War of the snapshots

Ever been to a wedding where half the guests are standing and snapping photos as the couple walks down the aisle?

One of the odd features of the videos documenting the current antigovernment demonstrations marking Ashoura in Tehran: it seems that half the people there, including police, are circling the action, holding up their cameras, and snapping away.

One one level, it's a battle of snapshots: Iranians struggling to get their photos out to be viewed around the world; law enforcement targeting people for future persecution. (Gaza too was a war of perception, which continued after the shooting stopped.)

It seems, too, as if the line between participating and recording is disappearing.  How long before someone documents his own murder?

Alienation in Tehran, and abroad

Tehran Bureau has a moving personal essay by a young woman of Iranian descent, living in London but with lots of family and friends in Iran, which she's visited often. Kamin Mohammadi traces through the experience of friends and family, as well as herself, the alienation, or schizophrenia, induced by living under an oppressive regime (or being closely bound to those who do). She ends with the confession of an uncle she had long admired:

as we sipped our teas at Mehrabad Airport, he started to confide in me, much to my embarrassment and no doubt his too, proud man that he is. But confide he did, in that way I have become accustomed to Iranians doing with me, trusted family or old friend yet an outsider who would take their secrets home with me rather than sit and gossip in Tehran.

And what he told me was that on his visit to Europe, he had felt like an alien. Looking, walking and talking just like all the other people, but, after 30 years of Islamic rule, after all the daily compromises he has had to make with his soul, his conscience, his very being in order to survive the regime and even prosper, he felt so different to all the people living as people should — in freedom — that he had felt locked up inside himself, unable to break the mask, unable to relate to anyone or allow himself to be understood.

‘Kamin jan,’ he said to me as I tried to contain his confidences, ‘we here, we look like human beings, but we are aliens. We are not like other people. I realised this in Europe. There is a gulf because they simply cannot understand what we go through every single day of our lives in order to survive this regime.’

The experiences Mohammadi chronicles recall those of eastern Europeans in the latter days of the Soviet empire, forced always in public life to do obeisance to an ideology nearly everyone recognized as bankrupt. State terror comes in many flavors, but the alienation it induces is recognizable across wide cultural gulfs.

Strike, sandstorm and shutdown in Tehran?

Someone please tell me if I'm following wandering fires here:

On Monday, Reza Aslan, whose Daily Beast posts seem to carry a whiff of wishful thinking, reported that Mousavi supporters were calling for a 3-day strike, beginning Monday, under cover of the 3-day Islamic holiday Itikaf,

a time when particularly pious Muslims cloister themselves inside homes or mosques for a period of intense prayer and deep spiritual reflection. It is a practice that the Iranian regime has long encouraged the country’s citizens, particularly the youth, to take part in, usually without much success.

Aslan also noted that a "massive sandstorm swept into Tehran Monday morning, blanketing the streets in a dark and dreamy haze."

Today, the Iranian government's media organ Press TV reports:

Tehran closes down for second day

The rising level of dust pollution has forced the closure of Tehran's offices and educational centers for a second day.

According to Tehran Governor General Morteza Tamaddon, the decision was made to decrease the number of cars on the streets and decrease the level of particulate concentration.

“Traffic and using private vehicles could aggravate the air pollution in the capital,” he said on Tuesday.

Studying the latest updates by Tehran's Air Quality Control Company (AQCC), Tehran's Committee for Coordinating Emergency Air Pollution found the particulate concentration at a dangerous level and declared the city closed down on Wednesday.

The committee had earlier announced that all offices and educational centers in Tehran Province would be closed on July 7, 2009 and its industrial centers would be closed from July 7 to 9

Was a planned strike under cover of holiday trumped by an official shutdown under cover of sandstorm? How frequent are sandstorm-induced shutdowns in Iran?

The wrest is silence

Today's march through Tehran, captured in this short video from a height that shows its massive length and breadth, makes me feel for the first time that something unstoppable is at work here - that this outpouring of popular will can't simply be crushed, Tiananmen Square style -- though the regime may well try. Maybe it's the silence -- is that Islam's contribution to the nonviolent toolbox? Islamic velvet? Beneath it perhaps lurks the Shiite passion for martyrdom that unseated the Shah. If massacred, these people will keep coming back for more -- in 40-day intervals.