Around noon on Wednesday, the sixth of Aban, three friends and I set off from Aran and Bidgol toward Tehran to attend the 40th-day memorial of Ayatollah Khazali and to offer our condolences to our esteemed friend, Dr. Mehdi Khazali.
As we approached Tehran, I picked up my tablet to check the news and messages in our groups. Unfortunately, I came across a distressing piece of news. I read it out to my friends:
“A ten-year-old child in Oshnavieh commits suicide due to not having enough money for a gift at school… Yesterday morning in the Tachinabad neighborhood of Oshnavieh, Hawari Qader Shavan, an elementary student, hanged himself and departed from this world.
For several days, he had been humiliated by the school for being late in bringing contributions, and his working-class family was neither willing nor able to pay more than five thousand tomans. Until yesterday morning, when his parents woke him up for school and went off to work (apple picking), they gave him five thousand tomans to take to school. But Hawari said that unless he was given a higher amount, he would be humiliated and would not go to school, even threatening to kill himself… Finally, after two hours, one of the neighbors, at his mother’s request, went to their house to make sure he had gone to school. Upon entering the house, they found the ten-year-old boy hanging from a gas pipe…”
After reading this news, had I not been embarrassed in front of the kids, I might have cried for a while to relieve myself.
I told my friends, “Guys, I am not the representative or spokesperson of Imam Hossein (PBUH), but I think if Imam Hossein could speak to us, the people of Iran, he would say to us: ‘You are a nation that deserves to weep for your own misery and wretchedness; I do not need your tears. A lamp that is needed at home should not be donated to the mosque.'”
Minutes hadn’t passed since this conversation when we reached the toll at the shrine of Imam Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That is, the entrance to Tehran, the entrance to the mother of cities of the Islamic world, the mother of cities of the Shia world. The scenes I witnessed there were so poignant that if I were in the place of the country’s officials, with these scenes, I would never again lift my head in shame, nor fix my gaze into the eyes of Iranians.
Everywhere I turned, I saw children stopping in front of car windows to beg, sell gum, and offer fortunes, among other things. The smallest was a girl of five or six with tousled hair, wearing only a thin, sleeveless outfit in the relatively cold weather. The little girl stood by a car worth several hundred million for a while. The driver didn’t even glance at her.
As the car moved, the child’s foot was so close to the car wheels that for a moment I thought her thin, delicate fingers might get caught under the wheels.
In this commotion, it seemed that no eyes saw this child. She was too small to be noticed.
What caught all eyes here were the towering domes and minarets of the mausoleum of the leader of the world’s oppressed, built at the cost of thousands of billions of tomans.
May God have mercy on that far-sighted elderly sage who, upon his arrival in Iran, promised:
“Not only do we want your material life to be comfortable, but we also want your spiritual life to be enriched. You need spirituality. They have taken our spirituality; do not be satisfied just because we build housing, provide free water and electricity, and offer free buses. Do not be content with just this. We will elevate your spirituality, your morale. We will elevate you to the stature of humanity… They have degraded you. We will develop both this world and the hereafter. One of the things that must happen is just this; it will happen. This wealth is from the spoils of Islam and belongs to the nation and the oppressed. I have ordered it to be given to the oppressed, and it will be. Further reductions in costs will occur in the future. But we must endure a little. Do not listen to these false tunes! They only talk; we take action…”
Mohammad Mahdavifar
Deminer and Diver of the Sacred Defense
1394/8/8 [October 30, 2015]