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Soheyl Here Soheyl speaks of his experience of the revolution, which occurred while he was still in high school. Like many other urban Tehranis, Soheyl knew nothing about the Kurds or Kurdistan or nonurban Iran until, like so many others, he was forced to flee the revolution through that region. He left Iran in 1982. I was not a participant in the revolution against the Shah because, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand the meaning and the consequences of people’s acts of revolt. I remember going to this big demonstration and hearing, for the first time, people chanting the slogan, “The only party is Hezbollah [the Party of God], and the only leader is Ruhollah [Khomeini’s first name].” I came home confused. I thought they were making fun of the Shah. I asked my father what the slogan meant. He was reluctant to respond. Although he favored the revolution against the Shah, I think the slogan had surprised him, too. Like many, he had assumed that all the clergy wanted was to kick the Shah out, that they would then turn to the intellectuals for the reconstruction of the society. But his disappointment came soon. I was only in high school and didn’t know all the things that make up a society, a nation, the history of a nation. I left Iran in 1982. The army had wanted me for a couple of years and I hadn’t responded to the draft notices. They wanted to send me to the front. And that was the main reason I left Iran. But there was something else. Not only did the army want me, I was in trouble with the government, too. After Khomeini came to Iran, I became active in the opposition against his Islamic government, although I had not been active in the opposition against the Shah. I was young and confused, and didn’t understand what the Party of God, or Khomeini, or Dr. Shariati, our martyred teacher, represented, and I didn’t understand what people were fighting for. But the slogan “Bread, shelter, freedom of choosing your party” was a slogan I could relate to. It was the only one that I understood, and the only slogan opposed by the clergy and stopped under the pretext that it was a Communist Party slogan. And it became clear to me that the clergy 198 revolution: narrating upheaval were quite organized and determined in their attempt to lead the nation. We were lost. They were not. So after Khomeini came—and by then I was older, too, and had gained a little more experience—I became active, very active against Khomeini, as a leftist. That’s why I had to leave. But I’m not a leftist anymore. I got tired of seeing the depression on the streets, the hopelessness of revolution, the fights. I wanted to breathe a breath of fresh air, and that is why I set out to leave, to get out in secrecy. I can tell you some, but not all, of the specifics of my journey out. I took a long bus ride. I had a Kurdish friend who took me to his home, in Kurdistan. I stayed with them for six weeks and then I left the country via the Turkish border. But the most important part of it, the most valuable part, was the time I lived with the Kurds in the mountains of Kurdistan. I didn’t know much about my own country except the few cities by the Caspian Sea I had visited and my birthplace—Qamsar—and Kashan. It was the first time that I encountered a people who were considered Iranian, who had their own culture and language, and who could barely speak Persian; yet they were so different from the Iranians I knew and was used to seeing in Tehran or other places I had visited. This was a nation that was fighting against the Tehran government, that was proud of its nationality and proud of its ethnic clothes. After living with the Kurds a short while, I began to realize that our people and our government had done nothing for the Kurdish people at all. If they had water pipes in the mountains, they had installed them themselves. If they had a school that taught their children the Kurdish language, they had built and run it themselves. If they had doctors serving their people, they had hired them from foreign...

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