Iranian Fire Festival as Protest

Farnaz Fassihi in the NY Times:

Iranians have looked for opportunities in recent months to display defiance against the rules of the clerical government. In Tuesday night’s annual fire festival, many found a chance. Across Iran, thousands of men and women packed the streets as they danced wildly to music and jumped joyfully over large bonfires. . . . The police said the crowds were so large in Tehran and other cities that traffic came to a standstill for many hours. . . .

This is the festival called Chaharshanbeh Suri, part of the lead-up to Nowruz, the traditional Persian New Year, which falls at the Spring Equinox.

In many places, the gatherings turned political, with crowds chanting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” “Death to the dictator” and “Get lost, clerics,” . . . The dancing crowds were another example of how far a large part of Iran’s society, particularly the youth, has moved away from the ruling clerics.

In some apartment complexes in Tehran and other cities, DJs played Persian pop songs as a packed crowd danced and sang along. . . People circled the bonfire and held hands while singing “For Women, for Life, for Freedom” from the lyrics of “Baraye,” an anthem of the female-led uprising in 2022.

It's deeply moving to see people defying their oppressors in this joyful way, but I still see little chance that the regime will fall.

What's Happening in Iran?

A while back the announcer at an Iranian soccer game asked for a moment of silence for the people of Palestine, but the crowd instead erupted into boisterous shouting.

It was a small thing, but I found it telling; many Iranians are so embittered by their own Islamic government that they can't even muster sympathy for fellow Muslims under Israeli bombardment.

This came to mind because Tyler Cowen linked to a tweet about the study from which the chart at the top comes, documenting the steep decline in religion in Iran. Based on survey data, the study found that more Iranians claimed to be atheist, agnostic, or "none" than Shiite. Cowen's comment section then filled up with supporting posts from people who claimed knowledge of Iran and said things like:

1. Islam is seen by younger people as the doctrine of a failed government staffed by a bunch of crooks.
2. And it's a foreign, Arab imposition, while the "real Iran" - the Achaenemids - were Zoroastrians, but quite willing to allow non-judgemental religious pluralism.
3. The IRGC is staffed by redneck losers, or by non-Iranians. (Iran has a separate "regular army" that all Iranian men must join as conscripts.)
4. There is a rather vast city-country divide, with people in the big Iranian cities largely non-religious or dabbling in Zoroastrianism, with the last stronghold of Islam being rural areas, particularly near Afghanistan (and around some of the religious cities).

Or:

Based on my interactions in person and online, most Iranians hate their terrible government and everything it stands for.

And this:

I don't support the US killing Iranians - too many innocents and future friends there.

Which I think is very wise.

But that doesn't answer the question of what is likely to happen in Iran now. The mass protests of the past couple of years showed that hundreds of thousands of Iranians hate the regime and its form of religion, but they were unable to budge it. Does that mean the anti-regime forces are weaker and less numerous than they seem from a western perspective? Or that the regime is willing to hold onto power using force and fanaticism? Experience seems to show that 25% is enough support to keep a dictatorial regime in power, especially when they are the most determined and violent part of the population.

I don't see the Iranian regime falling soon, but I wonder what happens as the people increasinging turn against the mullahs and their ideology.

Two Amazing Carpets from 16th-Century Iran

Above, the Schwarzenberg Carpet in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar; below the Emperor's Carpet in the Met. The Emperor's Carpet was made in Iran but ended up belong to the Habsburg emperors of Austria.

Barack Obama's Girlfriends and the Red Line in Syria

Remember this?

In August of 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas — a nerve agent that causes lung muscle paralysis and results in death from suffocation.

The attack killed 1,400 men, women and children, and at the White House, officials asserted “with high confidence” that the government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible.

One year earlier, President Barack Obama had described Assad’s potential use of chemical weapons as “a red line” that would have “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war.

When Assad appeared to cross that line, Obama ordered the Pentagon to prepare to attack.

But of course Obama changed his mind, and instead of a massive air strike we got a deal whereby Assad handed a bunch of chemical weapons over to the Russians, and the mess in Syria ground on without much US intervention.

This event still looms large for many people: anti-government Syrians and their allies, many US military and foreign policy types, some Europeans who think it was US weakness in Syria that made Putin think we wouldn’t help Ukraine – I’ve seen this stated several times on Ukraine war Twitter – and the sort of people who think the best way to understand history is by psychoanalyzing world leaders.

Within that last category we find David Samuels. Samuels, a long-time Jewish journalist, uses an actually rather interesting interview with Obama biographer David Garrow to develop his theory that everything wrong with the Middle East is Obama’s fault. (Besides inequality, tech monopolies, and Lord knows what else.) Samuels traces Obama’s failure to stand up for Syria back to his false version of his break-up with one of his white girlfriends, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. 

