Roland Elliott Brown explains this image of President Obama and a friend, several stories high on a Tehran building by a major highway:
As Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd recalls in his 2012 book, The Ayatollahs' Democracy, Obama's 2008 presidential campaign inspired rumours in Iran that the senator from Illinois had Iranian roots. Some fans made much of his middle name – Hussein – which he shares with the central martyr in Shia theology, the prophet Muhammad's grandson. Others made an omen of his surname, observing that it sounds like Oo ba ma'st, or "He's with us", in Farsi.
The Tehran mural aims to invert this occult symbolism by recourse to Shia tradition. The villain Shemr belongs to the narrative of Hussein's martyrdom at the Battle of Karbala in 680, the trauma that split Muslims into Sunni and Shia denominations.
The Shia, or "Party of Ali" (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law) sought hereditary leadership of Islam. After the murder of the Caliph Ali, and the death of Ali's son and successor Hassan, Ali's younger son Hussein clashed for succession with the Umayyad Caliph Yazid, who sent Shemr's army to destroy Hussein and his followers. Shemr offered some of Hussein's supporters a "letter of protection" in exchange for betraying him, but they refused.
In the mural, Shemr extends a similar letter to the viewer, as he and Obama utter the words Ba ma bash – "be with us" – playing on the president's name, and insinuating that anyone who still likes Obama in the wake of tightening sanctions – or who advocates meeting American, EU, or International Atomic Energy Agency demands over Iran's nuclear programme to avoid conflict – is a traitor to the faith.
Obama, the state insists, is a "Hussein" unworthy of loyalty.Hmmm...Hated Abroad, Unwanted at Home.Read the full story here.
No comments:
Post a Comment