What would you do if the political movement you are supportive of suddenly insists that they saw their leader’s face on the moon? And what if questioning it meant that you suddenly weren’t a “true believer?” In Tehran Blues, Kaveh Basmenji talks about an incident that happened during the Iranian Revolution.
‘How could you not see that? Everybody saw his face on the moon last night!’ In the summer of 1978, as a seventeen-year-old high-school boy, my jaw dropped to hear this remark from a classmate who excelled in all the empirical sciences. He was talking about seeing on the moon the portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the shah’s arch enemy, and a man who would shortly become the omnipotent leader of an Islamic Revolution that rocked Iran and the whole world, and laid the foundations of the first religious state in ages. To the present day, Iranian intellectuals still blame each other for having ‘fallen in such a trap’. In those days, however, anyone who openly doubted having seen the great man’s portrait on the moon would be at the receiving end of derisive looks and sarcastic remarks.
A few years ago I mentioned this story to a guest speaker at Beeson Divinity School who is an Iranian Christian. I’ll never forget that he said, “I remember being a kid and believing that I saw it!”
To be fair, Khomeini eventually denied it and the revolution would have happened without it, but it’s still worth reflection. It would be easy to say, “I can’t believe how stupid they were!” But I believe this response is naive. The Shah had devolved from a leader who modernised the country into a despot who used a system of secret police to terrify the country. When people are desperate and someone arrives on the scene who they believe is the answer, there’s not much limit to what we are often willing to believe.
As I was researching Iranian history for Arman’s Freedom, I couldn’t help but wonder, “What was it like for those who wanted Khomeini to overthrow the Shah, but were skeptical of the claim about his face on the moon?” After all, if they doubted it, they were deemed as an “unbeliever.” The short teaser below is from a chapter entitled, “Man on the Moon.”
- A few academic resources about the moon incident below:
- Researchgate
- Association for Iranian Studies
- Academia.edu
David Parks 