Marzieh, Iran's Best-Loved Singer, Touring for Resistance Group

By Richard H. Curtiss

Until he asserted American leadership in Bosnia this summer, U.S. President Bill Clinton had few fans in the Islamic world. But even before that he had an ardent Iranian supporter, and she is something of a connoisseur of world leaders of the past half-century. Marzieh, Iran's best-known female singer, has performed for Britain's Queen Elizabeth, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and once in Tehran and once in the United States for President Richard Nixon. Ever since this spring when America's current president penalized the Iranian government with a U.S. embargo and called upon the rest of the world to join it, 70-year-old Marzieh cannot stop praising him.

"I want to ask the whole world to impose an economic and military embargo on this regime which is highly isolated in Iran," she told the Washington Report in an interview in the U.S. national capital. "The people of Iran are determined and have the means to bring about change. But the world has a responsibility to deprive this regime of the resources and the means of repression.

"I want to emphasize that the sanctions imposed by President Clinton are in the interests of the people of Iran, and the rest of the world must join in a comprehensive embargo. They must support the aspirations of the people of Iran for democracy and for peace. The ruling mullahs have done nothing for the past 15 years but suppress the people, plunder their wealth and export terrorism, fundamentalism and chaos to keep themselves in power. It is only the ruling clergy and their associates who are benefiting and the rest of the 66 million Iranians are living in poverty and discontent."

Such strong statements, on the record, are seldom heard from Iranians with relatives still living in Iran. In the case of Marzieh, the near-legendary "nightingale of Persia" who was born Ashraf os-Saadat Morteza'i in 1925 in Tehran, political opposition takes special courage. Her husband, a banker, and her 18-year-old granddaughter still live in Tehran, as does her 42-year-old daughter, Hengameh Amini, a French-trained architect. When Marzieh defected in August 1994, her daughter, who had never been involved in politics, was arrested and held incommunicado in prison. She was released from prison after Amnesty International and a number of world leaders generated a protest campaign, but she remains under house arrest.

At present Marzieh depends upon her reputation as the grande dame of Iranian music to protect her family as she pursues a schedule of international concerts sponsored by the Mojahedin e-Khalq (People's Mojahedin), the largest organized Iranian opposition group. Asked about danger to her own person from a regime that has been accused by various European and Middle Eastern governments of assassinating its political enemies, particularly Mojahedin leaders, on their soil, Marzieh responds with optimism.

"As far as the people of Iran are concerned, they are well-prepared to bring about the necessary change because of the anger they have expressed against the mullahs and through the Mojahedin," she explains. "It is a movement that consists of the elite—the most dedicated members of society and those who have sacrificed. Ever since I joined the movement they have converted me to a routine of hard work and only four hours of sleep each night. I hope the rest of the world will get to know the quality and the dignity of the people of this resistance."

There is little in the life of this one-time icon of Iranian art and culture to explain her conversion, at age 69, to a firebrand activist willing to risk everything for a political cause. In the world press she has been compared to or Greece's Melina Mercouri or Britain's Vanessa Redgrave, both of whom put their beliefs ahead of successful careers and personal safety.

Marzieh's father was a learned scholar of Shi'i Islam, and her mother, who encouraged her to sing, came from an artistic family which included sculptors, painters, miniaturists, and other musicians.

"At that time, when families were less inclined to send their daughters to school, my father, though a clergyman, encouraged me to go through formal education," Marzieh explains. "When I began to study music it was extremely difficult to become a singer. One needed both a good voice and a good knowledge of music. Moreover, several masters of music had to certify the voice as well as the artist's grasp of the theory of music. Thus, I spent many years training under masters of Persian music before I formally began to sing."

Her performing career actually began in 1942 when, as a strikingly beautiful 17-year-old, for 37 performances she played the role of Shirin in a famous Iranian play, "Shirin and Farhad."

"In the same year I was invited to cooperate with Tehran radio," she recalls. "Three consecutive weeks, every Friday from 12:30 to 1 p.m., I was on the air, performing live. The public reacted enthusiastically."

Her instant success led to a nightly radio program from 10 to 11 p.m. that had perhaps the largest audience in the country. (Describing the program, the interpreter for her interview interrupted to recall how his father would not go to sleep until after the program ended each night, and how vigorously his father protested to the local radio station one evening when Marzieh's program was pre-empted for a live sports broadcast.)

Marzieh's enormous popularity led to competition among composers, lyricists, and poets to get her to perform their works. As a result, she still has a repertoire of more than 1,000 songs, and her unique style has influenced Persian music permanently.

All of these personal successes were played out against a background of severe societal tension, however, as religious conservatives scorned music and sought to humiliate actors and singers by calling them corrupt.

Such religious conservatives, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were among the disparate groups that created the 1979 revolution that brought about the Shah's downfall. Eventually, Khomeini's followers took over the revolutionary government, jailing or forcing into exile the leftist, secular and moderate Islamic leaders who had helped them make the revolution, including Marzieh's present political associates.

So long as Khomeini ruled, only military or revolutionary music could be played. Because he decreed that "women's voices should not be heard by men other than members of their own families," there was no role at all for female singers.

