“منظوری از کوهستان”

“A view of the mountains”
Saqi’s meeting

Death in celestial religions is seen as a passage from the mortal world to the eternal one, and therefore the deceased are highly respected. Especially in Islam, respecting the dead is as important as respecting the living. It is recommended to stand up in respect when a funeral procession passes by, as the deceased has departed from this world. However, in the forty years of the Islamic Republic, the dead are only respected if they are either supporters or neutral. In a way, the deceased are still alive in the eyes of the Islamic Republic and must be suppressed even after their death. This animosity is not limited to the deceased of the past forty years and does not only apply to political figures.

The creation of restrictions and suppressions on the commemoration of the death of Mohammad Mossadegh, the late Prime Minister of Iran, is not limited to him and continues on to Ahmad Shamloo and Forough Farrokhzad, and even to the breaking of the grave of poets like Sohrab Sepehri. It seems that the government, which has failed to make itself legitimate, even has problems with its dead and will go as far as to violate their sanctity and attempt to destroy their memory. But is it successful in achieving this goal?

Khavaran, the awakened conscience of the sixties.

Since the early 1990s, a large number of political prisoners, often with a tendency towards the Mujahedin-e Khalq or left-wing movements, have been buried in the Khavaran cemetery without the presence of their families, and only their graves have been shown to their families. But what turned Khavaran into a symbol was the widespread executions of political prisoners in the summer of 1988, ordered by Khomeini. In the months of Mordad and Shahrivar of that year, several thousand people (between 4,500 to 10,000) were secretly executed and, contrary to Islamic tradition, were buried in mass graves. The families of the executed later tried to mark the graves of their loved ones in that public place, but government officials destroyed these markers with bulldozers and by pouring fresh soil and planting trees, they desecrated the graves once again (1). In addition to trying to eliminate evidence of human rights violations, the families

Destruction of the tomb of the Sufi saint.

Nour Ali Elahi Qotb Darvishan, the founder of this school, passed away in 1353 and his mummified body was buried in the Nour neighborhood of Hashtgerd. Ten years later, his tomb was destroyed by the order of the Friday Imam of Hashtgerd, because the Nour Ali Elahi school was considered “deviant” and “misguided” by the Islamic Republic government. The destruction of any sign of otherness shows that the government cannot tolerate even a small group gathering, without having planned or controlled it. The destruction of the tomb of Qotb Darvishan and the Nour Ali Elahi school did not end there. Years later, the Friday Imam who had ordered the destruction of the tomb was killed, and then one of the followers of this school was arrested without reason or sufficient evidence and was executed for the murder of the Imam without a fair trial.

The Khalkhali account of the destruction of Reza Shah’s tomb.

The memories of Sadeq Khalkhali, the ruler of law, of destroying the tomb of Reza Shah, is a clear example of the thinking and ideology that explains the reason and motivation behind tomb destruction and tombophobia.

“On that day, we went to the military base and the commander of the base provided us with necessary resources. We gathered around 200 people and with shovels and pickaxes, we headed towards the shrine of Hazrat Abdul Azim. I gave a passionate speech in the courtyard of the shrine and said: the era of having ugly and beautiful buildings side by side has ended after the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and the Muslim people of Iran can no longer tolerate having the graves of martyrs next to the blood of tyrants and the faces of shining figures in Islamic history, such as Hazrat Abdul Azim, being desecrated by the graves of criminals like Reza Khan and Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, and Hassan Ali Mansur and the Pahlavi dynasty. We must do whatever it takes to destroy the graves of the leaders of disbelief and atheism. The people were chanting “Allahu Akbar” and expressing their joy. I spoke to the people for

Cemetery preservation and efforts to eliminate Baha’i corpses.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the most public and continuous opposition to the burial of the dead in the 40-year history of the Islamic Republic has been directed against the Baha’is. The destruction of Baha’i cemeteries in Shiraz, Yazd, and Qa’em Shahr are only examples of the government’s crimes against the deceased of a faith.

Fear of the graves of protesters

Mazaristizi and Mazaraharasi cannot be summarized by historical or religious figures or specific political movements. The effort to eliminate evidence of human rights violations continues, as seen in the destruction of the tomb of Ezzatollah Ebrahimnejad, a victim of the Kooy-e Daneshgah incident. Ten years after his death, the newspaper Etemad reported that his tomb in Behesht-e Zahra, Pol Dokhtar, Lorestan province, had been destroyed and the stone replaced. The new tombstone, placed by unknown individuals, made no mention of the cause of his death and changed the date of his passing from the 18th of Tir 1378 (the day of the suppression of students and a stain on the Islamic Republic) to the 19th.

This practice also extended to the destruction of the tombs of the victims of the 1988 events, such as the tombstone of Neda Aghasoltan, which was destroyed by a bullet shot.

In this text, only a few accounts and names were mentioned, but thousands of martyrs without graves are buried in various places in Iran. Women and men who are feared even in death by the government, and as a result, their graves are desecrated. This enmity and effort to forget forces human rights activists to work harder against forgetting, by documenting and recording the stories of each and every one of these victims, especially the unknown ones, so that history is not distorted.

Notes:

1. For more information, refer to the International Amnesty statement on the importance of preserving the Khavaran cemetery for investigations into mass killings.

   The foundation of success.

2. یک سریال

   For more information, please refer to the biography of Fardin Hosseini, a TV series.

   Bonyad Baromand

   Foundation for Progress/Prosperity

3. طور که

   As
   

4. Khalkhali, Sadeq, Memories of Ayatollah Khalkhali, the first head of the Revolutionary Courts, Tehran: Sayeh Publishing, 2005, pp. 342.