The Storm Petrels: Free Thinkers and Artists
Storm petrels are seabirds that are said to warn of an impending storm. Ancient seamen took note when storm petrels circled, squawked, and then flew away. According to lore, the flight of petrels portended a ferocious storm. Iranian free spirits were the first to flee revolutionary Iran, if they could. Like petrels, Iranian free thinkers fled and, if they could, landed on safer shores. Iranian artists and intellectuals, hounded by the Basij and local police and discussed in earlier chapters, have gone in different directions. Googoosh, the most popular chanteuse in Iran, was confined to Iran for 20 years.
She left and embarked on a whirlwind tour, selling out to audiences across North America. Back in Iran, she was sentenced in absentia to prison for making a joke about a mullah. It is unlikely she will leave her Beverly Hills mansion to serve a sentence. Younger generations of Iranians have rediscovered her music and adore it. Marjane Satrapi’s snappy graphic novel Persepolis has entered the mainstream, with even Texas libraries using it to promote adult literacy. Like many liberal Iranian expatriates, Marjane will not visit today’s Iran and would not be given a warm reception by the Guards if she tried. As of summer 2020, Marjane had helped create six films, the last of which was about another independent and creative woman, Marie Curie. Shohreh Aghdashloo, the actress who escaped revolutionary Iran to begin a flourishing career in the West, continues to advocate for liberalism in her homeland. She starred in a 2008 film, The Stoning of Soraya M., about Soraya Manutchehri, a thirty-five-year-old woman executed on false charges of adultery. With gritty realism, the film highlighted the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding her stoning. Soraya’s remains lie in an unmarked grave, but she still lives in memory.
Salman Rushdie, once sentenced to death for snickering at the Koran in the Satanic Verses, no longer hides in the shadows in fear of a Qods Force assassination team. Iran periodically promotes boycotts of his books. However, this did not deter Emory University from inviting him to the faculty. Rushdie remains a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. Still, many civil libertarians remain wary and fear the long reach of Iran’s intelligence services. They see the Rushdie affair as a defeat for those who would satirize elements of Islam.
Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes opined that Khomeini established what may be called “Rushdie rules,” which continue to guide and constrain conversations about Islam. These rules hold that, in Khomeini’s words, those who oppose “Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran” may be killed. Today, Western intellectuals around the world tread carefully when they trespass into the realm of blasphemy. Iranians who fled abroad and campaign against the Iranian government sometimes live in fear. They fear being tracked down and killed by Iranian services, and some fear being deported back to Iran.
Some Iranian exiles labor under the weight of the past. Ayanaz “Anni” Cyrus was married off as a child bride in Iran and escaped to America. She explained, “I was sold as a child bride in Islamic Iran. To save my life, I left Iran from Hell into the Unknown. America saved me.” But she found many Americans, particularly self-described feminists, uninterested in her accounts of frequent, unreported, and unpunished rape in Iran. She explained, “There is no such thing as rape between a husband and his wife. Women are just property.” Most girls have little chance to leave, and many are forced into arranged marriages. Women are still hanged in Iran. Sarah M. was the 104th woman executed during Rouhani’s reign and the first executed in 2020. But some women celebrities leave if they can. Feisty Iranian Olympic medalist Kimia Alizadeh was the only Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal at the 2016 games. She fled Iran in 2020, explaining, “I wore whatever they told me to wear. . . . I repeated everything they told me to say.” She hopes to compete in future Olympics, but not under the Iranian flag.
