"In the Clutches of the Demon"

In the Name of God
"In the Demon's Clutches"
The story begins in the autumn of 1998, at the annual congress of PEN International in Helsinki. Dr. Soroush travels to Helsinki on an invitation he had received from PEN several months earlier to attend the meeting as a guest. Arriving in the city the day before the congress, he learns that, through the efforts of Mr. Faraj Sarkouhi and his friends, he has been excluded from the congress. He has been moved from the hotel where the other writers are staying to a cheap hotel. He is not allowed to speak, and they will not even let him board the writers' minibus for a sightseeing tour of the city. Leaflets have been handed out at the congress denouncing him as a collaborator of the Iranian regime, and this at the very time when he is under pressure from the Ministry of Intelligence in Iran. He tries to speak with Mr. Sarkouhi, but Sarkouhi merely returns his greeting, says he is very busy, and offers no explanation. Only one of the PEN officials comes to see him and tells him that what your Iranian friends are saying is that you are a collaborator of the Iranian regime and have worked against writers. After the matter is reported in the Finnish press, the Finnish Foreign Ministry, which had issued Dr. Soroush's visa through the Finnish Embassy in Tehran on the strength of PEN's invitation letter, comes under criticism, and its representative goes to see Dr. Soroush. He tries to make some amends and ease the pressure from the press by moving Soroush to a more respectable hotel. Soroush leaves Helsinki without having given any talk.
When Dr. Soroush returned to Iran, I, like some other friends, learned of this strange affair, without understanding the reason for it. In those days Mr. Sarkouhi, by writing a courageous letter while in captivity and putting his own life at risk, had put up a valiant fight against tyranny and its security agents. The principle was to keep silent and not give the tyrannical enemy cause to rejoice. So nobody said anything.
Time passed until, six years later in London, I happened to hear from my dear friend and life-saving physician, Dr. Sabetian, how in Helsinki, at Mr. Sarkouhi's instigation, they had prevented Dr. Soroush from taking part in the PEN congress. I found it strange, and all I could do was explain to him that Dr. Soroush was not the agent of the regime he had imagined.
Again silence, and the passing of days, until some time ago, on 20 Tir 1386 (11 July 2007), in an article titled "Rectitude and Harshness," devoted to the issues of the Cultural Revolution Headquarters, which these days has become one of his preoccupations, Dr. Soroush made a very brief reference, in a few lines and without naming anyone, to this Helsinki affair. A few days later, on 26 Tir 1386 (17 July 2007), Mr. Sarkouhi recounted the affair in a lengthy article titled "Criticizing Individual Judgments and Positions, the Survival of Outlooks and Methods (Part One)."
The backbone of Mr. Sarkouhi's piece rests on this speculative analysis (without presenting any empirical or external data): because the Europeans wanted to secure economic benefits in Iran, and because Mr. Khatami's government wanted to strike a democratic pose for the world, his Ministry of Intelligence devised a conspiracy. The conspiracy was that they arranged with the Finnish foreign minister in Tehran to send Dr. Soroush as the representative of "Iran PEN" to PEN's annual congress, and thereby show the world that in Iran writers are free to have an association. The Finnish foreign minister, being after his country's economic interests, joins in this conspiracy and hoodwinks PEN as well. Meanwhile the "Writers' Association" (Kanun-e Nevisandegan) in Iran had for years been under pressure and had never been permitted to operate officially; on the contrary, some of its members had been arrested or murdered. (And of course this proposition, namely the pressure on the Writers' Association and the arrest and murder of writers, is true, and there is ample documentation of it.) But when Mr. Sarkouhi sees these four simple words, "Iran PEN, Abdolkarim Soroush," in the PEN booklet (that is, an external fact that we can investigate), he uncovers this conspiracy, and by pressuring the president of Finnish PEN he makes her rue her folly and blocks this action contrary to PEN's charter. In the end, the name of Dr. Soroush and Iran PEN is removed from the booklet. Dr. Soroush is barred from attending the sessions of the General Assembly, which are reserved for the official delegates of national PEN centers, but he is entitled, like ordinary people, to attend the public sessions. And of course Dr. Soroush, who had arrived in a car of the Iranian Embassy, pouts, sulks, and leaves. (Mr. Sarkouhi did, admittedly, concede in his subsequent piece that this claim of his was untrue and that Dr. Soroush had nothing to do with the embassy or its car.) Two other Iranian writers, without coordinating with Mr. Sarkouhi (according to his claim), distribute leaflets against Dr. Soroush at the congress.
