Our culture, tradition, custom, habit, arts and artifacts are dominated by Islam. Our primogenitors have accepted Islam's total domination for centuries. We have been conceived in the name of Allah just in the same way as our ancestors themselves have been conceived in order to be born as legitimate. We are nurtured as a Muslim. We learn the principal of sharia in school. We grow with peers who are Muslims. It is in the company of our peer that we learn the ritual of the five times prayer a day and reading Quran in school. In Ashora we participate in processions and would beat our chests with our bare hands or chains. We listen and sing monody commemorating the martyrdom of the third Imam, the grand son of Prophet Mohammad.

What distinguishes Islam from other socializing agencies, as well as other religion, is that, Islam wants totality of us. It seeks total domination over human life. Under Islamic rule there is no private or public, official or unofficial affaires that can begin without uttering the name of Allah. There would not be a book, a letter or a document that cannot be consummated without the name of Allah in the beginning.

What our emancipation from the rule of Islamic sharia is that submission to Islam is planted in our character when we are unconscious and unable to choose what to believe in. Islam provides order and meaning to our life. So we do not experience Islam as submission. More often than not we fail to feel submission in its negative terms. We feel at home with our religious belief system if not with the clerical rule. We tend to be oblivious to Islam's perpetual and controlling presence in our consciousness. In response to "how are you doing" we would praise Allah and thank him without noticing the presence of the rule of sharia.

It could be argued that in Freudian language, Islam would play the role of superego representing the external authority in our mind. It would directly attack the" id"- where Freud believes our desires and wants are concentrated seeking gratification. The superego suppresses id and establishes control on its drives for pleasure and happiness, those that would lead to deviation of the path of Allah, or what is describe as "straight path" in Quran, the book of Allah. Thus superego would marginalize the "ego" that according to Freud represents our rational part, the part that longs for self-preservation seeking self autonomy, and independence. This can only be achieved if ego left free to enter into interaction with the id negotiating a balance between rational and irrational demands necessary for the survival. The clerical rule acts like a superego neutralizing ego. It stifles ego's growth and autonomous development. The domination of ego is an introduction for the acceptance of one's own status as subject with a defective ego deprived of basic human rights: resistance to authority, self-defense and the ability to say no.

For example, as a Muslim we can pray to Allah only when we submit to meaningless, minute details of ritual of ablution to remove pollution from ourselves. If the purpose of ablution is to encourage cleanliness, issuance of instruction as how to achieve it must be based on the assumption that human beings lack necessary intellect to understand how to maintain the principle of cleanliness. The reality is that ablution has nothing to do with cleanliness. Ablution is an agent of the superego which continually weakens the ego. It is one of many devices that Allah has created to suppress the free will of the human being. Ablution and its performance have no need for examination or deliberation. Ablution is a ritual that can only be learned by imitation and conformity. Allah actually has made sure that his messenger would learn ablution and praying by imitation not by relying on his reason to understand the need for ablution before praying to Allah. Gabriel who presents Allah's teaching to Mohammed does not teach him to make use of his reason rather encourages the Messenger to learn through imitation.

Tabari, an early historian quoting Mahemmad-bn Ishagh (an observer of Mohammed as messenger) as having said that the Prophet himself learned ablution and praying to Allah by imitating Gabriel (Tabari, vol3, p. 954). The ritual of ablution has no other purpose but to deny free will to a human being. Ablution is a prelude to the total submission to Allah's will in a daily prayer repeated five times throughout the day. Mohammed Hosain Tabatabai, the author of the Tafsir-al- myzan(20 volumes interpretation of Quran), interpretating Quran's first Sorah, states that Allah himself has provided instruction for how men must praise him. Tabatabi argues that Allah's logic makes perfect sense for a finite can not describe what is infinite. According to Allah's instruction, we must begin with his name that is merciful and compassionate. Nevertheless, Allah orders us to call him "rab-el-allamain," or, the master and the lord of both worlds this and the world beyond. Tough we obey the Allah's order without feeling reduced.

