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Mr Khamenei
I heard your
speech on 4 June 2010. It was an
error-strewn oration. It ebbed
and flowed between slips of the
tongue and slips of the mind. It
testified to flagging oratory.
Our accomplished sermonizer, who
had surpassed all others in
deftness of speech in the thirty
years since the revolution,
seemed extremely muddled and
inept on that day. His homily
contained no enchanting
eloquence or sweet turns of
phrase. The bile of rage had
robbed him of all the
considerations of public
speaking. The steed of his words
refused to be tamed by the
fierce lashes that his muddled
mind inflicted on his leaden
tongue. Inelegant and unruly
words leapt out of the cage of
his mind and squatted upon his
tongue. His topsy-turvy
historical judgments only added
to the holes in his discourse,
and no sooner did he emerge from
one hole that he fell into the
next. He clawed at Talha and
Zubair's faces, and stumbled
into battle with them in Imam
Ali's stead. Never having won
the Sunnis over, he now pushed
them away. Imagining himself in
Ali's shoes, he saw enemies
every which way he turned. And
overexcited as he was by this
imaginary, nonexistent
resemblance, he portrayed the
opponents of his policies and
leadership as usurpers of his
position and mandate and as
violators of the pledge of
allegiance to religious
guardianship.
It was a
strange and outlandish
performance. His audience
expected him to attack, but he
lacked even the strength to
defend. Both the phraseology and
the reasoning were turgid. His
words were not well spoken; nor
did he have any good words to
say. He was true neither to the
laws of speaking, nor to the
laws of logic. Neither his
faculty of speech nor his
faculty of thinking could be
stirred from their slumber. All
he could do was to reach down
into history's timeworn sack to
pull out indiscriminately this
or that figure to rouse and
torment; to assign them bogus
roles; to reject their
ijtihad as deviant; to
present his own particular
dogmas as the measure of all
that is right; to wreak
vengeance on everyone past and
present; and, with utter
arrogance, to define truth and
falsehood in terms of people's
closeness to or distance from
his own ideas, hoping thereby to
restore legitimacy to his
discredited religious
guardianship.
Mr Khamenei
When you
first assumed office, I pictured
you as a not very well travelled
Shariati; as someone who is not
acquainted with fiqh, philosophy
and exegesis, but is interested
in history, art and oratory. I
thought to myself, maybe it will
turn out for the best. Most
faqihs and philosophers are
unacquainted with history. They
therefore - in Ibn-Khaldun's
words - make the worst of all
possible leaders.
As time went
by, as your theoretical and
practical despotism led you to
treat the people cruelly and to
mismanage the country, as
eulogists and sycophants
surrounded you, as counsellors
and critics were jailed or
shackled, as the land began to
descend into disorder, as the
cries of the poor rose up, as
the impure hands of the
plunderers began to snatch the
property and lives of innocent
people, it became clear to me
that the garment of leadership
and guardianship does not become
you and that the weary, sleepy
spirit of history was ill
advised to hand you the key to
our land in the dark of the
night.
Hardly a day
went by without some bitter
fruit falling from the evil tree
of tyranny to crack a head or to
poison a life. I prayed to God
to save Iranians from
devastation and a sultan from
his own misrule, but when the
noose of savagery tightened
further and the flames of
repression blazed higher, I
realized that prayer would not
solve the problem.
For years,
wishing to help, I had offered
counsel. I hoped that it would
have an effect, but it only
exacerbated the bile and made
the patient grow more sickly.
Our patient had become afflicted
with hallucinations. He saw
counsel as lies and trickery,
and criticism as conspiracy and
subversion. He cooked up charges
of espionage and immorality for
his critics, and sentenced them
to shackles and persecution. He
remunerated eulogists, devoured
critics and beheaded rivals. And
as the criticism and counsels
grew, so did his paranoia.
So, on the
command of God and wisdom, we
spoke out and protested. Growing
misrule, rising cruelty,
diminishing justice, and endless
plunder and transgressions
eventually knocked the
ill-fitting cap of legitimacy
off his head and exposed his
inability to run the land and
create order. He had lacked
spiritual authority from the
start; he eventually frittered
away his political authority
too. But he was still clad in
the handsome garb of the
sermonizer; that is, until the
unfortunate sermons of 4 June.
Then, it became clear that, not
only did he lack expertise in
fiqh and exegesis, he also had a
warped reading of history. And
he is incapable of driving his
words with the rod of eloquence.
He has eaten
the forbidden fruit of
guardianship and, now, like Adam
in paradise, he waits, naked and
dispossessed, to receive the
order to fall and to descend to
Earth.
And now, "O
Supreme Leader"!, let me tell
you: The order to fall has been
issued and it has descended from
the heavens to Earth. You do not
belong in the paradise of
religious guardianship any
longer. The voice of human
beings is the voice of God. Can
you not hear the voice of God?
Now, it is
best if the leader acquiesces of
his own free will, takes off the
ill-fitting garb of leadership
and, like Adam, the father of
humankind, utters the words of
repentance and descends quietly
from the celestial paradise of
religious guardianship to the
earth of the masses. It is best
if he lives peaceably with his
Eve, abandons the fratricide of
Cain and Abel, and acquaints
himself with the secrets of
history. Then, he will at least
remain a sermonizer, who, freed
of leadership, can preach and
offer guidance and be true to
people's trust, in the hope that
the people will allow him to
frequent the "mosque of decency"
once again and to give alms to
poor dervishes in gratitude for
his life and his health.
Or, would
that the slumbering members of
the Assembly of Experts roused
themselves long enough to break
off the shackles and to bring
the despotic guardianship to an
end. But is pinning our hopes on
the cold-blooded residents of
the Assembly of Experts hothouse
- who lay flowers at power's
feet and eat at the
guardianship's table - not like
trying to hold water in a sieve
or like blowing in the wind?
------
But when the
wretched rag, which is at the
beck and call of the leader's
office, published that bogus
report about my "apostasy", I
realized that it had gone
further than its usurped
position allows. I waited for
the signal from the leader's
office that would make the rag
retract that charge of apostasy.
For, I knew that the leader
considers it the guardianship's
prerogative to excommunicate and
to issue verdicts of this kind,
and that he would not tolerate
anyone stepping into this
terrain - not out of concern for
justice, but for the sake of
preserving his own position. And
so it came about. And the
wretched paper was forced to
publish a denial, piling one
bogus report upon another and
cleansing the initial act of
malevolence with another act of
malevolence; thus invalidating
the sham four-hundred dollar
bill that it had forged with
great idiocy.
The charge of
apostasy that was published by
that rag did not cause me any
offence. Nor did it make me
tremble. For, I obtained my
faith from mystics, not faqihs.
It is faqihs who should tremble
when they see such mindless and
faithless lackeys taking it upon
themselves to do their work for
them; burning their credibility
in the fire of politics. It is
"the Guardian of All Muslims"
who should grieve and tear at
his collar when he sees such
lame goats leading the flock,
playing the lord instead of
being the servants and usurping
the sultan's role in herding the
sheep. He should realize that,
before long, the impudent horns
of these domestic enemies will
be shredding the guardianship's
cloak and turban, breaking the
sovereign's crown and bringing
down the State. Let him hasten
to save Iranians from
devastation and the sultan from
his own misrule by taking
himself out of their clutches
before they take his fate out of
his hands. "East Wind, if you
have a cure, now's the time."
Abdulkarim
Soroush
June 2010
**Translated
from the Persian by Nilou
Mobasser
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