“Do not cry, do not read the Koran, do not pray: remember me instead by being happy and playing merry music”. This is how Majidreza Rahnavard died, lashing out with words of life at the executioner who hoisted him on the gallows for the inadmissible crime of moharebeh“war against God”. Majidreza, the second Iranian hanged for participating in what turned from an anti-government protest into a real revolution, was 23 years old, was accused of stabbing two militiamen basij during the demonstrations following the assassination of Mahsa Amini and, before his execution in the public square of Mashhad, he had spent three weeks in prison, interrogations, beatings, screams of silence.
Three months after the challenge to the sky of the best Iranian youth are the words that mark as milestones the road from which the theocracy of the ayatollahs will hardly go back. The horizon is cloudy and the regime is still far from falling but, as the most shrewd Israeli experts admit, what is happening in Iran right now is an epochal earthquake, an “unprecedented” rebellion against the system.
So the words. Those of President Ebrahim Raisi, who after threatening the “terrorist” streets and fomented by “foreign agents” dedicated the student’s day to explaining how, unlike protest, the revolt leads “to destruction and despair”, but also mellifluous of the Islamic culture minister Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili who yesterday, suddenly mindful of the deserted and silent stages since last September 16, invited fellow artists to organize a great concert to rouge the bloodied face of the country. The deadly words of the dictatorship and those full of life with which Iranian girls and boys respond day after day to beatings, tear gas, bullets.
Unable to entrust their voice to foreign journalists, banned by Iran, the young people who grew up reading Lolita’s forbidden verb in Tehran now shout their courage through more or less musical slogans that speak without the need for mediation. This is how the primordial mantra «Jin, Jiyan, Azadi» (woman, life, freedom) became intertwined with the universal language of the law of peoples, «Bella Ciao», «El Pueblo Unido», «We Shall Overcome». Thus was born the anthem of the revolution, «Baraye» by the Iranian Bob Dylan, Shervin Hajipour: «…To dance in the streets, to kiss loved ones, for women, life, freedom».
The streets that turn into trenches every night tell of a rising chorus in spite of repression and censorship to which yesterday the Ministry of the Interior added a further stranglehold on the internet, now almost entirely filtered. The gag like thehijabthat veil that more and more women provocatively remove from their heads playing, in defiance of the thugs of the regime, who resists the longest with their hair loose on their shoulders, each time a few more minutes of video to be entrusted to the Net to circulate, Message in a bottle.
“Don’t cry, don’t read the Koran, don’t pray” recites, without an ounce of rhetoric, the will of Majidreza Rahnavard. Seeds, not bullets: “Remember me by being happy and playing merry music.” Then, against the background of his poor body hung as a warning for the rebel squares, one can glimpse the grippy shadows of the executioners, anonymous figures like the executioners who finish off the partisans in Goya’s masterpiece, “Los fusilamientos”. They blindfolded him and we like to think it was to not look at the indomitable eyes they were afraid of. They should have gagged him, maybe. And he wouldn’t have helped.