My dear Iranian women students:
It’s me, your teacher from long ago. I was still a struggling doctoral student back then when your fathers, wanting their beloved daughters to have an American education, sent you across the ocean to the small USA college where I had my very first job as a teacher. It was 1976. And there was tension between our countries. But education seemed the miraculous bridge that united us.
…and today in Iran, I see your children and your grandchildren in the streets.
How impressed I was with your fathers back in 1976. As you gathered in my class, I felt I could see the spirits of your mothers and fathers standing behind you, willing you to learn, not standing in the way, not putting stones on your heads.
This touched me deeply, that your fathers, who at that time were the patrons and gatekeepers of the family, wanted your minds and spirits to be free and filled the wild ideas, for you to shape your own lives to match your greatest moral desires for your own people…
I have never forgotten you– nor that your fathers, especially, as you told me time and again– wanted you to be friends with people from the United States who were also bent on education and learning. Your instinct were good. You came to the right place and people in the USA who did not fear ‘the stranger,’ who thought we, as we thought you, had much to love, and much to offer one another…
… and today in Iran, I see your children and your grandchildren in the streets.
And I remember too, how each of you dear souls, from the beginning through to the end of the semester told me time and again what good and gracious things you would do in social work, in psychology, in helping to develop instead of cut the spirit born into all children, how you planned to help relieve the torments of various classes of Iranian people, how you would shape and build a new day in Iran for family life and intellectual life, and the life of honor of storytelling and the crafts of the hands.
I remember how excited you were at semester’s end, to return home with your armloads of education that had validated your mind and soul’s best instincts.
I found your longing to go home and begin work astonishing too… for so many of my students from other nations wanted to stay in the USA permanently. What was about it you, you bevy of beautiful young women with long shiny black hair and sloe eyes gentle like those of deers… what was it about you that had no magnet inside grab-attaching to the steel of America, but instead you had a homing device that spoke Iran, Iran, Iran.
…and today in Iran, I find with certainty, these are your children and your grandchildren in the streets of Iran. They are the fruit from the tree of your lives as young, impassioned, ace-smart, hard working, heartfelt women.
We talked so often about the prisons built by old men for the young in Iran and elsewhere in the world. You spoke of the big guards that the old men conscript to cover their frail bodies with muscles not belonging to them… to give the appearance of power that is not theirs, but rather purloined by amassing the physical prowess of others, and augmenting that with ill-gained weaponry.
You were awake and aware, and spoke incessantly about how you would instead create a kind of ‘parallel culture’ and keep it fully alive and flowing beneath the ruinous culture of bearded old men— ayatollahs who are not religious holy men of Islam, not teaching the heart, but are political Islamists in black robes, spending far more time finger-pointing and unleashing death on others, rather than showing radiant Allahu in action… through human endeavors of mercy, nourishment, creative acts…
Seeing now, dear students from long ago, your children and grandchildren in the streets of Iran this day, fearing for you and your kin, praying deeply for you, knowing over these years how you have built a city beneath the city of Tehran: I know you, and I know your mental toughness and prayerful hearts.
We spoke of this many times, and you to your honor, have lived it: we know we can live in true heart and spirit, even under oppression of someone close up and daily; we can bear up under it and keep going and do what goodness we do, and urge courage into others, even going underground when necessary to keep the spirit of women and the spirit of men alive in a sundered world.
Last night I listened to the audio recording of your sons and daughters, your grandsons and granddaughters, calling in the dark from rooftop to rooftop in Tehran… from one rooftop came the cry Allahu, from another rooftop the response in the night: Akbar. “Allahu” “Akbar” “Allahu” “Akbar…”
This you taught me, that this phrase of ‘The One,’ and that the One is ‘Great,’ is used in times of happiness and joy, when one wishes to encourage others, or to express validation of action and words of another, when wishing to praise a thought or a thinker, when in struggle, it is also a battle cry.
Just this one act alone last night in Tehran, with call and response chant from rooftop to rooftop tells me your grace and visionary stances are alive in your children and grandchildren, that you absolutely fulfilled the promises you averred to bring forth, long long ago.
May your fathers and mothers and you and all your offspring live long. And for all the reasons listed above: “Allahu” “Akbar…”