SPECIAL REPORT: THE CRISIS IN IRAN

The current crisis in Iran is, quite predictably, eliciting conflicting and often contradictory commentaries in the media and reactions from governments around the world. As is often the case with charged political events, the prevailing opinions and responses usually reflect existing ideological and political predispositions and tell us as much about what is going in Iran as what the protagonists would like to see happen.

There is no question that Iran is at a crossroads as the ties and tensions between theocracy and democracy, state and society, private and public spaces, political and religious discourses are shaken into the open, as the competing factions of the political class and the diverse social forces in civil society struggle for supremacy. Whatever happens in the next few tumultuous days and weeks, the resolution of this crisis will not take place anytime soon, for this is not simply about the disputed results of the election but the very soul of this ancient, proud nation.

What is going on in Iran is familiar and of interest to the Pan-African world where complex struggles for the three Ds of postcolonial liberation are also taking place: democracy, development, and self-determination. The cast of state and non-state actors, their discourses and actions, and the reactions of the outside world are familiar too.

Out of the dozens of commentaries I have read on the Iranian crisis in recent days, the following seem to capture the complex dynamics and developments behind the crisis and underscore the need for more nuanced understanding of what is going on. PT Zeleza, Editor, The Zeleza Post

THE URGE TO SPLIT THE WORLD INTO TWO WARRING CAMPS IS CHILDISH By Peter Beaumont

The Iran crisis is being hijacked by those who see themselves as anti-imperialists or pro-democrats, missing its true complexity

Visiting Iran [1] last year to cover parliamentary elections, I discovered a country utterly at odds with most of its depictions. I found myself discussing the sociologist Durkheim with a classical record producer in a cinema-cafe and debating the political situation in Iraq [2]'s Shia holy cities with a conservative mosque guard in southern Tehran. I sat with artists drinking bootleg vodka at a party and discussed the limits of personal freedom over the Islamic dress code with a liberal but headscarf-wearing teacher. Even the attitudes among supporters of President Ahmadinejad, whom I encountered in the countryside, were complex, confounding what I thought I knew. Iran, you see, makes a mockery of how the west would like to frame its reality.

Which makes reading many of the views expressed in the west during Iran's election crisis often baffling - I have struggled to recognise the place depicted. It is worrying, because if I have learnt a single thing from the last 15 years covering international crises, it is how simplified or distorted depictions of events are more easily established as given truths than challenged. And how dangerously, as Iraq made clear, those false images feed into the decision-making processes of western governments.

In the case of Iran, what has been visible in the west has been two competing versions of the country, coloured by political imagination and appropriated by the two rival - and confrontational - camps that have dominated our debate on foreign affairs since 11 September and the invasion of Iraq. Parties to a new cold war of ideas, their narrow and mutually antagonistic positions have reinterpreted each emerging international crisis to suit their own agenda and in defiance of the other's.

On one side are the remnants of the old left, bolstered by a new generation radicalised by anti-poverty, anti-globalisation and climate change activism. Informed by writers like the veteran activist Noam Chomsky and journalists such as John Pilger, their world view is characterised by an "anti-imperialist" narrative that is hostile to western interventions.

Opposing them is a more diffuse group with a far greater influence on policy-making, whose members range from broadly liberal to neoconservative. The unifying conviction that has glued this group together has been an almost religious belief in the transformative power that western democratic habits possess when transplanted into societies and cultures that have experienced largely restricted freedoms. It's a belief, it should be said, that remains strangely unshaken by the multiple failures in recent years.

The two tendencies, however, do mirror each other in one crucial aspect: the way in which they tend to describe a more homogenous Iran than exists - either more universally desperate for change or more supportive of Ahmadinejad.

More widely, the consequence of the domination of the debate on international affairs by these two world views is that each international crisis is co-opted as self-reinforcing evidence for their arguments, producing a degraded conversation full of finger-pointing and name-calling. Those who intervene, by and large, do so to confirm their credentials to their own audiences. The framing of issues like Iran in terms of a western-style, pro-democracy argument can also have unintended consequences. In a country whose leaders have an almost paranoid suspicion of the US and the UK, it offers an open invitation to interpret commentary as "interference" as inevitably has happened in the last few days.

In the case of events in Iran in the last two weeks, the reaction has been drearily familiar. For the dissenting left, confronted by what looks suspiciously like another "colour revolution" - after the "rose revolution" in Georgia and the "orange revolution" in Ukraine, which received support from the pro-democracy groups - the response has been to back the "anti-imperialist" Ahmadinejad, friend of the poor and foe of Zionism, as the likely victor. More victim of an attempted coup than responsible for a coup in office, it is a version of events that, through the necessity of bolstering his case, has tended to airbrush out the more unpalatable features of Ahmadinejad's Iran.

That critique has been more than matched by an equal barrage of opinion, often by those more familiar with Tel Aviv or Tallahassee than Tehran, who have bought wholeheartedly into a "freedom" narrative that seeks to interpret the mass demonstrations of those supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi [3] in an equally simplistic fashion - as representative of the aspirations of all of Iran.

It is a version with its own lacunae. Investing so much in the reformist opposition, and beguiled by a particular version that emanates from north Tehran's unrepresentative suburbs, it fails to acknowledge either the nature of Mousavi's agenda - a self-described "fundamentalist reformist" who is far less radical than they assume - or the reality of the huge support both for Ahmadinejad in his constituency and the Islamic revolution.

The domination of the debate by two such facile and self-interested arguments is important, precisely because the picture that we have of Iran matters.

And over Iran right now, there is an overwhelming need for a careful examination of what is occurring, which goes beyond the usual glib depictions of Ahmadinejad as nothing more than a dictatorial Holocaust-denier or Mousavi as a receptacle for hopes of a kind of liberal western reformation of Iran's revolution.

The crisis of legitimacy that has been unfolding in the wake of Iran's contested elections is one that cannot be expressed through simplistic nostrums. The social and political tensions that have been building since the Islamic revolution have gained pace since the emergence of the Reformists as a serious political force. What they speak to are a set of concerns that can only be understood in an Iranian context. The problems encompassed include the pressing issue of how to reconcile the increasingly conflicted question of how people behave in private in their homes and in the more restrictive public spaces. There is the tension, too, that has been growing for over a decade between the concept of velayat e-faqih - clerical jurisprudence - and the desire for more meaningful democratic representation in the context of a socially conservative Islamic state.

Critically, too, for both the hardliners anxious to preserve the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and reformists, the current crisis is being driven by a fraught anticipation of precisely what will happen to one of the most important keystones of the revolution, the role of Supreme Leader, which even the incumbent ayatollah Ali Khamenei [4] has questioned. Also brought into focus has been the issue of the shifting boundaries of the toleration of political expression and the terms on which they are set by an increasingly nervous regime, in a state that enjoys more freedoms than generally supposed, but which remain severely circumscribed.

Last, and perhaps most important of all, there is the issue of how Iran's brittle institutions negotiate a growing divide that - by the nature of the arithmetic involved on both sides - cannot be solved by either the ascendancy of Ahmadinejad's faction or the Reformists.

