From Persia with love
There is a photo circulating on social media that features what appears to be a young Iranian woman lighting a cigarette using a burning picture of the Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
It’s not clear where or when the photo was taken, but it’s an incredibly arresting image and it’s not the first time that smoking has been linked with freedom in the Middle East.
That’s not what I want to write about here, though, because whenever Iran is in the news my thoughts go back to 1978 when I briefly shared a flat with a young Persian student who was a keen supporter of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979.
I can’t remember his name but his English was good and whenever we saw him he was very friendly and polite. I say ‘whenever we saw him’ because neither I nor my fellow flatmates saw a lot of him. I don’t know what he was studying but unlike the rest of us he got up early to attend lectures and often returned late, when we were out. (We assumed he was in the library, studying.)
When he was in the flat – which was one of six in a three-storey block in the grounds of a large halls of residence – he tended to stay in his room, rarely venturing into the communal kitchen where we would be eating a healthy diet of baked beans, pasta and and drinking cheap beer.
Occasionally he would leave his door ajar. Like all our rooms it was very small with a single bed, built-in cupboard, desk and chair, plus a narrow book shelf on one wall, but he had decorated it so it resembled a small palace. There was also a smell of perfume, or incense, in contrast to my friend Dougie’s room where fermenting home brew gave it the aroma of stale ale.
Our man from Iran described himself as Persian and we understood he was at university in Britain on a scholarship paid for by the Shah’s government. And then, shortly after the Iranian revolution that saw the Shah overthrown and exiled, in January 1979, to Egypt where he died the following year, our flatmate disappeared, never to be seen again.
To this day I don’t know what happened to him and because we didn’t know him that well, and never socialised with him, we were not as curious as we might have been. I do however remember him describing how beautiful Iran is, especially in the mountains which came as a surprise to me because in those days I didn’t associate Iran with mountains, or snow.
I would therefore advise those online commentators who are disputing the authenticity of the young woman’s photo not to make rash judgements about the location just because there is snow on the ground. Either way, whether the photo was taken in Iran or Canada (as has been suggested), it’s still a remarkable, even iconic, image. As for my Persian flatmate, I won’t forget him either.
Home page photo credit: Tomas Ragina via iStock
