The African Roots of Iran's Islamic Revolution

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[00:00:00]There is a word.

[00:00:01]It echoed through the streets of Tehran in 1979.

[00:00:05]It appeared on revolutionary posters. It was written on walls.

[00:00:10]Ayatollah Khomeini spoke it in his sermons. It became the vocabulary of one of the most consequential political revolutions of the 20th century. The word means the oppressed, the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth.

[00:00:23]What almost no one knows, in Iran or anywhere else, is that this word did not come from the Quran.

[00:00:30]It did not come from Persian poetry. It did not come from Ayatollah Khomeini himself. It came from a black man from Martinique who died 18 years before the revolution he helped to ignite. His name was Frantz Fanon.

[00:00:43]This is the story of how his ideas, and the ideas of other black thinkers from the African diaspora, shaped the most powerful nation in the Middle East.

[00:00:53]And why that connection, buried for decades, may be the most important hidden history of the modern world.

[00:00:59]Black history shapes modern Iran. The people history forgot. Africa in Iran for 2,000 years. Before we can talk about ideas, >> [music] >> we have to talk about people. Because the connection between Africa and Iran is not only intellectual, it is physical, it is ancestral, it is in the soil of southern Iran, and in the music that rises from it.

[00:01:22]Between the 7th and [music] 19th centuries, an estimated 2 million Africans were brought to the Persian Gulf region through the Indian Ocean slave trade. They came from what is now Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan. Many ended up in Iran. Their descendants are called Afro- Many ended up in Iran. Their descendants are still there.

[00:01:43]Today.

[00:01:45]In the southern provinces of Hormozgan, Bushehr, Sistan Baluchestan, and Khuzestan, communities of Afro-Iranian people, carrying within their culture something that has survived 2,000 years and the eraser of official history.

[00:01:59]Historian Behnaz Mirzai, one of the few scholars to have studied this community systematically, estimated that in some southern Iranian provinces, 10 to 15% of the population is of African descent. "They have no knowledge of their own past," she said.

[00:02:15]"The history is lost."

[00:02:17]The healing ceremony called Zar, still practiced in southern Iran, exists today in Tanzania and Ethiopia. The same ritual.

[00:02:25]The same purpose.

[00:02:27]Practiced on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean.

[00:02:30]Not because someone taught it to both places, because the people who carried it across the water brought it in their bodies. Everything else was taken.

[00:02:37][music] Slavery was not abolished in Iran until 1929, within living memory. Within the lifetime of people whose grandchildren are alive today.

[00:02:48]And yet this history appears in no Iranian school textbook.

[00:02:51]The census does not track racial categories. The story has been officially erased, but the music survived. The ceremony survived. The people survived. Africa was in Iran before any idea connected them.

[00:03:05]Before any intellectual wrote anything.

[00:03:08]Africa was already there in the bodies, the rhythms, and the memory of people whose history the state does not acknowledge. Frantz Fanon, the man from Martinique, who changed Iran. July 20th, 1925.

[00:03:22]Fort-de-France, Martinique. A French Caribbean island.

[00:03:27]A boy is born.

[00:03:28]His parents name him Frantz Omar Fanon.

[00:03:31]He would grow up to be many things.

[00:03:33]A soldier who fought for France in the Second World War.

[00:03:37]And came home to a France that did not see him as equal.

[00:03:41]A psychiatrist who studied the relationship between colonialism and mental illness.

[00:03:45]A revolutionary who joined Algeria's war of liberation.

[00:03:49]And a philosopher who, before he was 40 years old wrote a book that would outlive him by more than half a century.

[00:03:57]By 1961 as Algerian fighters were dying for independence as France was deploying helicopter gunships against the liberation movement, Fanon was dying.

[00:04:08]He had been diagnosed with leukemia. He was 35 years old. He had months to live and he was writing at extraordinary speed, dictating to his wife when he was too weak to write the book that would become his testament.

[00:04:23]He died on December 6th, 1961.

[00:04:26]The book was published 3 weeks before his death.

[00:04:29]The Algerian revolution he had fought for succeeded 6 months later in 1962.

[00:04:35]He never saw it.

