Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [52]
6
“Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals,” proclaimed Ayatollah Khomeini, responding to protests by international human rights organizations of the wave of executions that followed the revolution. “They criticize us because we are executing the brutes.” The jubilant mood of celebration and freedom that had followed the Shah’s overthrow soon gave way to apprehension and fear as the regime continued to execute and murder “anti-revolutionaries” and a new vigilante justice emerged as bands of self-organized militants terrorized the streets.
NAME: Omid Gharib
SEX: male
DATE OF ARREST: 9 June 1980
PLACE OF ARREST: Tehran
PLACE OF DETENTION: Tehran, Qasr Prison
CHARGES: Being Westernized, brought up in a Westernized family; staying too long in Europe for his studies; smoking Winston cigarettes; displaying leftist tendencies.
SENTENCE: three years’ imprisonment; death
TRIAL INFORMATION: The accused was tried behind closed doors. He was arrested after the authorities intercepted a letter he had sent to his friend in France. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in 1980. On 2 February 1982, while Omid Gharib was serving his prison term, his parents learned that he was executed. The circumstances surrounding his execution are not known.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
DATE OF EXECUTION: 31 January 1982
PLACE OF EXECUTION: Tehran
SOURCE: Amnesty International Newsletter, July 1982, volume XII, number 7.
In those days we were all passersby in the crowded streets of a metropolitan city, faces buried deep in our collars, preoccupied with our own problems. I felt a certain distance from most of my students. When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.
By mid-October, we were almost three weeks into classes and I was getting used to the irregular beat of my days at the university. There was seldom a day when our routine was not interrupted by a death or assassination. Meetings and demonstrations were constantly staged at the university for various reasons; almost every week classes were either boycotted or canceled on the smallest pretext. The only way I could give rhyme or rhythm to my life was to read my books and work up my confused classes, which, surprisingly amid all the turmoil, formed fairly regularly and were attended by the majority of the students.
On a mild day in October, I tried to make my way through a crowd that had gathered in front of our building around a well-known leftist professor from the History Department. I stopped impulsively to listen to her. I do not remember much of what she said, but part of my mind picked up some of her words and hid them in a safe corner. She was telling the crowd that for the sake of independence, she was willing to wear the veil. She would wear the veil to fight U.S. imperialists, to show them . . . To show them what?
I hastily made my way up the stairs to the conference room of the English Department, where I had an appointment with a student, Mr. Bahri. Ours was a formal relationship—I was so used to calling and thinking of him by his last name that I have completely forgotten his first name. At any rate,