The present writer (Mohsen Sazegara), having ended up in Evin Prison, solitary confinement and interrogation four times in all over the past twenty-three years, now has as one of the fundamental questions on his mind this: why, for more than four decades, has this prison sat at the center of the relations between two regimes that have ruled Iran and the people? As a learned friend of mine put it, a serious intellectual like Michel Foucault is needed to make a comprehensive study of this phenomenon and the causes of its emergence in the relations between the state and the people, and between people and people. My own meager capacities certainly do not permit such lofty ambitions. But they are enough for me to explore, among the many facets of this question, one point that has caught my attention more than others. That point is the method of "leveling accusations" in Evin Prison, which also pervades the relations among us Iranians toward one another. That is, it is true that the ominous shadow of Evin Prison weighs heavily over Iranian society, but on the other side, the relations within Iranian society also exert their influence all the way into the depths of Evin's torture chambers. That is why, when I saw Mr. Sarkouhi's article ("Criticizing Individual Judgments..."), I decided to raise this issue with Mr. Sarkouhi and with the public in an article titled "Evin Prison Is Everywhere" (dated 4 Mordad 1386, 26 July 2007). Since I thought Mr. Sarkouhi was himself a victim of one of these very mental fabrications (namely Mr. Khamenei's theory of "cultural invasion"), I reasoned that if you ask him for real empirical evidence for condemning and punishing someone (namely Dr. Soroush), he would at least stop and reflect, and a constructive dialogue could be opened with him. My hope was that by putting my finger on an incident from nine years earlier, from the standpoint of the need to adduce empirical evidence for mental fabrications in the realm of political and social affairs, I could take a step in the project of "probing within Iranian society to find some of the roots of the methods of leveling accusations in Evin Prison." Besides, my impression of Mr. Sarkouhi was that if I showed him one or two empirical examples refuting the mental fabrication that formed the backbone of his piece, he would be honest enough not only to retract his theory but also to seek to apologize to, and make amends with, the person he had wronged.
But alas, a hundred times alas, Mr. Sarkouhi's response poured cold water over me (the piece "Evin Prison Is at the Center of the Islamic Republic: Evading Criticism Under the Cover of Sweeping Generalizations," dated 10 Mordad 1386, 1 August 2007). It was most regrettable, and instructive, for me to see that Mr. Sarkouhi had not only entirely failed to grasp the necessity of adducing empirical evidence for his claims, but, while repeating his earlier statements several times over and denying what he had done, had lined up six mental fabrications, along with further accusations, in the very same style. As Rumi says:
The philosopher denies the demon's existence; in that very moment he is the demon's plaything.
That piece made me rue my folly, and I repeated to myself the saying of the late Engineer Bazargan: "three times three, nine times over" I was wrong. I decided not to reply at all, because I feared that in Mr. Sarkouhi's next response, thirty-six unsubstantiated mental fabrications would be put forward this time. I fell silent, forgave Mr. Sarkouhi's harshness and accusations in my heart, and let it go, albeit with greater disappointment in my own generation.
Until, some time ago, a student rebuked me. He reminded me of a talk I had given four years earlier at Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University in Tehran and asked what had become of the responsibility toward the younger generation that had been raised in that talk. He was right. My resolve to write became firm.
