Speech [Role of the Pahlavi dynasty in deterioration of Iran's ideas and morals; sacred mission of motherhood]

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

I would like to first thank all of you ladies and gentlemen, who work for the Communication Company. When we were in Paris, you were the ones who actually gave us direct and effective assistance. You were the ones who in your capacity brought us into contact with those in Iran and other places as easily as possible. Naturally, the issues that we raised or wrote about were immediately reflected in Iran while there was a full-scale strike in effect. All the same, you were working in the interest of the movement and, therefore, this makes me all the more thankful. I hope God grants you the utmost success and health, and you keep up your good work for the country and Islam.

What I need to impress upon you is the fact that one of the most horrible crimes perpetrated by the former regime in our country, which was of course under the direct orders of the heads and foreigners, was to alienate our ladies from the inseparable honor due to them in this Islamic society, under some superficially deceiving guise. This deception was not only aimed at the Iranian women but Iranian men as well.

Those authorities in the former regime, even ever since Rida Shah came to power, were expressly at work to give a beautiful facade to different evil and harmful things and called them modernity and progress. These evil deeds were coming directly through the orders of foreign experts that had to be put into effect in this country. They used to make a lot of noise through their propaganda machines to make sure our people thought of what they were doing as being in the interests of services to the country. What in fact they had in mind was to ensure that people were deprived of enlightenments. Our younger generations were deprived of the sort of education badly needed by the country under some pretext, while, in the same breath, they were encouraging the young people to patronize the ever increasing debauchery centers, where nothing but corruptive things were practiced. In this manner, they were fast at work to send our young peoples' brainpower to waste and make the young people so corrupt as to render them useless to the progress of the nation as a whole. In short, brothels, just in Tehran, outnumbered educational centers, there were more liquor stores than bookstores. We were told that there were few centers for enlightenment of people in the city of Tehran, but, according to numerous reports, there were countless centers for debauchery and licentiousness all around Tehran, between the city and Karaj (an industrial town on the outskirts of Tehran), in Shemiran (northern part of Tehran) and the outskirts of Shemiran. These centers would deprave anyone, whether man or woman.

These were the plans that had to be implemented; why? The answer is that foreigners were afraid of enlightened men and women, who could be of great services to their fellow citizens, while on the other hand, if the depraved were in their services, they could easily be sure their interests were secured. They were against a committed individual, who respected his religion and himself, as they regarded such individuals useless to themselves, if not downright dangerous to their interests. They did not wish to see enlightened people in this East. They wanted the eastern women to act according to their wishes devoid of any enlightenment. They hated seeing enlightened men in Iran since if there be enlightenment among a nation, a nation devoted to religion, the country and its nationhood, the people of this nation will never betray their own. What they wished for was a bunch of traitors.

The foreigners did their best in the past 50 and some years to create a bunch of traitors. These very same people were the ones who hotfooted it out of the country along with him (Muhammad-Rida Pahlavi, the deposed ex-monarch of Iran). At the top of this bunch was Rida Khan himself and his son Muhammad-Rida. Rida Khans treacherous acts had different features, but Muhammad-Rida's treasons topped that of his father's. These people are afraid of learned people as a learned man may change the course they have set for their victimized country. That is why they hate to see learned people. However, in contrast to such people devoted to the worldly and mundane, there were the messengers of the Almighty God. These messengers were only assigned the task of instilling human values among the people, turning them into enlightened people. On the other hand, those in favor of the mundane would like to keep the people from being enlightened and to keep the people at the same level as that of animals and make them share the values of animals. Of course, the latter may appear to be highly advanced in such things as industries, but they are devoid of any human values and may even be traitors. A man may be a highly skilled medical doctor but devoid of human values. These people (the foreigners) are not afraid of the industrially skilled, they are afraid of learned people. As soon as a learned man makes an appearance in a country, he will immediately be done away with. If there is some university where enlightenment is encouraged among the youth so that they may uphold human and moral values, this type of school is absolutely opposite to what they have in mind. For all these reasons, they have done their damnedest to paint an ugly picture of Islam for the people of our country. They tried to get rid of the clerics; they tried to bring about a wide chasm between the clergy and the universities. They did their best so that there would not be any enlightenment. All they wanted to instill into the people's mind was worldliness. However, if there were spiritual teachings side by side with these lessons of worldliness, our universities would have been different and the people who graduated from these universities would have been different too. One of the biggest acts of treason was committed under the guise of freedom for women and liberation for half of the nation from under the yoke of servility. Of course, by all appearances, the words were very beguiling. They deprived the women of this country of enlightenment and tried to indoctrinate them with what they thought would serve their ends. These were the sort of things they were really after, which was mundane worldly attractions, and nothing else. What they considered a good worldly person was the one who craved to drive a car and didn't care if the car he was driving was a stolen one or given to him in the form of bribery. This type of person does not care how he has come into the possession of the car, no matter in what way. An enlightened person would never accept a stolen car no matter how much he craves to own one. What they wanted was a thief and a traitor. All the monarchist organs were expressly at work to create thieves and traitors and deprive our ladies of real enlightenment.

Ladies' enlightenment is the most important issue, as they are the ones who are responsible for giving the proper upbringing to their children. It is this very enlightenment on the part of the ladies that is passed onto their children and the same is never attainable in any school. Children love their mothers, and whatever they hear from their mothers becomes engraved in their hearts. This latter influence is non-existent in other places. These very enlightened mothers will bring up enlightened children that will prove valuable to their countries. Therefore, any advancement in the country owes its very initiation to you mothers. Similarly, ruin shall visit a country if you fail in your mission, that is to say, the enlightened children you hand over to the country would bring advancement to the country, and the country would remain safe and unblemished with foreign influence.