We are at a crucial moment not only for the Iranian nation, but for the geopolitics of the wider region. The challenge is not to mould Iran's reality into a shape we feel most comfortable with; to confirm our prejudices or our hopes. The challenge is to understand. Because only in understanding will we avoid setting up the conditions to repeat the worst errors of the last decade.

From The Guardian [5] June 21, 2009

BATTLE FOR THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC By Robert Fisk

Iran's Supreme Leader and its officially elected president are terrified by the spectre of counter-revolution

Now that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has placed himself shoulder to shoulder with his officially elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the very existence of the Islamic regime may now be questioned openly in a nation ever more divided between reformists and those who insist on maintaining the integrity of the 1979 revolution. Had Khamenei chosen a middle ground, some small compromises towards the countless millions - for in the election, it appears, they were indeed uncounted - who oppose Ahmadinejad, then he might have remained a neutral father-figure. Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters had religiously - in the most literal sense of the word - refused to criticise the Supreme Leader or the existence of the Islamic Republic during last week's street demonstrations

But reacting as all revolutionaries do even decades after they have come to power - for the spectre of counter-revolution remains with them until death - Khamenei chose to paint Ahmadinejad's political opponents as potential mercenaries, spies and agents of foreign powers. Treason in the Islamic Republic is, of course, punishable by death. But Khamenei's political alliance with his very odd and hallucinatory president may have sprung from fear as much as anger.

During his Friday prayers address at Tehran University, the Supreme Leader mentioned the dangers of a "velvet" revolution and it is clear that the regime has been deeply concerned by the democratic overthrow of Eastern European and west Asian governments since the fall of the Soviet Union. People power - through which the 1979 revolution was ultimately successful - is a devastating weapon (albeit the only one) in the armoury of a serious but unarmed political opposition.

In the aftermath of the Ahmadinejad "success" at the polls, his supporters were handing out leaflets condemning the secular revolutions of Eastern Europe, and their content says much about the anxieties of Iran's clerical leadership. One of them was entitled: "The system of trying to topple an Islamic Republic in a 'velvet revolution'." It then described how it believes Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and other nations won their freedom.

"'Velvet' or 'colourful' revolutions... are methods of exchanging power for social unrest. Colourful and 'velvet' revolutions occurred in post-communist societies of central and Eastern Europe and central Asia. Colourful revolutions have always been initiated during an election and its methods are as follows:

"1. Complete despair in the attitude of people when they are certain to lose an election...

"2. Choosing one particular colour which is selected solely for the Western media to identify (for their readers or viewers)." Mousavi used green as his campaign colour and his supporters still wear this colour on wristbands, scarves and bandannas.

"3) Announcing that there has been advance cheating before an election and repeating it non-stop afterwards... allowing exaggeration by the Western media, especially in the US.

"4) Writing letters to officials in the government, claiming vote-rigging in the election. It's interesting to note that in all such 'colourful' projects - for example, in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan - the Western-backed movements have warned of fraud before elections by writing to the incumbent governments. In Islamic Iran, these letters had already been written to the Supreme Leader."

Another leaflet maintained that a study - which Khamenei's advisers have obviously undertaken, however inaccurately - demonstrated that vote-rigging will be alleged on the very day of the election and that victory will be claimed by the opposition hours before the counting is finished and before their own defeat is announced. The results, says the document, will therefore already have a "background" of fraud. "In the final stages... supporters gather in front of the regime's official offices, holding colourful banners and protesting against vote-rigging." This part of the demonstration, the leaflet says, "is run by the foreign media who are the opposition movement's supporters so that they make good pictures and mislead the international community".

All this shows a unique and obsessive concern among the Supreme Leader's disciples about just how popular Mousavi's post-election campaign has become. Even the cutting of SMS and mobile communications - and in a sophisticated society such as Iran, this must have cost millions of dollars - did not prevent the calling of rallies which always assembled at the same moment and at the same place.

What we are now seeing is a regime which is far more worried than the Supreme Leader suggested when he threatened the opposition so baldly on Friday. Having refused any serious political dialogue with Mousavi and his opposition comrades - a few district recounts will produce no real change in the result - the Iranian regime, led by a Supreme Leader who is frightened and a president who speaks like a child, is now involved in the battle for control of the streets of Iran. It is a conflict which will need the kind of miracle in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad both believe to avoid violence.

From The Independent [6] June 21, 2009

A STRUGGLE FOR THE LEGACY OF THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION By Robert F. Worth

On the edge of a noisy Tehran rally for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [7] early last week, a middle-aged woman in a chador was cursing the opposition protesters who say the Iranian election was a fraud. "They are traitors, they are not even related to this country," she said. "We all support Ahmadinejad and his policies."

But even there, in a government-organized crowd watched over by riot police and Basij [8] militiamen, dissenting voices could be heard.

"Not everyone here is for Ahmadinejad," whispered a woman in a gray headscarf who spotted my reporter's notebook. "Most of them are for the opposition, they just came here to see what is happening." She scurried away into the crowd, but another came up - "the election was stolen!" - and another, and another, until I lost count and began to wonder if I was dreaming:

"It is all cheating and lies." "Don't believe them." "This is not the true Iran [9]."

Ascertaining what the true Iran is has never been harder. What is clear, though, is that the electoral dispute has exposed a deep rift in Iranian society, one that cannot be measured or healed by vote counts. On each side, faith merges with perception, making the partisans believe with fierce certainty that they represent the country's true majority.

The difference is sometimes caricatured as one between a Westernized urban elite and the pious lower classes. In fact, it is not that simple, even if there is little doubt about who all those fashionable Tehrani women in jeans and loose head scarves voted for. A vast opposition rally on Monday - in which more than a million people are believed to have taken part - was also full of people who looked more like Ahmadinejad supporters: women in traditional Islamic garb, and working-class men.

In essence, the core of the struggle is between two competing views of what this country's Islamic revolution sought to achieve.

"One side wants a gradual evolution of democratic institutions and a more democratic reading of Islamic institutions," said Kavous Seyed-Emami, a political science professor at Imam Sadeq University in Tehran. "The other side is for a populist and more or less authoritarian reading of Islam."

Over the past week, those differences have often been boiled down to slogans. "Death to the dictator!" chanted supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi [10], the lead opposition candidate. "Death to those who oppose the rule of the clerics!" was the refrain on the other side.

And more than a week after the election, no one can yet say for certain whether the official count of a 62 percent victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad represents the way Iranians really voted. Many supporters of Mr. Moussavi believe firmly that he won by the same crushing margin.

"Look who supports Ahmadinejad, it's just sectarian groups, a minority," said Parisa, a 26-year-old woman at a rally for Mr. Moussavi last week. At a rally the next day for Mr. Ahmadinejad, Muhammad Ali, a 49-year-old English teacher, said with equal sincerity: "Ahmadinejad belongs to all the people, not just one group. But Moussavi and the others, they are just from a narrow sector."

Even on the economy, the most important issue for most voters, perceptions were starkly at odds. A refrain for opposition voters was the need to bring Iran's high unemployment and inflation under control. Yet many Ahmadinejad supporters echoed their candidate's claims that prices were going down, that jobs had been created, that life was getting easier.

