Death of Returned Diaspora Pop Icon and Ex-President Ahmadinejad

Habib Mohebbian, an Iranian pop singer who spent about three decades of his life in Los Angeles among the Iranian diaspora after the Islamic Revolution, died of a heart attack on Friday in a village near the city of Ramsar, in the north of Iran. Heartbreaking pictures of his corpse in a mortuary body refrigerator that made the rounds even on official news websites were soon taken down as the move was lambasted as an overt violation of his family’s privacy.

The favorite’s return to and now death in Iran has had political resonations as well. Swimming against the tide, Habib quietly returned to Iran back in 2009, in the midst of the tumultuous developments before and after the disputed presidential race that made many flee the country in self-imposed exile.

However, Habib’s return with the dream of working in Iran to release new albums and give concerts led to nowhere. In January 2012, he released a music video in collaboration with the pseudonymous Samir Zand, son of a prominent conservative, namely Ayatollah Khaz’ali, with hope to ease sensitivities in the establishment and get official permits needed to release albums. The trial balloon Habib launched, however, soon proved to be pecked at and punctured, not only because of Islamic and revolutionary concerns but also on the account of jealous competitions among publishers involved in the country’s music industry, as Arash Nasiri noted in an article published on Musicema.

Now that Habib rests in a holy shrine in Ramsar after a funeral that saw a large number of his fans, reports have once again hit headlines that Ahmadinejad and his confidante Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei were instrumental in the deceased’s rather easy comeback. According to Asr Iran, as early as 2010, Mashaei had told reporters that all Iranian artists were free to work inside the country or overseas within the framework of Iran’s regulations, in an implicit reference to the then still shocking case of Habib. This came amid other furious responses by more orthodox politicians, including Tehran Friday prayers leader Ahmad Khatami who said Iran was no place for LA-based singers.

New shades are still coming to light. That Ahmadinejad went to the bother of attending Habib’s funeral in Ramsar has reinvigorated speculations about his idiosyncratic approach to culture, populist political methodology, and characteristically betrayed promises. The reports of his funeral attendance were soon dismissed but his official website has published a letter of condolences. “He was a popular artist wholeheartedly devoted to his land and its sublime, human and divine culture,” said the letter.

According to the Young Journalists Club, a principlist news agency, Ahmadinejad paved the way for Habib’s return and the singer shortly met him and one of his close insiders, most probably a reference to Rahim Mashaei. YJC reported that Ahmadinejad liked some of the pre-Revolution Iranian singers and believed easier criteria should be at work in cultural spheres related to religion. Elsewhere in YJC’s report another LA-based singer comes up in the spotlight. “It’s heard that he was particularly fond of Siavash Ghomeishi and even wanted to bring him back to Iran in his own airplane after a New York visit,” the report said.

Though Habib, sometimes referred to as the “lonesome man of the night” after one of his greatest hits, never quit efforts to persuade the country’s cultural authorities, whether they be in Ahmadinejad or Rouhani’s administration, his professional life became overcast until in last October when vague sparks of hope relit his night. He was given a few minutes on a semi-official stage in Musicema’s third annual celebration to present awards where he broke his six-year silence. He self-consciously chose to go on what seemed to be a fool’s errand from the very beginning. Ahmadinejad and his clan jettisoned him after they declined to let him release his comeback debut for three years, in a characteristic gesture that has victimized a number of other celebrated artists including most prominently actor Ezzatollah Entezami who was staged as a supporter of Rahim Mashaei’s presidential campaign nipped in the bud by the Guardian Council. A year before a presidential election in which many expect Ahmadinejad to enter in person, his media arms are set to prove once again that abuse of popular celebrities is a strategy pursued at any rate and any costs. Few of the mob will figure out how his administration reignited the brain-drain and put many artists, professors and experts out of work, let alone remember how they called Habib “an instrument of the West’s cultural invasion against Iran”.