Ebrahim Raisi’s “Divine Comedy”

By Lev Tsitrin

“Of the dead, nothing but good is to be said” goes the old saying — yet not everyone follows the dictum. Consider Dante’s classic: the only living protagonist in the Divine Comedy is Dante himself — and he dishes out plenty of rather malicious dirt about those he met on his trip to the underworld. I confess I am no great fan (I read the Comedy — in a Russian translation — twice, only to find parts of it, including much of the Paradiso to be indigestible) — but I think the book’s essential task, to find divine justice in the fate of those described in it, is admirable.

In that spirit, why not examine what befell Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — since Iranians themselves aren’t doing it, being prevented from thinking by the regime?

Raisi’s case is particularly interesting for those involved in what in the West is called “theodicy,” or “justification of God” — i.e. answering the question of why there is evil in the world if God is good.

This question of why the righteous suffer is particularly relevant to Raisi because he was particularly godly, particularly righteous, and particularly good — which is why he was groomed for the position of the next Supreme Leader of Iran by the current one, Khamenei. No one was more eager then Raisi to eradicate sin. The unthinkably wicked — those so monumentally perverse that they opposed the Islamic regime itself — he hanged en masse. In 1988, according to Wikipedia  “for approximately five months … [between] 2,800 and  … 30,000 … prisoners were loaded into forklift trucks in groups of six and hanged from cranes in half-hour intervals” on his orders. Bludgeoning to death of teen girls who showed their hair is his more recent accomplishment.

What can be more saintly? What can be more godly? And yet, how do you explain — leaving alone justify — his fate? Much is written about Job’s suffering — but what a difference is there between the two! Job was merely innocent, while Raisi was actively godly. Raisi was so much more deserving in God’s eye, having done so much more for Him — think if all the hangings and bludgeonings for the sake of His glory (not to mention having Iran’s proxies rocket Israel, this enemy of God — and sending a swarm of missiles and drones at Israel right from Iran) — and yet, what a terrible, undeserved fate! Raisi gets into a helicopter — and God sends the fog that plunges this champion of righteousness, this future Supreme Leader of Iran to an untimely death!

Plus, in the case of Job we know right upfront that God was merely testing him, at Satan’s urging. But who’s to blame for Raisi’s death? Surely, the “Little Satan” always brews mischief — but doesn’t the assumption that Israelis generated the dense fog fifteen hundred miles away from their borders give them a bit too much credit?

So how to explain the martyrdom of the godly — nay, saintly! — President Raisi? Frankly, I am at a loss.

The only thing I can think of — and I tremble with fear even as I say it — that perhaps Raisi, and the regime he represented, are in the wrong, and not in the right? Perhaps Iran’s hangings and bludgeonings and rocketings are not godly acts after all, and Raisi has landed in hell rather than heaven?

It is a blasphemous thought — but all things being relative, just because it is blasphemous in the ears the ayatollahs does not mean that it is blasphemous in the ears of God. After all, ayatollahs merely follow the Koran — the way they understand it. But whether they understand it aright, and whether the Koran represents God’s word, are questions that have no answer. No one can possibly know whether God ever talked to Mohammed; the thing is simply impossible. Those who unequivocally say that He did, are mere idol-worshipers — they make the god they worship out of their own heads. Of course it would make sense to them that the god of their imagining protects the way of life they imagine to be godly — yet Raisi’s death is a real reality check; the Islamist god of his imagining — the god on whom the ayatollahs staked their regime — did not intervene on his behalf in the fog, but let his great champion who wielded both a halter and a club in defense of his god, be killed.

“Just are the ways of God, and justifiable to men,” observed John Milton. Assuming that Raisi’s fate was both “just” and “justifiable,” perhaps it is logical to draw from it the conclusion that a god imagined by the ayatollahs is no God, but an idol? If so, the godly way for the Iranians to proceed is to dump the ayatollahs — and this is the real message in the present-day “Divine Comedy” lately acted by Raisi?

Put on your thinking cap, Iranians — and start thinking outside the mental box into which the idolatrous ayatollahs locked you. The more you think, the more you will realize that Raisi’s demise should be only the start. The rest of the ayatollahs should be dumped, too.

Lev Tsitrin is the author of “The Pitfall Of Truth: Holy War, Its Rationale And Folly”

Image from X – appropriated in a good cause, with thanks.