In part, the split revolves around opposed understandings of Iran's political evolution since the 1979 revolution. For the opposition, a defining moment came in 1997, when the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami [11] won the presidency in a landslide. Many in the opposition see that as a natural growth from the incendiary radicalism that founded the Islamic Republic to a more mature and democratic style of governance. Mr. Khatami's broad victory margin - which was repeated in 2001 - still feeds their sense that they are the country's true majority.

On the other side, many people see the same years as a gradual falling away from the zeal of the republic's early years. Even those who admire Mr. Khatami often complain about corruption among leading officials, especially former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani [12].

For them, Mr. Ahmadinejad was the first president who seemed to understand Iran's poor and working class, and who seemed capable of fulfilling the revolution's promises of economic and social justice. They also respond to his aggressive nationalist rhetoric, which is rooted in a longstanding fear that Iran has been bullied, politically and culturally, by the West. By contrast, many younger and more cosmopolitan Iranians would like firmer connections to the outside world.

The past few weeks have helped widen the gulf. After years in which they felt downcast and helpless, opposition partisans saw the sudden birth of a popular movement in support of Mr. Moussavi that exceeded their hopes. Rallies began drawing tens of thousands of cheering people. The streets of Tehran and other major cities began exploding after dark with carnivalesque street celebrations, in which young people danced and dressed in the signature bright-green color of the Moussavi campaign. Word of the events spread by Facebook [13], which - like other new Internet technologies - proved a challenge for the authorities to control. Women became a driving force, emboldened by Mr. Moussavi's ground-breaking decision to campaign alongside his wife, the distinguished political scientist Zahra Rahnavard [14].

As the rallies gathered force in Tehran and elsewhere, a conviction began to ripen: the country belonged, once again, to the partisans of democratic reform. Large numbers of Iranians who had voted for Mr. Khatami, and who - frustrated by his failure to put his ideas into practice - had sat out the vote in 2005, said they would return to the polls. The result seemed inevitable. A number of polls by opposition researchers suggested that Mr. Moussavi would not only survive to the second round; he would win in the first, by a decisive margin.

"They thought they could do anything to this country, that we were like clay," said Saeed Leylaz, an economist who supported the Moussavi campaign, a few days before the election. "But we have proved this civilization is much bigger than that. They realized they are riding the back of a whale, a very big whale."

Many Moussavi supporters began to warn darkly that any result other than their victory would be proof of electoral fraud. At the same time, they believed that their massive street presence would make rigging the election impossible: how could the incumbent even pretend to win in the face of such numbers?

But on the other side, there was no lack of confidence. Many Iranians said they thought Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the nationally televised debates, despite the criticism he received for his aggressive style. He had spent much of the previous four years traveling around Iran, visiting big cities and small towns in a way that no previous president had done. He produced two campaign videos, shown on national television, that brilliantly highlighted his common touch and simple lifestyle. In one, he is tied up in traffic with aides when the driver asks if he should take the breakdown lane. "No," the president replies, "that's for the fancy people."

The other candidates produced their own videos, but even opposition partisans conceded that they were much less effective.

A few days before the election, Hossein Shariatmadari, the general director of the hard-line government newspaper Kayhan and a close confidant of Iran's supreme leader, offered his own serenely confident prediction. Mr. Ahmadinejad would win easily.

"President Ahmadinejad is well-embraced by all the people," said Mr. Shariatmadari, a courtly man who has links to the intelligence services and is widely feared in Iran. "He has special characteristics that people want in an ideal president."

In retrospect, many Iranians now read such predictions as a wink from the clerical elite. They did not just want Mr. Ahmadinejad to win, it is said. They wanted him to win big, so as to persuade the reformers that they were a minority, and to erase the stain of Mr. Khatami's reformist landslides.

Instead, the election and the dispute that followed had an entirely different and unexpected result: Both sides now view themselves as the true Iranian majority. It is not yet clear how any future vote count might persuade either side otherwise.

From The New York Times [15] June 21, 2009

UNDERSTANDING IRAN'S ELECTIONS By Mustafa El-Labbad

One needs to understand the broader, "strategic" mind that guides Iran before grasping the significance of lower contests for the presidency

The 10th presidential polls in Iran drew to a close with the victory of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the first round. The surprising results triggered a storm in Iran that has yet to subside. As mass protests rage in Iran's major cities on the part of supporters of reformist candidate Mir-Hussein Mousavi, observers are wondering how to reasonably contextualise these developments.

To even begin answering such a complex question we must look beyond customary platitudes. Some Ahmadinejad fans maintain that he was the "candidate of the poor", the leader of the "rejectionist axis" in the region, and "the chief enemy of the US and Israel," and that these are the factors that decided the election in his favour. However, such labels that play on the prevalent themes of his ideological rhetoric fail to supply a sufficiently objective analytical framework. Nor does the customary left-versus-right framework serve the purpose, given that all candidates were solid members and supporters of the establishment and that their ideological stances elude such ready-to-hand pegs; that the entire socio-political map in Iran is much more fluid.

Nevertheless, the Ahmadinejad- Mousavi contest and the electoral results did throw into relief some major regional, ethnic, gender and other socio-cultural divides. In addition, while Ahmadinejad undoubtedly enjoyed broad support among large segments of Iranian society, he also had the backing of certain state agencies and their military and security arms, which intervened on his behalf and against Mousavi who also indisputably enjoyed widespread popularity. This intervention, moreover, was not necessarily ideologically motivated, as will be explained.

There is also a danger in projecting the superficial "good-versus-evil" dichotomy onto the "conservative- versus-reformist" dichotomy and fitting this into a hackneyed mould. It produces nothing but cheap name- calling and mudslinging: if Ahmadinejad is as described above then, according to the labellers, Mousavi must be the "candidate of the rich", "the friend of Israel", and the "enemy of the resistance". Nothing puts paid to such mindless branding more than the fact that Mousavi, like Ahmadinejad, is a card-carrying member of the regime. Thus, to praise the incumbent as a champion of the rejectionists and to condemn his electoral rival as some kind of turncoat ignores the real dynamics between the wings of the Iranian regime.

Iran entered its electoral season at the height of its "soft strength," having fiercely resisted all forms of international pressure and, in recent years, succeeding in extending its regional influence as never before. Four candidates fielded themselves for the presidency, a very rare sight in the Middle East, even if the Iranian presidency is not the top office in the land under their constitution. The regime emerged from the elections deeply shaken by the biggest challenge to its legitimacy in the history of the Islamic Republic. However, like the good-versus-evil dichotomy, it is facile to pass off the post-election furore as a "conspiracy".

The reform candidate Mousavi, who had served as prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war and who had safeguarded the Iranian economy and steered his country's foreign policy during that period, is not an "American plot" against Iran. To think otherwise not only does an injustice to Mousavi but to the entire Iranian regime. And the tens of thousands who have taken to the street in protest against the official results of the polls and in support of Mousavi are not "enemies of Iran" or "agents of foreign powers". Their sheer numbers alone indicate that they express a large and significant body of popular sentiment. But Mousavi is not a devil, nor is he an angel and the same applies to Ahmadinejad. The two are political rivals who competed in the electoral process, campaigning on the basis of their respective beliefs regarding what best serves Iran's national interests. Herein resides a major lesson in real life.

