I can’t think when I last came across a book that opened with such disturbing words: “I am writing this preface in the final hours of my home leave. Very soon I will be forced to return to my prison … This time I was found guilty because of the book you are holding in your hands – White Torture.” That was last March. Narges Mohammadi, a leading Iranian political dissident, had been briefly released from jail because she had had a heart attack, followed by cardiac surgery. Now she is a prisoner again, facing 80 lashes and a total of more than 30 years behind bars. Part of her sentence will be spent in solitary confinement. “I declare once more that this is a cruel and inhumane punishment,” she writes. “I will not rest until it is abolished.”
Mohammadi builds up her campaign against solitary confinement partly with her own story, but mostly through interviews with 12 other Iranian women who have also experienced it. They come from different backgrounds and were jailed for a variety of things the Islamic republic regards as crimes: being a member of the Bahá’i religious minority, or a Sufi, converting to Christianity, supporting the People’s Mujahedin, or simply getting involved in protest movements.
One, Hengameh Shahidi, was given almost 13 years for complaining publicly about judicial corruption. After being released last year, she is still under medical treatment as a result of being in solitary confinement, and she has never been able to resume her normal life. “Solitary confinement can amount to torture,” a UN special rapporteur told the United Nations some years ago. White Torture demonstrates clearly how true that is.
Another of Mohammadi’s interviewees, Marzieh Amiri, is an Iranian journalist, imprisoned for trying to find out what had happened to a group of protesters. “I was returned to solitary confinement … At that moment I saw myself as mad, and I experienced a fear that was not the fear of the interrogator and the prison – I feared myself …. Your bedrock is the principle of social life, and the solitary cell takes it all away from you.”
Prisoners, especially women, are being treated with particular savagery in Iran at the moment. The regime has its back against the wall, as the country experiences yet another phase of sub-revolutionary upheaval. Past triggers were a blatantly stolen election (2009) and an unacceptable rise in the price of fuel (2019).
This time, the protests go to the very heart of the way people are obliged to live their lives under the Islamic republic. After the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody for not wearing proper hijab, the demonstrations have not been about the government’s crookedness or economic inadequacy; they have been about the way it tries to control people’s behaviour.
Almost every day, crowds come out on the streets to protest. Sometimes they attack public buildings. Sometimes they set fire to police cars. Mostly, though, they dance and sing and chant, and the women among them pull off their headscarves and shake their hair free as a sign that they are no longer bound by the state’s rules. But there is a heavy price to be paid for this taste of freedom. The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights says that as of 12 November, the police, army, and basij militia have killed at least 326 people, including 25 women and 43 children. The Islamic republic declares war on those who challenge it.
Will the demonstrators win? I think they must, at some stage, but not immediately. There is no discernible leadership to the protests, and if the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, President Raisi and the rest of their increasingly incompetent regime were sent packing, Iran would be thrown into utter chaos: worse, maybe, than the terrible period after the Shah was overthrown and there was near civil war between the new state and its extreme opponents.
What the present demonstrations show is the degree to which an elderly, ultra-rigid politico-religious system has long passed its sell-by date. Iran has a population of 85 million, half of them educated and outward-looking, and thoroughly aware how weird and antiquated their government is. The demonstrations are their response.
In Tehran in November 1978, with a million people in the streets chanting “Marg bar Shah!” and “Javid Khomeini!” (death to the Shah, long live Khomeini), I took refuge from the teargas and bullets in a shopping arcade, with an Iranian university professor. He tried to persuade me that even though the leader of the revolution was an exiled septuagenarian cleric, the new Iran would be advanced and decent and respected in the world.
“No more torture?” I asked. “Of course not.” Mohammed doesn’t write to me nowadays because he’s scared the authorities will read his emails; but he long ago confessed he had been grossly, almost childishly overoptimistic about the way the Islamic Revolution would turn out. The people in the streets today show something of the same innocence. When the rule of the ayatollahs comes to an end, will “white torture”, plus every other type of torture, vanish from Iran with them? I wish I thought it would.
• John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. His weekly programme, Unspun World, is on BBC Two, BBC World, BBC World Service and iPlayer. White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners is published by Oneworld (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
