In Iran, protesters, particularly militants, are subjected to extraordinarily violent suppression by way of taking pictures within the eyes. Blinding an enemy who dares to problem the ability that exists is the most recent act of repression within the nation’s lengthy historical past.
Right through Iran’s dissident crackdown in recent times, and right through the nationwide Girls, Lifestyles, Freedom 2022 motion, the frequency of eye accidents inflicted on protesters has come underneath public scrutiny. Girls, younger other folks and scholars, regularly passers-by, actually misplaced a watch, or – sight – from bullets or projectiles from shut vary. Safety forces ways we are actually witnessing once more: Attorney and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi estimated on January 9 that “at least 400 people have been admitted to a hospital in Tehran with eye injuries from gunshots since the protests began at the beginning of the year.”
Such brutal use of power finds a lot more than easy police disasters. Those acts are a part of a political rhetoric echoed all through Iran’s lengthy historical past, by which concentrated on the eyes symbolically indicates the deprivation of somebody’s private, political capital.
Energy lies within the eye of the beholder
In historical Iranian political tradition, energy and eyes are inextricably related. I see, subsequently I do know; I see, subsequently, I pass judgement on; I see, subsequently I rule. This idea extends all through the Iranian literary and political realm. For instance, within the Shahnama (Ebook of Kings) by way of Ferdowsi (tenth century), blindness is a story marker of political and cosmic decline: it heralds the lack of farr (divine glory), the primary of legitimizing energy as an everlasting, symbolic disqualification of the workout of sovereignty. Being blinded is synonymous with being fallen.
Within the Shahnameh, the passage by which Rustam blinds Esfandyar with an arrow is an instructive scene for Iran’s political empire: by way of concentrated on the eyes, the tale overtly buddies the lack of sight with the disqualification of energy and the tip of all grounds for claiming sovereignty.
Rustam blinds Esfandyar with an arrow (opaque watercolor on paper), undated. Click on to zoom. San Diego Museum of Artwork/Bridgeman Photos
Traditionally, blindness has been used as a political weapon of neutralization. It was once a strategy to get rid of a rival – a prince or dignitary – with out losing blood, which was once regarded as sacrilegious when it got here to the elite. The blind weren’t shot, however eliminated from the political enviornment.
Shah Persia Abbas the Nice (who dominated from 1588 till his loss of life in 1629) blinded a number of of his sons and grandsons whom he suspected of plotting in opposition to him or of opposing the succession to the throne.
In 1742, Nader Shah ordered his son, then Crown Prince Reza Qoli Mirza, to be blinded, an act symbolic of the observe of political silencing in Persia.
From blinding rituals to safety blinding: why are protesters’ eyes so regularly within the line of fireplace of Iran’s safety forces?
The Islamic Republic does no longer declare blinding as punishment, however the mass repetition of eye accidents right through recent repression finds a symbolic continuity.
As soon as uncommon, centered and said, using blinding is now common, denied by way of the government, used with guns known as “non-lethal” and seldom sanctioned.
But its political position of neutralizing with out killing, hanging to the frame to discourage and save you additional dissent stays similar.
In recent Iran, eyes have turn into political guns. Protesters file, report and disseminate what they see. Photographs are circulating, achieving borders and weakening the federal government’s narrative. When the eyes are affected, you can’t see or display others, preventing recording, id and witnessing.
The purpose is not only a person’s perspective; this is a broader imaginative and prescient that connects the streets of Iran with world public opinion.
Not like the act of blinding in precedent days, which was once reserved for the male elite, these days, violence across the eyes is most commonly directed at girls and younger other folks. The feminine gaze, impartial, free of all ideological regulate, that the arena sees, turns into politically insupportable for a regime in accordance with dictating the frame and what must be observed.
A continuum of visual brutality
The continuing crackdown that adopted the mass protest motion that started in past due December 2025, intensified after a national web blackout, it sounds as if sought to scale back publicity to acts of violence inflicted on protesters.
Unbiased scientific experiences and eyewitness accounts described hospitals as beaten with casualties – specifically blindfolded – together with an building up in crowd regulate involving live-action firearms, which was once documented in numerous Iranian provinces. Those violations ascertain that the frame, and particularly the power to peer and file, continues to be the principle goal of repressive rule.
Numbers apart, girls’s first-hand accounts inform a unique tale about those recent practices. Whilst Iranian society has witnessed girls main activist actions for the reason that assassination of Mahsa Gina Amini in 2022—a few of whom had been intentionally blinded right through protests—such accidents represent each efforts to quash an impartial feminine gaze that poses a political danger to the established order; and the resistance of those injured, but defiant girls with disfigured faces, who’re working example of Iranian repression.
Historical past isn’t restricted to the far away previous of political neutralization: it’s impregnated by way of the ladies of these days’s private physically reviews, the place the trauma of the attention can also be interpreted as exploitative violence and an indication of the political combat that revolves across the visual view.
The frame turns into ‘capital’: final sovereignty
The Islamic Republic will have damaged clear of the sanctity of monarchy, however the historical theory of seeing the frame as capital that holds private energy continues to be intact. Whilst monarchs have resorted to blinding their topics to offer protection to their dynasties, safety forces use mutilation to make sure their survival.
This technique produces a paradoxical impact. In Persia, blinding was once used as a weapon of political destruction in precedent days. Nowadays, it makes the brutality of the regime visual to all. Because the disfigured faces flow into, the sufferers turn into symbols, and the eyes they misplaced turn into a testomony to Iran’s deep disaster of democratic legitimacy.
Historical past does no longer repeat itself however lives via gestures. Via taking pictures within the eyes, the Iranian govt is reviving the previous rulebook of domination: Remove a person’s skill to peer and get rid of him politically.