Sufism not only plays a major role in Iranian culture -- its influence extends to its political heritage. Indeed, we could say that present-day Iran is very much an extension of the great legacy of such Sufi philosophers and poets as Khayyam, Hafez, Bastami and Rumi. The political and cultural substance in Iran has naturally been imbued by the contributions of these intellectual and literary giants, some of whom explored causal relations that extend beyond the immediately discernible.

In his major poem Mathnawi wa Ma'nawi (Spiritual Couplets), Rumi relates the story of two ants walking by a splendid painting of colourful flowers. The first ant tells the second, "My, what a beautiful painting this is! It all has to do with the colours." The second responds, "No, the beauty stems from the fingers that controlled how the colours were applied." To which the first answers, "But the fingers are nothing without the influence of the wrist. The wrist is the most important!" Naturally, the wrist leads to the forearm, the forearm to the upper arm, and finally the arm to the mind, which, as the second ant says, "moves the upper arm, the forearm, the wrist, and the fingers." The first ant pauses at this and then says, "But the mind, unless transformed by God, is mere matter."

The story, of course, is a parable about epistemology. Rumi has a perception of a "partial mind" and a "total mind", the former belonging to human beings and, hence, subject to limitations of time and place, as much as it strives towards comprehending the greater truth, which can only perceived by the "total" or all-seeing mind. If we may apply Rumi's famous spiritual-metaphysical concept to present-day Iranian politics, we might say that there exists an Iranian strategic mind above the parts, these being the candidates and the tactical approaches and partial ideas they advocate. The strategic or "whole" mind draws the greater picture and the candidates move within its contours to the extent their manoeuvrability and skills permit.

One cannot escape the observation that each of the presidents of the Iranian Republic from Rafsanjani through Khatami to Ahmadinejad had certain traits that suited Iran's national interests at the time. Rafsanjani served as president in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war and oversaw the reconstruction of the country at a crucial and precarious moment. Because of his influence among all the articulations of the regime, and his "historic legitimacy" during the Islamic revolution, his presence at the helm alleviated internal contradictions and helped smooth Tehran's emergence from its international isolation.

Khatami was the intellectual and enlightened president who rehabilitated Iran's "soft power" through his appeals to a "dialogue of civilisation" and "faith and philosophy" which, incidentally, demonstrated the Iranian talent in transposing its rich Sufi metaphysical heritage into contemporary moulds. In the era of the smiling, open-minded Khatami, Iran made impressive and irreversible leaps forward in its nuclear programme. In Ahmadinejad's first term, Khatami's foremost achievement -- the inroad into nuclear technology -- became the mainspring for Iran's regional project. Aided by former US president Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in particular, Iran under Ahmadinejad succeeded in expanding its regional influence as never before. By the end of his term, Obama was elected president in the US and had begun to make overtures to Iran that would have been inconceivable under Bush.

Iran is not facing a problem in Iraq; Obama is, having inherited it from his predecessor. Tehran is not the party that has to reassure its allies that it will be entering into dialogue with Washington; the reverse is the case. Now that the tone of US-Iranian relations has shifted from sabre-rattling to conciliation, the Iranian strategic mind seems to have rejected the Obama framework for talks and that same mind seems to think that another Ahmadinejad term will best serve to secure concessions or further softening from Washington. Apparently, too, that mind feels that the current regional situation presents an opportunity for the further expansion of Iranian influence before finally sitting down for talks with Washington and that Ahmadinejad's hardline approach is best suited for the purpose of gaining a stronger hand.

The results of the Iranian elections can only be understood by trying to grasp the greater picture as perceived by the strategic mind behind the scene, all other innumerable details being precisely that: details.

From Al-Ahram [16]

IRAN'S DEMOCRATIC UPSURGE By Hamid Dabashi

Regardless of their integrity, Iran's elections -- and even their aftermath -- are the fundamental democratic and collective expression US hawks and Zionists fear most

"A messianic apocalyptic cult..."

-- Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Iran and Iranians

By design or serendipity, the Israeli claim to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" has suddenly been globally exposed for the ludicrous joke that it is.

The June 2009 parliamentary elections in Lebanon will go down in history as a major advance for the cause of democracy in that small but vital country. The victory of the March 14 coalition of Saad Al-Hariri, by which they now hold 71 seats in the 128- member parliament, has left the remaining 58 seats to the Hizbullah-led coalition. Israel and its American allies have been quick to paint this result as a victory for "pro-Western" elements and thus a defeat for Hizbullah. This is not the case. Victory of the March 14 coalition is the victory of democracy in Lebanon -- a victory Hizbullah shared.

Because Israel is a racist apartheid state, it cannot see the world except through its own tribal lens. The victory of the March 14 coalition in Lebanon is the victory of the electoral process, which now solidly includes Hizbullah and its parliamentary allies. Hizbullah is now not only part of Lebanon's civil society, but also its political apparatus and institutionalised democratic process, and Hizbullah achieved this without abandoning its status as a national liberation army that will defend its homeland against any and every Israeli barbarity that may come its way.

As the Arab and Muslim worlds celebrate this democratic victory, it is imperative to see it as having nothing to do with Obama's presidency, or his speech in Cairo, lecturing Muslims in the region on democracy while his army is illegally occupying Iraq and slaughtering Afghans.

On the heels of the Lebanese elections, the cause and the march of democracy took an even bolder leap in Iran, and that leap is not because of US promotion of democracy, but in fact is despite and against it. At time of writing, millions of Iranians inside and out of their homeland are angry and heartbroken with the official results. Some go so far as considering what happened a coup d'état. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to question the validity of the official results that have declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the clear winner. The only point of which Iranians can be sure and proud is the extraordinary manifestation of their collective will to participate in their politics. This unprecedented participation neither lends legitimacy to the illegitimate apparatus of the Islamic Republic and its manifestly undemocratic organs nor should be abused by bankrupt oppositional forces outside Iran to denounce and denigrate a glorious page in modern Iranian history.

Every four years, during presidential elections followed by parliamentary elections, the paradox of the democratic theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran fascinates and baffles the world. During this presidential campaign, Iranians boisterously joined rallies and then stood in long queues to vote under the extended shadow of Israeli warlords threatening a military strike. The propaganda machinery at the disposal of Israel will have the world believe that a populist demagogue like Ahmadinejad is "the dictator" of Iran, as one of their spokesmen in New York, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, once put it. And thus on the model of an Oriental despot he represents a backward people whose fate deserves to be determined by others (the US/ Israel, of course). As the prominent Israeli scholar of Iran, Haggai Ram, one of a handful of courageous Israeli dissidents, has aptly demonstrated in his Iranophobia, Israel's fixation with Iran has now reached pathological proportions and is a case study of self-delusional hysteria feeding on itself.

