The Iranian agony:

...encouraging citizens to spy on their neighbors and co-workers...

...gious symbols and sentiments that had dominated the revolutionary movement in its final phases...

...Those judged to deviate from the leader's path, or whose loyalty was in question, were labeled counter-revolutionaries, religious hypocrites, infidels, agents of corruption on earth, enemies of God and the Prophet, and they were excluded from the political, economic, and cultural life of the country, harassed or liquidated...

...urging parents to turn in their own children to the authorities, on suspicions of anti-regime activity...

...It is a policy which is attempting to make a maktabi, i.e., a strict follower of the Imam's line, out of each and every living soul in the country...

...To carry out its mission in the name of Islam and the world's downtrodden masses, the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini has glorified, condoned, and otherwise promoted a whole range of policies and actions which, only a few years ago, would have been morally repugnant to the majority of the Iranian people...

...They mobilized hundreds of zealots from the ranks of the ever-present Party of God, attacked the universities, took over the buildings, and wounded or killed scores of students...

...THE PLIGHT of Iranian intellectuals and artists, which has been almost entirely ignored by their erstwhile sympathetic counterparts in the West, cannot be considered separately from the tragic immiment of the rest of the Iranian nation...

...The government's attitude toward the intellectual community is unmistakably clear...

...HUMAN RIGHTS & THE PLIGHT OF IRANIAN INTELLECTUALS The Iranian agony AU BANUAZIZI THE PRESENT SITUATION in Iran poses a frustrating and agonizing paradox for those of us who spoke out'on human rights in the last decade-and-a-half of the Pahlavi regime...

...As was the case under the Shah, the plight of the Iranian intellectuals and artists is inextricably bound with the fate of the rest of Iranian society...

...Iran today is a country in which not life, but death is celebrated...

...In practice, this "revolutionary justice," which was applied with utmost ruthlessness, meant an ever-increasing monopolization of power and control in the hands of Khomeini's immediate clerical coterie supported by tens of thousands of his fanatical devotees...

...When university students and faculty began to exercise some of the rights they had won during the course of their long struggle through the revolution, the Ayatollah made the remarkable observation that...

...Today Iranian intellectuals are struggling for their survival: survival as writers, poets, artists, filmmakers and the like, survival as a community, but also survival in the literal sense...

...Following the triumph of the revolution in 1979, the clerical establishment, which for a variety of reasons had played a key leadership role in a broad coalition of nearly all segments of the Iranian society, began to consolidate and strengthen its position vis-a-vis all other groups...

...On the other hand, we find that, despite the considerable coverage given to such flagrant violations, the reaction of the international community has been, on the whole, fairly mute and late in coming...

...So is their opposition to the regime and their struggle for freedom of expression and basic human rights...

...and, finally, death in the form of a relentless crusade against domestic infidels and the so-called religious hypocrites...

...Under the Pahlavi regime the Iranian intellectuals were involved in a struggle against censorship and government control of the arts, against official harassment and intimidation, and for their rights of free assembly and organization...

...and countless other crimes...

...The same fate awaited publishing houses, bookstores, and other centers of cultural, intellectual, and artistic activity around the country...

...This article is based on a speech given at the Convention on Human Rights and Civil Liberties in Iran held in Chicago last Spring...

...From 1968 to 1982 he served as the editor of the Journal of Iranian Studies...

...Its ultimate objective is to stamp out every vestige of tajaddod (innovation), i.e., to rid the nation of all those whose minds have been contaminated by foreign, non-Islamic ideas...

...The general policy, then, is one of liquidation...

...Their perilous situation and struggle, which is an integral part of the movement against repression and religious despotism in Iran today, deserves more sympathy and support from the concerned international community than it has received to date.received to date...

...Later, when independent newspapers and other publications refused to follow the officially-prescribed line, they were closed down, their offices ransacked and their staffs assaulted and sometimes imprisoned...

...The present regime in Iran, we should bear in mind, came to power as a result of a mass-based, popular revolution...

...stoning of women and men for alleged sexual crimes...

...death in the form of suicidal human-wave attacks in a holy war whose staggering casualties have already surpassed those of most other regional conflicts of our time...

...Unless writers or artists follow the officially-prescribed line and periodically and publicly profess their devotion to the regime and the holy principles for which it stands, and unless their lifestyle is in accordance with the rules set down for all true believers in the theocratic state, they are declared counter-revolutionaries and are harassed or imprisoned, or they could receive even worse treatment at the hands of the Imam's goon squads...

...And hardly a day passes by without their being reminded of the rightness of their course in the name of God, Islam, and the Imam...

...Since these savage attacks, which took place over two years ago, all institutions of higher learning in Iran have remained closed pending the Islamicization of their curricula and until such time when all "undesirable" elements have been weeded out...

...Insofar as the pn...

...This paradox and its implied double-standard notwithstanding, I believe that in order to grasp fully the gravity of the situation we need to go beyond the many particular instances of human rights violation and try to understand the underlying worldview and values that have helped shape the policies of the Islamic regime and enabled it to mobilize its supporters and to justify its actions...

...Death in the form of thousands of official executions that have exceeded those carried out in the rest of the world combined during each of the last three years...

...Bani-Sadr, inspired by the Ayatollah's message, responded with decisiveness and vengeance...

...The concern with human rights, which is ultimately a concern for certain inalienable rights of the individual, is indeed an alien concern to the leaders of the present regime in Iran...

...The point which must be emphasized is that such actions are carried out not only by the official agents of the government and the various quasi-official revolutionary bodies, but also by ordinary citizens who believe that their actions - no matter how brutal and barbarous - are in accordance with the ideals of their religion...

...a brutal policy of persecution - bordering on genocide - against the country's largest religious minority (the Baha'is...

...This is particularly striking if we compare the relatively concerted efforts of the various international human rights organizations and groups to expose the repressive policies of the Shah's regime in the late 1960s and the 1970s to the general reticence of some of the same groups in the face of the current repression in Iran...

...In that struggle, they received considerable support from many individuals, groups, and organizations around the world committed to such democratic rights...

...leadership is concerned, the intellectuals - be they artist...

...iters, academics, journalists, lawyers, jurists, or even sclu of Islamic studies - are suspect and, in the final analysis, potential enemies of the state...

...On the one hand, we find in the chilling accounts of eyewitnesses and other observers, as well as in several recent reports of Amnesty International, that the extent and scale of the violations of the most fundamental rights in Iran are probably far greater now than at any other time in this century...

...They perceive human life as a commodity which can be sacrificed, or else offered willingly on demand, in furtherance of the holy causes that they alone define and purportedly serve...

...death in the form of officially sanctioned killings by the mobs who brand themselves as the "Party of God...

...Elevating Ayatollah Khomeini to the position of an infallible saint, the clerics equated his pronouncements with religious dogma and demanded obedience to him as a matter of religious duty...

...His disciples, including his first hand-picked president, Mr...

...These have included physical torture and gang-style executions of thousands of its political opponents...

...It adroitly exploited the reliALI banuazizi teaches social psychology and modern Iranian history at Boston College...

...From the day Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Teheran in February of 1979, members of the clerical establishment started a campaign to denigrate the role played by the Iranian intellectuals, and the secular opposition in general, in the revolutionary movement...

...during the Shah's reign, our universities had been turned into factories which took our innocent youths as raw material and turned out prostitutes and Communists at the other end...