A Fire of Lilies

Front matter

IRANIAN SERIES

A FIRE OF LILIES PERSPECTIVES ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN MODERN IRAN AHMAD KARIMI-HAKKAK

LEIDEN

Part One

1 — Revolutionary Posturing: Iranian Writers and the Iranian Revolution

2 — Protest and Perish: A History of the Writers’ Association of Iran 3 - Authors and Authorities: Censorship and Literary Communication in the Islamic Republic of Iran

4 - Of Hail and Hounds: The Image of the Iranian Revolution in Recent Persian Literature

Part Two

5 — A Well Amid the Waste: An Introduction to the Poetry of Ahmad Shamlu

6 — Up from the Underground: The Meaning of Exile in Gholamhossein Sa‘edi’s Last Short Stories

7 — Poet of Desires Turned to Dust: In Memoriam Mehdi Akhavan Saless

8 - A Storyteller and His Times: Ali-Akbar Sa‘idi-Sirjani of Iran

Notes Bibliography Index

Acknowledgments, Notes, and a Dedication

This book would not have come together in this form, had it not been for years of insistence by my most esteemed friend and colleague, Professor Asghar Seyed-Ghorab. It was he who first thought that these writings of decades past may deserve the chance to be perused as a collection by a new generation of Iran scholars and students as well as general readers. He then graciously accepted my request and graced the volume with an insightful Introduction, which sheds much light on the historical and cultural contexts of all that follows his essay. And it was he who saw to it that this book would have an appropriate set of preliminaries as well as an index and a bibliography. As such my most sincere expression of gratitude should head the list of acknowledgments that I would like to register here: thank you most sincerely, Asghar.

Leiden University Press in general and Mrs. Anniek Meinders, Mrs. Kate Elliott, Mrs. Amber de Groot, and Mrs. Romy Uijen in particular, deserve my thanks for their part in making this book what it is, as did the two anonymous readers who made valuable suggestions toward updating these essays — thanks, one and all. Last but not least, I am grateful to the following for their permission to publish the essays as a book: The International Journal of Middle Easter Studies (IJMES), World Literature Today, The Journal of Iranian Studies, Mazda Publishers and Iranbooks.

The transliteration of Arabic and Persian words has been done in accordance with the Iranian Studies transcription guidelines. For proper names and Persian words commonly used in English I have used their more familiar forms. Also, I have used the Common Era dates throughout this book. As a small token of my appreciation and sympathy I would like to dedicate this work to all those who played a part in the making of the Iranian Revolution only to suffer its consequences.

Prologue

Fascinating thing, human memory, especially as it stares at certain moments of the past! Having had my youthful dream of becoming an academic fractured in 1973 in the form of the non-renewal of my contract with the Tehran college I was then teaching at, having then returned to the US to complete my education and gradually giving myself up almost entirely to the dream of an anti-monarchy revolution, and finally having returned to my homeland as soon after the victory of the Iranian Revolution as possible, I cherished the uncharted world of the possible that the revolution’s potential offered much too dearly to let go of it because of so unimportant a set of incidents as the constant harassments the extremists in the revolutionary coalition exerted on academics like me to conform. Looking back on my tenacity now, forty years after the event of the revolution, I feel a certain uneasiness, at times in the form of a physical sensation.

The essays in this book began as barebone jottings in my journal contemporaneous with what was happening to me, around me, and to my homeland; what patterns the reader might detect were almost entirely after-thoughts a decade or two later, after I had had a chance once again to return to the safety and freedom of an exilic individual life as well as the security of a deeply cherished academic career. There was only one drawback: this was not a career in my country, as I had always assumed it would be, but the life of a professor and an exile. The result, as I see it now, is the gradual evolution of experiencing something, say a revolution, in an immediate way, moment by moment as if by breathing it in and breathing it out, followed by the slow simmering of putting it into writing about a place from a distance: a huge adjustment, though not only at a professional remove - psychological, philosophical, almost existential - from what I most loved about my home country, the Persian language and Iran’s culture, and most especially the glorious literary heritage it has given to a world so desperately in need of some unmitigated wisdom and beauty.