The reality of the Iranian polity, as the world has once again been witness to, is vastly different to the picture US/Israel propaganda is feeding the world. A vibrant and restless society is defying all mandated limitations on its will and demanding and exacting its democratic rights. The undemocratic institutions of the Islamic Republic -- beginning with the idea of velayat-e faqih, or rule of the cleric, down to the unelected body of the Guardian Council -- are not obstacles to democracy in Iran but invitations to democratic assault. What the Iranian electorate, young and old, men and women, seem to be doing is far more important than a mere head on collision with ageing and arcane institutions. They are pushing the limits of their democratic exercises in unfathomable and unstoppable directions. The Internet has connected Iran's youth to the global context, and they have in turn become the catalyst of discursive and institutional changes beyond the control of the clerical clique in Qom and Tehran.

This is more than anything a battle between generations. Iranian society is changing and fast. The ageing custodians of the Islamic Republic wish to limit what can be said or expected. But the globally geared and wired youth, more than 60 per cent of the electorate, is now radically altering the contours of those limits. They are not merely defying them, but are sublimating them. The red line in Iran is thinning by the hour, for facing it are skilful players exercising their political muscles. It was quite evident in the course of the US presidential election of 2008 that an Internet-savvy Obama outmanoeuvred McCain's arcane operation. The same is true of Mir-Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karrubi's campaigns, the two reformist candidates, on the one side, and Ahmadinejad's on the other, with Mohsen Rezai in-between. The social basis of Mousavi's platform is the urban middle class, the youth, and women. The economic basis of Ahmadinejad's demagoguery is the rural and urban poor. They are both skilful campaigners in reaching out to their respective constituencies.

The rising demographic tide is against the old revolutionaries. Iranian children born after the revolution in the late 1970s have no active memory of its hopes and furies and could not care less about those who do. Every four years since the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the Iranian electorate has been upping the ante. They voted for Rafsanjani in 1989 and for eight years he rebuilt the economic infrastructure of the country after the war, creating a class of nouveau riche. Then in 1997 they voted for Mohamed Khatami who gave them a modicum of civil society and opened the vista of wide-ranging social reform, and yet did nothing -- or very little -- to alleviate the poor masses Rafsanjani had left behind. In 2005, those disenfranchised by Rafsanjani's economic project and indifferent to Khatami's social and cultural agenda pushed power into the hands of Ahmadinejad. And now, in 2009, a major segment of disaffected voters, in their millions, are investing trust in Mousavi, a former prime minister with impeccable revolutionary credentials, a war hero, and a socialist in his economic projects.

Again, the scene is overwhelmed by the massive participation of the youth, students, and above all women, on both sides of the political divide. This new generation is Internet-aware, versatile with Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It is globally wired. The presence of Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi's distinguished wife, is an added aspect of this campaign. A prominent public intellectual and a former university chancellor, a poet, painter and sculptor, and a staunch advocate of women's rights, Rahnavard is dubbed by some foreign journalists as the Michelle Obama of Iran. "No," retorted one of her Iranian admirers in response, "Michelle Obama could have aspired to become the Zahra Rahnavard of the United States."

This election has also been extraordinary because of live televised debates that exposed skeletons collected for 30 years in the closets of the ageing elders of the republic. Ahmadinejad, bastard son of the Islamic Revolution, is fast devouring, in his populist demagoguery, the idealism and aspirations of that revolution. Opposing Ahmadinejad are the architects of Iran's creative imagination. More than ever Iranian artists and filmmakers have been active in this election. They have published open letters, produced video clips, and joined others in rallies. From Paris, Mohsen Makhmalbaf wrote an open letter supporting Mousavi and encouraging everyone to vote for him while dispatching his youngest daughter, Hana, to go to Iran to make a documentary about the elections. When Mousavi challenged the official results, Makhmalbaf became a conduit of his campaign with international news outlets, using his connections with foreign journalists.

Majid Majidi, another prominent Iranian filmmaker, directed Mousavi's campaign commercials. Other Iranian directors, actors, producers have similarly exerted their efforts. Student organisations, labour unions, professional associations and women's rights organisations -- all have been engaged, on the streets, on the Internet sites, writing fiery essays, shooting movies, and producing video clips. Rahnavard, a painter with a talent for colour symbolism, chose green for her husband's campaign (neither red for violence nor white for martyrdom, the other two colours in the Iranian flag). And when Khatami went to Isfahan to campaign for Mousavi, upwards of 100,000 people came together in the historic Meydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan to cheer him and support the reformist candidate. This is democracy from bellow; democracy not by virtue of institutions, but by collective and defiant insistence. Israeli warlords should think twice before aggressing the Iranians.

Disappointed by this democratic flourishing are not just Israeli and American Zionists that spent time and money portraying Iran as a diabolic dictatorship deserving to be bombed. Equally scandalised by this election are the colourful band of lipstick jihadi Hirsi Ali wanna-bes who are writing one erotic fantasy after another about Iranian "women", over-sexualising Iranian politics as they opt for "love and danger" during their "honeymoon in Tehran". The representation of Iranian women in the flea market of the US publishing industry began under President Bush with Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and has now come to a new depth of depravity in Pardis Mahdavi's Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution. Between a harem full of Lolitas and a bathhouse of nymphomaniacs is where Nafisi and Mahdavi have Iranian women, marching in despair awaiting liberation by US marines and Israeli bombers. What a contrast to the real work of women, as testified to in this election, and now on the street in defence of the collective will of the nation.

On two sides of Iran lie in waste Iraq and Afghanistan, liberated for democracy by George W Bush and now Barack Obama. In the middle, millions of Iranians who would have been maimed or murdered by a similar "liberation" peacefully poured into streets and jubilantly marched to polling stations to vote, in a grassroots, however limited and flawed, but still promising and beautiful, march towards democracy. And now that they think their votes have been stolen from them they are more than capable of demanding them back.

Whoever the final winner of Iran's election may be, fanatical Zionists in Israel and the US, power-mongering Mullahs in Tehran and Qom, comprador intellectuals and career opportunists from Washington DC to California, are its sorest losers. The winners are the indomitable Iranian people. We are witness, regardless of controversy, to a triumph of democratic pluralism, from Lebanon to Iran -- a nightmare for the Jewish state that wants the whole region remade in its delusional, racist, apartheid image where sects and factions fight each other to the dogged end. "A messianic apocalyptic cult," indeed, can only describe the country of the man who pronounced it.

Mr Prime Minister, thou dost protest too much.

Al-Ahram [17] June 19, 2009

REFORMISTS ARE ISLAMISTS, TOO By Ali Jawad

The 'Green Revolution' is underway. Iranians have put aside their greatest fears, and now carry the destiny of the nation in their own hands. We are in 1979 all over again; only that now, it is the ‘mullahs' who have become the fleeing Shah. Tensions on the Iranian streets have boiled over to a simple equation: "whose violence threshold is higher?"

