This morning, Gregg wrote about Mahmoud Vahidnia, a math whiz and sophomore at Iran's Sharif University of Technology who publicly criticized Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to his face, after Khamenei made a speech at the university on Wednesday.
The story of Vahidnia's audacity was, curiously, first reported on Khamenei's official Web site. Yet concerns lingered over whether Vahidnia, reportedly harassed by "security forces" after his 20-minute critique, had been arrested. The Los Angeles Times' Babylon & Beyond blog gave us news on Monday (which I'm just now seeing) that Vahidnia was not arrested and is doing fine. New video and quotes from Vahidnia, after the jump.
Despite reports of his arrest, reports surfaced that Vahidnia is okay. He told the Persian-language Alef.ir news agency in a report that appeared in the reformist newspaper Sarmayeh on Sunday that rumors of his detention were unfounded.
He also said he made the speech on his own volition. "I had not coordinated with anyone," he told the news agency. "Even my family had no idea what I was going to say."
He added, "On the whole the meeting with the Supreme Leader was constructive."
Here's a video of a BBC Persian report on Vahidnia, though since it's in Persian, I can regretfully not be of any assistance in translating:
I suppose it's ironic that it was bookish math student - a winner of a gold medal in Iran's national math Olympiad, according to Wikipedia - who had the gall to speak truth to such enormous power. But math is a world of sureties, where rigorous application of time-tested theories, proofs and formulas yields logical, often predictable answers. Vahidnia, if descriptions of his academic career are accurate, has likely spent many years of his life wrapped in such a world.
To Vahidnia - and I might be reaching here - facially problematic Iranian practices, such as Khamenei's absolute power over certain institutions and restrictions on the press, must seem absurd, simply because they don't make practical sense. If this isn't good for society, he must wonder, then why does it exist? I imagine him stepping out of the Sharif University library bleary eyed one morning after spending all night with his nose in a textbook and asking himself why the country is the way it is, since on its face it seems to be malfunctioning in several ways. It must've seemed quite logical to challenge Khamenei on Iran's broken systems.
Anyway, Iran's elites and expatriates are probably loving Vahidnia right now. One blogger, calling himself Azarmehr, compares Vahidnia to Kaveh the Blacksmith, a mythical Iranian who challenged the demon king Zahak.