is exactly the same sense of caring Cyrus displayed for the Jews living in captivity millennia ago. When the poet Sa’di wrote in the thirteenth century that all humankind are from one strand, sharing a single soul, such that the pain in one part is experienced as the pain of all, he obviously did not mean to include only Persians, or Iranians, excluding people of other ethnic or cultural backgrounds. I wonder, those who complain about why Iranians care so deeply for the people of Palestine, those suffering in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, for the Yazidis, and so on, truly believe in the teaching of Sa’di, whose poem they recite often as an expression of their ‘Persian’ identity. They ask why Iranians chant for the plight of Palestinians in Tehran, while reminding us of the glorious times of Cyrus the Great. But, has not the memory and the good name of Cyrus endured because he cared for the plight of the oppressed and the captive in other lands as well, respecting their human right to self-determination?
What I witnessed over the decades in my mother’s deep sense of empathy for what the prophet’s household endured represented to me not only what being truly a Muslim, a Shi’ite, means, but also what being a Persian, an Azeri, or any Iranian genuinely means. She sincerely, deeply, felt a sense of empathy for those who perished in the massacres of the prophet’s household and his descendents. She cried for them, for folks she had never met, Arab folks wronged by other Arab folks, more than fourteen hundred years before, as if she cried for her own brother and sister, for her own child, mother, and father. She felt their misery, like her own; she grieved for them, like her own. I am not sure how else one can be more genuinely a Persian, an Azeri, an Iranian, in the true Sa’dian sense of the words, than the way she felt the pain of Arabs being wronged by Arabs centuries ago. Being Persian, being of the region called Iran, meant being caring, living in peace, with one’s neighbors. When a member has pain, other members suffer and become restless, Sa’di said. That is exactly how Tayyebeh genuinely was (and is)—a living Sa’di poem. That to me represents a quantum, a superposed, way of experiencing the Iranian identity, rather than still holding on to an outdated, Newtonian, chunky way of being this or that.
Even today, when she does not recognize anyone in the room, not even recognizing the nurse who lives with her night and day, she hugs and thanks the nurse as if she meets a new person each hour. You always, still, find her offering back in appreciation the first bite of any food offered to her. She is, genuinely, in the deepest roots of her soul, now proven by her Alzheimer’s, a caring person. When she told me many times in person that she loved her son living in the US, putting her hands on her heart when saying it, I told myself that it was one thing to hear your mother say she loves you when she is aware, and another to say it when she is not. Hearing someone amid Alzheimer’s say that she loves another is something quite different. It arises from the depth of her soul, from all her being. How could a feeling of love for another be any more pure and genuine? And, amid her Alzheimer’s, she still continued to sing her religious songs, mourning for Imam Hussein. How deeper can one’s faith and caring for another be?
The faith of Shi’ism in Islam was embraced early on and thereafter by Iranians as an anti-colonial response, having been subjected to the inhuman conservative and oppressive elements imposed on Iran by native despots or outside invaders, including conservative rulers at times under what they regard as the false banner of Islam, and more recently against new Western colonialist and imperial interventions in their lives. In their view, Shi’ites are keeping alive what they regard as the true humanist core values of Islam as shared by their like-minded brothers and sisters. This is perhaps one reason why Iranians are particularly sensitive to the oppression and wrongs committed against their Arab sisters and brothers in Palestine.
A Persian, an Iranian, in the deep Sa’dian sense of being a member of the family of humanity, cannot but feel for the wrongs and pains Palestinians are enduring every day and night, decade after decade, at the hands of those Israeli leaders implementing the last overt Western settler-colonialist project. What is most puzzling for Iranians like me is how Israeli leaders can commit such atrocities in full view given such a violent oppression the Jews themselves, along with others, including gypsies and communists, endured during the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis fueled by such abhorrent anti-Semitic and racist hatred. But, then, Arabs are Semites too, no? How can those having witnessed or endured the horrors of the Holocaust remain indifferent toward, let alone live with, the conditions of occupying a whole people’s land in Palestine, turning their captives’ homeland into a vast concentration camp for them, bit by bit swallowing their lands? How can the soldiers, sitting conveniently at the border, using their high-tech weapons, target youths across the border and behind the fences, so mercilessly killing and maiming them one by one each day, because they rightfully protest against the occupation of their homeland by colonial-settler occupiers? Are they not the captives, today? You occupy their lands; they resist. And then you label their resistance wrong and punishable by such measures? Such twisted logic is something that should shock any conscience, let alone those of the Jewish faith to whom both the Christian and Islamic faiths trace their values.