Biographer Garrow tracked Jager down and got her version of their break-up, which Obama had described in Dreams from My Father. In both versions this had something to do with Obama’s turn toward blackness. But in Obama's version this was a “a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.” But it Jager's version the fight was about Obama’s  

refusal to condemn a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. . . . It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

Samuels claims that the invisibility of Jager and her account of the relationship was some sort of conspiracy among Obama-loving journalists, which to me sounds like a weird description of his time in office; was there anything that some conservative did not accuse him of? But this all goes much deeper:

I have never seen any evidence that Barack Obama has the slightest personal animus toward Jews as individuals. But from his denial of American exceptionalism, and his sourness toward Israel, going all the way back to Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s account of their breakup, there does seem to be an awareness of the underlying problem posed to his politics by Jews—that is, the problem posed by Jewish group survival and their continuing insistence on Jewish historical particularity.

It’s all about the Jews! 

Because, see, the Progressive narrative is all about the noble suffering of oppressed groups and the perfidiousness of their oppressors, the White Race. Jews screw this up by being both oppressed (in the general historical sense, and in the Holocaust) and oppressors (as wealthy people in the US who own buildings in black neighborhoods).

How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem.

So, I guess, in order to maintain the narrative that history is about oppressors and the oppressed, Jews have to be wished out of existence. And that, plus a generalized Progressivism, explains why Obama worked so hard to avoid war with the “antisemitic state” of Iran. Samuels thinks that Obama refused to bomb Syria because he wanted the Iran deal (the JCPOA) so badly, and he wanted the Iran deal so badly because he hated “American exceptionalism,” the Vietnam War, colonialism, and Israel, and was at best ambivalent about Jews.

The sheer amount of political capital and focus Obama put into achieving the JCPOA during his second term, to the near-exclusion of other goals, suggests that the deal was central to his politics. It also carries more than a whiff of the kind of politics in which the American Empire is seen not just as unexceptional, but also, in some ways, as actively evil. It was a politics born out of the confluence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, which saw a racist war abroad being used to protect a racist power structure at home. That old alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics made the Democratic Party that Obama positioned himself to lead—college-educated, corporate-controlled—seem cool, allowing it to use post-1960s radical ideology as a language to sell stuff.

This kind of history simply befuddles me. If only Obama had recognized antisemitism and not lied to himself about why he ditched Jager, we could have had a peaceful, democratic Syria! Besides less inequality and tech monopolies!

But it was not just Obama who did not want to intervene in Syria, it was the vast majority of Americans, including such Obama haters as Sarah Palin. One day of bombing was not going to change the war; to have any real impact we would have had to send in a massive force and remove the Assad regime. That was not going to happen, especially under a President whose whole campaign was focused on avoiding more Middle East wars.

As for war with Iran, I think that would have been a catastrophe on par with what Russia is experiencing in Ukraine.

I think the stuff Garrow dug up about Obama is interesting, and I agree that he is a strange person who has written two dishonest memoirs. But the history of the world doesn’t really depend on the psychological quirks of term-limited Presidents.

Islamic Art in the Cleveland Museum

The Wade Cup, Iran, Seljuk Period, 1200-1221 AD

Ink drawing of a dragon with a phoenix head by the Turkish artist Sahkulu, mid 1500s

Iznik dish with artichokes, c 1535-1540

Rustam kills the White Div, from Firdausi's Book of Kings, mid 1500s

Dragon-headed stand, Syria, 1200-1260

Mihrab (prayer niche) from Isfahan, Persia, mid 1500s, unless it is a 20th-century fake. If it is a fake it's pretty damn amazing anyway.

Dish from Nishapur, Iran, 819-1015

Illustration from a manuscript of the Book of Kings known as The Great Mongol, Iran, c. 1370-1500. Notice the Chinese porcelain prominently displayed outside the king's tent.

Detail of a brass ewer made at Khurusan in Iran, 1256-1352. Lots more here.

Horoscope of Prince Iskandar

Horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror. This horoscope shows the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar's birth on 25th April 1384. It was created in 1411 in Shiraz, Iran. The chief astrologer was Imad ad-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, but the names of the artists are not recorded. Huge file at wikimedia commons.

Sanctions Hurt People, not Regimes

Azadeh Moaveni and Sussan Tahmasebi have a piece in the Times today protesting that sanctions on Iran mainly hurt the very people who hate the regime most, middle class women.