The above characterizations capture, to a large degree, the essence of the sensationalized media reporting that has gripped Western capitals in the wake of the Iranian elections. As is the norm with Western coverage of Iran, much of any analysis specializes in the art of the demonization of President Ahmedinejad. Not far distant, as always, is a usual dosage of derisive language reserved for the Islamic Republic. Indeed, the latter enjoys a rich and arguably unparalleled heritage in contemporary Western media. The difference this time around however, has been the extent to which hysterical media outlets have lined up to champion the cause of presidential candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Without need for truth or facts, media outlets from across the spectrum have at once become pro-Mousavi advocates in this kangaroo trial whose verdict had been determined even before the trial was underway. A question should be posed at this stage for objective readers: ‘what response should we have expected from these very media outlets had the election results registered a victory for opposition candidate, Mr. Mousavi?'

But even this unfailing pro-Mousavi advocacy shades (almost surreally) in comparison to a most flabbergasting marvel in Western reporting over the last few hours. Believe it or not, but the likes of the BBC now have nothing but words of praise for the "language of the Islamic Revolution" i.e. the slogans of 1979; that single event which gave the US one of its most painful drubbings. Not in my wildest dreams did I foresee a day in which, both the Right and Left would light up with glee on hearing cries of "Allahu Akbar" shouted out from Tehran's rooftops. Regaining my composure (for having the great privilege of witnessing this historic milestone), I was led to question: ‘what has led to this sudden (and truly unexpected) spiritual awakening of the Western media?'

Novel fantasies aside and back to reality. To any impartial eye, there is something deeply out-of-sync in the dominating frameworks against which the sights and sounds of Tehran's so-called 'Green Revolution' are analysed. On the one hand, there are fast-selling images of liberal Americanized youths who (as we are endlessly told) happen to be worshippers of all things Western, and impatiently seek to break away the shackles of the ‘despotic mullah regime'. Juxtaposed against these visuals are the traditional chants of the Islamic Revolution of "God is Great" and the newborn slogans of "Ya Hossein, Mir Hossein".

Question: what should we make of the disparity between these two contradicting poles that are somehow seamlessly interwoven in the fictional world of Western media?

The answer to this question has almost entirely eluded the West ever since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. For Western capitals, the failure to properly appraise the religiosity of Iranian society has been a perpetual quandary. Let's get things straight: Mousavi and his supporters are not calling for a counter-revolution against the Islamic Republic. Although the BBC (who wilfully signed up to the Bush-Blairite ‘Ministry of Truth') is twisting and turning rumours in its attempt to depict the ongoing tensions as a life-or-death predicament for the Islamic Republic, the reality on the ground could not be further distant.

Chants of "Ya Hossein, Mir-Hossein" admittedly mesmerize the BBC's Tehran correspondents. To Iranians, the slogan that translates to: "O Hossein, Mir Hossein", sticks out like a sore thumb. One would find it instructive to compare the slogans raised during the 1979 revolution to the almost insulting one cited above in order to get a measure of the difference in the usage of religious symbolism (the opening segment of the slogan: ‘O Hossein,' is in reference to the revered third Shia Imam, and grandson of the Holy Prophet whereas the latter, as is evident, refers to the presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi).

Such attempts, aimed at plastering Mousavi's campaign with quasi-religious legitimacy, have drawn the ridicule of many Iranians - including some of his own supporters. A slogan of such wanting sophistication and symmetry, somewhat like a Mozart-Whitehouse remix, not only reflects the tardy desperateness of leading Mousavi campaigners to reach out to a highly religious society (i.e. a wider political base), but even more importantly, it further demonstrates just how deficient Mousavi's campaigning really was in appealing to the wider Iranian electorate.

As the clock ticks away, media pundits on the airwaves will almost certainly lay claim to the ‘real import' of ‘Tehran's frustrations'. Spurious experts on the BBC will likewise speak of the impending downfall of the ‘mullah regime'. Facing all these, and yet more, Orwell provides an apt response: "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."

Or perhaps more fittingly: "All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."

Ali Jawad is a political activist and a member of the AhlulBayt Islamic Mission [18] (AIM)

From Counterpunch [19] June 18, 2009

THE IRANIAN UPRISING AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW MEDIA By Henry A. Giroux

As the uprisings in Iran illustrate, the new electronic technologies and social networks they have produced have transformed both the landscape of media production and reception, and the ability of state power to define the borders and boundaries of what constitutes the very nature of political engagement. Indeed, politics itself has been increasingly redefined by a screen culture and newly emergent public spaces of education and resistance embraced by students and other young people.1 For example, nearly 75 percent of Iranians now own cell phones and are quite savvy in utilizing them.2 [20] [21] Screen culture and its attendant electronic technologies have created a return to a politics in which many young people in Iran are not only forcefully asserting the power to act and express their criticisms and support of Mir Hussein Moussavi but also willing to risk their lives in the face of attacks by thugs and state sponsored vigilante groups. Texts and images calling for "Death to the dictator" circulate in a wild zone of representation on the Internet, YouTube, and among Facebook and Twitter users, giving rise to a chorus of dissent and collective resistance that places many young people in danger and at the forefront of a massive political uprising. Increasingly reports are emerging in the press and other media outlets of a number of protesters being attacked or killed by government forces. In the face of massive arrests by the police and threats of execution from some government officials, public protest continues even, as Nazila Fathi reports in the New York Times, the government works "on many fronts to shield the outside world's view of the unrest, banning coverage of the demonstrations, arresting journalists, threatening bloggers and trying to block Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, which have become vital outlets for information about the rising confrontation here."3

It is impossible to comprehend the political nature of the existing protests in Iran (and recently in Moldova) without recognizing the centrality of the new visual media and new modes of social networking. Not only have these new mass-and image-based media-camcorders, cellular camera-phones, satellite television, digital recorders, and the Internet, to name a few-enacted a structural transformation of everyday life by fusing sophisticated electronic technologies with a ubiquitous screen culture; they have revolutionized the relationship between the specificity of an event and its public display by making events accessible almost instantly to a global audience. The Internet, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have reconstituted, especially among young people, how social relationships are constructed and how communication is produced, mediated, and received. They have also ushered in a new regime of visual imagery in which screen culture creates spectacular events just as much as they record them. Under such circumstances, state power becomes more porous and less controlled and its instability becomes evident as the Iranian government points to the United States and Canada for producing "deviant news sites." As if such charges can compete with images uploaded on YouTube of a young man bleeding to death as a result of an assault by government forces, his white shirt stained with blood, and bystanders holding his hand while he died.4 [22] Or for that matter suppress images of militia members along with other identifying information about the police and other thugs attacking the protesters. The Internet and the new media outlets in this context provide new public sites of visibility for an unprecedented look into the workings of both state sponsored violence, massive unrest, and a politics of massive resistance that simply cannot be controlled by traditional forces of repression.