My concerns with the public issues of the Middle East while recalling the personal troubles of my mother may seem disjointed to some. But understanding how they interrelate is exactly what a sociological imagination invites us to do. You may think what goes on in the Middle East is just a local issue. But, it is not. It is a global issue, and it is also personal for everyone. The Israeli-Palestinian problem is Iran’s problem, and is a problem for the US, and for practically anyone living today. It is based on a Newtonian, chunky way of separating regions on the map, an absurd legacy of economic imperiality we still suffer from today, making us feel what goes on elsewhere is not our problem. What goes on in the Middle East involves a disaster surviving from the horrors of the WWII. The world we live in today would have been very different had the problem been solved in a just and egalitarian way. It was not, due mainly to the intransigence of the Israeli leaders who wish not to give an inch but to take everything. Implanting a settler-colonialist state in the region served both imperial and local colonial interests. But it has not gone well, since it essentially denies the basic human rights of people living in their homeland, including their right to self-determination. Iran’s contemporary history has been intricately shaped by the regional crises and interests left over from WWII. The 1953 coup in Iran, bringing back the Shah to power to serve the West’s economic and geo-political interests resulting in cultural conflicts, were undertaken to safeguard Western imperial interests aided by their local allies. The so-called “modernization” was a cloak for increasing semi-colonial and neo-colonial subjugation of Iran to the economic, political, and cultural interests of the West as led by the US and the UK.
I recall that my mother, who in his youth wore the veil and later a scarf, at some point when I was young, discontinued wearing even the scarf to follow the Western norms and to please her husband, who, among his friends, felt my mother should appear more “modern.” This was an expression of the East-West conflicts translating into personal tensions and troubles in our household. It may appear minor, but it was not so for my mother. I think, over time, she realized how artificial and empty such symbolic prescriptions of “modernity” were, diminishing her marital happiness, and her sense of spiritual self-worth. Not wearing the scarf did not bring her happiness, wearing it again did. She went back to wearing it as she grew more senior, and became more independent and outspoken in expressing her views.
She kept on her living room shelf a picture of a young girl wearing a scarf representing to her Ruqayyah, the four-year-old daughter of Imam Hussein—who died weeping over her father’s severed head after the battle of Karbala, in today’s Iraq. Looking back, one of the first signs of her Alzheimer’s was that of thinking the face of Ruqayyah in the photo was speaking to her. Amid her Alzheimer’s, I also found her still reaching out immediately for her scarf when a man’s face appeared on television screen, especially one she found attractive! She had from early on amid her illness begun being unable to distinguish reality from what was on TV. This was both bad and good. Television kept her company, as if people visited her. She said hello and goodbye to them. We used to joke, after she reached out for her scarf, about which gentleman on the screen she would accept as a suitor. She was quite picky, laughing often with a bitter, but still sweet, smile. I see I am using verbs in past tense again.
My mother’s resistance to Western cultural symbols she found empty and foreign to her was expressive of a trait in her personality I found inspiring. She was remarkable in insisting on her principles. She lived true to her faith and her sense of right and wrong, in both social as well as personal matters.
People living in the greater Iranian region were attracted to the original message of Islam, because they found in it echoes of human values different from what they were experiencing under their own kings at the time. Shi’ism was historically embraced as an Iranian resistance movement, one that sought to keep alive the empathy for what the prophet’s household and descendants endured as an expression of their own resistance against injustice perpetrated by native despots or outsiders, be they oppressive Arab rulers, Mongols, and Turkic invaders. Being Shi’ite is being Iranian, feeling a deep sense of empathy for the humanist message at the genuine core of Islam. Shi’ism was an intelligent Persian and more broadly Iranian response to colonial invasions wielding false banners of Islam. Being Iranian, Muslim, and Shi’ite, are not separable identity chunks, but superposed identities resulting from a long historical tradition of living superposed with others in the Middle East.
