Alors, les Français sont en train de flatter l’islam bien.
Sadegh Hedayat

Once, one of the Iranian politicians in the Parliament of Iran during his speech accounted a brief conversation with arteshbod Hossein Fardoust, some years after 1979.

Fardoust was a friend of Shah and one of the most influential figures of SAVAK—in the last meeting he would show up in casual dress and announce to other army arteshbods that the game is over, Shah is finished and we should surrender the army. In that he wouldn’t be executed.

That Iranian politician, who was defending of himself during his impeachment session, said that I asked Fardoust having breakfast with him: “what happened before revolution that led the country towards this way?”

“The disintegration of the high profile dignitaries”, Fardoust answered: “when high profile dignitaries and elites are desperate, the system will be put in the precipice of collapse.”

I would like to replace the word collapse with the word conversion that, in terms of historical context, means state apparatus conversion: like what happened in the multi-sided story of Catherine Shakdam that I can read it related to collapse-conversion that Yemen might experience it due to a lack of any willpower aiming at peace, like the collapse that happened in her relationship with her Yemeni husband, like the friction that led her away from the parents of hers, and each time, she converted—Of course all of these metaphors are somehow related to Europe crisis at the present-day.

Again similar to the collapse-conversion of 1979, the oil pie and the energy crisis are in between. As a result, the events that happened a year ago, before the revolution, in areas of Britain like Sheffield might now be somehow detected in Canada.

The migration to the big cities in a few years before the Iranian revolution, in an allegorical way, mirrors the huge spate of refugees who reach out Europe and stay in six-meter rooms in Paris and Berlin. Historically, occultism has bowled off in such a social egosystem of survival.In this regard, the Islamic cults would be a source of horror within some intellectual debates in some western countries—exactingly those have active Muslim communities. I should clarify, by which I mean not monotheistic Islam, necessarily, but certainly any form that forbids like freedom of speech and freedom of religion, which is many forms.

The work of French writer Michel Houellebecq is one bore here, could be considered as a point of embark particularly. His controversial novel Submission (2015), regardless of his statements in the letters to Bernad Henri-Levy, is the biggest slice of the cake he cooked for the feast of late laïcité secularism.

The plot of the Submission is the most horrifying plot against the west—if such a thing could be called yet nowadays—; in a hasty way, the book is the narrative of how an Islamic party named Muslim Brotherhood can manage a regime change in France and turn it into something copied from the regime change in Iran by dint of Islamic Revolution or Islamists attempts in Algeria or Egypt during the last decade.

Arguably, this rough emulation gives away the first clue that we are reading a satire creativity; and, the second clue is the last line of the novel.

Satire always go for things that are forbidden to talk about. Just like Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Houellebecq in this book tries to say something that is overshadowed by an irrational fear.
However, Rushdi’s book is nothing but a satirical work about a character who has magical beliefs. The same is repeated in Houellebecq’s book in a materialistic approach.

The main character of the Submission has no faith in his knowledge; for him, intellectual pursuits are just some social climbing tricks. In a same way, religious beliefs of Gabriel Farishta, are his social climbing devices, which don’t work for him that good.

Back to the topic contention, step by step our uptake would be complete: contradictions of today’s European countries in the face of immigration, confronting the other in the high steps of the social ladder—gaining the large proportion of global power by the Persian Gulf states—and the toppling of the elites’ social place.

Iran, under Shah, already experienced all in a way.

Interesting enough, in the real world, intellectuals who don’t write fictional stuff, sometimes make more thrilling story lines which are still funny based on these efficacies, or as she herself describe it through the word journey; the striving journey of Catherine Perez-Shakdam may be the most interesting one hitherto and can jazz up this text more.

Around 2016, maybe after that Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi left Yemen by dint of civil war, a 32-year old French woman after a while that she wouldn’t know how to handle the new circumstances, ventured out and flight from London to Tehran to take part in a political conference on the issue of Palestine.
She might have stood up and unanimously shouted that Down with Israel, or Death to Israel.
She would put on an all-around-face headscarf and go for pray time to time at least three times a day. She would stand against the so-called effrontery of U.S.A, and be a whole compassionate political commentator for Muslim people around the world.

