Dancing with the Crying Eyes
I hate funerals back home. I was never a huge fan of weddings either, but funerals were, on the whole, another level of annoying for me. I found them hypocritical since the only people who gave a speech were the mullahs who had no idea about the deceased person and just got some money to deliver the most generic and AI-slop sounding speech ever, which is tiresome and monotonous as hell. However, considering that, at least on paper, Iran is an Islamic country with Islamic rule, it's extremely problematic to do anything other than invite a massive crowd to the mosque after the burial, even though many individuals don't count themselves as muslims and even if they do, they barely practice it.
The split between religion and the common people isn't a new idea in Iran. Yet, seeing many people reform the structure of a funeral is a remarkably impressive and, at the same time, gloomy thing to observe. I remember after the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement, some protesters were executed by the regime. The state media televised their "confessions", where they had to admit to their missteps and how much they were influenced by the "external enemies of the regime", seeking forgiveness from the great supreme leader. One of these forced confessions caught the attention of many viewers. Majidreza Rahnavard spoke against the "traditional" funerals. He asked the attendees of his funeral not to read the Quran on his grave, but to dance to music and be happy when he’s gone. Almost 3 years later, this is the same pattern that can be seen in numerous videos from the funerals of the victims of the regime's massacre in January. You notice how the parents are dancing while crying next to the grave of their children. The reconstruction of the purpose of funeral and life after death, bypassing the religious components, is just the tip of the iceberg of the ideological evolution of a muslim majority country in the late 80s to this date.
The videos from these funerals foster two contradictory sentiments inside me: On one hand, I have the absolute hatred for the regime and the despair coming from witnessing how many up-and-coming young people got murdered, and on the another I feel a weird sense of delight seeing the progress towards a "hopefully" less conservative and inflexible population. Indeed, this doesn't mean I stand against a certain religion or advocate for isolating the believers, as I genuinely don’t care about one’s religion as long as he/she isn’t trying to shove it down my throat, but I support the removal of religious laws and radicalism that have been torturing the Iranians for so long at this point.