A few weeks after the Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned “brutal men of the regime” in Tehran for oppressing Iranian women who were demanding their rights. “As human beings with inherent dignity and inalienable rights, the women of Iran deserve the same freedoms that the men of Iran possess,” Mr. Pompeo said. . . .

The decimation of Iran’s economy is unfolding in the lives of the very constituency that has been working for reform and liberalization, and in whose name Mr. Pompeo and other leading American officials speak: middle-class Iranian women. The slump is tearing away at their fragile gains in employment, upper management positions and leadership roles in the arts and higher education, while reducing their capacity to seek legal reforms and protections.

When the sanctions hit, Mahsa Mohammadi, a 45-year-old editor and language teacher in Tehran, was saving to pay for a graduate degree in education at a university in Istanbul. Her rent in Tehran doubled because of inflation, and she was forced to move with her young son to a small city with no cultural life.

Inflation continued rising; the rents doubled again. Ms. Mohammadi lost most of her income from English tutoring. No one could afford language classes anymore. She could then no longer afford even the small city. She moved to a cheaper, conservative hamlet near the Caspian Sea where people look down on divorced mothers. Studying abroad is now an increasingly elusive dream.

“All our demands and hopes have whittled away,” she said. “The pressure is unbearable.”

The problem with using sanctions as a weapon against repressive regimes was laid out by George Orwell in 1984. Orwell's mega-states fight endless wars against each other, partly to whip up patriotism but partly to use up resources that would otherwise lift the populace out of poverty and therefore out of their complete dependence on the regime. Digging and refilling enormous holes, he wrote, would work just as well, but war was more plausible.

Many social scientists have said the same thing more analytically: poverty helps thugs stay in power, because when resources are scarce they control the only path to a decent material life.

On the other hand we tried to opposite tack with China, thinking that trade and openness and rising incomes would moderate their regime, and that hasn't worked very well, either.

I am not sure where this leaves us, since I think war with Iran would be disastrous for everyone. Perhaps admitting that events in other countries are not really something we can or should try to do something about.

The Mantis Man of Teymareh

Perusing the images from a major photographic survey of rock art in central Iran, archaeologists noted this figure. The pose is a common one called the "squatting man", except that this particular figure has extra limbs, two of which are hooked like those of a praying mantis. So they call this a Mantis Man. That's a bold claim because images that combine humans with insects are vanishingly rare before modern times. Still, could be. Scale in centimeters. The carving was likely done between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago. Below, more images of rock art in the Teymareh Mountain locale, from this site:

Thomas Friedman on the Assassination of Qassim Suleimani

Qassim Suleimani has been a hugely prominent figure in all of Iran's proxy wars across the Middle East, but that does not mean his policies have been wise or successful:

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.

The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.

I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.

First, often in the Middle East the opposite of “bad” is not “good.” The opposite of bad often turns out to be “disorder.” Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn’t mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran’s tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.

Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.

Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the “martyr.” The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won’t get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran’s wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.

And yes, the morning after, America’s Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani’s death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.

The real tragedy of four decades of US-Iran conflict is that none of it was much wanted by the citizens of either county. There is no reason for the US and Iran to fight, except that intense mutual suspicion has made peace impossible, leaving various opportunists on both sides to advance their careers by stirring up trouble.

As for Suleimani himself, I think he is best remembered by some of his own words:

The battlefield is mankind's lost paradise – the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest. One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise – the battlefield.

The Gorgan Wall

At the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea, near the modern border of Iran and Turkmenistan, a narrow plain separates the mountains from the sea. This plain, its width varying from 50 to 200 kilometers (30 to 130 miles), has long been a route of invasion. Alexander the Great came this way, as did the sons of Genghis Khan and many others.

So it is hardly surprising that at some point a wall was built  across this plain. There is little stone on the Caspian plain, and the wall was made of brick. In some places all the bricks were fired, but in most the core of the wall was mud brick and only the outer courses were fired. The wall is  6 to 10 m (20–33 ft) wide, and it is studded with at least 30 small forts at intervals of between 10 and 50 km (6 and 30 miles).

The wall can still be traced for 195 km (120 miles), beginning by the sea and following the Gorgan River across the plain to the mountains.

 Most of it is not well preserved; the walls of this fort are more or less intact because it was swallowed by sand dunes, protecting it from the weather and brick miners.

Until recently the history of the wall was lost. Medieval Persian historians called it Sadd-i-Iskandar, Alexander's wall, and associated it with the legend that Alexander the Great built a wall of bronze against the people of Gog and Magog. More recent theories have focused on the classical Persian empires, especially the Parthians and the Sasanians.

