Abolfazl Ghadyani is an ageing revolutionary. He put his life on the line to make the Islamic Republic in Iran possible. He is now a political prisoner of the Islamic Republic. The day that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was having a global podium to denounce the dictatorial regime at the UN, as he called it, Abolfazl Ghadyani was subject to Ayatollah’s own dictatorial reign in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic. He could not attend the NAM meeting. He was not invited. But once he heard of the meeting and of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s speech, he wrote a public letter to him and had it published (original letter in Persian). This letter is not just to President Morsi, it is also to Egyptians at large, to the Egyptian revolutionaries who have just toppled a dictatorship, just as Iranians did more than 30 years ago, and by extension it is to all Arab revolutionaries who have made this magnificent Arab Spring possible. In this brief public letter, Ghadyani speaks from a position of experience, of struggle, of deep identification with the Egyptian revolutionaries. For he sees in them his own youthful image, the image of his own generation when more than 30 years ago they were full of identical aspirations and have now ended up with this catastrophe called the Islamic Republic. What Abolfazl Ghadyani says matters – for at the age of 67 he has spent his lifetime struggling for the formation of the very Islamic Republic that has now put him beyond bars. He is not the proverbial child of the revolution that is being devoured by it. He is among its founding fathers. To read the full article, click here.
A Persian letter to Arab revolutionaries
