I went to see Tricycle Theatre’s production of Guantanamo Bay by Victoria Brittain & Gillian Slovo on the twelfth 

     of June, the last day before its transferal to the West End. As the play opened, to a theatre packed with ninety-nine 

     percent English people, I heard a sound that chilled me and made my hair stand on end: the Azan, the Muslim call to 

     prayer, ‘Allah o Akbar’. This is the last sound heard by women as they were being stoned under the Taliban rule - and 

    also the slogan that I used to hear in prison after the horrific sound of executions by the Islamic regime of Iran. The 

    condemned are taken away for execution during the noon Azan and bullets hit their targets after the dawn Azan. 

    ‘Allah o Akbar’ is the command to commit a holy crime, to attack and stone or kill, as well as the reward for the 

    executioner after his job is done.

      This June performance transported me on my own private journey of imprisonment and torture, and I barely noticed 

    that the play had started. The setting, with cells on each side of the theatre’s corridor, was similar to a prison that I was 

   in for one of my eight years as a political prisoner in Iran. With one exception: we did not have beds in our corridor;  

    instead we had to lie on the floor, side to side and packed like sardines in a can.

      The Azan didn’t last long, fading as soon as the prisoners got up to pray, but when the sound started again, it took me 

    back to the year 1988. It was the time of massacre, when the Islamists in power killed thousands of prisoners in Iran 

    because they were not Muslim - or because they were not the kind of Muslim dictated by those in power. My cellmates 

   in the prison were transferred to solitary confinement, walled up so they could not see each other, and beaten five times 

   a day, every prayer time, until they converted to Islam and started to pray.

      The play’s interval again began with the Azan, which continued from the point where it had faded away. To avoid 

    hearing the sound again, I blocked my ears and rushed out of the theatre, wondering why Islamists were allowed to 

    produce a play about America’s injustices to them, a play that could appeal to so many English people, even to a 

    West End audience, yet I couldn’t find a publisher to publish my book, which is a small picture of what Iranian 

    Islamists had done and are still doing to people like me. It was at this point that my friend pointed out the play’s 

    producer, a man without a beard and without the appearance of an Islamist. A European, if not English! Clearly 

    neither a friend of Bin Laden, nor an Iranian regime agent.

      The second half started with the same ‘music’, Allah o Akbar. When it stopped, an intellectual started lecturing us 

    about the human rights violations practiced by the American and UK governments. This wasn’t the first time that I 

    have watched opposition to Western governments’ brutality from Western intellectuals’, and once again it made me 

   wonder why they can’t demonstrate opposition to their own governments except by taking sides with brutal foreign 

    governments.

     Why do people in the West believe that people in countries like Iran are all Muslims? Why don’t they notice that in 

   each riot in Iran there are people setting fire to veils and Qurans? Why don’t they see that people in those countries are 

   sick of oppressive religions and fight for secularism and freedom? Why do they see Western brutality but fail to see 

   Islamist brutality? Why do they have to take sides with the murderous governments and not the murdered people, or 

   those who are forced to run for their lives from one border to the next, fleeing death and hunger and humiliation?

    The play, ‘Guantanamo Bay’, has moved on since June: now it is winning People’s hearts in New York! Ben Brantley, 

   the New York Times theatre critic, writes of it enthusiastically: ‘There is no question that it is a partisan work.’ Yet 

   Brantley does not seem to realize that we are constantly being fed partisan information and politicized theatre. Only 

   recently, for example, have we learned of one particular ‘theatre of war’: the Cold War era in Afghanistan, where the 

   CIA helped to train Islamic partisans to fight Soviets, and thus gave birth to Bin Laden.

     One problem lies in the Western media itself, which signally fails to inform people in the West about how bitterly the 

   workers, women, and university students’ movements are fighting, street by street, against oppressive Islamic regimes. 

   Nor does the Western media report that the most powerful secular movement against Islamism in the world today is in Iran. 

   That regime may have defeated my generation, but the generations after me, who were born and grew up under an Islamic 

   regime, are united in fighting against that regime and Islam itself.

     Rarely does the Western media point out the similarities between Guantanamo and those prisons in countries like Iran 

   where Islamists rule. People like me, survivors of such prisons, have no voice here, and the minds of those who have a 

   voice seem preoccupied with other things. So, while people as young as 13 can be lashed and stoned to death under 

   Islamic regimes for ‘inappropriate’ behavior (such as making friends with the opposite sex), the Western media doesn't 

   discuss this, just as it avoids discussing those thousands of people executed during the last 25 years by Iran’s Islamic 

   regime. Why is that? Do people in the West think that Iranians deserve such brutality - because, after all, this is ‘their’ 

   culture? No, it's not possible. No one could believe that a people in any country wish to live under such a culture, or 

   such a brutal regime.

     Given that the Islamists’ anthem, the Allah o Akbar, now has a political meaning, with the suppression of women and 

   the killing of ‘infidels’ at its core, I can¹t understand why so many people here are willing to support it. What kind of play, 

   I wonder, would Islamists produce to demonstrate American brutality? Surely the Azan would be the same as it was in 

   Tricycle theatre’s production, as would one other thing: an omission. Neither ‘Guantanamo Bay’ nor that imaginary 

   Islamist production would show the way in which Western governments continue to back dictatorships all over the world, 

   Islamist or otherwise.