When The Revolution Comes

The women of Iran are up in arms over the government’s harsh new restrictions on feminine dress. Women who don’t adhere to the regulations mandating head scarves and modest clothing are threatened with jail, beatings and five years’ internal exile in some godforsaken donkey shit village in the country’s interior.

Iran, or Persia, as it has historically been known, is an ancient culture of extremely sophisticated refinement. Persian literature and poetry predates Islam and has informed all the cultures of the world, from India to Europe and beyond. The classic beauty and refinement of elegant, perfumed women of Persia have been celebrated worldwide for many centuries. This is one the lovely things that Hafiz, a fourteenth century Persian poet, had to say about the enchanting women of his land:

Send a bouquet of your face with morning breeze
Perhaps inhaling your scent, your fields we envision & trace.
May you live fulfilled and long, O wine-bearer of this feast
Though our cup was never filled from your jug or your vase.
My heart is reckless, please, let Beloved know
Beware my friend, my soul your soul replace.
© Shahriar Shahriari
Los Angeles, Ca
January 17, 2000


The whole western concept of romantic love and longing, which was transmitted to the French by the Spanish, had its origins in Arabic-language poetry influenced by the love poetry of the Persian Safavid Empire.

For the camel humping, flyspeck dotted imams and fundamentalist mullahs to believe that they can humiliate and debase these beauties by forcing them to dress like common fishwives or nomadic goat herders demonstrates how far divorced from reality they dwell.

For these animals to stifle the women of Persia, who are every bit as seductive as Helen of Troy or the great classical beauties of France and Italy, is a crime against humanity of the first magnitude. The fact that this is happening in Persia, a civilization celebrated for the magnificent beauty of its female creatures increases the enormity of the injustice, which, incidentally, has been completely overlooked by the hack journalists of the western press, neutered as they are by the stifling conformism of their profession.

The modern Persian woman favors French and Italian designer clothing, Hermes scarves, Gucci sunglasses and Shisedo cosmetics.

The vanity of the female is a force of nature akin to a hurricane or a tornado, and you interfere with it at your peril. Archeologists in Crete recently discovered the remnants of a gigantic factory dating back 5,000 years dedicated to the manufacture of – makeup!

Ancient Rome more than once tried to restrict extravagant displays of feminine vanity as an economy measure during wartime, only to face violent internal upheaval of enraged women demanding their jewelry, makeup and fancy togas.

As Chairman Mao was famously quoted for pronouncing, Women hold up half the sky. The men who are championing female repression are the same ones who insist on women caring for them and serving their supper. You never know when she’s going to feed you a nice soporific, wait until you are asleep and kill you and dismember you, as recently happened in New Jersey.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not here to defend all of female humanity. Normal people don’t interest me at all. I am only here to stick up for the elegant minority of women who look good in a pair of pink satin pedal pushers and Cuban heels, the kind who don’t even see me, except for the ones who disdainfully put a quarter in my cigar box and admonish me to get a haircut and lose some weight.

Ayatollahs of Iran, your day of judgment is fast approaching, and the coup de grâce will likely as not come at the hands of a woman!

When the revolution comes, the green crescent will be lowered and replaced by a Christian Lacroix cocktail dress. Fundamentalist judges will find themselves judged as defendants in their own courtrooms by female lawyers with their heads uncovered and their eyes shaded by Porsche-Carrera sunglasses. Imams will be paraded in the streets wearing pantyhose and Christian Dior lingerie which they had been found to be wearing all along under their religious vestments.

When the Revolution Comes!

Tags:   None

© All rights reserved.

Posted on 5/5/2007 ( Permanent Link )
Read 373 Times
 Send to Friend