“این عکس یک آسمان زیبا را نشان می‌دهد”

This photo shows a beautiful sky.
Farhad Noori

The terrifying horror film that has been released by the government, depicting the siege and beating of Sufis and their vulgar behavior, also tells of the government’s long-standing animosity towards Sufis. The repeated chanting of “Sag Sabileh” in the film may seem like a common and vulgar phrase, but it carries the message that the situation goes beyond the arrest of a few protesters and is aimed at suppressing and eliminating a way of life that has stood against the unlawful actions of the Iranian judicial and security system for almost two decades.

The story of the seventh garden should not be reduced to a few days of protest that ended with the intervention of military forces. If we were able to delve into the minds of the officials, we would see that the will of the language and tongue of these officials has been in the hands of some religious authorities and powerful figures in the security apparatus, those who for years have made dealing with mystical practices their priority and have made every effort to eliminate mystical paths.

This short and disturbing film depicts the arrest and torture of dervishes on the night of the seventh Golestan vigil (February 19th and early morning of February 20th, 2018). It shows that the authorities had pre-planned and predetermined religious and political motives against the dervishes. After the killing of one of the personal guards named “Haddadian” during the events of the sunset of February 19th, which his face was covered in the blood of military guns, the official media of Iran quickly compared him to the martyrs of the shrine and labeled the dervishes as “Daesh” and used this hasty propaganda to incite and provoke the forces on the scene against the dervishes. In a way that in the early hours of Wednesday, February 20th, the scene of the incident, which was under the control of riot control vehicles and anti-riot forces, was handed over to the personal guards to take revenge for the

The encounter of individuals’ clothing in the early morning of the first of Esfand (the last month of the Iranian calendar) was as if they had conquered all victories and brought down ISIS to its knees in the heart of Syrian soil. Despite having captured the dervishes and being able to handcuff them, put them in vans and transfer them to their detention centers, they created a valley of death and tunnels, and besides cursing and intimidating and calling for a fight, they brutally beat any dervish they wanted with deadly blows of clubs, spears, swords and axes. These encounters were so severe that they were forced to take some of them, who were in critical condition and on the verge of death, to the hospital, but it was too late and a dervish named “Mohammad Raji” was killed due to the deadly blows.

Of course, these encounters were not new for the dervishes. They had been familiar with such hostile behaviors since the destruction of the dervish house in Qom in 1984. In Qom, there were riots with stones, bricks, sticks, and metal pipes. In Borujerd, they had seen up close how the Pahlavi regime had torn the clothes of an old dervish with a stick. They had seen how in Kavar, the government agent had pointed his gun at “Vahid Banani” and shot him in the groin, causing his body and clothes to be covered in blood and die in that gruesome state. The dervishes had experienced being humiliated by interrogators in solitary confinement. They remember the experience of being mocked and ridiculed during interrogations. They remember the sound of the cursed electric razors in the solitude of their cells, as the government agent forcefully shaved their heads. The dervishes have seen their tears mix

A quick look at the scandals that authorities hand over to them during the night arrests clearly shows the level of resentment and hatred towards the followers of mysticism within the body of the Islamic Republic system. It is not without reason that Commander Jafari, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, visits the hospital to meet with the administrator of the Sufi news agency, affiliated with the Office of Sects and Religions of the Revolutionary Guards – which has been working tirelessly to create division among the dervishes – and kisses his hands. Because these hands belong to the writer of deep and irrational hatred towards some scholars and clerics of the seminary from the Sufis and the Gonabadi dervishes.