Thinking anew some forty years later about the incidents and happenings that have been prime instigators for these essays, I still feel haunted by them. Having processed them away from the initial impressions they may have registered in me - as shocking, crazy, unreal - I recall them now as shards of my past life parading before me as I watch them in wide-eyed wakefulness; review them in my mind as compassionately as I can, often finding myself unprepared to have experienced them in the moment of their occurrence. I also almost invariably judge my initial responses as inadequate and myself as wanting in forming them. I question my part in processing them constantly. How could I even bear to see women around me subjected to cries of “put on your scarf or suffer blows on the head”? How would I take it to see foreign diplomats being paraded before cameras, collectively humiliated as spies? And how would I stand by and watch as hooligans ransacked the book collections in the Writers’ Association of Iran? There is no end to such daily thoughts!

The scenes that most frequently disturb me in my dreams are those related to the arrival of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, and what I see is exactly what became the stuff of so many press photographs of the event - multitudes of adoring followers crowding rooftops and treetops, trying to get a glimpse of the man they were all too eager to pledge allegiance to. These are followed by a recurring nightmare featuring the photographs of the late Shah’s longtime premier Hoveyda and three other top officials of the monarchial state, somehow juxtaposed in my mind to the responses I gave to my interrogators four years later, as they were trying to decide whether I must be purged from my academic position, which is what they decreed two weeks later. I recall the chief interrogator most vividly, as he pointed to the files in front of him as he asked me why I, an opponent of the monarchial state, had now turned into such a counterrevolutionary academic, such an ardent opponent of the Islamic republic. My response was uncompromising: the reasons are the same!

One memory I had suppressed completely until I was reminded of it many years later by the beneficiary as he recalled it in a public talk; it illustrates the concerns I had developed in the four years that I spent in post-revolution Iran. One early morning in the summer of 1983, over a year after the Writers’ Association had been disbanded, many of its members opting to live underground — an episode which I refer to in one of the essays in this book - I showed up on the doorstep of my friend, the poet Esmail Khoi, to tell him that it was time for him to leave the country, adding “immediately, this very day in fact!” The situation had deteriorated much

Prologue | u too rapidly for us to develop mechanisms to protect the members. Some had fled the country, but Esmail was much too nonchalant about his safety, it seemed to me. A few days earlier our mutual friend, poet and playwright Sa‘id Soltanpur, had been arrested at his wedding, and I had just heard that morning from the state-run radio station the official announcement that he had been executed along with a number of other prominent opponents of the new government.

The two men accompanying me - trusted smugglers, I had been assured - were there on Esmail’s doorstep to get him out of the country. “Time to go, Esmail; I said in a tone of voice that made it clear I was not joking, and he did leave with the men. What most haunts me still is his last words: “Take care of these, they are my poems.” And he handed to me the bag he had been carrying from one hideout to another, once or twice a week. I knew then his words would leave an unforgettable mark on me. We kissed and he departed, in the care of the men who had promised to get him out - fortunately they succeeded. The words from his poem entitled “People are forever right,” which I cite in one of the essays still ring in my ears now and then, even when the context is no longer Iran but, say, the United States in 2019.

Easily summoning what immediate responses or reactions such experiences — such experiencing - are capable of instigating, I ask myself now what other lasting marks they may have left within me. I see the event grow distant in my mind’s eye, yet I cannot help feeling overwhelmed anew when summoning my recollections of the enormity of the moments I have collected personally - and doubtless innumerable Iranians have witnessed collectively - the weight of our common responsibility in rendering them tellable in a more or less exact, or at least honest, manner begins to press upon our minds. And then the haunting yet inevitable feeling that I, for one, but perhaps many of us, may have failed time and again to register in the ledger of time. And that feeling of failure, I now think, was itself an inalienable part of the process I have gone through over the intervening decades.

Yet, I know instinctively - I have always known it seems - even at moments of absorbing unwelcome news or urging myself to maintain my sanity, if not my balance, or reminding myself of the urgency of jotting down something to enable me to write the fuller version later, that I cannot help but harness my emotional reactions to that which was external to me and develop an impression, however raw or passing, of the gravity of the moment, the texture of the lived experience. Each personal observation, each news item of one more atrocity happening around me grips me in its spell, making me sense an overwhelming feeling of the impossibility of the task of reflecting it in anything close to a satisfactory way, and at the same time keeping my mental balance as I commit it to writing.

