If you’d like to know the kind of people who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, there’s no better example than the villagers—the husband, his sons, and the citizens—of the remote stone-walled hamlet of Kupayeh who populate the vivid, at times horrifying, film called “The Stoning of Soraya M.”
Opening Friday across the United States, its arrival could not come at a more opportune moment, for gathered within this tale are all the characters whose today’s real-life homologues are parading across the world’s television screens (at least those outside Iran, where anything remotely accurate is being purged).
There’s Ayatollah Ali Khameini, masquerading as the venal, crooked mullah of the village, newly released from a felony stretch he was serving in jail after the Shah was overthrown and Islamic justice returned with the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini. Clearly, he sees the Koran he clutches in his crooked paw as his path to wealth, power, and, whenever he can, illicit sex extorted from any woman who seems sufficiently vulnerable or gullible.
There’s Ahmadinejad, in the form of Kupayeh’s mean-spirited, opportunistic mayor with a vicious streak—frightened of his own shadow and so easily intimidated by the local mullah and a husband who by day serves as a prison guard with all the lethal tools of power at his control and at night pursues the 14-year-old daughter of a death-row inmate.
Above all, there are the nasty, sniveling villagers who, on a command from the mullah, are fully prepared to launch into screams of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!) and turn into an unthinking vigilante mob bent on eradicating any vestige of humanity or justice.
Finally, of course, there’s Soraya herself—a martyr in her own right, a symbol of the slavelike oppression of women in the male-dominated society of “revolutionary” Iran—not unlike Neda Agha Soltani, whose murder on the streets of Tehran turned her into a martyred symbol of resistance. Soraya, like Neda, died in horrific circumstances believing to her last breath that each had done no wrong.
While Neda has become a worldwide talisman (or taliswoman) for the cause of freedom in Iran, the real-life Soraya is about to become, thanks to Cyrus Nowrasteh’s glistening tribute, a symbol of opposition to the truly barbaric practice of stoning—still a centerpiece of sharia law in the kinds of villages that maintain Ahmadinejad and his doppelganger Ayatollah Khamenei, the kinds of villages that are keeping their Islamic world safe for Muhammad.
The real-life Soraya, then only 35 years old, mother of two young girls and two boys, met her end on August 15, 1986, stoned to death by a stone-wielding mob in Kupayeh. Soraya was murdered (no other word will do) by the villagers among whom she had lived all her life. Her own father, her two sons, and her greedy, profligate husband, Ghorban-Ali, all threw the first stones. Iran, even today it seems, is a society where, the film points out quite directly, a woman assumed guilty needs two witnesses to prove her innocence while a man needs only two witnesses to accuse her of even the most heinous crime.
Fortunately, in Soraya’s case, there was a journalist to bear witness. As it happens, a Franco-Iranian writer, Freidoune Sahebjam, stumbled into the village the morning after Soraya was stoned to death on a totally trumped-up charge of adultery. The book he subsequently wrote, and which horrified much of the world, has been transformed into this gripping film. It will hardly help Khameini, Amadinejad, and their ilk make their case for a democratic Iran—free of coercion, where the rights of women and men receive equal respect before the law. After all, it’s their electorate who stoned Soraya M. to death. In this case, art truly imitates life.
David A. Andelman is the editor of World Policy Journal and The World Policy Blog. A veteran domestic and foreign correspondent and editor of The New York Times, CBS News, and most recently Forbes.com, he is the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.