[00:04:36]But his ideas, through a chain of connections he never imagined, would go on to reshape a country he had never visited in a language he did not speak through a revolution that occurred 18 years after his death.

[00:04:49]The bridge Ali Shariati and the letters Fanon never expected.

[00:04:55]Ali Shariati was born in 1933 in the city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran.

[00:05:01]His father was a progressive Islamic intellectual and a founding member of an underground movement supporting Iran's nationalist leader Mossadegh the man the CIA and British intelligence had overthrown in a coup in 1953.

[00:05:14]Shariati arrived in Paris in the early 1960s.

[00:05:18]It was the height of the anti-colonial moment. Jean-Paul Sartre was writing.

[00:05:22]Simone de Beauvoir was writing. And across the city, students from France's colonies, Algerians, West Africans, Caribbean intellectuals, were debating the future of the colonized world. The 1979 revolution happened 2 years after Ali Shariati died >> [music] >> in 1977, aged only 44, before he could see the revolution he had helped intellectually prepare.

[00:05:46]But his ideas were already everywhere.

[00:05:48]While Shariati was translating Fanon's work A Dying Colonialism into Persian, he did not just translate.

[00:05:56]He wrote to Fanon.

[00:05:58]He corresponded directly with the man whose ideas were changing his understanding of Iran.

[00:06:03]And Fanon wrote back.

[00:06:05]Fanon was cautious. He feared, and he said this directly to Shariati, that the spirit of sectarianism and religion may result in a setback for a nation that is negated in the process of becoming.

[00:06:18]He worried that replacing one form of authority with another, even a religious one, would not produce the liberation he was writing about.

[00:06:26]He wanted something more radical, more genuinely from the people. But Shariati had a different vision.

[00:06:33]He believed that for Iran, specifically, Islamic tradition was not the obstacle to liberation. It was the vehicle for it. That the people of Iran could only be mobilized if the language of liberation spoke in terms they already understood and honored. They disagreed.

[00:06:49]They wrote letters. They debated across the Atlantic.

[00:06:53]And then Fanon died in December 1961.

[00:06:57]And Shariati continued alone, carrying the dialogue forward in Persian into the heart of Iranian intellectual life.

[00:07:05]Here is what Shariati did.

[00:07:07]He translated two of Fanon's major works into Persian, The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism.

[00:07:14]And in translating The Wretched of the Earth, he faced a problem that became a solution. The French title, Les Damnés de la Terre, the damned, the wretched.

[00:07:24]In translating this into Persian, Shariati could not find a word that carried the same moral and political weight.

[00:07:31]So he looked to the Quran.

[00:07:33]In the Quran, there is a word for those who are crushed by power, those who are oppressed and downtrodden.

[00:07:40]The Quran calls them mustadafin. When the Shah banned Shariati from public speaking, his lectures were recorded on cassette tape. Thousands of copies were made. They moved through Iran like a secret. In bazaars, in mosques, in university dormitories, young Iranians were listening to a man who told them, "Your religion is not a source of shame.

[00:08:02]Your culture is not inferior. The West is not a model. You have your own tradition of liberation, and it is called mustadafin."

[00:08:11]Ali Shariati died in 1977, aged 44, two years before the revolution. He never saw what his translation built. 1979, Fanon's name on the walls of Tehran. The revolution of 1979 was one of the most photographed events of the 20th century.

[00:08:29]Every image has been studied. Every banner, every slogan.

[00:08:34]Historians who examined the posters of the 1979 revolution found something that has almost never been covered in mainstream Western media. On the walls of Tehran, the name of Frantz [music] Fanon, his photograph, the phrase "Our brother, Frantz Fanon", a man from Martinique, [music] who died in 1961, whose face appeared on the walls of Tehran in 1979, called "Our brother", by people who had built a revolution partly on his ideas, translated through Shariati, spoken in the language of Shia Islam.

[00:09:10]Five weeks after the revolution was consolidated, on November 4th, 1979, Iranian students stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran. They took 66 Americans hostage. The crisis lasted 444 days, and within days of taking the hostages, the Iranian students made a decision. They released all African-American hostages and all female hostages immediately. The reason they gave, solidarity with oppressed minorities inside the United States.