These essays are now before you, reader, elevated by a well-informed scholarly introduction aimed at clarifying the larger historical context that surrounded their genesis.! Overarching them are the processes which have given shape to my life, as I witnessed Iranian intellectuals, particularly Iran's poets and writers, assume the revolutionary posturing that formed the trajectory of my youth as well as that of millions of other young Iranians, longing for a free society. This is perhaps true of most other writings that reflect the history of some consequential event, as they trace the growing aversion to an existing situation that begins to swell within us as we contemplate the power systems around us. We certainly feel motivated by the sentiments that seem to express exactly how we feel towards certain power structures existing in our world. Then, as the first rumblings of the possibility of a change appears, we feel certain it would be a positive turn of events. Struggling to remain optimistic, even as we see revolutions launched by unlikely leaders go not to seasoned, politically tested servant leaders, but to leaders we have hardly grown to know or had reason to trust. The Iranian Revolution was happening whether people like me wanted it or not, and all young people like me could do was to submit to the process at hand and hope to be able to seize what possibilities might arise.

Speaking for myself only that is what pressed upon me the urgency to return to my country just as soon as I could and begin to observe what was happening at close quarters, and actively participate in them, as we might. The essays gathered in this book chronologically follow stages of a revolution after it happened, all the way up to the time when people like me, let’s say I for one, lose all hope and decide to withdraw, reverse course, or leave the scene, as I did. By the summer of 1983, the Islamic Republic had managed to quash almost all resistance to its power and dash all hopes for gradual reform, as well as losing much of its legitimacy. I had most certainly lost all the hopes that I had tried to cling to for over four years, since my return to Iran in the early months of 1979, the season that had been affectionately dubbed “The Springtime of Freedom.” I had also lost some of my most cherished friends, including Sa‘id Soltanpur, whose cruel arrest, summary trial in an “Islamic” court, and execution I have alluded to above. The feeling that weighed most heavily on my heart was sensing that I might never see my home country again.

Literature and Politics in Modern Iran

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Leiden University

Introduction

In the blurb for his planned 20-volume The History of Persian Literature, the late Ehsan Yarshater (1920-2018), a Nestor of Iranian Studies, characterised Persian poetry as the jewel in the crown of Persian culture.! This is not an exaggeration; poetry plays a role in every domain of Persian culture. If Persian culture is the body of Persian-speaking peoples, poetry is the soul, the stamina, and the aura. This soul was breathed into the body during the renaissance of Persian culture in the ninth century when, after two centuries under the sway of Arabic, literate Persians asserted themselves by composing poetry in their mother tongue, and this poetry played an essential role in the revival of Persian culture.” One example is Ferdowsi’s monumental poem, Epic of the King (Shah-nameh). Encompassing over 50,000 couplets, the epic recounts the history of the Iranian peoples, from the creation myth to the arrival of the Muslim Arabs in Persia. One of its central themes is the ethics of good rule and true justice. The epic is still read, recited, performed and embroidered upon in Iran today.

In the early Islamic context, in which most of the ancient cultures of the region, including Egypt, had acquiesced in the dominance of Arabic language and culture, the rise of Persian as a literary and cultural medium was surely politically marked. The emergence of several local dynasties in Eastern Iranian lands which propagated Persian culture by inviting poets to the court greatly enhanced Persian culture. A history of the role of Persian poetry as a political medium remains a desideratum.’ One could argue that in this classical and largely courtly tradition, literature is a twin of politics, since literature carries political messages, and politics provides new subjects for literature. Persian poetry was not only used at Persian courts (and later at Ottoman and Mughal courts and even at a court in China), it became a medium for mystics in a vast area from the Balkans to Bengal.’

In a country with a tumultuous political culture in which poetry functions as an icon of identity, it is not surprising that poetry, and literature in general, is still a chief medium for commenting on sociopolitical events. Basing himself on Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), Roland Bleiker says that the poetic connects “the soul and the mind, thus giving us back our dreams and opening up possibilities for creating ‘images which have not been experienced, and which life does not prepare?”5 Bleiker argues that poetry is the core of language and language is the essence of human beings, thus poetic aesthetics throw light on identities, such as the Korean national identity, on relations, including international relations, and on contemporary political events such as war, genocide, terrorism and climate change. His characterisation applies seamlessly to the Iranian case: “Poetry is, in fact, all about language, about engaging its core and stretching its boundaries so that it becomes possible to think and dream again. It is in this sense that poetry is a perfect illustration of an aesthetic engagement with politics: a kind of micro-biotope in which we can observe, in an experimental way, why and how the aesthetic matters to politics.”

