Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Video of the death of Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot in the chest as she stood near a peaceful protest in Tehran this Saturday, has become a potent symbol, spreading worldwide through social websites and news media alike. In the third in a series of guest posts, professor of history Reza Afshari frames the current social climate of Iran.

A young woman, with her stunning eyes wide open, dies on the pavement, taking her last breath and muttering, “I am burning.” Depictions of graphic, bloody, and often senseless street violence hardly serve a constructive purpose as they are brought into our living rooms each evening. But the image of Neda Agha-Soltan dying in a street in Tehran presents something radically different: visual evidence of the passing of a significant moment in Iran’s tumultuous history.

Journalists are responsible both for documenting the event and for explaining the context within which it assumes historical significance. To do so in this case requires the full depiction of the images — in all their heart-sickening, graphic clarity — as well as of the context in which they are becoming icons of Iran at this troubling juncture.

This is how I see that context.

Millions of Iranians, bursting upon the political scene, have drastically altered the prevailing views about Iranian society, revealing realities hardly noticed before the presidential election. We were often told about a divide in Iran, a culture at war with itself. Most observers, however, misread the relative strength of the two sides.

The first Iran, the authentically Islamic one, encompassed the multitudes that habitually gathered in state-sponsored events and lined up for collective Friday prayers, shouting slogans protective of the country’s independence and Islamic identity. This Iran presented the country’s “real” face — the scruffiness of the lower classes combined with the unsophisticated piety and political militancy of authentic Islam. They were assumed to be the majority, righteously preserving the revolutionary essence of the Republic.

This austere image — so clumsily cultivated by President Ahmadinejad — stood in contrast with that of the second Iran, comprised of upper-middle-class habits on display in the economically better-off neighborhoods of northern Tehran. Women with loosely worn scarves mingling with men with morally slipshod behaviors, this second Iran was depicted as annoying but insignificant, a minority whose Westernized lifestyles were met with derision and harassment. This group was tolerated only as long as its members remained apolitical, and as long as they kept their relatively modern lifestyles, new technology and products of American pop culture in the privacy of their homes.

Neda belonged to this second Iran. However, the events surrounding her death have cast doubt over the idea that this second Iran is insignificant, apolitical or even a minority.

A few journalists have noticed this significant socio-cultural realignment. Azadeh Moaveni spent two years in Iran, returning home to America with a husband and lots of notes for what would become the book Honeymoon in Tehran (2009). She began conscious that she belonged to a class “unrepresentative of Iran as a whole.” She started hanging out with Iranians on the other side of the divide, hoping to discover “the authentic soul of the country” — among what she, like many others, assumed was the representative majority. Instead, she found that the “other” Iran — often dismissively referred to as modern middle classes — constituted “the core of the nation.”

The divide that matters in Iran… is not between city and town, or wealthy and working-class. In any Iranian city, be it Isfahan, Yazd, or Shiraz, the relevant divide was between a minority of religious militants, many of whom had politi¬cal and financial ties to the government, and the majority of moderate Iranians, who longed for stability and prosperity. The latter included many devout believers, who revered Islam and lived according to its edicts. But they had grown to consider their faith a private matter ...

Secular Iranians — those who fasted during Ramazan but who during the rest of the year also enjoyed an occasional drink; those who believed that the mullahs should get out of politics — composed a sizable part of the population. This was a simple fact of Iranian society, as real as its more conservative, traditional spectrum …

Recent events testify to the accuracy of this view. But where will this phenomenon, revealed in blatant electoral fraud, lead the country? Those habitual revolutionists who see the advent of a “green revolution” repeating the “orange” ones elsewhere may be disappointed. For my part, while I am deeply saddened by the senseless lose of life, I feel that I have just witnessed the most significant political victory for the generations that have come of age during the rule of the Islamic Republic: This young Iran piercing through the myth of being a “minority” by announcing its massive arrival at the political stage and catching Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by surprise.

The late Shah lost Iran in the late 1970s by misreading the Iranian population. Today, it is the Ayatollah’s moment. He and his military associates panicked, not at the “reformist” candidate himself, but at the political winds gusting from the “other” Iran and catapulting Mousavi to an almost certain victory. In their reaction — aborting the electoral process and relying on the elite Revolutionary Guards and Basij vigilantes to uphold authority — they have insulted the civil intelligence of the people. This is not Iran’s Tienanmen moment, after which the regime would be expected to appease the population through their pocketbooks. Instead, the estrangement of a cross-section of Iranian society seems irreversible.

It is in this context that Neda has assumed in death a role that she most likely never wanted or needed in life. It is not that she has become an iconic image of a revolution — there is no revolution, despite the hopes of expatriates who wish for a second act of the year 1979. Rather, the bloodied image of Neda, dying in front of her music teacher (could it get more secular than that?), is already being woven into a complex expression of a new and permanent rupture.

Read the previous post in this series, where poet and journalist Roya Hakakian discusses the journalistic responsibility to publish controversial information.