[00:09:42]They were making a distinction on camera to the world between the American government and the Americans who were also victims of that government.

[00:09:50]That analysis, the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized within the same country, comes directly from the intellectual tradition of Fanon. In 1984, Malcolm X 5 years after the revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a postage bearing the 5 years after the revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a postage stamp bearing the image of Malcolm X for the Universal Day of Struggle Against Race Discrimination, an African-American Muslim activist assassinated in New York in 1965, honored on an Iranian government stamp in 1984.

[00:10:27]What the dialogue produced and what it got wrong.

[00:10:32]Now, I want to do something that documentaries about big ideas rarely do.

[00:10:37]I want to tell you what went wrong or at least what remains genuinely contested. Fanon worried about it himself.

[00:10:45]In his letter to Shariati, in that correspondence across the Atlantic, he said he feared that any ideology that replaced one authority with another would not produce the liberation he imagined.

[00:10:57]Not even Islam.

[00:10:59]He wanted something more uncertain, more experimental, more authentically built from the bottom up.

[00:11:05]And from one perspective, he was right to worry.

[00:11:09]The revolution of 1979 did overthrow the Shah. It did end a monarchy that had used American backing and SAVAK, its secret police, to torture and imprison thousands of Iranians.

[00:11:21]It did produce one of the most extraordinary popular mobilizations in the history of the 20th century. And it also produced an Islamic republic that restricts the rights of women, that executes dissidents, that has itself been accused of human rights abuses on a systematic scale.

[00:11:37]Mustadafin, the oppressed for whom the revolution was made, did not all become free.

[00:11:44]The Black Panthers in America had a similar relationship with Fanon.

[00:11:48]They made his ideas famous. They handed The Wretched of the Earth out at rallies. They popularized him globally.

[00:11:55]And they too, in some of their internal politics, reproduced forms of the hierarchy and violence that Fanon had been trying to escape.

[00:12:04]Fanon's ideas were a diagnostic, the most precise available in the mid-20th century. What people built on that diagnosis, that was always going to depend on who was building and what they brought with them.

[00:12:16]Why this history matters today.

[00:12:19]Here is what this history asks of us.

[00:12:22]We have been taught to think of black history and Middle Eastern history as separate stories, as different chapters in different books, as topics that belong in different university departments and different documentary series.

[00:12:34]This history says otherwise. The Afro-Iranians have been in southern Iran for 2,000 years. They are carrying East African music and healing ceremonies in the body of Persian culture, erased from every official record, alive in every performance.

[00:12:50]Frantz Fanon, a black man from the Caribbean, gave Iranian revolutionaries the conceptual framework to understand their own oppression.

[00:12:59]Not because he was trying to, but because the diagnosis of colonialism he wrote in his dying months was so precise that it described what was happening in Iran as clearly as what was happening in Algeria.

[00:13:11]Malcolm X, the son of a Garveyite preacher from Nebraska, was honored with a postage stamp in Tehran 19 years after his assassination.

[00:13:21]Because the people who had built a revolution recognized in him the same fire that had moved through their own streets.

[00:13:27]These are not coincidences. They are not footnotes. They are the record of something that the people in power never intended and never expected. The colonized talking to each other across oceans, across centuries, across languages finding in each other's struggles the words for their own.

[00:13:46]The word mustadafin, still used in Iran today.

[00:13:50]It is in the founding documents of the Islamic Republic.

[00:13:53]It is spoken from podiums and minarets.

[00:13:56]It is taught in schools.

[00:13:58]Most Iranians who use it do not know it comes from a Caribbean man who died in 1961.

[00:14:04]Most black people who study Fanon do not know their intellectual ancestor helped shape a revolution in Farsi.

[00:14:11]This documentary exists to close that gap.

[00:14:14]Even a little.

[00:14:15]Even for a moment.

[00:14:17]Because the history of resistance, the full history, not the fragment we are allowed belongs to all of us. And if we knew it all of it we would understand how the world actually works.

[00:14:29]Not how the powerful say it works.

[00:14:32]But how it actually works. Through ideas that cross oceans. Through words translated in hope. Through people who found each other across every barrier that was built to keep them apart.