Ninety-One Lashes for Dancing in Tehran

In May 2014, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tweeted that happiness is a human right and that his government shouldn’t respond too harshly to behaviors caused by joy. Three months later, six young Iranians who danced to Happy by Pharrell Williams in a rooftop video were sentenced to prison time and corporal punishment. The tweet was still up there somewhere, doing whatever tweets do after the person who wrote them has acted in the precise opposite direction.

The video had circulated widely earlier that year—young people jumping around Tehran with their faces uncovered, clearly having fun, clearly not operating within the codes Iranian law requires of them in public. They were arrested almost immediately. By then the clip had several million views, and the hashtag #FreeHappyIranians briefly united a corner of the internet the way these moments do: loudly, briefly, until the next thing arrived.

The sentence handed down was six months suspended plus 91 lashes each. Sasan Solaymani received a year suspended instead of six months. For a video in which they danced. In which they were, by any observable measure, happy.

The police officer who spoke to the press was very calm about it. Our dear youth should avoid people like them and not cause us any trouble, he said. They can be certain that we will identify troublemakers in the shortest possible time. There’s a specific register of institutional speech that uses "dear" while describing the outer limit of what’s permitted. It’s designed to make enforcement sound parental. It doesn’t.

The sentences were suspended, which means they may never have been carried out—that’s something, maybe. The people who made the video went on living their lives in a country that had publicly demonstrated what happiness costs there. Pharrell said he cried when he heard what happened to them. That’s about as useful as a tweet, but I believed him.