A viral dance and ‘happiness campaign’ frustrate Iran’s clerics

IRAN - A new form of protest against the government is rocking Iran – a viral dance craze set to an upbeat folk song where crowds clap and chant the rhythmic chorus: “Oh, oh, oh, oh.”

In cities across Iran, men and women of all ages are gyrating their hips, swirling their arms in the air and chanting the song’s catchy lines, according to videos posted on social media, television news channels such as BBC Persian, and Iranians interviewed.

People are dancing on the streets, in shops, at sport stadiums, in classrooms, malls, restaurants, gyms, parties and everywhere else they congregate. In Teheran, traffic was stopped in a major highway tunnel for an impromptu dance party to the song. Young women, hair uncovered and flowing, dance in parks, and young men performed a choreographed hip-hop dance.

“It’s obvious that joining this dance trend sends a strong message,” Mr Mohammad Aghapour, 32, a DJ who goes by the professional name DJSonami, said in an interview from Teheran. “It’s a way of protesting and demanding our freedom and happiness.”

In most countries, dancing and singing in public would not be considered taboo. But in Iran, dancing in public, especially by women and between men and women,

is banned.

Although the rule is regularly defied, enforcing it has been arbitrary. Music, dancing and singing are deeply rooted in Iran’s culture, and attempts by Islamic clerics to take that away in their 43 years of rule have, by and large, failed.

But seldom has a single song and dance turned into a collective act of civil disobedience. It all started with an old man at a fish market in the northern city of Rasht in late November.

Dressed in a white suit, the man, Mr Sadegh Bana Motejaded, 70, who owns a small market stall energetically swayed and bopped. He serenaded the crowd with a folk song and encouraged others to join in with some joyous noise – “helheleh kon, velveleh kon”. A small group of men clapped, shouting back the rhythmic chorus: “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.”

Mr Bana Motejaded is known around town by his nickname, Booghy, derived from the Persian word for megaphone. For years, he had a side gig at the football stadium, where he carried a megaphone, walking the bleachers and energising the fans by honking loudly, according to videos on his page and local media reports.

“My reason for dancing is to make people happy,” Mr Motejaded told a local television reporter this week. “I only want people to be happy and to change their mood.”

The video of him dancing and singing at the market went viral when Mr Aghapour reposted a remix of the song with techno beats with video of the original dance from a local blogger who had appeared in the video and posted it on his Instagram page.

Then came the crackdown. Local police in Rasht announced on Dec 7 that they had arrested a group of 12 men who appeared in the video and shut down their Instagram pages and removed the video from several websites.

On Mr Motejaded’s Instagram page, then with about 128,000 followers, an emblem of the judiciary appeared in the place of his profile photo. All his posts had disappeared, and instead, a single post from the judiciary read that “this page has been shut down for creating criminal content” and that the person who had engaged in the activity “has been dealt with”.

A person close to Mr Motejaded, who was familiar with the details of the arrests and asked that his name not be published for his own security, said in a telephone interview from Rasht that the local intelligence division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had summoned the men and interrogated them for many hours. He said they were blindfolded, beaten, threatened with legal action and forced to sign a pledge that they would never again sing and dance in public.

He said Mr Motejaded was detained for several hours and accused of instigating against the government. As part of the crackdown, police swarmed street musicians performing in Rasht, arrested some and confiscated their instruments, he said.

The nationwide uprising, led by women, that erupted across Iran in 2022 has, by and large, been crushed with violence, but protests endure in other, creative ways, such as the Ashura religious participants’ changing of the words of religious ballads to reflect their disdain with the Islamic Republic’s rulers, and the current dance trend.

News of the arrests spread like wildfire across Iran, fuelling outrage. Many people posted angry messages on social media accusing the government of being at war with happiness. They said the authorities were quick to round up citizens for no other crime than joy but failed to arrest officials accused of rampant corruption.

“The regime has no common sense,” said Mr Mahan, a 50-year-old physician in the city of Rasht, who asked that his last name not be used for fear of retribution. “It has become like an authoritarian father, unable to protect and guide his family and resorting to violence as the only way to feel relevant and powerful.”

People mobilised, filming themselves dancing to the song everywhere, mimicking Mr Motejaded’s dance moves. They posted the videos on social media and circulated them widely on applications such as WhatsApp, calling it the “happiness campaign”.

Mr Aghapour’s own remix of the song, which includes the original dance, has generated 80 million views since he posted it on his Instagram page on Dec 1.

Local newspapers ran front-page stories questioning the wisdom of the crackdowns, saying they had backfired by causing an embarrassing flouting of government rules. Mr Mohammad Fazeli, a prominent sociologist, called it a “defeat while manoeuvring” and a “self-made disaster” in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“How to create an opposition activist out of a simple singer,” read a headline in the conservative newspaper Farhikhtegan. Some officials and clerics said the fierce reaction showed that the Islamic Republic was out of step with public opinion.

“If an old man expresses some happiness outside his shop, we think of him as a criminal, but if he had danced during our religious ceremonies, he would be praised,” said Mr Ezzatollah Zarghami, the minister of tourism and a former Revolutionary Guard commander who for years was the head of state television. “We have a problem with projecting happiness.”

The dance protests became so contagious that even the Asia Football Confederation’s official Farsi page, with nearly four million followers, posted a video compilation of some Iranian football stars and teams dancing and cheering to the song.

The government retreated. Police in Gilan province issued a statement on Dec 11 denying Mr Motejaded was ever arrested. They resurrected his Instagram page with all its previous posts of dancing and singing. Local news channels flocked to interview him, and in one video that some say was likely coerced, he says he was not arrested.

He now has close to one million followers on his Instagram page and is hailed by many Iranians as a national hero who inadvertently sparked a renewed call for change. NYTIMES