Egyptians Lack Iranians' Need for Revenge

The February 14 anti-government protests in Tehran were inspired by the demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia, and show many similarities, with thousands taking to the streets to demand radical change.

Setting aside the obvious dissimilarities in the kind of regimes the Iranian and Arab protesters are taking on, the ways in which they behave and articulate their demands reveal some major cultural differences.

Despite the brutal treatment that President Hosni Mubarak’s regime has meted out to dissidents over the years, the mood of the protests on Cairo’s Tahrir Square has been upbeat, at times joyful. In Iran, by contrast, the desire for revenge is always there as an undercurrent.

Even government-organised demonstrations in support of the Egyptian uprising – which the Iranian regime as well as the opposition has sought to appropriate – featured posters calling for Mubarak’s execution. At the same time, the Egyptians were simply demanding that their president go away.

At the February 14 rally, the opposition’s “Day of Rage” show of support for the Egyptian pro-democracy movement, some of the protesters chanted “Death to Khamenei”. This slogan, which first emerged after the 2009 crackdown, substitutes Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s name for that of the Shah, against whom the call was first directed in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The massive protests of 2009 which followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election featured similarly fierce rhetoric. Protesters carried the bodies of those killed in the violence, chanting “I’ll kill the one who killed my brother”.

Along with vengeance, the imagery of death and mourning always features prominently. In the post-election unrest of 2009, Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery became a battleground as police waded into several mass gatherings held to mourn the dead.

“There’s been no apparent sign of vengeance or widespread mourning ceremonies among the Egyptian demonstrators,” said Ahmed, an Iraqi who works for a TV station in Cairo, speaking four days before Mubarak finally agreed to step down.

Ahmed belongs to the Shia Arab community of southern Iraq, and so is in a position to compare and contrast political cultures.

“Unlike us Iraqis and Iranians, who are rooted in a death cult, the protestors here in Cairo aren’t even shouting ‘Death to Mubarak’,” he said. “Whenever they aren’t being fired on or stoned by Mubarak supporters, people are holding parties, singing or playing guitars, ‘ouds’ and drums.”

Hooman Majd, the New York-based author of a recent book called The Ayatollahs’ Democracy, sees “dramatic differences” between Iranian and Arab cultures, particularly in their relationships with Islam.

“The mourning ceremonies of Shia Islam have no real equivalent in Sunnism, and so a culture that has mourning and martyrdom as an important component will naturally fall back on it in times of stress,” Majd, whose grandfather was a distinguished ayatollah, told IWPR. “Mass mourning, originating in [Imam] Hossein's death in Karbala, is… central to the Shia psyche.” (See Iranians and the Cult of Death for a closer look at death in contemporary Iranian culture.)  

Egyptians have reason enough to be angry.

If the Tunisian protests took off after street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest when the police confiscated his cart., Egypt had its own iconic figure – Khaled Said, who died in the street after police dragged him out of an Alexandria café and beat him up. His death prompted a massive campaign using the social networking site Facebook, which spread the word for silent protests in late summer and ultimately served as a conduit for mobilising demonstrators this January.

While Facebook may have provided a platform for outrage at the behaviour of the security forces, allegations of brutality did not come as a revelation. As long ago as 2006-07, mobile phone footage of the victims of Egyptian police abuse and torture were being posted on the internet.

This provides another contrast with Iran, where the harsh treatment of detainees in autumn 2009 came as a shock not just to the opposition but also to many – including senior clerics – who were otherwise sympathetic to the regime.

The Egyptian and Iranian movements also differ in non-culturally-specific ways, for example in the time they had to prepare. The Egyptian protests grew out of the Kefaya movement which emerged in 2004, whereas the 2009 post-election demonstrations in Iran were essentially reactive.

A few days before Mubarak’s departure from the presidential palace, Elliot Colla of the Arabic and Islamic Studies department at Georgetown University said that “what is happening is the culmination of years of work by activists from a spectrum of pro-democracy movements, human rights groups, labor unions, and civil society organisations”.

Mahjoob Zweiri of Qatar University, an expert on Middle Eastern and Iranian politics, argues that the two groups of protesters were pursuing different aims.

“What the Egyptians wanted was to remove the whole system, whereas in the case of Iran, it was a reaction to the 2009 election result,” he said.

Zweiri says that while both the Iranian government and the opposition have cited Shia principles as justification, “at the moment it does not seem that religion or religious belief lies behind the movements in either Iran or Egypt. All we see is [a desire to] end years of autocratic governments and build a new future.”

As a one of the activists involved in the Tehran "Day of Rage" noted, Iran’s protesters have to pursue their aims within their own context.

“Maybe we as Iranian society are not yet ready for a broad uprising like those in Tunisia and Egypt; we must find our own way of rebelling,” he said.

“We have to use our own capacity against the autocrat regime in Iran – perhaps by chanting slogans about death.”

Majd argues that the "death to…." formula so often heard in Iran does not have to be taken at face value. He compares it to the Arab offensive gesture of showing the sole of one’s shoe, which he says "doesn't mean one literally wants to step on the person – it’s just an insult. There were plenty of shoes held aloft in Tahrir Square”.

Nima Tamaddon is editor of IWPR’s Iran programme.