Having worked with Tehran Times, Russia Foreign Affair Council, Press TV and some other heavy duty Iranian right-wing media, she revealed her Jewish identity, talking about Iranian Anti-Semitism, in that she herself describe it, in the Times of Israel.

The first reaction to this, from conservative wing in Iran and Islamic Republic henchmen, was a black-out shock and some political nosebleed, and consequential domestic brawls, because the first hypothesis, self-evidently, rotated around a spy game planned by Mossad.

But step by step the dark clouds of obfuscation are going away and new lights of a two-way understanding looms the whole story; it is merely a personal endeavor to find an exit from what she wouldn’t like to go through. Or, in some ways, Catherine Shakdam would be a seagoing lady confronting Lovecraft’s beasts tête-à-tête.

Call it luck or the result of a hunger so fierce for rallying western thinkers to Iran’s cause that certain ‘details’ were overseen, I nevertheless walked right into the belly of the Beast – invitation in hand, by the request of the very government whose motto calls for the death of all Jews and the annihilation of Israel. (Shakdam, 2021, Times of Israel).

Only Islam Knows

Akin to François, the narrator of Submission who converted to Christianity once before, Catherine once converted to Islam because of her love for her ex Yemeni husband in part. After that, once again she shifted from Sunni Islam to Shi’a Islam, apropos when civil war started in Yemen; this time maybe in order to dump more cruelly her ex-narc! Because, according to her in the interview with BBC Persian, the Yemeni husband was utterly anti-Shia.

She was born and bred in a secular yet traditional Jewish family. The domestic contradiction—there is no God but its principles are good—makes Catherine audited, and propels her to an infinite research for the God of those principle during her adolescent years of audacity which led her to marriage and vague theological ambits through a long Islamic pilgrimage.

Exactly the same reason puts Francois in a way of Christian research; he needs to find a transcendental way of life, an European way of life. For both, the result is nothing but a nihilistic frustration. At the end, both of them find their refuge in the other’s deployment; Catherine in Israel encampment and Francois in Muslim brotherhood—which would be the allegorical side of the satire that shows us circumstantial events led by political post right mind paradigms. People from Iran to America participate in elections, not to get their candidate into office, but to sideline another front.

But yet a fine line separates Catherine from François; but first I want to mention what they share in common. Like him, who seeks out some strobe light of elevated inspiration in the Christianity, she searched out the Islam’s orb from Sunni to Shi’a. The irony of all is that, at the end, she obviously wants her benefits like him.

However, Catherin and Francois have an unbridgeable distance in comparison. She is brave, but he becomes a Muslim out of cowardice and defeat.

To do it in justice more, the paradoxical axiological situation that Francois experiences is that he has two options: convert to Islam and take the full advantage of a high salary and bigamy with young students or abide and retire with just enough pension.

Of course the liberal man is submissive to his benefits. Francois is a professional academician and even avoids to write anything that would be a little bit problematic in “an under the radar journal”, Let alone that he would prefer the Christian aesthetic to the opportunity to live in the sublime but patriarchal conditions of a novice Muslim at the lap of Islamic luxury.

He needs the advantage of Islamic bigamy after he witnesses sexual euphoria in Paris through his cyber-urban voyage when heard that Miriam is onboard with a man in Tel Aviv—sees women who are professional in gangbang performances and making a lot by doing it and the like.

Facing all, he cannot stand his isolation because of his age and different social status.

This is the social irony that secularism and liberalistic side of the idea of freedom produce for men in middle class for instance, whom Hoellebecq too often writes for.

In the Platform (2001) men need to design and join the touristic clubs in Thailand in order to obviate their social need, because they haven’t a suitable place in the Parisian portrayal of urban life. Liberalism for men is the something utterly different from the same framework for women especially in the steep of collapse— pandemonium of conversion.

If François refused the benefits of going back to the Islamic University of Sorbonne, he somehow would spurn to the innermost deal of secularism and existentialism.