If they did not let you take care of your children by tempting you to work in offices and forced you to let nurseries take care of your children, your children would then be deprived of the love, which only a mother could give to her children, and as a consequence would develop a multitude of emotional disorders. These very emotional disorders give rise to all kinds of evil deeds, such as stealing, murdering, and treason. The reason for these emotional disturbances among children, who have been deprived of mothers' love, is that children are immensely innocent and delicately naive, while tremendously vulnerable and in absolute need of mother's love. Therefore, it defies any logic for anybody else to take the place of a mother in bringing up children. The children, who have been brought up by other than their own mother, definitely prove to be prone to corruption. That is why they (the former regime officials) tried to separate children from their mothers and give these children the sort of upbringing they had designed for them in places they had set up to serve their ends. All the while, they kept many of our women preoccupied with such preposterous games as why should women stay at home and raise their children. They, too, must participate in the social affairs. Of course, if their intentions and concern for women were genuine, it would not have been bad at all. Unfortunately, these evildoers were entertaining some very malicious intentions behind this beautiful facade of their concern for women.

These evil ones did not by any means wish to let half of the country's population participate in the social affairs. Actually, they neutralized and paralyzed this very half too! How did they manage to do so? Through their so-called land reforms, which were given a most grandiose publicity? What did their land reforms do for the country's well being? Just look at all these shantytowns and tin-plate residences spreading all around the city of Tehran. They did all this so that we would stretch our hands towards other countries and they could sell us all our foodstuff requirements and clothing. Now, we desperately need to buy everything from foreign countries. They ruined the infrastructure of the country's agriculture in the name of doing away with the big landowners and poor peasants acting as serfs. What was the result of this so-called land reform? Hordes of desperate and impoverished people began to populate the outskirts of the urban areas. Abject poverty in tandem with annihilated agricultural infrastructure was the product of their so-called land reforms. These traitors and foreign lackeys used to get their cues from the US or other colonial powers.

From the very beginning, the idea was to prevent people from becoming enlightened, as they were afraid of losing their stakes. Those who could take these stakes out of their hands were enlightened people who, in turn, were brought up by enlightened mothers. It all begins here. Being a mother and the status of motherhood that are tantamount to good upbringing of children is the most profound service a person can render to his or her fellow human being. Therefore, they downgraded this position as much as they could. In fact, they vilified its very nature. This was a single instant of high treason to the national interests. The highest point of the best achievement in the world is being a good mother, as mothers secure all the vital interests of the nation; they knew that women had to be kept unaware of this fact. So, they made sure your children would get their initial upbringing from others (day care centers for children). Then these children were sent to school. Of course, the schools were also made in a way to teach nothing but depraved ways. Further up and higher (higher education center), they did away with all enlightenment altogether so that there would not be any enlightened in official capacity.

Praise be to Allah, these are the things of the past, and I hope such a state of affairs would never re-appear again. It was through you, you ladies that this movement was afforded the taste of victory. Those who were educated by the devious ones kept themselves out of the game, save for once in a while when they tried to raise barriers, which were of no consequence. But it was you who pushed the movement ahead and served it well at all times. When the mass demonstrations started in Iran, you were the vanguards of these demonstrations and not those from the so-called upper classes as the only thing they were concerned with was to obtain their jobs and nothing else. However, it was you who felt sorry for the conditions of the nation, it was you who had compassion for Islamic tenets, and you pushed the movement ahead until it became triumphant. You saved your country through giving good upbringing to your children. A good upbringing to a child is the highest point of achievement in any society. That is why they did their best to make this job appear contemptible in your eyes. No other responsibility is so blissfully, as honorable as the responsibility of motherhood. What they did was the most terrible act of treachery by making many women give up their responsibilities as mothers. In the same breath, people such as Malik al-Ashtar gained their renown because of having been bought up by good mothers. Husayn ibn `Ali was brought up by such a mother. Great men owe their greatness to great mothers, and mothers may even save a whole nation. Therefore, they gave this blessed responsibility a bad name. They made dolls out of women and alienated them from their major responsibility so that they would not care what was going on in the country and what would happen to their people.

All they wanted for our young people was to be a bunch of alcoholics, gamblers, and heroin addicts. This was their ways of teaching their absurdities. They wanted to make our young people feel dead to whatever was going on around them and to take away whatever good was left inside them. Now, we must wake up. We must take notice of the fact that whatever they did was nothing but treachery. Praise be to Allah, the main traitors have left the country and their remaining lackeys, God willing, will do so later. We must now wake up and not be deceived again. We should not be hoodwinked by their propaganda, as they want to dump us back, where we were before. Unfortunately, the devious ones still have their roots in Iran. If we fail to eradicate them through our unreserved cooperation and unity, these corrupt leftovers shall grow again. They will then manage to find sympathizers, and if you mothers, you sisters, and you brothers fail to stop them, they shall gain enough power to bring ruin to the country again. We are all responsible, you are responsible, I am also responsible as a theology student, and I shall keep praying for your success. You ladies, and you gentlemen are all responsible to safeguard this movement and help to stop any disruption in it.

I pray to the Blessed and Almighty God to give you all the best of health and success and to assist you in your blessed missions. Let me reiterate the point that when we were in trouble, it was you ladies who served the country.