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| Ruzbeh Saadati |
I am a child of a village. Our people are Shafi’i Muslims and Turkish. We have lived through layers of discrimination and humiliation—starting with the absence of basic infrastructure like roads, gas, and schools in our village, and extending to the everyday insults we endure in the cities. Even in the interrogation rooms of Tabriz, the guards found ways to demean us. I remember one waking me at two or three in the morning, saying, “Don’t sleep like Omar”—a sentence that made sleep impossible, replacing rest with unease.
In 2013, while imprisoned in Ahar, a small city in Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province, I refused to take part in the mandatory group prayer. The ward officer responded by sending me to the prison yard and threatening, “İndi səni şiə elərəm”—“Now I will make you a Shiite.” He stormed toward me, face red with fury. It was the Turkish activists who stepped between us, bearing the weight of responsibility. Apparently, the officer was determined to grant me paradise—by force if necessary. An hour later, I was called into the guardroom. There, in the prison director’s office, handcuffed, I was beaten by the duty officer and a soldier. The scar left by the handcuffs—an imprint of defiance—still sits between my eyebrows.
These forms of violence, as brutal as they are, remain temporary. The deeper pain lies elsewhere. It is more enduring and harder to explain—often even to those who appear to share our struggles. Some friends, seeing me as someone who isn’t conventionally religious, found my resistance meaningless. But what mattered wasn’t whether I was religious. What mattered was that the intelligence officer in Tabriz and the prison guard in Ahar believed I was—and they humiliated me for it. That alone was reason enough to resist. That alone made it real.
The women of our village bear an even more complex and layered form of suffering—one that we men cannot fully grasp, much less articulate. At best, we can speak to the pain we share; the rest remains beyond our reach. These women are imprisoned both by the traditions that govern their homes and by the state’s patriarchal, homogenizing policies. If we are victims, they are greater ones. And their voices must be heard.
In all this, our position toward those in power is clear: the state, its institutions, and its beneficiaries thrive on our marginalization. That is why they neither listen nor see. But the problem doesn’t end with the state.
Even among those critical of the current system, true understanding is rare. Some dismiss our identity and attachments as mere fanaticism, while they themselves proudly display their own heritage and authenticity. Others, who’ve only read about justice and oppression in books, adopt a pose of empathy from ivory towers. Their command of abstract ideas gives them the illusion that they understand our condition better than we do. And from that illusion comes the arrogance to dictate when, where, and how we may speak—presuming they know what's in our best interest.
But we—all of us who have been treated as “the other”—do not need instruction. We need to be heard.
Telling our story—our version of reality—is the first and most essential step. It must be listened to. Only through this can both the storytellers and the listeners begin to build a shared understanding of the present, and imagine a different future. Any obstacle placed in the way of this narrative is not neutral—it is an act of complicity with injustice. It helps preserve the status quo.
Change begins the moment silenced stories are spoken aloud. When words become a bridge between disconnected lives. The future becomes possible only when denied experiences are given voice—because real alternatives emerge from within these narratives of pain and resilience, not from political promises.