Why some Australians are mourning the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
On January 3, 2020, I was alone in my cell in the section of Tehran’s Evin prison run by the intelligence service of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Without warning, a guard I knew named Taraneh burst through the heavy steel door, tears streaming down his face. “A very good man died!” “One of the best men we have in this country!” he sobbed.
I was friendly with Taraneh, he was one of the IRGC’s kind prison guards. In happier times, he would meticulously correct my Persian, and I would portion out pieces of kebab for him from my prison rations; He would pack them up and take them back to his family, who he confessed was too poor to buy meat.
I hugged him. “What happened, who is this man?”
“Hajj Qasim!” Taraneh wailed. “He was one of the kindest, gentlest, most honorable men. He helped everyone, he was very self-sacrificing. He single-handedly defeated ISIS and saved not only Iran, but the whole world…”
My jaw was on the floor at this point. Taraneh was, of course, referring to Qasem Soleimani, who heads the Quds force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and is one of the most successful and notorious terrorists the Islamic Republic has ever produced. He is the architect of Iran’s “axis of resistance” strategy and the mastermind of the Revolutionary Guard’s devastating intervention in the Syrian civil war. Donald Trump had bombed a man who was more blood-soaked than almost anyone in the Iranian regime except Supreme Leader Khamenei.
But from what I gathered from the sickening amount of state television propaganda in the following weeks, Soleimani was remembered by his supporters as a caring family man who made the ultimate sacrifice in religious service to both nation and religion. Taraneh’s tears were real, and based on the information she had to give, her good heart was in the right place. A “good man” had been killed by evil enemies; It was natural that Taraneh and his colleagues in the IRGC mourned his death loudly and emotionally.
Although it is difficult to understand this from our location in Australia, similar dynamics are being experienced in Iran and some parts of the Middle East following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei last Saturday. While ordinary Iranians at home and abroad celebrate the death of a dictator who just six weeks ago ordered the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent protesters with military-grade weapons, Iran’s regime supporters mourn deeply. I have no doubt that Taraneh and other Revolutionary Guard members I know are among them.
There was understandable outrage this week when it emerged that some Shiite mosques and gathering places (majlises or husseiniyat) in Sydney and Melbourne were holding mourning ceremonies for Khamenei. lionized as a “martyr” and a “pure-spirited” “righteous scholar”. The Iranian-Australian community is vocally opposed to efforts to mourn Khamenei, which they see as celebrating a tyrant responsible for mass killings, torture, rape, terrorism and the oppression of his loved ones in Iran. The Jewish community also expressed fears that a man known for his violent anti-Semitism and who runs a country that the Australian government recognizes as a state sponsor of terrorism will be remembered just months after the Bondi attack.
These Shiite Muslims, mostly of non-Iranian, Arab and South Asian descent, operate from a worldview that is radically different from that of both anti-regime Iranians and most of us here in the West. Narratives designed to spread an explicitly Islamist interpretation of Shiite religious practices, promoted by Iran for decades, elevated the thinking of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, who positioned his regime as a defender of the oppressed.
At the heart of political Shiism, Hz. There is the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE, where Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein, took a principled stance against injustice and oppression, despite knowing that he would be martyred in the process.
Ayatollah Khomeini was adept at transplanting the Karbala paradigm into a modern context and, in doing so, inspiring a new generation of Shiite believers to rise up against oppression, first through the 1979 Iranian revolution and then through attempts to export Iran’s revolutionary ideology to other parts of the Shiite world. Large numbers of Arab, Pakistani and Indian Shiites, many of whom have been historically oppressed by Sunni Muslim or other rulers, have embraced Khomeini’s narrative, as well as pro-regime voters in Iran. If you add to this that Ayatollah Khamenei is viewed like Khomeini before him, Merca hand imitationWhen you look at this event, which is seen as the greatest source of emulation by millions of Shiite followers, you can begin to understand why someone who is viewed by much of the world as the arch-terrorist and mass murderer is mourned by so many.
Of course, this does not mean that ceremonies commemorating Khamenei pose any less of a threat to Jewish and Iranian Australians. We have recently experienced the unimaginable trauma of Islamist-inspired terrorism, and what these mosques and assemblies are effectively doing is commemorating the leader of a terrorist regime responsible for untold blood and atrocities.
The problem here is not Shia Islam, but the Islamic Republic’s efforts to use and denigrate the Shia religion to justify decades of oppression. While there is no legal basis to ban these commemorations, we must question whether they are in line with Australian values and whether we should allow supporters of the Islamic Republic to immigrate here.
But I can’t help but think about the tears Taraneh shed for Qasem Soleimani. Many of those mourning Khamenei in Australia live in an alternative moral universe in which the villains responsible for oppression are seen as both victims of oppression and combatants against it. Some may be radical followers of the regime in Iran, but others are probably more like Taraneh. If we want social cohesion to be more than a political buzzword, perhaps we need to find a way to reach the Taraneh among us.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow and regular columnist in Security Studies at Macquarie University. He is the author Sky Uncaged: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.
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Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow in Security Studies at Macquarie University and a regular columnist in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He is the author of Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.