The wall was certainly built by some great power in a fairly short period of time – years or at most decades rather than centuries. The fortresses are all essentially identical, and along its length are the remains of brick kilns, all of them built to the same plan.

It was those kilns that allowed archaeologists to identify the wall's builders. In the early 2000s a joint British/Iranian team explored several of the kilns and took charcoal samples for radiocarbon dating, and the all came out in the 450 to 525 CE range. So this was a Sasanian creation. During that same study several forts were studied with magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar and they turned out to be densely packed with barracks and other buildings, leading the archaeologists to conclude that the Wall was defended by at least 30,000 men.

The Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE) was the great rival of the late Roman and early Byzantine states, a powerful fusion of ancient Persian civilization and new warrior blood from the steppes.They defeated the Romans on several occasions, most notably in 260 when they smashed the emperor Valerian's army at Edessa and took him captive (above). But like everyone else in Asia they had continual troubles with nomadic raiders from the steppes, including a long series of wars with the "White Turks," and the best guess is that this wall was built in part to keep them out.

The building of walls against outsiders is an ancient human habit; the Romans and the Chinese were also great wall builders, and there are many lesser-known examples. The walls built by ancient empires were never in themselves defensible against either determined attack or small parties of stealthy raiders, so historians have long debated their purpose. In part it must have been symbolic, impressing immigrants or attackers with the power and seriousness of the states that built them. No doubt they were also a complicating factor for any would-be attacker, for if men could scale them horses could not.

Walls that stretch across the landscape always make me marvel at the sheer energy of our species. Since ancient times we have thrown our surplus strength into monumental building of a hundred kinds – walls, tombs, temples, canals, roads – remaking the earth in ways that would surely have astonished our ancestors of 10,000 years ago. It also fascinates me that we can forget so quickly who built these great works and why. That, it seems, is less important than the sheer fact of their existence, standing as monuments to our power to challenge the gods.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the US State Department

Much of Middle Eastern politics these days is dominated by the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional leadership. One of the few novel things about Obama's foreign policy was a desire to move away from blind support of Saudi Arabia and prod both parties toward accommodation. Once the issue of the Iranian nuclear program had been dealt with, Obama wanted to move toward recognizing Iran as a normal nation and try to peacefully resolve their conflicts with the Saudis and others. Obama disliked the Saudi leadership and resented the assumption that he should always support them despite their horrible record on human rights and billions they have spent exporting fundamentalist Islam around the world.

The Trump administration has gone back to treating the Saudis as close allies and strongly taking their side in the rivalry with Iran. Other than his habit of storming around the world irritating everyone, this may be the most noteworthy thing about Trump's foreign policy so far. (I'm not convinced that his ramblings about NATO will amount to anything in the end.) He has gone back  to the Bush administration line that Iran is an "evil" nation we need to oppose at every turn. Which makes this little incident at the State Department yesterday interesting.

Dave Clark, a reporter for Agence France Presse, asked acting assistant secretary Stuart Jones a pointed question about President Trump criticizing Iranian democracy while standing next to officials of Saudi Arabia—not exactly a beacon of democracy itself. "How do you characterize Saudi Arabia's commitment to democracy?" he asked. Is democracy a barrier against extremism?

The response, as you can see in the video at the link, was 19 seconds of complete silence.

In truth Saudi Arabia is a family dictatorship and they have regularly opposed democracy in other countries as well (Iraq, Egypt). Iran's elections are far from perfect but at least they have elections. I'm not going to carry water for the Iranian regime, which is a corrupt, violent theocracy – but then so is Saudi Arabia's. It seems to me that our long-term interest is best served by making peace between them, and I don't understand why we should waste any effort helping one over the other.

UPDATE

Here is Rod Dreher on the same scene:

To be fair to him, there is no answer that is both honest and consistent with US policy. Which tells you something about US policy.

Interesting Trump Administration Announcement about Iran

Without fanfare, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just sent a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan certifying that Iran is complying with the terms of the nuclear deal.

Trump and many other Republicans have denounced the deal as little short of  treason, but in power they are finding that they have to live with it. The sanctions on Iran only worked because they were supported by Europe, China and Japan, and none of those countries would put their sanctions back in place unless definitive evidence emerged of Iranian cheating. So until the Iranians do something flagrant on the nuclear front, the US has little choice but to stick with the deal. Which anyway seems to be working, in the sense that it makes it much harder for Iran to accumulate enriched uranium.

Of course we have lots of other issues with Iran – Syria, Yemen, terrorism, anti-Israel rhetoric – so the political conflict will go on, and the chance of a shooting war remains. But the situation is much less dangerous than before the Obama administration's deal was made.