As I noted earlier, some today contrast the post-Islamic Revolution Iran with earlier times, going back to pre-Islamic period of Iran’s history, constructing a dualism that, amid historical amnesia caused by the passing of time, offers a false sense of discontinuity in Iran’s history. But, in my view, and the way I experienced it being embraced by my mother’s genuine feelings of empathy for Islam’s prophet and his descendants, there is no discontinuity, perhaps a transcontinuity, in Iran’s history. The spirit in Cyrus that cared for other oppressed people in the region, including the captive Jews, is the same spirit that deeply cares about the Palestinians being oppressed today. Israeli rulers pursuing the occupation of Palestine, by their actions, in my view, are betraying Jewish values, violating the humanist sentiments the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have espoused. “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor.” This is a simple, yet profound message, coming from the Torah. Those wishing to build a Jewish homeland should be the first to respect it for their neighbors and do it in a just way, not to initiate and continue occupying and oppressing them as instruments of Western imperial powers and interests.
So, unfortunately, when those aggrieved today in Iran—amid socio-economic and political conditions brought on by decades of imperial economic sanctions and imposed direct or proxy wars to install another puppet regime in Iran to pursue the imperial interests of the US, UK, and the West and their regional allies—complain about Iranians’ caring about the oppressed in the region while nostalgically reminding us of Iran’s pre-Islamic history going back to Cyrus, they should remember instead that in fact it was precisely the caring for the oppressed in the region that distinguished Cyrus. To celebrate Cyrus today is to seek after the Palestinians’ and all peoples’, including Iranian’s own, rights to self-determination. If Cyrus was alive today, to do a sociological thought experiment, would he also not be pro-Palestinian, because they are the ones kept imperially captive today?
What is the use of referring us back to Cyrus’s Cylinder as the earliest symbol and expression of human rights and respect for others people’s self-determination when, amid the politics of the Middle-East today you do not care about a people deprived of their lands, statehood, and dignity—or, even worse, invite foreign powers to solve Iran’s problems that only they, as a self-determined people, are entitled to confront and solve on their own? Do you seriously think foreign powers are caring about your human rights, imposing the harshest sanctions on Iran? If the U.S. does not appreciate being intervened, through elections, political interference, let alone militarily, in its own domestic affairs in choosing its own path, why does it find it legitimate to do the same to those in other regions of the world, including Iran?
To those in the U.S. administration who invite U.S. citizens of Iranian descent to voice their views about their policies about Iran, here I offer mine.
Iranians will never forget the past, how the US and UK administered a coup in Iran in 1953 to topple the legitimate government of Mohammad Mossadegh, using the most deceitful and degrading motives and machinations. Iranians are aware and on-guard today so that the same will never happen again. When you instruct your cadets that it is common practice to “lie, cheat, steal”—you are not representing the best of what American people are and desire. You cannot impose democracy on another people and nation, by lying, cheating, and stealing. You show it by example, by respecting their right for self-determination. You are supporting those in the region who are at the roots of what the world, including people in the region and those living in the West, are suffering from. You are funding, arming, and supporting the sources of literalist and most conservative sects and branches of Islam whose ideology has engendered terrorism in the region and beyond.
What you say and act do not represent the views and interests of all U.S. citizens. America is not just what you say it is; America has many voices, including mine. Iranians have learned the lessons, and made a revolution to choose their own independent path against the forces that brought on such designs for Iran. You were bothered by the take-over of the U.S. embassy in Iran and taking of its personnel hostage. That should not happen amid normal diplomatic relations based on mutual respect and trust. But, by your coup in Iran, already admitted to in your own officially disclosed secret documents as well, you had broken the norms, pursued illegal interference in another nation’s affairs, and had toppled the legitimate government of another nation. You violated the rights of a people to their self-determination, holding them as a nation hostage to your own imperial interests for decades, far, far, beyond 444 days. Ever since 1979, the West and the US in particular have imposed conditions of war and most restrictive sanctions on Iran to reverse the gains made by an independent nation. Iran has been in a state of war ever since the 1979 revolution, and those who judge any political, economic, and cultural shortcomings Iranians still face in the post-revolutionary period should not ignore the exceptionally harsh conditions imposed by the West on Iran.
Iran as a nation has the right to choose its own path, to gain its political independence to safeguard its national interests, to advance in economic, political, cultural, and spiritual ways arising from its own history, rather than becoming another Western clone and appendage at the heart of Middle East. Iran has a right to learn from its own mistakes, to fight its own corruptions, to resolve its own interethnic discrepancies, to experiment with its own models of democracy, to develop its own ideas, theories, and institutions of government—which can never happen and become perfect overnight. The forty years since the Iranian revolution of 1979, one of the major revolutions of the twentieth century, are still nothing compared to the longer times it has taken for other nations in the West to build their institutions, on the ashes of two world wars and many regional wars they often themselves caused due to their imperial interests.