Reversing it, for Catherine as a woman liberalism is a recess to find her place in the society and amateurism gives him some opportunity to express her brilliant and high-minded views in the face of patriarchal and narrow-minded-know-it-all professionalism. The gender duality of liberalism, in Houellebecq’s view, creates such degenerate dualities.

The trouble with Catherine is that in every quarrel henceforth, she might find the Anti-Semitism and anti-woman views as the culprit. Which is somehow related to Francois conviction; Francois solely yearns for Miriam’s arse, nothing else; in nowhere he misses her company, her intelligence, her kindness. All the virtues the girl has, for him, is the hors d’oeuvre to rejoice over her arse.

To sum, the culpability of men is not being anti-woman, but a lack of maturity among the whole people, women and men in the absence of a mature worldview: there is no God but its principles are good, particularly as a reason for defiance and quarrel.

Surprisingly, the two meet in Iran, where Catherine meets some of the Islamic Republic’s intellectuals; those who have a different background than they do today.

In short, it is not Islam that is the core of the submission motor as a fictional-intellectual organism. It is the contradictory and insoluble tug of war that a metropolitan man experiences in a modern society at the crossroads of secularism or conversion to the dominant religion; whether it would be Islam or a framework, for example, a party at some point in time wants to wear its own hijab on the body of such a man.

In other way, the appeal and “magic” of political Islam to Houellebecq is summed up here: no matter how and to what degree Richard Nephew touch off the sanction umbrella on Iran, people will abide like the first group of Muslims in the Vally, She’be Abi-Taleb. It would be a more meaningful reason for disobedience.

On the other hand, Francois always overcalculates his years ahead up to old ages and disability; he cannot stand this pain, losing time; while after conversion, his age doesn’t matter in the new social circumstances. He will be more respected now, and even eligible to express love as an old man to the young girls. The matter of time and the longer longevity and sexual health in old age in the modern societies bring about new social contradictions especially for elderly people—more explicitly, the sense of being unwanted for old men and sexual hastiness for middle-aged women—that Houellebecq warn about many times. Ironically, Muslim views on old men for him would be somehow the answer, however I’m not sure, and this is because his shrewd jest. In such a situation, and given all above, Catherine’s refuge is the solipsism of amateurism at the end of the journey, where the next oeuvre of the writer Serotonin (2019) begins, wherein a lack of a maturity and acumen would not only be lethal, but also ushering towards the self-mockery.

Houellebecq knows it well: there is no God—intellectual God— but varieties of evil, ferocious and dominant, shrewd and haunting. We need the principles not to go to heaven; to ward off the evil. Francois and Catherine both have no principle to do so, no conviction or anything like that—by saying that everything would be happening due to Anti-Semitism or the like, nothing will be solved.
Maybe only Islam has taken the matter as it really is. The world is throwing up Islamophobia every day, but at the same time, from prominent football players who are going through retirement, to others who have similar conditions, convert into Islam day by day.

During the primary elections, after the Iran revolution, the Toudeh party candidate was Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali. Toudeh was, in fact, the most powerful communist party in the political battleground. Socialists and populists, in Submission, all support Ben Abbes in order to outmaneuver Marine Le Pen.

Operation Shakdam

Having watched a documentary on TV about thousands of people who are disappearing and shift off of their ordinary lives to be vanished, Florent-Claude, the narrator of Serotonin, decides to leave Yuzu, his unfaithful Japanese partner, and join to this passive movement—the whole novel alludes to political psychosis that citizenry cannot cope with.

Later, we will see that emancipation is a very fragile status. I can even say that it is a very transient stance.

Emancipation always needs to cross new lines up to the point that Florent-Claude finds out this crossing—conversion— is a sort of mandatory. During the last chapters, Florent-Claude understands every emancipation would be replaced with a personal and psychological malaise before long. This is the path of the depressed, the amateur as well.

