Interview
Author Mohammad Tolouei: Freedom will only come from Iranians themselves
‘In Iran, Israel’s reputation is so negative that no opposition group would dare march in favor of these attacks. Israel lacks the moral authority and political credibility to ignite a social movement in Iran.’
In Iranian writer Mohammad Tolouei’s The Encyclopedia of Dreams (just published in Italian by Bompiani in Giacomo Longhi’s translation), 30-year-old Ebrahim’s wife left him, and after a blind date arranged by his mother and aunt, he gets together with young Elham. Although the two form an unmarried couple – a taboo in the Islamic Republic – they travel together, sleep in hotels, and share an adventure that takes them south from Tehran, first to Isfahan and then to the Persian Gulf.
The journey itself is a voyage of discovery during which Ebrahim and Elham exchange life stories, implicitly reflecting on their country’s fate. Tolouei gracefully and empathetically explores his fellow citizens’ state of mind and their yearning for freedom and democracy, which emerges out of their life paths. He talks about a landscape of opposition to the ayatollahs’ regime that must now contend with Israel’s recent attacks on Iran.
At the moment of Israel’s first strike on Iran last Friday you were in Madrid, about to fly back to Tehran. How did you feel, and what was the reaction of your loved ones in Iran?
I was confused and disoriented. When I called my family and friends in Iran, they were just as confused. For the first two days everyone thought these were sporadic raids that would provoke some retaliation; from the third day on, people – especially in Tehran – were genuinely frightened. From what I could see, from the third day on, public opinion was pressing the government to respond to Israel’s attacks.
Besides halting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, Israel’s strike seems meant to spur “regime change.” Do you think that idea holds water? Could regime opponents use this situation to topple the ayatollahs?
So far that notion sounds more like a continuation of the plot in the TV series Tehran [an Israeli spy thriller] than something playing out in real streets. As far as I know, reality doesn’t look like that. In Iran, Israel’s reputation is so negative that no opposition group would dare march in favor of these attacks. Israel lacks the moral authority and political credibility to ignite a social movement in Iran, and its politicians have no idea who the Iranian people are. When the Defense Minister in Tel Aviv says Tehran’s population will pay for attacking Israel, he imagines he is talking to the defenseless people of Gaza.
Over the last decade, after reformists tried to democratize power, ultra-conservatives regained hegemony and repression worsened – most of all against the protests sparked by the killing of Mahsa Amini, which saw 500 people killed, and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. How strong is the opposition today, and where is it based?
I think the most important thing Westerners miss about Iran is how stratified social opposition is. At times it goes very deep and spills into street protests, driven by love of freedom. That notion of freedom encompasses many symptoms and demands that are shifting over time. I think it’s a proven fact that if people desire something deeply enough, sooner or later they get it. The government cracked down on those it believed linked to the “Mahsa movement,” yet in practice, on the streets, freedom from the hijab has taken root. That freedom is not “legal,” but it has become customary. Today the Iranian opposition is not made up of forces abroad; the diaspora voices its opinions but plays no real role in what is happening inside Iran. Right now, the urban middle class is the regime’s largest opponent.
In The Encyclopedia of Dreams you describe how an unmarried couple manages to skirt the regime’s restrictions on emotional life. Unable to be free in public, have many Iranians created their own way of living out their feelings while avoiding the regime’s control or repression? A kind of concrete “parallel world”?
Iran's urban middle class is educated, has extensive access to the Internet, considers itself similar to anyone else in the Western world, as it is today, and wants to have its own unique and individual lifestyle. In the years following the Revolution, people wanted to live their lives freely. Now, the most important thing to point out is that there is a gap between real life and the life approved by the authorities. Sometimes the gap is wide, sometimes small, but this gap has always existed. The biggest mistake the Iranian government has made is to want to impose a single lifestyle on everyone. It wants people to live as it wants them to. This causes people to hide their lifestyle or to behave one way in society and another way in their private lives, in their homes and personal spaces. This gap has always existed, but at times it has worsened. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement has highlighted how much this gap has widened. Although I think people always find a way to try to live as they wish.
In your novel, it is the middle class that is suffering most from limits on personal freedom and on feelings. Is the repression too strong for that pain to turn into open political opposition? And how would you describe the regime’s social foundations?
Freedom is not something the Iranian people will give up. The government has created a group of supporters, those who will support it to the end, marginalizing the others. In fact, any authoritarian government chooses a part of society as its social base and grants it extra-legal powers and privileges. In Iran, this obedient minority exists and is very loyal, given the privileges it receives. I don't think there has been a crisis here, but the number of people who believed in the government has decreased, and this is not limited to one year or the last few years. Over the years, from the student movement 25 years ago, through the Green Movement, after the attack on Flight 752, and up to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, each of these events has alienated part of the system's supporters. The reality is that the urban middle class has gradually transformed itself from a supporter of the Islamic Republic to its opponent. And this is the largest social class in Iran, the one that decides how it wants to live. The regime has a solid base among the upper and lower classes, but it has completely lost the urban middle class. And the latter desires life more than anything else. It wants to live, and it will certainly become an enemy of Israel because of the conditions the latter has now created that threaten this desire for life.
Elham, the female protagonist of your novel, is haunted by dreams of a twin sister who died in infancy. Is that a metaphor for what Iran became after 1979, when the revolution that toppled the Shah turned into a theocracy instead of the democratic republic so many had fought for?
In my view, this is the most important concept I wanted to express in the novel. Iran is a truly layered reality, both in its conscious and unconscious dimensions. It is very fluid and its needs change rapidly. Western analysts want to find a frame of reference to understand Iran, but I believe they are always behind Iranian society. Now everyone is talking about the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, but in Iranian society, people have absorbed these themes in practice. The face of Iran has really changed after this movement. Now people are looking for other things (which make up their lives), but they are still being analyzed according to the same criteria. In each of the dreams of the novel's protagonist, I tried to describe the social trends that emerged in Iran over a decade. Although there is continuity in these trends, it seems that people's lives are taking place on different planets. People fought for ideas that were stolen from them under the Shi’a regime, and this anger has manifested itself in different forms in different eras. Each of the dreams seems to represent the collective destiny of Iranians over several decades, a kind of collective sociology, public diary, or ethnography of collective desires.
Mahsa Amini’s death sparked worldwide outrage, yet one senses the protest movements lack the backing they would need in the West. How can we help those fighting for freedom inside Iran?
Iranians have long since stopped hoping for Western support. They feel history keeps leaving them alone at critical crossroads, while outside powers exploit them. As far as I can tell, the people believe in change from within and want to accomplish it themselves.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/mohammad-tolouei-in-iran-un-sogno-di-liberta-iscritto-nelle-vite on 2025-06-17