Persian poetry became even more central to politics during the ‘awakening’ leading to the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911).’ Poets ceased to praise kings and courtiers, and directed their attention to ordinary people and to communicating modern European political philosophies and the sociopolitical events of the period. Their poems, published in the newly-founded newspapers and recited in coffee houses and bazaars, were instrumental in Iranians re-evaluating their own culture in the light of technological and social innovations in Europe. The famous poets of this movement became models for contemporary Iranian intellectuals. Indeed, poets and writers are so essential in the turbulent history of twentieth-century Iran that any history of modern Iran neglecting the role of literature - poetry, short stories and novels, and more rarely drama - would be seriously incomplete.

There are many examples of literary engagement with the sociopolitical events after the Constitutional Revolution period. Bozorg ‘Alawi (1907- 1997) with works such as prison stories, Waraq para-ha-ye zendān (“The Torn Pages of the Prison; 1941) and Panjah o se nafar (“The fifty-three; 1942), which reflect prison life during the Pahlavi period, comes to mind. ‘Alawi’s works were banned in Iran between 1953 and 1979.8

Basing himself on Arthur Rimbaud, Bleiker refers to the subjectivity of language and how our thinking is controlled by language, going so far as to change Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” to “I am thought.” This comes close to the link that Persian poets from Ferdowsi’s time, in the tenth century, have drawn between poetry and reason (kherad). For them, poetry is essentially thought inspired by the Unseen. The Persian word sokhan, speech, also means intellect, and the logos.!° Modern Persian poets are deeply cognizant of the classical literary tradition when they comment on a sociopolitical event. Poetry being thought implies that poetry could also control people’s thinking. Bleiker states, “The essence of poetry, then, is not located primarily in its formal aspects, such as rhyme or line breaks. The key, rather, lies in the self-consciousness with which a poem engages the links between language and socio-political reality”!

The Present Collection of Articles

This collection of articles is a must for any scholar of Persian literature who wants to study Persian literature from the 1960s to the first decades of the 1979-Revolution. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, an authority in Persian Studies, has participated in the literature of the period and in the literary lives of the major Iranian poets and writers. In individual chapters, he shares his experiences with authors such as Ahmad Shamlu, Akhavan, and Gholamhosein Sa‘edi, writing about their lives, governed by the state’s repression, censorship, and extortion. While Karimi-Hakkak brings this unique personal perspective into his analysis, he falls between an engaged participant and a critical scholar. He examines the activities of the authors, their establishment of the Iranian Writers’ Association, and surveys the relevant sociopolitical events.” The chapters deal with a turbulent period of modern Iran, in which Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) entered the political scene, was arrested, exiled and later returned to Iran as a leader. Iran witnessed a radical change from monarchy to theocracy, the longest conventional war of the twentieth century in which one and half million people were killed (i-e., the Iran-Iraq war 1980-1988), and the new era of international politics between Iran and its new allies.

Another unique quality of this collection is that Karimi-Hakkak is the first scholar to examine certain topical subjects. It is an honour and privilege to include this collection of articles in the Iranian Studies Series at Leiden University. It is not my intention to review individual articles in this short introduction. Rather I would like to direct the reader’s attention to the significance of Karimi-Hakkak’s scholarship on modern Persian literature and its close relationship to politics. Karimi-Hakkak persuasively shows that literature and politics are so much interrelated that politics deeply affected the lives of a generation of poets and writers, some having their works banned, some being imprisoned or exiled, and some executed.

Karimi-Hakkak’s subject touches the core of modern Persian history. Being part of that intellectual and literary generation himself, Karimi- Hakkak describes the literary activities, how poets and writers found ways to convey their ideas, and the writers’ struggle with the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979). A key element is his meticulous analysis of the history of the Writers’ Association of Iran (Kanun-e Nevisandegan-e Iran), founded in 1968. This essay perceptively discusses how the Iranian intellectuals, writers and poets had to live in a repressive society, constantly fearing arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. Karimi-Hakkak gives examples from first-hand witnesses. For instance, he cites Behazin (1915-2006),”? a prominent novelist, translator, and active Marxist, who says in one of his stories that, when he asked how (mere) writers could entice people to take up weapons to fight the Pahlavi regime, the military prosecutor told him “the concept of enticement to take up arms is not limited only to actual weapons. Rather, any spoken or written statement can provide a context for opposition because it arms them against the state”!* This short citation shows how repressively censorship operated during the Pahlavi period. One of the main aims of the Writers’ Association was to fight censorship, but the Pahlavi regime did not leave room for any fight. Censorship had a deep impact on intellectual life in Iran. Karimi-Hakkak shows how, according to official statistics, the number of annually published books “dropped from over 4,000 in 1969 to about 700 in 1976,” because of strong censorship, while the “number of pirated editions and unauthorized publications in the same period grew tenfold?” The books of prominent writers were banned, and even ordinary words such as “winter,” “night,” “tulip” and “forest,” associated with the guerrilla movement in the Caspian Sea area, became problematic. The term gol-e sorkh or “red rose” was suspect, as it could refer to the executed guerilla Khosrow Golesorkhi (1944-1974).

