Speech by Mohsen Sazegara, Washington, 12 Bahman 1403 [31 January 2025]

In the name of the Lord of soul and wisdom
Truly, in this gathering where the friends and admirers of Davar (Ebrahim Nabavi's pen name) have come together and his mark is everywhere, it is his own place that stands emptiest of all. If only he had not gone and left us to grieve his absence.
I have known Ebrahim Nabavi since long ago, since the days of our youth. I followed his work in film criticism, fiction, poetry and satire in Gol Agha (a satirical weekly), but with the reform movement and the launch of the newspaper Jameh, when he joined the staff of that paper, we actually became colleagues. Davar would come to the newspaper's office in the afternoons. He had no fixed desk or chair, and like a butterfly he would flit from the desk of one section to another, chatting, talking and joking, and after two or three hours he would find himself a corner, write his satirical "Fifth Column" and hand it in to the typesetters. This column, which ran every day on the left side of page three, became the most-read column of a newspaper whose circulation had approached half a million before it was shut down, and people would sometimes stand in line for hours for the paper to reach the newsstands so they could buy it, and the first thing they read was this column. With this column Nabavi not only became the star of Jameh and of the world of the press, but one can say with confidence that he opened a new chapter in the history of Iranian satire, and after him many followed in his path.
It was not without reason that when, on Khamenei's orders, they shut down that newspaper and the papers we published after it, and issued arrest warrants for the managing director, the editor-in-chief and the publisher, among all the writers and reporters only one arrest warrant was issued: for Ebrahim Nabavi.
When Khamenei, on the basis of his theory of the "cultural invasion," was pressuring the Ministry of Intelligence, saying, "I am certain that the publishers and people behind Jameh are foreign agents and take money from foreigners," Nabavi wrote in the Fifth Column: Yes, we confess that we take money from foreigners; the only problem is that the scoundrels have dumped the money by the truckload behind the newspaper's office in one-cent coins, and we spend all of it buying pizza and ice cream for ourselves. In effect, with unparalleled courage, he made the Leader's theory of cultural invasion utterly worthless. The Leader held a grudge against him and ordered his arrest, and after that Nabavi again and again found himself facing arrest, prison and interrogators.
Ebrahim Nabavi was a shining star in the country's art, literature, satire and press, and he stands above the prevailing political currents. He is one of those who will outlast our times, and decades, indeed centuries, from now his works will still be published. As the more than eighty books he has left behind bear witness, along with his encyclopedia of satire in Persian literature, which he compiled in more than ten volumes through grueling labor, we must rightly regard him as one of the enduring figures of our era and be proud to have been his contemporaries.
Because of my profession, which is politics, and because of my experience and age, I ask your permission to voice a complaint and a criticism of the activists and supporters of all five political tribes of Iran, namely the monarchists, the leftists, the nationalists, the ethnic groups and the Islamists, who, in the manner of ideologues, place every person and everything on the scales of their tribe's and group's beliefs and political standards, and pass judgment on them, or sometimes curse and insult them. Decades from now, whether or not each of Iran's political families earns a paragraph in the history of Iran, Nabavi will be a golden page in the history of Iran.
Except for art, which is the crown of creation,
No reign's era endures.
Politicians are the guests of history, and artists are its hosts.
Let me end my words with these few verses by Rumi:
Someone said, "Master Sanai has died."
The death of such a master is no small matter.
He was not straw, to fly off in a gust of wind;
He was not water, to freeze in the cold;
He was not a comb, to break on a single hair;
He was not a seed, to be pressed down by the earth.
He was a treasure of gold in this dustbin of a world,
Who reckoned both worlds worth no more than a barley grain.
His earthly frame he cast toward the earth;
His soul and wisdom he carried to the heavens.
The clear wine had mingled with the dregs;
It rose to the top of the vat and parted from the dregs.
Thank you
Mohsen Sazegara
12 Bahman 1403 [31 January 2025]
Washington