Laleh and Ladan: A Symbol of the Unmatched Courage of Iranian Women

In the midst of national sorrow and the tragedy of the death of two Iranian twin sisters, the world sympathizes with the Iranian people and the Safaian family. For a quarter of a century, the world has been hearing news of Islamic Iran with distaste and sadness, from state terrorism, arrests, executions, and torture, to the sinister attempts to acquire dreadful and foolish weapons, and worst of all, the news of the suppression of Iranian women's rights by the inept government Taliban. Laleh and Ladan consciously and with free will preferred death to a lack of independence and went to the operating room with smiling faces and high spirits, earning the astonishment and respect of the world. Two girls from a country where its officials interfere in the most private matters of people's lives decided that they would either live freely and pursue their personal goals as independent human beings, or not live at all. They did not intend to commit suicide, and what they did stemmed from a love of life. The case of Laleh and Ladan was more than just a strange 'medical file'; one in several million newborns is born conjoined, and there are a number of such cases in the world, but none have managed to capture the minds and senses of people from various countries like this. For years, many Western intellectuals have insisted that the criteria and concepts of individuality and the rights that accompany it are products of Western democracy and cannot be 'imposed' on Islamic countries. Behind this ugly ignorance of the history of the West and East and behind the democratic and liberal facade of this view lie the diplomatic traders who perhaps spend ninety percent of their energy on political dealings behind the scenes to maintain notorious regimes. If the world waited fifty hours for the result of the surgery to separate the Iranian twins, it was because they saw the highest effort to revive and prove individuality in these two sisters; and this has been the deepest desire of humans from prehistory to today. All enlightenment and reform movements aimed at shortening the hand of government and church from the realm of individual life in recent centuries have had no other driving force than the human desire to achieve individuality and the right to free choice. Laleh and Ladan painfully proved the universality of this desire once again and rejected a fate that had been written for them. However, another hand of fate desired that their death coincide with a time when Iranian society, from the intensity of the desire for freedom and reaching the point of defining the limits of the rulers' power, has reached a boiling point.