Karimi-Hakkak characterises the activities and place of the Association eloquently, “Its fortunes, consisting of periods of feverish activity and lifeless dormancy, epitomize the pattern of intellectual life in Iran, reflecting its problems and promises, its intellectual validity and artistic vitality, its ideals, achievements, and failures”! The Association was active in a period in which autocracy had reached a zenith. In the 1960s several consequential events happened. In 1960 John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was elected President of the United States, and he criticised the Shah’s regime. Following the death of the quietist Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi Tabataba’i (1875-1961), who had been the source of emulation for much of the Shiite world, Ayatollah Khomeini, then a cleric of average rank, came onto the scene. This coincided with the Shah’s six programmes of reforms, including land reform and women's suffrage, initiated in 1963. The reforms were later named the White Revolution of the Shah and the People. Ayatollah Khomeini voiced his disagreement with the reforms, which generated demonstrations during which many people were killed. Khomeini himself was arrested, leading to more bloody demonstrations. In addition to his criticism of the reforms, especially women’s suffrage, Khomeini strongly condemned the Shah for passing a law giving diplomatic immunity to Americans living in Iran. Khomeini was imprisoned and later exiled to Turkey, and then to Iraq. In 1965, the Prime Minister Hasan-‘Ali Mansur (1923-1965) was assassinated by a member of the fundamentalist group, Jam ‘iyat-hd-ye mo’talefeh-ye Eslami, which supported Khomeini’s ideology. The Shah created an army around himself, and eradicated all political parties, establishing a one-party system.

The situation of poets and writers in the 1950s and 1960s under the repressive state remained frozen. Literary works of this period reflect the quiescence of intellectual life. Karimi- Hakkak’s biographical essays could be characterised as remarkable eye-witness accounts of the lives, works, and regular daily activities of prominent figures of Persian intellectual and literary history, interlaced with unique personal memories. For instance, in his essay on Mehdi Akhavan Saless (1928-1990), a poetic giant of twentieth-century Iran, he describes meticulously how he first met the poet:

‘He sure has a peculiar way of looking at you, I said to the friend who had taken me to meet the Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan Saless in the summer of 1979. My friend, fellow poet Mahmud Azad Tehrani, nodded, and I tried to explain: ‘It was as if he were eyeing me on two levels, a constant surface look that seemed simple and trusting, and a sharp occasional glance, skeptical and testing, that penetrated at times all the way down into my soul, fixing it as if at the point of a needle?!”

Observations such as the above are interwoven with erudite and sharp analyses of the literary works. Akhavan is one of the sophisticated poets of his generation, giving the ‘new poetry’ movement (she-e now) a “solid background in the classical tradition, an uncanny sense of dramatic storytelling, and a facility with words that distinguishes his style from all the other members of his generation.” We do not have many scholarly works on Akhavan in English and this essay is a unique examination of the life and works of a poet who is central in modern Persian literature, as well as giving us unique personal anecdotes. Karimi-Hakkak demonstrates how Akhavan could bridge the two literary camps in the period when he thrived as a young poet. There was at that time a literary battle between modernists, staunch supporters of New Poetry led by Nima Yushij (1897-1960), and the traditionalists, who criticised New Poetry and remained faithful to the millennium-old tradition of Persian poetry.!* In addition, the fall of the democratically-chosen Mohammad Mosaddeq (1882-1967) through the intervention of the CIA and the installation of a repressive regime created disenchantment in Iran, especially among intellectuals whose hope for freedom of expression was shattered. It took about thirty years for intellectual life to recover, in the open dissatisfaction in the 1970s which led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Karimi-Hakkak depicts how Akhavan’s iconic opening lines, known by heart by many Iranians, describe the frigidity, alienation, and impotence of the period, warning Iranians of an “intolerably repressive state”:!°

Kasi sar barnayarad kard pasokh goftan o didar-e yaran ra Negah joz pish-e pa ra did natvanad, keh rah tarik o laghzan ast.