The fact is that submission is generalized in Islam and begins with a fundamental belief in oneness of Allah that is, "Nobody is but him." This is an absolute and final truth. It needs no examination or deliberation which tends to freeze any kind of flexibility in every fiber of our being as a believer. As a Muslim we would never entertain the thought that oneness of Allah may not be true, even though Satan is as eternal as Allah. Belief in oneness of Allah requires faith in Mohammed as the messenger of Allah and his ire's. We submit to myths and fiction and never question the way in which Allah has chosen his messenger and that Quran's content is actually a divine revelation and that Gabriel was an intermediary between Allah and Mohammed. That is why we submit to the rules and regulation of sharia by imitating clergy who learns the divine rule by studying in the seminaries acquiring Ijtihad, or ability to understand the Allah's language . We are diminished as a human being o. We arenly able to imitate while at the same time we feel happy and content. We embrace jihad (holly war) and shahadat (martyrdom) through rejection and the destruction of life here and now to gain the ultimate rewards that Allah would offer, eternal life in heaven living with virgin angels. We impose hijob on women so that her exposed hair, face and the prominence of her body would not transform us from a rational being into a wild animal who like id would seek nothing but pleasure deviating from the way of Allah. We fast and suffer from hunger. We pay religious tax (khoms and zakot). We go to hajj (pilgrim to Kabah) and sacrifice sheeps to keep Allah happy and content. We commit many more superstitious action in the hope that it would alleviate the anger and the violence that lies in the nature of Allah. We attribute miracles to Quran and expect it to respond to our needs and wants. As we hear the Quranic verses every fiber of our being would be impacted and would arise in us the feeling of hope and fear without understanding Allah's word whether he is bestowing mercy upon us or he is promising retribution and eternal damnation in the hell or whether he is talking about kindness and his generosity or avenge and vengeance. For Allah only speaks in Arabic. Historically we have accepted our inability to read or understand the content of the holly book and have become dependent on the clergy and their knowledge of the book. Thus we forget that as human being we are endowed with power to reason, think and choose for our own. At best we make use of our reason as an instrument to respond to our material needs and interest not for reflection to know and understand Allah. Had we done so we would have realized that Allah needed to be reconstituted as a God who has no need to be praises and prayed to at all times. A God who would not feel happy and content by seeing the human being as a "Bandeh" or slave.

Furthermore, we are taught that oppression takes place when we refuse to submit to the will of Allah, that is to say, if we reject our own status as subject or doubt the oneness of Allah. Therefore, the oppressor to a Muslim can not be the one that will draw the sword, like the first Imam, Ali and decapitate hundreds to please Allah and gain its blessing. So violence too becomes sacred and an holly act. Within last 30 years we have been witnessing the massacre of the political prisoners and of Kurdish people at different times, in addition to increasing number of the people that are hanged every day.

Thirty year of clerical domination has created an exceptional historical opportunity to see the real face of Islam as a discourse of power and fear. Or in Freudian language, make the ego a hero by overcoming the forces of superego represented by clerical institution; to overthrow the divine rule, break the yoke of enslavement, and emancipate ourselves, if, however, we truly believe in and long for freedom and justice. We must remember that justice in enslavement is essentially an Islamic justice. Emancipation means empowering our human reason and discovering the truth about ourselves and our religion. No movement can hope to survive in future, no matter "green" or red, if it does not pave the way for social emancipation.

Therefore emancipation is only possible through acquiring consciousness not of what is unthinkable and unknown but of that which seems normal and natural, such as " Nobody exists but him," or "Allah is great" is as much part of natural order as the exchange of that which you do not need for what you need, in the capitalist market, a system, according to Adam Smith, is compatible with human nature.

Perhaps, the time has come that the leftist revolutionaries friends, the followers of Marx and Lenin takes what Lewis Althusser has called "crude economism," seriously. The reality is that the superstructure would not always reflect the economic base and relation of production. In other words, our values, beliefs, culture, and religion have largely remained unchanged despite the development of the capitalist economic relationships. Islamic values and beliefs not only have not weakened due to the economic modernization, but in actuality have been strengthened, reaching its pick in the 1978 Islamic revolution capturing the state power. There are those who attribute the defeat of the progressive forces to the opportunism of the leftist parties and organizations and the weakness of the liberal democrats, while ignoring the role of the Islam in shaping our values and goals, determining the essence of our character not only in the last thirty years but also throughout history. To put it differently, the political and social structure that we have created is a reflection of our way of life, customs, habits and what we believe in, not the result of economic transformation.

The sharia rienforces the system of slavery, and the system of rulers and the ruled institutionalized and transmitted from one generation to the next. The political despotism will come to an end when we relegate the rule of clergy and the clerical institutions to the dustbin of the history. We can only expect to construct a free, prosperous, and secular Iran, when we get rid of the laws of sharia altogether and become aware of the myths and fiction of the oneness of Allah and prophethood. It is only then that we can say we have emancipated ourselves and step in road to freedom.

Firoz nodjomi New york 07/06/2010