Parastoo Ahmadi sang a song.
It is almost two years ago now. December 2024, in Qom, the home city of Iran's clerical establishment. A sleeveless dress, her hair uncovered, a band behind her and a livestream on YouTube that millions watched.
On Friday an appeals court upheld the sentence. 74 lashes. For her and the eight people behind the cameras and instruments. Without a hearing. Her lawyers say the court could have settled for a fine, that it chose the harshest option it had, and that the reason was plainly to deter.
Note that last part.
The punishment is not for her. It is for everyone else.
So what was it she actually did?
This is where it gets interesting - for anyone who wants to understand the difference in design and architecture between our two ways of being in the world.
She brought something into being. That is the whole crime. A song is the smallest thing a human being can create, and the most indivisible - you cannot take it from the one who sings without taking the voice. She did not take off the headscarf. She took off the lid.
And let me say it plainly. It is not the Iranian regime I want to talk about. It is Islam. Because it is sharia the sentence was passed under, and it is Islam's view of the human being that makes 74 lashes the right answer to a song.
Our own order is rooted in the Judeo-Christian view of the human being, and it begins in Genesis. There, man is created in the image of God and set to name the animals. Creation is delegated. It continues in us. Every time someone sings, draws, builds or writes, something happens that resembles the first day - light that orders without force. That is why the West could do what it did. We are not smarter than anyone else. Our foundation simply says - that Man may create. That he is created to create.
Islam's order is rooted in the opposite. Creation belongs to Allah alone. Al-Khaliq, the Creator, is his name, and his only. Man is 'abd - servant. He may reproduce, honour and submit. But to bring forth something new, by himself, with his head uncovered, in front of everyone - that is to step up onto a place that is not his.
And then you do what you do when someone steps up there. You whip them back down.
That is why Islamic societies do not deliver. Not because Islam is old. It is a spring chicken next to Judaism and young next to Christianity. But because it is sealed. Muhammad calls himself the seal of the prophets, the final revelation, and a revelation that is final has closed in advance the very thing man was created to do. An order that may not create cannot create. That is not politics. That is mechanics.
Googoosh, Iran's greatest singer, stood on stages in Tehran in the seventies with her hair bare. Today she writes about Parastoo from exile. It was never Persian culture that forbade the song. It was sharia, laid down over it in 1979.
Imagine it had been Adele. Taylor Swift. Billie Eilish. Dua Lipa. Beyoncé.
A sleeveless dress, a song, a livestream - and 74 lashes, upheld without a hearing.
She sang a song.
It is what she was created to do.
In Islam it is still the most dangerous thing a woman can do.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Tuesday evening, friends
....
Oh, and one more thing. We still have plenty of pop singers, at home and across Europe, running around sounding the fanfare for more import of exactly that order.
Anyone can think about that.
