Alex Shams in the Boston Review:
Down a tree-lined street near my grandmother’s house in Tehran is a mosque where locals go to chat, rest, and sometimes even pray. In the back of the mosque, behind a small library, is an office for a youth group that organizes volunteers to teach classes, run food drives, get together on religious holidays, and take trips to impoverished villages on Tehran’s outskirts to build schools. Whenever I visit my grandmother’s house during Muharram, a holy month for Shia Muslims, I see its members handing out food and sweets. The group has branches in most mosques across Iran: within a twenty-minute walk from my grandmother’s house, there are probably half a dozen. They receive a government budget, and they host political events, like celebrations of the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution. Millions of Iranians are members; many are teenagers or young adults, separated into boys’ and girls’ groups.
The group is called the Basij. It is classified by both the U.S. and Israeli governments as a terrorist organization—meaning that under those country’s laws, every one of its members is considered a terrorist. The Basij have always inspired a mixture of fear and fascination in me. As a branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, they are considered the Iranian government’s enforcers at the neighborhood level, taking part in patrols looking for contraband like guns and alcohol, dressing in camouflage, and setting up checkpoints on the weekends.
More here.
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