David Sassaman

Essay 2 Draft

English 101

July 28th, 2009

Fear Lulls the Mind to Sleep

When you sleep, you stop thinking. When you stop thinking, you leave

yourself vulnerable to being controlled. Then to combat being controlled, one must

think for themselves. This is what Marjane Satrapi’s grandmother and many other

Persians believed in the 1980’s, according to Persepolis 1 and 2. They knew this

because in the 1980’s Iran perverted and abused religion to impel its followers and

require its citizens to think and do its will, deceitfully.

Iran perverted the Islamic religion to meet the desires of those in power,

which effectively became a tool they used to exert control over the Iranian people.

We see this when Marjane questions the changing clothing regulations decreed by

the traditionalist university administration; she asks, “Is religion defending our

physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?” (Satrapi, “Persepolis 2” 143). The

authorities are changing the rules not because of new discoveries in decency, but

because they wish to repress the students and withhold their “individual and social

liberties” (“Persepolis 2” 91).

They then abuse this modified religious device by forcing it on the nation, the

brunt of which is felt by the women. The Women’s Branch of the Guardians of the

Revolution was added in 1982 to control women’s rights, identity, and equality by

“explaining the duties of Muslim women” so as to “put us back on the straight and
narrow” (“Persepolis” 133). The regime directed schools, its faculty, its curriculum,

and who attended. Azar Nafisi says it this way:

“How well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was

not the quality of one’s work but the color of one’s lips, the subversive

potential of a single strand of hair? Could one really concentrate on one’s job

when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a

Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she

appeared to condone adultery?” (11).

The rights of everyone were heavily restricted, specifically in regard to alcohol,

parties, affiliation, entertainment (like music), unbiased news, outside (broadly

considered Western) influence, free speech, and so on. The bright red cherry on top

was that the government was pulling these strings from behind the absolute

covering of religion, subduing the people while blaming their heartlessness on god:

“It is not I who says it, it’s god” (Satrapi, “Persepolis 2” 144).

The powers that be in Iran impelled the already devout to comply by

declaring that it was the right thing to do, they were acting in accordance with

Islam, and that they would even receive blessings and rewards beyond imagination.

“They told the boys that if they went to war and were lucky enough to die, this key

would get them into heaven . . . They told him that in paradise there will be plenty

of food, women and houses made of gold and diamonds” (“Persepolis” 99-100). For

the non-Muslims, they were required to conform by the regime that enforced the

rules and doled out severe consequences for disobedience (as seen on page 51 of

Persepolis). To their shame, occasionally Guardians of the Revolution sentenced

punishment simply because the clout became amusing, much akin to a bully picking

on foes more feeble than he. (Page 135 in Persepolis 2 demonstrates this quite
well). Lord Acton accurately summed up 1980’s Iran in his 1880’s letter when he

proclaimed:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men

are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not

authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of

corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the

office sanctifies the holder of it” (Dalberg-Acton, 364).

The religious rulers committed all these heinous acts of inequality and

oppression deceitfully. By targeting gullible children and teenagers, they had great

success influencing tractable minds that were eager for validity, purpose, power,

and religious fulfillment.

“Every day I see buses full of kids arriving. They come from the poor areas,

you can tell… First they convince them that the afterlife is even better than

Disneyland, then they put them in a trance with all their songs... They

hypnotize them and just toss them into battle. Absolute carnage” (Satrapi,

“Persepolis” 101).

The key to paradise that the boy received earlier was given to the boys in school.

He was only 14. The public was inundated with religious slogans on the walls (“To

die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society” (“Persepolis” 115)), sixty-

five foot murals of martyrs adorned with slogans honoring them (“The martyr is the

heart of history,” “I hope to be a martyr myself,” “a martyr lives forever”

(“Persepolis” 96)), even streets were named after martyrs. Teachers indoctrinated

their pupils with verbal, textual and pictorial propaganda (“Persepolis” 19, 44, 144),

while the adults were force-fed tainted and at times fallacious news from biased

sources (“Persepolis” 15, 62, 111) while the administration kept a lid on honest
reporting (“Persepolis” 29) and outside [generally regarded as Western] influence.

Marjane said it well the first time she experienced satellite TV: “The satellite

antenna was synonymous with the opening up of the rest of the world. We could

finally experience a view different from the one dictated by our government”

(“Persepolis 2” 170).

“It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us

into cowards” (“Persepolis” 144) Marjane’s grandmother rightly says. The longer a

country’s leaders oppress its people, the closer they are to the lull of sleep, to

heartlessness, to inactivity because no one is thinking for themselves anymore.

They’ve forgotten how to be individuals and have been instead replaced by

autonomous robots, blindly following a perverse and abusive regime.