Boeing, Iran, and Trump

Here's a challenge for the incoming president:

Boeing announced a $16.6 billion deal on Sunday to sell planes to Iran, which for decades had been economically blacklisted by the United States. The company instead chose to emphasize how many jobs the sale would support.

“Today’s agreement will support tens of thousands of U.S. jobs” associated with the production and delivery of the planes, Boeing said in its news release.

So does Trump care more about the jobs at Boeing or the tough line he wants to take with Iran?

As with most subjects, Trump has said contradictory things about his attitude toward the nuclear agreement with Iran. On the one hand he has promised to tear it up on day one, and some of his advisers are on record as saying the same thing. But at other times he has said that the right approach is not to shred the agreement but to enforce it, and he has mentioned his own experience at buying into existing contracts and finding ways to get more out of the other parties from the fine print.

This is one of the areas where I have absolutely no idea what Trump actually intends, and that makes me nervous. But it also allows room for hope that he will tone down the saber-rattling if that allows him to pose as the savior of thousands of jobs.

Tile, Iran, 17th Century

Anti-American Posters in Iran

Pictures posted by Moose and Hobbes after a recent trip to Iran.

Which Leading Republican Presidential Candidate Would Defend the Nuclear Deal with Iran?

Donald Trump. As he said, "I'm a deal guy."

I should note that while Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina have promised to tear up the deal on "day one," Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Rand Paul have clearly said  that they wouldn't, and Jeb Bush has been noncommittal. So there is a diversity of views within the party on this one. I just find it striking that while Trump sometimes comes across as completely crazy there are issues on which he makes much more sense than "establishment" politicians like Rubio.

Not Taking Yes for an Answer

This week, the UN certified that Iran was keeping its side of the nuclear agreement -- dismantling centrifuges, pouring concrete into their proposed plutonium reactor site, shipping most of the enriched uranium abroad. As a result, most sanctions were lifted, and Iran's $100 billion in frozen assets unfrozen. When American sailors mysteriously wandered into Iranian waters, they were detained but freed after 24 hours. Four Americans imprisoned in Iran on dubious pretexts were freed in a prisoner exchange.

This all seems like good news to me, wonderful evidence that diplomacy sometimes works. But on the Republican campaign trail, and in Israel, somehow it is yet more evidence of Iranian perfidy and American weakness. Marco Rubio can stand for many:

This nuclear deal and the appeasement that has accompanied it will not improve Iranian behavior. Just the opposite—it rewards bad behavior. It teaches the world a simple lesson: when challenged, America backs down and abandons its allies.

Sigh. If dismantling centrifuges and pouring concrete into reactor sites isn't good behavior, what would be? It is certainly true that Iran continues to oppose certain American allies, but damnit somebody should be opposing Saudi Arabia's criminal bombing campaign in Yemen, and Bahrain's crude oppression of its Shiite majority. Iran does support Hezbollah, but on the other hand they also actively oppose the Islamic State, which is more than anybody can say for Israel.

We've seen the result of go with your gut, good guys vs. bad guys, shock and awe methods in the Middle East, and it isn't pretty. From what they are saying, all the leading Republicans want to repeat the mistakes W made in Iraq, and that Obama and Hillary made in Libya: more intervention, more bombs, more fighting, leading to more instability. The Islamic State is scaring people just like al Qaeda once did, but we must not react with stupid violence. We know where that leads. We need more diplomacy, not less, and more engagement with anyone who can help hold back the chaos.

Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah

Shirin Neshat is a contemporary Iranian artist, born in 1957. She came to the United States to study in 1974 and after the revolution she decided to stay. She returned to Iran for the first time in 1990, making several trips before she was banned from coming back in 1996. These images were created in 1993-1997, an artistic response to the way her homeland had been transformed by fundamentalism.

Neshat is a westernized woman but a Muslim.

Her works mainly explore gender issues in the Islamic world, particularly the various dimensions of women’s experience in contemporary Islamic society. The Iranian national identity in the twenty-first century is deeply rooted in the past and these women cannot ignore their cultural identities. Neshat believes that the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran led many Iranian women to become “brainwashed and submissive.” One of the themes of Neshat is to show how the compulsory veiling law in 1983 shows the power of Islamic laws placed significant limitations on Iranian women both in private and public domains.

The calligraphy is Persian poetry by Tahereh Saffarzadeh (1936-2008), perhaps Iran's most prominent female poet of the twentieth century. These verses describe the role of Iranian women as supporters of the war effort against Iraq in 1980-1988.

These fascinating, disturbing images are very controversial both in Iran and in the west, and there has been a huge amount of argument about how they should be interpreted. They certainly rattled my mind when I first saw them.