The Sydney Terrorist and his Poetic Delusions

Critic Hossein Nushazar looks at Mohammad Hassan Manteghi, aka Man Haron Monis, who followed the tradition of the "court poet" that has been so popular under Ayatollah Khamenei. But when he failed to garner the attention he craved — as a poet and a self-styled religious leader —he turned to terror. 

After 16 hours, Australian anti-terrorist commandos stormed the Lindt Café, bringing an end to the Sydney siege. When it was over, a 34-year-old man, a 38-year-old woman and the 50-year-old lone gunman dead. Three further hostages, all women, were injured.

The man who terrorized 17 people in a central Sydney café was Mohammad Hassan Manteghi, also known as Man Haron Monis or “Sheikh Haron”. Manteghi was “turbaned,” as Iranians say — meaning that he dressed as a mullah, but had not actually studied at a religious seminary. In other words, he was a fake mullah.

“How can someone who has had such a long and checkered history not be on the appropriate watch lists?” asked the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot. “And how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?”

According to a statement issued by the police, “Sheikh Haron” had been an accessory in the murder of his ex-wife, had been charged with more than 40 sexual offences and was sentenced to 300 hours of community service for sending offensive letters to the families of Australian men who had fought in the Middle East.

The name Manteghi means “logical” but he was anything but. Otherwise he would have not been wearing a turban and a robe. And if he had really wanted to be a real mullah, he should have taken a whole nation hostage like other mullahs do, rather than a few Australian citizens in Sydney.

In addition to his brilliant past, Manteghi was also the author of a poetry collection, Within and Without, published in 1996. It is not clear who the publisher was. Most probably he was self-published.

The poems in Within and Without cannot really be called poems. Yes, they are a collection of words set next to each other, given a religious veneer through a combination of lamenting religious figures and unrefined and superficial mystical sentiments. They follow the style of the Islamic Republic’s “court poets” of the past 20 years — people like Hamid Sabzevari, Yousef-Ali Mir Shakak, Alireza Ghazveh and Ahmad Azizi who are unknown outside Iran but have found a place for themselves within the Islamic Republic through eulogizing the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolution. Their poetry is awkward both in content and form. It is poetry that perverts the ethos of genuine Persian poetry, dragging it towards the sewer of vulgarity and classicism that does not ring true.

In the same way that hooliganism and dagger-wielding has its roots in the Iranian brotherhood subculture “Ayyari,” a response to foreign domination and lawlessness, the origins of this kind of religious poetry — complete with mystical themes that have been prevalent under Ayatollah Khamenei’s leadership — can be found in the mysticism of Iranian Islamic culture. But both degenerate and pale imitations of a culture, an echo of a once-authentic heritage that rarely exists today.

One of the Islamic Republic’s early hooligans was Hadi Ghaffari, known as the murderer of the Shah’s longtime prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who walked the streets in a clerical garb carrying a pistol on his hip. Mohammad Montazeri, the cleric son of Ayatollah Montazeri, who was known as “Mohammad Ringo,” and  Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the hanging judge of the Islamic Revolution, are two others who fit the same mold.

Turban Instead of Homburg

If before the revolution they wore a homburg, after the revolution these men changed into the clerical garb of turbans and robes. This was a new phenomenon in Iran. Mohammad Hassan Manteghi is a counterfeit copy of somebody like Hadi Ghaffari. He wanted to be like Khamenei’s court poets. But since he could not, he tried to imitate them. When he failed at this too, he picked up a gun.

The delirious words of Manteghi are more murmurs of a personal pathology than they are expressions from a poetic universe. He put words together and offered them as poetry to show off, the same way that he dressed as a cleric, taking the Lindt café as his bloody stage so that he could hit the headlines at news agencies around the world for a few hours.

We do not have any insight into his personality, any information as to how he was brought up and why he immigrated to Australia. But we do know that he is a “copycat”, a phoney poet dressed in a fake garb.

But this kind of fakery — poetry, attire and character — has a long history in Iran. Even before the revolution, there were many self-styled and forgotten poets who put words together in the free-form style of Nima Yooshij, the father of modern Persian poetry. The phenomenon of “Sheikh Haron” shows that now eulogy and religious poetry can somehow satisfy the “I am Aphrodite” complex of people like him. And if their words cannot satisfy this complex, they resort to violence and bloodshed. Psychologists have studied the phenomena of fatherless youths who fell for Fascism. In Manteghi’s poems, Imam Ali, the son-in-law of Prophet Mohammad and the patron saint of Shias, is more a father figure than a religious one.

During puberty, boys imitate their father. When fathers turn out to be fakes and kill their children, one should expect that characters, attires, names, poetry and all cultural manifestations turn into fakes as well. Mohammad Hassan Manteghi, the Sydney terrorist, is the realization of this fake culture, one which has been imposed on Iranians by Khamenei’s court poets.