Iran had been a monarchy for eons. It needs its own generational time and space to find itself based on its own history, legacy, culture, art, and human values. You cannot judge a nation’s progress in the timeline of a few decades, especially when it has been subjected to relentless military, economic, and political threats and sanctions for decades. Iran has a right to its self-determination to grow through its own trials and errors. No revolution and war situation has been ideal and fair for all parties involved. There are always innocents on both sides. The U.S. grew out of its Civil War, the world has grown out of two devastating world wars, and Iran has a right to experience its own shortcomings and struggles as well.
To those who invite concerned Iranians or citizens of Iranian descent to voice their views about their policies about Iran, I say this.
Leave Iran alone to find its own path. Apologize for the debacle of the 1953 coup in Iran. Stop pursuing the same in new forms today. End the sanctions, now. Instead of sending your naval forces and planes and radar-evading planes to undemocratically impose your will on another nation, take a bouquet of flower on a civilian plane to Iran, with a sincere letter of apology to all Iranians. Apologize, for instance, for having downed a civilian airplane in the past in the Persian Gulf, killing all the passengers on board in the waters your most advanced radar-evading drone went down recently, the same waters in which your ally’s, UK’s, piracy in the high seas was locally answered. Take a bouquet of flowers to Iran with the letter of sincere apology. Iranians are generous and forgiving; they will receive you with respect, but they are smart enough to know when a gesture is genuine, and when not. [Post-publication note: this essay was written in 2019 and before the tragic and mistaken downing by Iran’s defensive forces of a Ukrainian passenger plan in Iran on January 8, 2020, amid the highly volatile and unpredictable security situation originally caused and created by the illegal US assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and others in Iraq. The tragic event would not have happened had the US not taken such interventionist military actions against Iran, and for this reason I hold the U.S. primarily responsible for causing the tragedy].
If you are concerned about human rights in Iran, first clean your own historical and regional backyards. See what your policies are doing to your own nation, dividing them, with innocents dying as a result of your guns and racist policies domestically. You think you are saving Afghanistan from wars? See how your own streets have become war-torn. What is the use of your Harvards and MITs if you cannot solve basic problems you face in your domestic and international relations? Acknowledge more fully and directly the suffering you caused for the native Americans long past and continuing; help heal their scars, now. You think you won over them, but in spirit, they have been the winners, and the judgment day for more has not yet arrived. Acknowledge the horrors of slavery and how your ancestors shipped black slaves like cattle from Africa to generate your wealth and profits. That does not make you great. It is shameful. Heal it. If you are so much observant of human rights, take the perpetrators of Jamal Khashoggi’s death to the court of international law and to jail. Stop arming and befriending the killers instead. Stop allying yourself with the most conservative and extremist sects in the Middle East who, in the name of Islam or Judaism, are perpetrating exactly the same policies of terrorism for which you blame others in the region.
Be fair in your judgments. You accuse Iran of not respecting women’s rights, when Iranian women are among the most educated in Iran and the Middle East, if not the world. The literacy in Iran has far, far, exceeded that during the reign of your installed Shah. In your allies’ lands in the region, women could not even drive a car until recently. In Iran’s post-revolutionary schools the likes of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and only woman mathematician winner of the Fields Medal was trained. Iranian education and universities are advanced today, and becoming more so each day, despite (and especially because of) your sanctions. Iran has acquired nuclear technology and has a right to its use for its national development. It is the only nation who has announced, for spiritual and religious reasons, that nuclear weapons are illegal and inhuman. Remember what you did to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The impact was not different from the horrors in concentration camps other Westerners committed in Auschwitz. So, ban your ally Israel from holding and threatening with nuclear arms. Instruct her to reveal and destroy its nuclear weapons, developed in secret over many decades principally with the help of Western governments.
