Anthony Sanchez Gonzalez.
“I don’t care if they kill me in the war. Of what I loved, what will remain? This question once posed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has resonated in the hearts of Iranian women since the assassination of Mahsa Amini almost a month ago. All of them don’t mind getting arrested, or worse. The manifest doubt in his eyes is to ask: of what they love, what will remain?
Like Saint-Exupéry, who questions the survival of customs, the permanence of irreplaceable vocal accents and the memory of spiritual lights, the Iranian women rebelling against the theocratic rule of the mullahs are trying to preserve the vestiges of a civilization almost completely swallowed by religious fanatics. This movement aims to combine Islamic consciousness with modern consciousness. We also find the foundations of this lost civilization in the motto that they bravely sing in the streets: “Women, life, freedom”. These three words alone summarize the main question that has haunted a large number of intellectuals throughout time, namely, the gap between religious societies and the evolution of the world.
The theologian Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Adonis the poet, the philosopher Hassan Hanafi or the thinkers of the Renaissance have tried to analyze this distortion between persistent archaisms and the world’s march towards more individual freedoms. Such reflection is essential to understand, beyond the interpretations of religious texts, what are the dikes that have frozen at times most societies in rudely retrograde models throughout history.
However, it seems reductive to me to make these disquisitions today confronting Islam and modernity in a Pavlovian way, as if they were two perfectly defined blocks. By simplifying these two entities to the primitive, we are on the wrong track and do not understand the full extent of the Iranian women’s revolt, which is carried out with many men at its side. By wanting to look at what is happening in Iran with our Western eyes, we hide the specificity of this struggle for freedom.
If Iranian women, singing “Women, life, freedom”, aspire to a powerfully universal value that is the freedom to decide for themselves, this value does not resonate in the same way in the psyche of Muslim peoples and in that of non-Muslims. Westerners. The difference lies in the relationship with the sacred and the mystery. In our increasingly dissected Western societies, the invisible is no longer in the odor of sanctity. Often mocked, caricatured and corny, the sacred is expelled from our lives so that the so-called modern man, deprived of transcendence, finds himself without the possibility of witnessing the emergence of the sacred. This disembodied and rootless man, punished by his need for spirituality, finds himself naked at the end. It is not something new, more than 100 years ago Paul Valéry writes: “Ancient men put their philosophy to populate the universe as ardently as we later put ours to empty it of all life.”
The question then is whether we are really free. I think it would be totally indecent to claim otherwise in view of the situation of so many peoples who are simply fighting for the right to ask this question. Yes, we are free. From there, it’s about what we do with that freedom. We are free to move forward, but we do not know which way to go. We are free to think, but we no longer know how far to do it because we are very afraid of going beyond the authorized framework. We are free to love, but do we at least know, from what we have loved, what will remain?
Iranian women have the answer to these questions. Because they are part of those peoples who have not turned their backs on the sacred. Because they embody those consciences that know that the greatness of a civilization does not lie in absolute freedom, but rather in the fervor with which the sacred dwells in the heart and in the mind. Because they have understood that the absence of transcendent values leads to decadence. Because they do not perceive themselves as an object subject only to the desire of man. Because they have the deep conviction that the cosmos is not just a measurable whole. Because they have the weapons to overcome the transience of things. Because they reject a purely technical view of the world. Because they know how to build a Noah’s Ark that will allow them to escape from a desecrated world. For all these reasons and much more, these women are giving us a lesson in freedom.
A sacred lesson in freedom.