In that talk to the students I had said that my generation, on account of all the theoretical naivety and blunders that created disaster, must apologize to your generation with all its being, if an apology could make amends for the past. And I had said that one of the best things my generation can do is to pass on our experiences to you properly, so that you will no longer, as we did, accept or reject an important social or political issue on the basis of a few mental fabrications or by sketching a few simple lines.
For this reason I decided to undertake an analysis of Mr. Sarkouhi's rejoinder, but not in order to answer him. For I think that would be fruitless; he, like many of my generation, is so captive in the clutches of the demon of mental fabrications and estrangement from empirical logic that there is no hope of his release. He is not to blame. I promise that from now on I will not pursue such writings of his any further. Let him spin his tales, write, and be content.
But in the lines that follow I will dissect Mr. Sarkouhi's latest piece ("Evin Prison Is at the Center...") as a case study of the writing style and subjectivism of my generation. His piece is a good example in this respect. I must first clarify two points. First, to avoid verbosity, I have summarized each of Mr. Sarkouhi's mental fabrications, some of which are repeated several times, clearly and plainly in one or more sentences, then stated whether it is true or false, and then analyzed it. Second, since Mr. Sarkouhi has in some places spoken in the language of innuendo and sarcasm and sowing doubt, I have had to set these instances out for the reader clearly and without veiling. I had a dear friend from Hamedan who died of cancer two months ago. He used to relate, from his late father, that at the head of their alley there was a grocer who was a master at sowing doubt about people's affairs. For example, if people came to ask for the hand of a girl from that neighborhood and inquired of him about her, he would shake his head and say, "Oh sir, better not ask me." My friend, quoting his father, used to say that had the grocer said bluntly that the girl was a prostitute, it would have done less harm than speaking ambiguously like that. I have marked such doubt-sowing statements of Mr. Sarkouhi with the label "the Hamedani grocer" in parentheses, to make clear that they are not Mr. Sarkouhi's explicit assertions but things he wanted the reader to infer. Let us get to the point.
First mental fabrication:
Because Mr. Sazegara supported Mr. Khatami's government, his motive in writing the article "Evin Prison Is Everywhere" was to exonerate Mr. Khatami's government and distort a historical fact. —False—
This mental fabrication has two fundamental flaws. First, it is not true. Why? Because,
First, a living person needs no attorney or executor. I am alive and, in full possession of my faculties, I state that my motive in writing "Evin Prison Is Everywhere" is what I wrote in that article and have briefly mentioned in this piece, not what Mr. Sarkouhi has imagined.
Therefore I had no intention of defending Mr. Khatami's government.
Second, there is not a single piece of empirical data for Mr. Sarkouhi's proposition. On the contrary, all external evidence shows the opposite. For example, in dozens of interviews and writings I have made the harshest criticisms of Mr. Khatami and his government; I held no position in his government; in the 2001 presidential election I wanted to be his rival, but the Guardian Council did not allow it; and Mr. Khatami himself has repeatedly criticized and distanced himself from the ideas and actions of people like me, using the term "extremism." Moreover, during Mr. Khatami's glorious tenure I went to prison twice, and the three newspapers I published were shut down, and of course Mr. Khatami did not bat an eyelid and did nothing at all.
Second, Mr. Sarkouhi has employed the well-known logical fallacy of "conflating the motive with what it motivates." Use of this fallacy is above all a legacy of the Iranian left. I wish that instead of such wrangling with Dr. Soroush, Mr. Sarkouhi had spent a little time reading his books carefully, so as not to commit such blunders; among them his book Satanic Ideology, which explains this very logical fallacy. In this fallacy, instead of refuting a statement or theory, you attack the motive and ultimately the person himself, and then conclude that his statement or theory is invalid. You can find numerous examples of this satanic ideology in that same book of Soroush's, or you can turn to any of the writings of my generation, especially the leftists, and find a few examples. And if you lack the time or patience, just search through this very piece by our dear friend Mr. Sarkouhi: besides the example I have cited, it contains more such masterpieces. It would not be a bad exercise.