Do not fund Israel’s expansionist policies in the region in violation of the rights of Palestinians and of the airspace and lives of its neighbors. If you wish peace for Israel, wish peace for its neighbors equally, in real terms and not just in words. Stop funding and supporting the continuation of a policy of occupation that is illegal according to the charters of the United Nations. Stop supporting Israel’s apartheid policy of separating the Jews from the Arabs. You wish for peace in the Middle East? Solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem by accepting fair borders as already designated in the UN charter. You will never be able to solve the problem by bullying. See the bigger picture than your immediate interests. This conflict is the source of all conflicts in the region, predates the Iranian revolution by decades, and is at the root of much of the problems in the world today, and not just those living in the region. It is a legacy, at its roots, of a long outdated, Newtonian vision of the world, one in which human interests are chunked up into pieces where one assumes that by imposing one’s “greater” will on another, one can mechanically solve the problem. As Sa’di said, you can never have peace if others are in pain, especially from your acts. Humankind, human history, human life, is quantum in nature. Interests are superposed. You cannot separate one from another, thinking that you can be happy and another sad. Human peace will never come about that way. You wish to celebrate Cyrus? Liberate your captives, and therefore your own soul, today.
You can never have peace within if you mistreat others without. Do not try imposing yourself on others. You cannot bully your way to true human (let alone American) greatness. You can never have justice without the same for others. Self and society are twin-born. You can relate to others because, as a social being, as a human, you can relate to yourself. Self and society are superposed. Your relation to others is a relation to yourself. You can never abuse others without abusing yourself. Learn from your soldiers and veterans. There is a reason they suffer and commit suicide when they come home from the supposedly patriotic missions for which they are sent. They are scarred for life for a reason. They can never pull that trigger without pulling the trigger to their own soul and dignity. You can never impose coups on other nations without suffering the consequences. Democracy and freedom cannot be imposed on another, without depriving your own nation of them.
Your peace with Iran can begin by taking that bouquet of flowers, and the sincere letter of apology, to Iran, to start a new chapter of friendship with Iran. But such a friendship gesture will never succeed if you duplicitously continue with not bringing a just resolution to the Middle East conflicts, at the heart of which is the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Iranians are justified in believing that a simple gesture of peace short of resolution of longstanding regional solutions would not work. Stop expecting that Iran not partake in assuring that its interests are served in its own neighborhood and region. For Iran, local peace cannot be achieved short of regional peace, and ultimately global peace. Nationalists still live a pipe-dream of modernization perspective, thinking each nation can go through its life in isolation from the region and the world. It cannot. It is a part of a world-system; it has to consider regional and global problems also as her own. Iran has every right to live in peace with its neighbors and be able to defend itself against foreign threats. Resolve regional problems at its root. Solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by defunding Israel’s illegal settlement expansion policies to reverse them, bringing her to the negotiating table, one that is fair and just to the Palestinians, and meets their rights as stipulated in the UN resolutions.
Iran has to be reckoned with. It will never allow again the humiliation of the 1953 coup, now being plotted in new ways and with new social media and satellite TV news anchors and game players. No one can deny the problems Iran faces domestically, but it would be a grave mistake to ignore the world-systemic context in which Iran’s domestic problems have come about. The world should respect Iran’s choosing its own path on the basis of its own philosophies, spiritualities, and the economic, political, cultural, and artistic resources, models, and talents unique to its own history.
The imperial policies of the West, led by the US and the UK, in the region are at the root of much of the suffering of the region’s peoples’ lives. It is the most shameful and disastrous, Newtonian-inspired, “divide and rule,” imperial project from which both Arabs and Jews, as well as Iranians, not to mention others in the region, and in other parts of the world, including those in the US and the UK, are suffering everyday. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict predates the Iranian Islamic revolution by decades, and in part is a cause of it. It is not just a local, regional problem. It is a problem for the world to solve, urgently. It is the most urgent social problem left over from the last world war. A solution where both sides can live in peace as neighbors can only be brought about by supporting the efforts and aspirations of those in solidarity across the isles among both peace and justice loving Arabs and Jews, and all those supporting them world over, while exposing the problem’s root ideological and epistemological foundations.
My family’s personal troubles, the separations between my beloved parents, were never separate from the public issues caused amid a polarizing dualism of East and West in Iran’s contemporary history. The contrasting dualism of tradition and modernity did not have to be solved the way it did under the Shah, had Iran been respected to choose its own path as a new nation. Anyone who may say what I have expressed above has no place in an “objective” scientific study is being deceptive. Such personal sentiments can never be separated from what we study. They exist, whether others like them or not. Some may duplicitously pretend to be “objective” by hiding them. I choose to share my views openly in the interest of objective transparency.
