One of the World’s Leading Executioners Has a Rapper in Its Sights

One of the World’s Leading Executioners Has a Rapper in Its Sights

New York Times-May 31st,2023

By Holly Dagres

It was a balmy 1:30 a.m. nearly a year ago in Shahin Shahr, a city in central Iran, and the rapper Toomaj Salehi was sitting on the roof of his apartment building, jotting down some new lyrics. On the street below, he watched as the driver emerged from a small, boxy Saipa Pride and started rummaging through a trash dumpster.

It was a depressingly familiar sight.

The irony, Mr. Salehi pointed out to me as we briefly DM’d on Twitter that night, is that a Saipa Pride used to be among the most affordable cars in Iran. Now it’s 2 billion Iranian rial — or about $3,900 at the official exchange rate — while the average minimum salary hovers around $100 a month. “We’re being finished off,” he wrote, referring to how the clerical establishment is wearing down the people of Iran.

A little over four months later, Mr. Salehi was in prison, where he remains today. Iranian authorities arrested the 32-year-old dissident rapper in October for supporting the anti-establishment protests that erupted after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, died while in the custody of Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the mandatory law requiring that women wear hijab.

Now Mr. Salehi’s life is in danger. The Islamic Republic has carried out many executions in recent weeks, and human rights organizations say they believe he is an imminent target. The grisly rise, intended to stamp out dissent, has helped make the Islamic Republic one of the world’s leading executioners.

Its campaign against dissent won’t succeed. As the protests that erupted last fall simmer on and repression continues, Iran’s Gen Z-ers have made it clear that their demands for change cannot be silenced. Mr. Salehi knows that; the body of music he worked his whole life to create has helped that generation find their voice.

For years, young Iranians have gravitated toward Mr. Salehi’s fearlessness and anti-establishment lyrics. He raps in Persian, part of the Rap-e-Farsi genre that took off in the 1990s. But his idol is Tupac Shakur, and like Mr. Shakur, Mr. Salehi writes about the injustice and inequality that haunt his society — in Iran’s case, poverty, child labor, killings of protesters, executions. He has taken the country’s clerics head-on, calling out their systematic corruption, state mismanagement and their increasing repression of society as a whole — all topics that deeply resonate with Iran’s fed-up youth.