Once in a while you’ve probably seen them: little prayers popping up in the middle of the tweets about Iran & #iranelection. As you may have noticed, these RT’s from @pray4iran or from @green_4_iran are quotes from the alternative friday prayers for #iranelection. These prayers pop up as reminders for unity, they might also give some of us a ‘head up’ & moral support in our fight for freedom.
Dear friends of #iranelection, I would like to write/tweet a tribute today – my tribute to this project of alternative Friday Prayers.
First of all, my gratitude goes to @greenthumbnails and @lissnup who imagined and started this project 19 weeks ago.
I’d like to give you a little review of these weeks: there were 18 Friday prayer sermons written by 14 different prayer leaders. The prayers were not only posted on the website (http://pray4iran.org/) but also edited as tweets, ready every friday at 12 Tehran time. Which meant that the original text of the Friday Prayer sermon needed to be put into ‘tweetable’ shape & scheduled. This implicates that somebody had to do all this ‘backstage’-work, as well as finding people who would write a prayer.
If you don’t know it already, I am honored to tell you: the person doing all that work & even cheering us up was @greenthumbnails. #FF
Besides all that work @greenthumbnails was even leading 3 Friday Prayers himself. Once at least because nobody else wrote a sermon. In addition to all this, @greenthumbnails was developing a lot of other ideas like the ‘Hunt for green October’ for example…
The prayers were also translated into german, chinese, french, japanese, dutch, spanish,… farsi, and even pirate language (on pirate day).
This cannot be a complete review of all the prayers – all of them were inspiring -, but I’d like to mention some of them. It started on 14th of August with a Friday Prayer by @greenthumbnails explaining the profound meaning of Allah-u Akbar. The next sermon was written by @MelodyMoezzi (21 Aug.): A powerful tribute to the rooftop-chants in Tehran reverberating around the world.
The feeling to be part of a new sort of community on twitter appeared clearly through the prayer written by @dakster9 (28th August). This new community accepts us as we are, religious or not, believers or not, experiencing a new form of solidarity. The prayers were also a way to explain who we are and what hopes and wishes we have, what it means to be Green. That was the case in the two powerful sermons led by @lissnup on 4th september and 13th november.
You may wonder, while reading all this, why I decided to write this tribute. Perhaps you don’t know, yet ? Last Friday was the last sermon.
Just when I and @seansanderson thought it would be a good idea to make a press release for this online-phenomenon (on 12th dec.)…, there was a tweet from @greenthumbnails that reads as follows: “i am delivering this message with a mixture of sadness & relief: i have decided to leave the @pray4iran project – im sorry. this will likely mean that there will no longer be friday prayers and that the site will no longer update. thank you to everyone involved.”
( ) Fill in with your own thoughts, please. I myself felt very, very sad and speechless, although I’m not a religious person. This was really a special experience, I have to say.
But the little prayers popping up in the middle of our activity on #iranelection will still appear as @green_4_iran continues tweeting. And as you see today, even the site may update from time to time. And you may visit the site and read the prayers once in a while.
I saw a very appropriate retweet today which really gives you a good review of what @pray4iran was all about… it goes as follows:
RT @shirdl: “I have no religion, just the religion of Freedom”. We shall overcome #iranelection