To Catherine, Shi’a Islam and Iran camp was the hotel that, like Florent-Claude, she decided to stay, after divorce, for a while and be out of reach might to go through no contact. Maybe because of the false fact that traveling into Iran is a rare opportunity, for some could be space of emancipation:

Before I delve into what was said and how I understood it, allow me to explain how a ‘girl like me’ ended up where few Jews were ever allowed to enter. (…) I must admit that my holding of a French passport greatly helped. If France had not decided to offer Ayatollah Khomeini a home when it did in the 1970s I’m not sure Iran would have let me through. But Iran holds France in high esteem still and my government’s act of political compassion then, most definitely put my hosts in a generous mood. (Shakdam, 2021, Times of Israel).

Needless to say, the whole paragraph above is nothing but a prevarication and a piteous self-mockery of an excited yet reclusive amateur. There are millions of Iranian Jews living in Iran and having round trips to Israel every year.

Further, as a translator who worked with international and diplomatic organizations in Tehran, I can corroborate the fact that this hospitability of a foreigner with a political background is a routine; Iranian politicians would love to show you around, especially ideological sites as a political commentator, and the matter of being a Jew or communist or agnostic etc., plays no role in this regard; despite the fact that Catherine was around as a Shi’a Muslim in full hijab, and few weeks ago says, in an interview with BBC Persian, Shi’a Islam for her was somehow a space of privacy after divorce of her Sunni husband.
In this station, as a rule, like Florent-Claude to Camille, Catherine has to say some lies in order to justify the puzzle of her past—have mercy on me and believe my lies, I am a novice Muslim.

But this relationship doesn’t last and Florent-Claude has to shift off again. Either way, after healing up and crossing the mal bankfogs of memory from the Yuzu time, he need to build up a new love affair that will be another let down; where the next book of Houellebecq Aneantir (2022) begins: La coïncidence n’était pas fortuite, une amélioration des conditions de vie va souvent de pair avec une détérioration des raisons de vivre, et en particulier de vivre ensemble (p.35) Before that, let’s put Aneantir for another time and finish our work with the Serotonin.

The problem with the narrator of the novel, Serotonin, as cleverly designed by the author, is a deficiency of a hormone called serotonin. What you need to have a good erection.

Serotonin is the most important hormone that helps you control your erection, while it is also an inhibitory drug; the most beautiful and gentlemanly hormone that has ever existed.

Anxiety, depression, lack of sexual confidence, poor self-esteem, impaired quality of life, sexual dissatisfaction, and interpersonal difficulties are symptom of premature ejaculation which is caused sometimes due to serotonin deficiency.

Erection is not a trivial concept or ability personal and collective, even if the habit of experience or hearing of it make it seems so. While reading In the Presence of Schopenhauer (2017) you will come up with that erection and being de sujet is an elevated manner of evolution—you might concoct some abstraction between arousal and art which becomes little by little proliferated and incarnated to some palpable idea of creativity.

At the opposite, Houellebecq criticizes Schopenhauer’s idea of a noble creation related to some sort of expurgated state of mind, being overly abstemious, and in a way, in a sacred aura of not having and not wanting.

In this regard, erection, As the promised moment of mindfulness that fragments of the self would be integrated to reincarnate the whole, is at odds with both ecstasy caused by meditation and violence while aimed at the same teleological keenness: to persuade the other to comply and be converted.
The idea of soft power, at its core, would be the same thing exactingly. Conversion and evolution, by such an approach, share a lot in common.

In the absence of erection, Gabriel Farishta doesn’t want his social climbing departure in Bollywood anymore, and leaves a note to get on a plane and then it crashes.

As a final point, in the era of intelligence theology, the war of talents among the regional and global powers is the war of how you are able to use a talent as an elevated medium, which means candidate-led hiring market, and political games and competitions are no exception to this rule. I would like to replace the phrase candidate-led hiring with amateur-led hiring.

Onto this chess board, we are being converted on a routine basis from one state apparatus to another due to a lack of any sort of political serotonin. Catherine perez-Shakdam was not either a Mossad spy or her journey had any pre-prepared map. She was an amateur, seeking how to promote herself in the passive candidate pool of recruiters, who step by step becomes a thoroughgoing Cthulhu to herself.
Or, like Gibraeil Frishta, when he loses his faith, stops the limousine in front of the hotel to go there and feast over the meat foods table.

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