The pedagogical force of culture is now writ large within circuits of global transmission that defy the military power of the state while simultaneously reinforcing the state's reliance on military power to respond to the external threat and to control its own citizens. In Iran, the state sponsored war against democracy, with its requisite pedagogy of fear dominating every conceivable media outlet, creates the conditions for transforming a fundamentalist state into a more dangerous authoritarian state. Meanwhile, insurgents use digital video cameras to defy official power, cell phones to recruit members to battle occupying forces, and Twitter messages to challenge the [23]doctrines of fear, militarism, and censorship. The endless flashing of screen culture not only confronts those in and outside of Iran with the reality of state sponsored violence and corruption but also with the spread of new social networks of power and resistance among young people as an emerging condition of contemporary politics in Iran. Text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the Internet have given rise to a reservoir of political energy that posits a new relationship between the new media technologies, politics and public life. These new media technologies and Websites have proved a powerful force in resisting dominant channels of censorship and militarism. But they have done more in that they have allowed an emerging generation of young people and students in Iran to narrate their political views, convictions, and voices through a screen culture that opposes the one-dimensional cultural apparatuses of certainty while rewriting the space of politics through new social networking sites and public spheres.

A spectacular flood of images produced by a subversive network of technologies that open up a cinematic politics of collective resistance and social justice now overrides Iran's official narratives of repression, totalitarianism, and orthodoxy-unleashing the wrath of a generation that hungers for a life in which matters of dignity, agency, and hope are aligned with democratic institutions that make them possible. Death and suffering are now inscribed in an order of politics and power that can no longer hide in the shadows, pretending that there are no cracks in its body politic, or suppress the voices of a younger generation emboldened by their own courage and dreams of a more democratic future.

In this remarkable historical moment, a sea of courageous young people in Iran, are leading the way in instructing an older generation about a new form of politics in which mass and image-based media have become a distinctly powerful pedagogical force, reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural production, engagement, and resistance. Under such circumstances, this young generation of Iranian students, educators, artists, and citizens are developing a new set of theoretical tools and modes of collective resistance in which the educational force of the new media both records and challenges representations of state, police, and militia violence while becoming part of a broader struggle for democracy itself.

Any critical attempt to engage the courageous uprisings in Iran must take place within a broader notion of how the new media and electronic technologies can be used less as entertainment than as a tool of insurgency and opposition to state power. State power no longer has a hold on information, at least not the way it did before the emergence of the new media with its ability to reconfigure public exchange and social relations while constituting a new sphere of politics. The new media technologies are being used in Iran in ways that redefine the very conditions that make politics possible. Public spaces emerge in which data and technologies are employed to bypass government censors. The public and the private inform each other as personal discontent is translated into broader social issues. Global publics of opposition emerge through electronic circuits of power offering up wider spheres of exchange, dialogue, and resistance. For example, protesters from all over the world are producing proxy servers, "making their own computers available to Iranians," and fuelling worldwide outrage and protests by uploading on YouTube live videos exposing the "brutality of the regime's crackdown."5

Demonstrations of solidarity are emerging between the Iranian diasporia and students and other protesters within Iran as information, technological resources, and skills are exchanged through the Internet, cell phones, and other technologies and sites. The alienation felt by many young people in an utterly repressive and fundamentalist society is exacerbated within a government- and media-produced culture of fear, suggesting that the terror they face at home and abroad cannot be fought without surrendering one's sense of agency and social justice to a militarized state. And yet, as the technology of the media expands so do the sites for critical education, resistance, and collective struggle.

The uprising in Iran not only requires a new conception of politics, education, and society; it also raises significant questions about the new media and its centrality to democracy. Image-based technologies have redefined the relationship between the ethical, political, and aesthetic. While "the proximity is perhaps discomforting to some, ... it is also the condition of any serious intervention"6 [24] into what it means to connect cultural politics to matters of political and social responsibility. The rise of the new media and the conditions that have produced it do not sound the death knell of democracy as some have argued, but demand that we "begin to rethink democracy from within these conditions."7 [25] [26] These brave Iranian youth are providing the world with a lesson in how the rest of us might construct a cultural politics based on social relations that enable individuals and social groups to rethink the crucial nature of what it means to know, engage civic courage, and assume a measure of social responsibility in a media-saturated global sphere. They are working out in real time what it means to address how these new technologies might foster a democratic cultural politics that challenges religious fundamentalism, state censorship, militarism, and the cult of certainty. Such a collective project requires a politics that is in the process of being invented, one that has to be attentive to the new realities of power, global social movements, and the promise of a planetary democracy. Whatever the outcome, the magnificent and brave uprising by the young people of Iran illustrates that they have legitimated once again a new register of both opposition and politics. What is at stake, in part, is a mode of resistance and educational practice that is redefining in the heat of the battle the ideologies and skills needed to critically understand the new visual and visualizing technologies not simply as new modes of communication, but as weapons in the struggle for expanding and deepening the ideals and possibilities of democratic public life and the supportive cultures vital to democracy's survival.

As these students and young people have demonstrated, it would be a mistake to simply align the new media exclusively with the forces of domination and commercialism as many do in the United Sates-with what Allen Feldman calls "total spectrum violence." [27] The Iranian uprising with its recognition of the image as a key force of social power makes clear that cultural politics is now constituted by a plurality of sites of resistance and social struggle, offering up new ways for young people to conceptualize how the media might be used to create alternative public spheres that enable them to claim their own voices and challenge the dominant forces of oppression. Theorists such as Thomas Keenan, Mark Poster, Douglas Kellner, and Jacques Derrida are right in suggesting that the new electronic technologies and media publics "remove restrictions on the horizon of possible communications" [28]and, in doing so, suggest new possibilities for engaging the new media as a democratic force both for critique and for positive intervention and change. The ongoing struggle in Iran, if examined closely, provides some resources for rethinking how the political is connected to particular understandings of the social; how distinctive modes of address are used to marshal specific and often dangerous narratives, memories, and histories; and how certain pedagogical practices are employed in mobilizing a range of affective investments around images of trauma, suffering, and collective struggles. The images and messages coming out of Iran both demonstrate the courage of this generation of young people and others while also signifying new possibilities for redefining a global democratic politics. What the dictatorship in Iran is witnessing is not simply generational discontent or the power of networking and communication sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube but a much more dangerous lesson in which democracy implies an experience in which power is shared, dialogue is connected to involvement in the public sphere, hope means imagining the unimaginable, and collective action portends the outlines of a new understanding of power, freedom, and democracy.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education [29]" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex [30]" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed [31]" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.

Notes.

1 . I take up the issue of screen culture and the challenge of the new media in Henry A. Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

2. I want to thank Tony Kashani for these figures.

3 [32]. Nazila Fathi, "Protesters Defy Iranian Efforts to Cloak Unrest," New York Times (June 18, 2009), p. A1.

4 [33]. Brian Stelter and Brad Stone, "Stark Images of the Turmoil in Iran, Uploaded to the World on the Internet," New York Times (June 18, 2009), p. A14.

5 [34]. Ibid., Stelter and Stone, "Stark Images of the Turmoil in Iran," p. A14.

6. Thomas Keenan, "Mobilizing Shame," South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004), p. 447. Keenan explores the relationship between ethics and responsibility in even greater detail in his Fables of Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1997).

7. Jacques Derrida cited in Michael Peters, "The Promise of Politics and Pedagogy in Derrida," Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies (in press).

8. [35] Allen Feldman, "On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (March 2005), p. 212.

9. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1987), p. 390.

