Walking through central London as part of the Free Iran protest movement a couple of Sundays ago, I kept noticing the faces of bystanders. There was certainly very little in the way of support. But equally, open hostility wasn’t the predominant response either. Many of the expressions were marked by something harder to discern – a kind of consternation, an ill-disposed bemusement, as though what was in front of them couldn’t quite be metabolised, not without a certain level of discomfort anyway.
The marchers, among them actual survivors of imprisonment and torture, were carrying the traditional Iranian lion-and-sun alongside the flags of America and Israel. They have been calling for the same freedom that Britain has, for the longest time, claimed to represent in the world. And yet there on the faces of onlookers was not recognition, but something else entirely.
I have spent a great deal of time with the Iranian diaspora. I have photographed them during their Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations in Golders Green, at the permanent encampment outside the Iranian Embassy in Knightsbridge, and at their Sunday protests on Whitehall, where they gather outside Downing Street, calling on the government to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). They are, in my experience, some of the most serious and clear-eyed people living in the UK at the moment. They have seen political Islam from the inside, not as a theoretical proposition but as a lived system of repression and coercion. A system that has disappeared friends, imprisoned family members and attempted to overwrite a truly great civilisation. The country of Hafez and Rumi has in their exile become a byword for extremist and authoritarian terror and a nation that is now ranked 145th out of 148 for the treatment of women. Some of these protesters literally have the scars.
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