Second mental fabrication:
"Mr. Khatami's government, in order to establish a fake institution in place of the Iranian Writers' Association, or any other institution writers might set up themselves, in international forums within the framework of the plan for parallel institutions, tried to palm off a fake PEN on PEN International and pretend that democracy in Iran is at a level where an institution such as PEN enjoys the right to free presence and activity, and that the claims of the Writers' Association and of independent writers unaffiliated with the factions of the regime about the suppression of freedom of expression and censorship are untrue. Mr. Khatami's government intended to dress up the relative freedom of expression and assembly of 'insider' writers affiliated with the regime's factions and sell it to the world media as freedom of expression for all citizens, insiders and outsiders alike. In carrying out this plan, the Finnish Foreign Ministry was also complicit." (This passage, quoted verbatim from Mr. Sarkouhi's second piece, is the backbone of both of Mr. Sarkouhi's pieces, and it is exactly what I had asked him to provide evidence for. Instead of evidence and empirical proof, Mr. Sarkouhi in his second piece merely repeated the same claim with greater vehemence and anger, as though the reader or I had trouble reading or were hard of hearing.)
This is a speculative analysis without adequate empirical data. For instance, if we had access to the documents of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence or of the Finnish Foreign Ministry, we could reject or accept this analysis. The only empirical and verifiable piece of data Mr. Sarkouhi has presented is that the PEN booklet stated "Iran PEN, Abdolkarim Soroush," and that from these four simple words he uncovered this conspiracy. But unfortunately, in the search I conducted, not even this single verifiable piece of data could be traced. I asked Mr. Sarkouhi to publish it and make it available to others; in his rejoinder he evaded even that and angrily shouted at me that yes, this is an old trick of putting the plaintiff in the defendant's seat, and go buy the PEN booklet in London, it is written there. No such sentence appears in any of PEN's minutes. On the contrary, there are several pieces of empirical evidence to the contrary.
For example, Mr. Sarkouhi reported in his piece that after that sentence (meaning "Iran PEN, Abdolkarim Soroush") was seen, the session became stormy, and he and others from other countries went after the president of Finnish PEN and ultimately forced her to back down. But the president of Finnish PEN at the time, Ms. Elizabeth Norden, said in an interview with the Finnish newspaper Soumen Etela Sanomat on 13 September 1998 that, since she had not been present, she could not comment on this treatment of Dr. Soroush. That is, she was not even there for Mr. Sarkouhi to confront her in a stormy session as he has portrayed. Presumably one of these two people is lying. On the other hand, Kalevi Haikara of PEN's Writers in Prison Committee told the same newspaper, in the same issue, that he regretted this treatment of Dr. Soroush and felt that the PEN congress had been influenced by the views of an Iranian refugee writer (presumably meaning Mr. Sarkouhi) and that the treatment of Soroush had been hasty. Another person, Pentti Holappa, then vice-president of Finnish PEN, also told the same newspaper in the same issue that there had, however, been no ill intent or discrimination behind the treatment of Soroush. (Here I also thank the dear friend who took the trouble to translate this article from Finnish into English for me.)
Third mental fabrication:
Under Mr. Khatami's government, the theories of Dr. Soroush and his friends came to power. —False—
One need only consult Mr. Khatami's writings and speeches to see that this proposition is false. This piece of mine is not the place to address the theoretical foundations of the reform movement in Iran, although it is a very important discussion, and in my view the failure of the reform movement ultimately goes back to its theoretical vacillation and weakness. But I think it useful to mention one point. A few days ago a woman reporter from the New York Times met with me for several hours. She has taken a year's leave from the paper to write a book on the theory of the reform movement in Iran, based on her previous studies and experience. So far she has spoken with more than fifty people and has traveled to Iran six times.