Marzieh, a charismatic and vivacious woman whose singing voice is as strong today as it was when she began her career more than 50 years ago, grows indignant as she describes this interpretation of her religion. "In Islam it is not prohibited for women to sing and in fact the Prophet Muhammad very much enjoyed great voices," she explains. "His granddaughter, Zeinab, was a great orator and there were many prominent women in the early years of Islam.

"There was no prohibition on others hearing the voices of women. The Prophet was the messenger of the emancipation of women. The point is that these mullahs by no means represent true Islam. They misuse and harm Islam. True Islam is represented by the Mojahedin."

After Khomeini's death in 1989, the mullahs in charge of Iran's government lifted the ban on singers, but decreed that only men could perform before mixed company. Women could sing only at gatherings of other women. Marzieh declined to resume her career under the new rules, vowing not to sing in public in Iran until the government of the mullahs had fallen.

Although she traveled abroad frequently, she also spent about eight months of every year in a house on her family's land in Lalun, a village outside of Tehran. There, she said, her voice remained strong because daily "I went into the desert and sang for the birds, the trees, the river, the passing clouds and the stars."

In 1994, en route to an engagement with the BBC in London and then a trip to the United States, she stopped in Paris for a conversation with Maryam Rajavi, whose brother and sister had been executed in Iran and who had been elected by the National Council of Resistance of Iran as the president-elect of a future multi-party democratic government. It was then that Marzieh decided to remain in Paris where she was appointed adviser for cultural and artistic affairs to Mrs. Rajavi, and a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, of which the People's Mojahedin is the major constituent party.

"There is no question the Shah's rule was a corrupt police state," she says to explain her decision. "But the mullahs have far surpassed the Shah. For the 15 years before I left, I always had the hope to see the mullahs banished from Iranian society. But every day I saw the situation getting worse."

"The situation of women in my country was constantly deteriorating. I therefore decided in France to echo the cry of the women in Iran as well as in the rest of the world. What actually gave me the inspiration to leave the country was that the resistance was progressing and, most important, that it had elected a woman for the transition period.

"The People's Mojahedin are Muslim but they represent anti-fundamentalist Islam. The fact that they are serious, dedicated, honest and that they have an army means that they cannot be compared with others who have simply stood aside and said not a word about what is happening in Iran."

Marzieh has a great deal to say about the current situation in Iran where, she says, 150,000 people have been jailed and tens of thousands executed, including "children, pregnant girls, the intelligentsia, the cream of the crop." Confirming her previous public statements that when virgin girls are sentenced to death in Iran they are routinely raped by agents of the regime because the mullahs believe that "otherwise their souls would go to heaven," she exclaims angrily: "I swear to God that this has been happening through all of the reign of the mullahs."

Nor does she detect any signs that "moderates" within the present government may eventually assume leadership. "What do you expect of these backward mullahs of the Middle Ages when they say that two women witnesses are only the equivalent of one man?" she asks.

"The whole world has not been able to get them to reverse the Rushdie decision. This is compatible with the other crimes of the mullahs against both men and women. If a woman goes outside and a bit of hair shows from under her headscarf, she is arrested and then her family is summoned to watch while she is punished with 74 lashes. If she wears lipstick, the Revolutionary Guards are capable of slashing her lips with razor blades. If she wears cosmetics, they'll throw acid in her face."

Since joining the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Marzieh has performed before large audiences of Iranian exiles. In March she sang at London's Royal Albert Hall. There were classics like "What Should I Say," rebuking a faithless lover, and also songs of a more nationalist bent like one that brought the audience to its feet applauding its call for branding the foreheads of the mullahs with the "seal of eternal shame."

She also has appeared in Sweden and in Germany, where an audience of 6,000 attended her concert in Dusseldorf. In the U.S. she sang informally at a Sept. 19 invitational dinner in the Rayburn House Office Building sponsored by several members of Congress, including Reps. Dan Burton (R-IN), Robert Ney (R-OH) and Robert Torricelli (D-NJ). She also scheduled a major concert for Sept. 30 in the Pantages theater in Los Angeles, home of the largest Iranian community in the United States.

Although Marzieh's broadcasts on foreign radio stations and cassette tapes are secretly listened to all over her country, not all Iranians abroad share her enthusiasm for the People's Mojahedin, which the regime seeks to identify with Iran's enemy in the devastating 1980-1988 war with Iraq. Similarly, although the People's Mojahedin support Clinton's embargo on Iran, the enthusiasm of some 200 U.S. congressmen for the Mojahedin is not shared by the State Department, which in a 1994 report branded the organization "fundamentally undemocratic" and "not a viable alternative to the current government of Iran."

Members of Congress denounced the report and the Mojahedin issued a point-by-point rebuttal entitled Democracy Betrayed* which accused the State Department of seeking to appease the Islamist regime in Iran. In fact, as Marzieh tirelessly points out, there is at present no other organized Iranian opposition group comparable to the Mojahedin with its large force of captured Iranian tanks at the ready in the Middle East and its core of dedicated and highly educated activists staffing political and information offices throughout Europe and the United States.

Now, Iran's best-loved singer has enlisted in its volunteer ranks "so that I can be the voice of my people and echo the cries of the women who have for so many years been deprived." For the Mojahedin, Marzieh may be a weapon even more formidable in the post-Cold War world than the military brigade they maintain in Iraq, just across the border from politically repressed and economically depressed Iran.

* Democracy Betrayed is available from the AET Book Club.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.