From Counterpunch [36] June 19-21, 2009

STATES OF MIND: THE IDEA OF IRAN By Negar Azimi

In the world of celebrity dissidents, Akbar Ganji may be Iran's most famous. A slight man with a tuft of hair atop a mostly bald head, he is perhaps best known for the seventy-three-day hunger strike he endured in 2005, near the end of his six-year detention in Tehran's hilltop Evin Prison. Ganji was born in 1960, and like many men and women of his generation, he agitated against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from a tender age. After serving in the young Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard during the grueling Iran-Iraq war, he served as an attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Turkey, where, among other things, he was encouraged to spy on restive Iranian students in Ankara. But as he journeyed deeper into Iran's political interior, Ganji grew increasingly disenchanted with what this new Islamic Republic had become. The values for which the revolutionaries had ostensibly fought, from freedom of thought and expression to the freedom to participate in fair and transparent elections, had been smothered. More and more, this regime made it clear that it would not tolerate critics.

Ganji eventually left government and became a journalist. By the mid-1990s he was publishing courageous investigative essays in reformist newspapers, Kiyan and Sobh-e Emrooz the most prominent among them, about the excesses, financial and otherwise, of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's regime. Most notable were Ganji's dispatches about a series of ghastly murders of dissident intellectuals during the presidency of Rafsanjani's successor, the incongruously smile-prone and mild-mannered Mohammad Khatami; Ganji's reporting eventually implicated high-ranking officials within the Ministry of Intelligence and other security agencies.

The state Ganji had once defended with his life locked him up in Evin in 2000 on multiple charges, ranging from spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic to endangering national security. By the fifth year of his sentence, Ganji was penning what he called letters "to the free people of the world." In the second of these letters, dated July 2005, he referred to the country's all-powerful Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who is more or less elected for life, as a sultan, urging him to step down and calling for a new, secular constitution. That same year, Ganji began his stubborn hunger strike, and soon enough images of the rail-thin prisoner on the brink of a premature death, his eyes rolled back into their lids, landed in e-mail accounts worldwide--including my own. His plight was taken up by various crusaders from the international human rights movement, while the coiners of the phrase "axis of evil" anointed him a hero ("America stands by you," at least one Bush-era White House press release declared). Having served his prison sentence, Ganji left Iran in 2006--supposedly for a short trip. He has not returned, instead joining the growing ranks of Iranian dissidents based in think-tank havens like Washington, DC.

Ganji recently published a slim volume born of his time in prison. Immodestly called The Road to Democracy in Iran, it opens--chillingly--with the words "Today, June 29, 2005, is the nineteenth day of my second hunger strike." The book is not a collection of prison notes, however, but rather a sketch of a future Iranian state, one that would have the most basic human rights principles at its core. This is not Ganji's first prison manuscript. In 2002 he penned the opening notes of his six-part "Republican Manifesto," in which he lamented the trampling of individual rights in contemporary Iran and made his best case for a secular democracy. Ganji's touchstones are Karl Popper and Immanuel Kant. He may owe more to the Age of Reason than to the Koran.

Like many Iranians of his generation, Ganji was at one time an ardent follower of the late Ali Shariati, a fiery and charismatic figure who put forward a reading of Shiism that evoked Marxism and shades of revolutionary Third Worldism. Shariati flourished in the heady climate of early 1960s Paris, as France's turbulent war with its Algerian colony raged. He collaborated with the Algerian National Liberation Front in its revolutionary struggle, was coddled by Marxist scholars, translated Sartre into Farsi and cavorted with Frantz Fanon. He returned to Iran in 1965 and soon thereafter began delivering rousing lectures to budding revolutionaries at Husseinieh-e Ershad, a blue-domed religious institute in central Tehran that has since become inextricably tied to Shariati's image. Shiism, Shariati told his listeners, has a core set of values that stands to resolve many of society's ills. He distinguished this original Shiism from the pernicious faith he saw propagated by the clerics around him, what he contemptuously referred to as "Safavid Shiism," after the Safavids, who established Shiism as Iran's state religion in the sixteenth century. Cassettes of Shariati's lectures were distributed en masse, and Shariati, inadvertently or not, became a primary intellectual architect of the Islamic revolution to come. He was arrested in 1974--accused of being everything from a Wahhabi to a Communist to a SAVAK collaborator. Upon release he traveled to England, where he subsequently died of a heart attack (his supporters believe he was eliminated by the shah's secret police).

The Road to Democracy in Iran testifies to Ganji's movement away from Shariatism toward a firm belief that religion cannot possibly survive as the foundation of a modern democracy. Nor can culturally specific conceptions of rights, whether African, Confucian or Islamic in nature. "We are not relativists," he writes. Rather, a chastened Ganji insists that democracy can only be rooted in a universal recognition of the most basic human rights--perhaps most prominent, the right to shape one's fate. Ganji goes on to ponder the role of the intellectual in bringing about this brave new order ("We must struggle"), but in the same breath he warns that "human rights will not be achieved through academic polemics." He decries the more fundamentalist readings of religion, though he stresses that modernity and religiosity are not mutually exclusive. (Kant's dictum of religion existing only within the confines of reason seems most fitting here.) In one chapter, Ganji singles out for criticism the pains and injuries, both physical and psychological, that women endure in the name of Islamic tradition and history: rape, coerced sexual relations, mandated hijab and even limits on their mobility. Being a Muslim, he insists, "means accepting the essence, and not the historical aspects, of the religion."

Though seductively pithy, Ganji's manifesto occasionally gets bogged down in abstractions, vagaries and clichés. The "West enjoys cultural and spiritual hegemony," he writes in one of many unexplained non sequiturs. Indeed, his habit of invoking clashes between "western civilization" and Islam runs the risk of reinforcing the very polarities he frequently criticizes. He denies that he is an essentialist but then goes on to locate modernity exclusively in the West and reduces Islam to its premodern forms. And though he points out that religion is amenable to myriad interpretations, he doesn't summon any concrete examples of what a progressive Islam could look like.

In one crucial respect, Ganji and the clerics who rule the Islamic Republic today are coevals: both share a firm--and occasionally maddeningly chauvinistic--belief in Iran's unique destiny. "We do not believe that historic change occurs in leaps," Ganji writes. "We must make it clear that we are against war, against foreign intervention in Iran, and against solutions imposed by outsiders." For the clerics, Iran's unique destiny is, at least in part, linked to the country's Islamic lineage. Disenfranchised Iranian monarchists in and around Los Angeles are in the destiny business too: they tend to carry on about how one of the country's first rulers, Darius I, once laid claim to the largest empire the world has known, stretching at its peak from Macedonia into Egypt and east to the Indus River. They point out that despite a procession of Muslim Arab conquests in the seventh century, the Persians managed to hold on to their language, even enjoying a poetry renaissance in the centuries that followed, with Sa'di, Hafez and Rumi among its luminaries. For their part, nationalists of all stripes stress that Iran was the source of one of the most influential critiques of the West--the late twentieth-century intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad's concept of gharbzadegi, or intoxication with all things Western. Despite their points of divergence, these stories testify to the remarkable endurance of the very idea of Iran, less a cultural, religious or geographical entity than a remarkably resilient state of mind.