Many Western media outlets and media personalities invite Mohammad Marandi on as an “intellectual” and an expert on Iran. He is a regime sympathiser whose role is to defend and whitewash the Islamic Republic’s crimes.
Listen to what he says in this video as he tries to normalise a barbaric law: “Many things that are in Shia fiqh might sound very odd when they’re presented in a particular way in the West, but it’s because they’re intentionally misrepresented.”
I’m not sure how a punishment such as lashing a woman, or any human being, can be “intentionally misrepresented”. What exactly is being misrepresented about lashing someone?
And let me be clear: those lashes are not “gentle”, as Marandi suggests. People subjected to flogging by the Islamic Republic have described severe pain and injuries afterwards. But even if they were somehow “gentle”, what difference would that make? We are still talking about the state strapping down a HUMAN BEING and beating them as punishment.
My main problem is not Marandi. Marandi is there to do a job, and he does that job very well, defending a theocratic regime responsible for the torture and killing of countless Iranians and for treating women as inferior for decades. My problem is with the Western media outlets who repeatedly give him a platform, question him softly as though “perhaps he has a point, let’s hear him out”, and invite him back again and again to repeat the same propaganda. Because this is exactly how Shia fiqh has been sold to Western audiences for years.
Every time a law or punishment is exposed for what it is, you are told you have misunderstood it. You are told it has been taken out of context. You are told it is “our” religion, “our” culture, “our” legal tradition, and that Westerners simply do not understand its nuances. The barbaric law that people like me were born to it and experienced it for years. The law that, us, Iranian women live with the consequences.
You do not make flogging less barbaric by calling it Shia fiqh. You do not make discrimination against women more acceptable by calling it culture. And you do not make brutality disappear by accusing those who expose it of “misrepresentation”.
Mario Nawfal