Expressing such views, I wish to say that in this study I have no intention of sweeping my own values under the rug of a false principle of subjectless objectivity that is itself a Newtonian ideological artifact serving the interests of imperiality—of those who marginalize and stigmatize critical and humanist voices using a supposedly ‘neutral’ science, while pursuing a variety of subtle or overt Islamophobic and Islamophilic strategies for similar ends.
What I hope to have learned as shared in this volume is not simply a ‘physics’ nor a ‘sociology’ finding, but one that transcends their chunkiness in favor of a liberating, unified vision that would expose imperial and colonial ‘divide and rule’ policies dualizing East and West—ones that are also at the root of what separates parents and children across and inside any household or individual—as not only an inhuman, but also an unreasonable, proposition.
Tender, let Wine’s Light brighten our Cup’s physicality!
Singer, our wish was fulfilled! Sing its musicality!
We’ve seen the image of our Beloved’s Face in the Cup,
O clueless of our Drinking’s joyful eternality!
Will never die he whose heart was resurrected to Love;
Inked on the world’s chronicles is our immortality!
The flirtatious winkings of star-highs have been so much that
Even the spruce charms with its cypress commonality!
O wind, if you breeze right through the rose gardens of our friend
Remember to tell her this, with congeniality:
“O dear, why don’t you recall my name intentionally?
Does not remembering names signal hospitality?”
Drinking Wine is pleasant in the eye of our Tender;
That’s why Wine was given reign of spirituality!
I fear the day I won’t be able to use the excuse of
The legal bread of mentor for Wine’s illegality!
Hafez! Shed a seed of tear from the corner of your eye;
May Love Bird’s choosing us be its eventuality!
— Hafez Shirazi (Tamdgidi translation)
The Azeri set of poems adorning the gravestone of Tayyebeh Tamjidi (1928-2020) in Behasht Zahra cemetery outside Tehran, Iran, bloc 19, translated earlier in this essay amid a wider set, is provided below with Persian translations:
آغاج باشى بار ايستر / سَرِ درخت ميوه مى خواهد
خسته جوليم نار ايستر / دل خستۀ من انار مى خواهد
او واقت من اوشاقيديم / آن زمان ها من بچه بودم
ايندى گويليم يار ايستر / حالا دلم يار مى خواهد
گيزيل گولى دَرَلّه / گل طلايى را مى چينند
مخمل اوسته سَرَلّه / روى مخمل آويزان مى کنند
خيرى السون او گيزين / خوشا به حال آن دخترى
سويدوقونا وِرَلّه / که به کسى که دوستش دارد بدهند
گيزيل جولم در منى / من گلى هستم طلايى، من را بچين
مخمل اوسته سر منى / روى مخمل آويزانم کن
آللّاها باخ رحم اِلَه / تو رو خدا، به من نگاه و رحم کن
من جوانام، آل منى / من جوان هستم، با من ازدواج کن
آراز قيراقى مئشه / حاشيۀ رود ارس جنگلى است
گتى دستمالى دوشه / بيار دستمال را پهن کن
اراسينا گول دوزوم / تا در ميانش گل بچينم
دوورَه سينه بنؤوشه / و دور تا دورش بنفشه
بو دَرّه نين اوزونى / در اين درّۀ طولانى،
چوبان، قِيتر قوزونى / اى چوپان، برّه را برگردان
ناواختدى گُرمميشم / خيلى وقت است نديده ام
نازلى يارين اوزونى / صورت يار نازنينم را
گتديم داقين باشينا / رفتم به قلّۀ کوه
يازى يازديم داشينا / نوشتنى ها را روى سنگش نوشتم
گديب گلن اوخوسون / تا هر که مى آيد و مى رود بخواند
نلر گلدى باشيما / چه ها بر سرم آمد
آچيق گوى پنجره نى / پنجره را باز بُگذار
گزوم گرسون گلنى / تا چشمم کسانى که مى آيند را ببيند
نجه قَبرَ گويالّار / همانطور که در قبر مى گذارند
عشقين اوسته اولنى / کسى را که به حسرت عشق مُرد
يرى يرى گليرم / برو برو من هم دارم مى آيم
دستمالا گول دريرم / دارم گل مى چينم و به دستمال مى ريزم
آش بوينوندا يِر اِلَه / بغل خودت را باز کن و من را جا بده
سويوخ دييب اولورم / چون از سرما دارم مى ميرم