Roya Hakakian: Egypt Through the Lens of Iran's 1979 Revolution
[Roya Hakakian is the author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown 2004) and the forthcoming Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic Press 2011).]
Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I've begun talking to the living-room television. "Drop that hand!" I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: "How come we didn't do that?"
We, as in the young Iranians who flooded Tehran's own equivalent of Liberation Square, Azadi, on the same exact day 32 years ago. I was 12 at the time, but the events of that year remain my existential paradox, my life's most cherished trauma.
The pundits now breezily call Iran's 1979 revolution "Islamic." But at the time, religious and secular, villagers and urbanites, educated and illiterate, all equally angrily, were marching in the streets and demanding the removal of the Shah. Iran's future was as unknowable then as Egypt's future is now.
Comparisons between Iran and Egypt abound and the guessing goes on as to what number Egypt's needle truly points on the Iranian time scale: 1979, or 2009 — the year the Green movement took the streets of Tehran. One of the dozen exuberant wallposts on my facebook page on Friday reads: "Egypt did it in 18 days. Iran will do it in a week!"
Egypt is not Iran. No two histories or nations, no matter how much they have in common, are interchangeable. But movements striving for common democratic goals have consistently exchanged the lessons of their struggles to inform and warn their comrades elsewhere against the pitfalls and to also facilitate a change of their own. The fear that fleeing dictators exude is very potent....
Read entire article at Time.com
Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I've begun talking to the living-room television. "Drop that hand!" I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: "How come we didn't do that?"
We, as in the young Iranians who flooded Tehran's own equivalent of Liberation Square, Azadi, on the same exact day 32 years ago. I was 12 at the time, but the events of that year remain my existential paradox, my life's most cherished trauma.
The pundits now breezily call Iran's 1979 revolution "Islamic." But at the time, religious and secular, villagers and urbanites, educated and illiterate, all equally angrily, were marching in the streets and demanding the removal of the Shah. Iran's future was as unknowable then as Egypt's future is now.
Comparisons between Iran and Egypt abound and the guessing goes on as to what number Egypt's needle truly points on the Iranian time scale: 1979, or 2009 — the year the Green movement took the streets of Tehran. One of the dozen exuberant wallposts on my facebook page on Friday reads: "Egypt did it in 18 days. Iran will do it in a week!"
Egypt is not Iran. No two histories or nations, no matter how much they have in common, are interchangeable. But movements striving for common democratic goals have consistently exchanged the lessons of their struggles to inform and warn their comrades elsewhere against the pitfalls and to also facilitate a change of their own. The fear that fleeing dictators exude is very potent....