Her questions to me were why there are traces of Dr. Davari's views in Khatami's statements, or where the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Tehran and Dr. Bashiriyeh's views stood within the reform movement, and the like. Compare this inquiring approach of a Western journalist in researching a subject with the approach of an Iranian journalist (Mr. Sarkouhi) on the same subject, who so easily opens his mouth and issues a fatwa, then passes judgment on the basis of that very fatwa and issues enforceable verdicts. This one comparison alone may show almost everything I want to say.
Fourth mental fabrication (of the Hamedani grocer variety):
Mr. Sazegara, without the necessary qualifications, has needlessly poked his nose in and entered into the serious debates that Mr. Sarkouhi wishes to have with Dr. Soroush. —False—
Of course I have none of Dr. Soroush's areas of expertise. That is, I have no training in pharmacy, analytical chemistry, theoretical and practical mysticism, first philosophy, philosophy of science and epistemology, jurisprudence and its principles (fiqh and usul), philosophy of religion, or modern theology. These debates are left to Mr. Sarkouhi, who is presumably an expert in such matters.
But in the field of discussion I have entered, I am not entirely empty-handed. That is, owing to my studies in mechanical engineering and physics and the years I spent in a physics research group at I.I.T. working on the details of nuclear interactions, I am somewhat familiar with research methods in the empirical sciences. Later, owing to my studies in history, I also became familiar with historical research methods. At present I am also director of the "Center for Research on Contemporary Iran," one of whose tasks is collecting historical documents of post-revolutionary Iran. In any case, it is enough for me to be able to ask the likes of Mr. Sarkouhi not to make baseless statements and to present external, empirical evidence for their mental fabrications.
Fifth mental fabrication:
Mr. Sazegara does not know the difference between "majma'-e omumi" and "neshast-e omumi," and did not spend even half an hour reading the PEN charter, and so he has, deliberately or inadvertently, mixed up these two meanings and misled the reader. —False—
In charters, the meeting at which the representatives of the units of an organization gather to make decisions is usually called the General Assembly. In Persian this term has been translated both as "majma'-e omumi" and as "neshast-e omumi." For example, in the case of the United Nations the term "majma'-e omumi" is used, while the charter of the "Muslim Students Association in America and Canada" uses "neshast-e omumi" for the same concept. In fact, for the single word "Assembly" two translations are used, one Arabic, "majma'," and the other Persian, "neshast." I used the term "neshast-e omumi" precisely in the sense of General Assembly.
Sixth mental fabrication (of the Hamedani grocer variety):
In order to answer the rumors spread behind his back about graft in the country's industries, Mr. Sazegara gave a lavish account of his illness and of the help of Dr. Sabetian and his other friends. —False—
My aim in writing that account was mainly to show Dr. Sabetian's humane character, to express my thanks, and to state the extent of my relationship with him when I mentioned his name. Perhaps I made a mistake, and mentioning this matter, which lay outside the main discussion, led receptive minds like Mr. Sarkouhi's toward such conclusions. I do not know. But one thing I do know, and that is that if my pockets had not been sewn shut, my tongue could not have been so loose toward those in power in Iran. The last time I was in prison, one of my two interrogators said: "So-and-so, for three years we have been with you like your own shadow. We have turned your whole life upside down. If you had a financial or moral weakness, our job with you would have been much simpler." So Mr. Sarkouhi need not worry; let him leave such talk to the organ of the torturers, namely the Tehran newspaper Kayhan, and rest assured that if people like me had even a straw's worth of such weaknesses, they would by now have made several mountains out of it.
At the end of this piece I must also mention one point. Mr. Sarkouhi rightly pointed out in his article the necessity of criticism and self-criticism. I only hope that he himself will act on these words when he realizes he has made a mistake somewhere.
Mohammad Mohsen Sazegara
3 Mehr 1386 (25 September 2007)