Nafa k-in ast pas digar cheh dari chashm ze chashm-e dustan-e dur ya nazdik.”°

None will answer your hello, heads are bent in collars

none dares raise a head to respond, to meet your friendly face your eyes cannot see but a single step ahead

for the path is dark and slippery

and if you extend a hand of love to someone

reluctantly will he move his hand out of his bosom

for the cold is scorching in the extreme

your breath, rising out of the warm hearth of your own chest turns into a dark cloud

stands like a wall before your eyes, this being your own breath, what do you expect from the glances of near or remote friends?”

While many poets and writers remained engaged in sociopolitical developments, others wanted to disentangle themselves from politics, writing poetry or short stories for the sake of art itself, cherishing artistic and aesthetic values rather than conveying a political message. Persian poets of this kind have had a hard time escaping from the stereotype of the engaged literati, especially in the decades following the 1979-Revolution when people expected poets and writers to voice their opinions on political events. Addressing this subject in his treatment of Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000), one of the greatest poets of twentieth-century Iran, Karimi-Hakkak demonstrates how the poet began his career entirely engaged with sociopolitical developments. As the years went by, his poetic genius turned from an authentic social response to politics to filling the poetic space with imagination by evoking new images. As Karimi-Hakkak shows, this transformation is visible in Shamlu’s collections of poetry, from The Fairies and Poetry that is Life to collections such as Aida in the Mirror, Blossoming in the Fog, Phoenix under the Rain, Elegies of the Earth and Abraham in the Fire.

The present collection of essays highlights the political processes affecting Persian literature, emphasising how Persian writers and poets suffered imprisonment, threats and even execution both during the Pahlavi dynasty and after the 1979-Revolution. Karimi-Hakkak observes that even before returning from exile, Ayatollah Khomeini referred to writers as “‘agents of the shah’ and lackeys of the superpowers, and warned the faithful to steer free from their influence.” In such a vehement political context, the poets became rebels against totalitarianism. Shamlu, for instance, wrote a famous poem after the Revolution, which displeased the government, which then forced the poet to focus on scholarly research instead of writing poetry. The poem “In this Blind Alley” perceptively depicts life in post-revolutionary Iran, conveying how censorship, state control, and intimidation created a frigid and loveless life in Iran. The poem became instantly famous, even proverbial, on the lips of people who wanted to describe the repressive situation of Iran (see the chapter Of Hail And Hounds).

From the beginning, the Islamic Republic was unequivocal in its treatment of non-revolutionary intellectuals, as can be seen from the high statistics for books banned, prosecutions and imprisonments. In the West, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, authorising his murder, is well-known. In Iran, many writers lived under severe censorship and sociopolitical restrictions. Karimi-Hakkak foregrounds such cases. A salient example is the arrest of ‘Ali-Akbar Sa‘idi-Sirjani (1931-1994), an essayist, poet and writer who criticised the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sirjani’s talent lay in his satirical style, drawing on classical Persian poetry and applying it to modern times. For instance, he alluded to Hafez’s (1315-1390) treatment of the clerical class as dissemblers with double standards. A main reason for Sirjani’s arrest was that he had a huge impact on society. To silence him, the Ministry of Information charged him with trafficking in narcotics, sodomy, and contact with counterrevolutionary elements, all offences that can be punished with execution. His books were banned, as they were considered to be camouflaged criticisms and even an open assault on Islam. Through the example of Sirjani, Karimi- Hakkak exhibits how totalitarian states resort to violence, imprisonment and execution to silence writers. In such states, sensitivity to authors’ influence can become so intense that their settings, characters, ideas in anything they write are assumed to be directed at undermining the state's policy and legitimacy. In Sirjani’s case, the Islamic Republic inferred that his literary production was poking fun at Islam and the Islamic government. Sirjani criticised clerics for their lack of historical awareness and even lack of knowledge of Persian, implying that some of the clerics were not even able to read a simple Persian text. An example that Karimi-Hakkak offers from Sirjani’s work relates to the book Kuroshe dorughin va jenayat-kar (‘Cyrus, the Impostor, the Criminal’) by Sadeq Khalkhali (1926-2003), a low-ranking cleric who rose to a high position and became infamous for his executions at the beginning of the Revolution. To delegitimise the monarchy and support the new vision of an Islamic Iran, Khalkhali critiques King Cyrus (600-530 BC), who in the Pahlavi period had been a pre-Islamic role model in the monarchy’s nationalist ideology. In this book, Khalkhali misreads the phrase rah-zani (‘highway banditry’) as rah-e zani (‘the path of femininity’), and on that basis said that Cyrus was a homosexual. Sirjani derides this misreading in an attractive teasing style.