In their narrowest definition, the angry demonstrations surging through the streets of Iran are about a disputed election. But at a deeper and more consequential level, they are also about a looming sea change in history – not only Iran’s, but that of the entire Middle East and points as distant as North Africa and Southeast Asia.
The future of Islam, as a way of life as much as a religion, hangs in the balance.
For the past three decades, a war has raged across large stretches of the Muslim world. It has cost more than a million lives, in regional battelfields as widely dispersed as the Philippines and Indonesia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Iran and Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Sudan and Somalia, Algeria and Morocco.
The late Harvard poltical scientist Samuel P. Huntington called it a “war of civilizations,” pitting Islam against the West. Yet the targets and casualties of Muslim violence are overwhelmingly Muslim, rather than American or European, and the toll in destroyed property and economic havoc is Muslim by an even more disproportionate margin.
This is not a war between the mandarins of the Atlantic Alliance and the mullahs. It is a civil war within the ranks of Islam, fought across two hemispheres – and the spiralling events of the past week could mark the onset of its final tumultuous chapter.
“In 15 years of writing about the Middle East, I have never encountered a situation that changed so fast that one could write an article that becomes outdated in the time it takes to write it,” Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of California told the Persian Gulf-based Al Jezeera news on June 17.
A TALE IN TWO PHOTOS
Two photographs from Iran’s post-election convulsions tell the story.
In one, picturing a demonstration in support of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the officially proclaimed victor, all but a tiny number of the participants appear to be men in their fifties or sixties. They are the generation that overthrew the Shah, fought the Iran-Iaq war and consolidated the Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.
Whatever the immediate outcome of the Iranian presidential dispute, history is about to pass them by.
In its vanguard are the subjects of photo number two, 500,000 marchers led by Ahmadinejad’s moderate opponent Mir Hossein Mousavi. Take a close look at them, in any of the thousands of images from the Tehran streets that have been posted abroad on the Internet. The protesters represent a broad range of ages, but well over half of them are women and young people, the missing players in the pro-Ahmadinejad photo.
Iranians between 16 (the minimum voting age) and 30 comprise 45 per cent of the electorate. The demographic handwriting is on the political wall.
Now take a closer look at the second photo. Many of its women have wrenched the hajib from their heads, or pulled it back to expose their hair. The young, of both genders, have embraced the casually defiant pose of contemporary youth and the accessories that accompany it: Levis and t-shirts, cell phones and Twitter. There is an updated Iranian cultural revolution exploding in this photo, the reverse image of the revolution that brought Khomeini to power and ensconced the Koran in Iran’s courts of law.
A week before the election, the outlook was for a change-of-command that empowered the moderate reformist but religiously orthodox Mousavi. Instead, the government’s apparent vote tampering, followed by a brutal crackdown, has transformed alienation into full-fledged insurgency.
The very concept of theocracy and its suffocating strictures are now being openly called into question.
In its ferocious tone and breakneck escalation, the crisis strangely resembles the Iranian revolution of 1979, which saw the Shah cling desperately to his throne against the tide of enormous and ultimately irresistible opposition. “The slogans that are being heard in the Iranian street these days, such as ‘Death to the Dictator,’ a reference to Ahmadinejad, were heard in the past only against America and the late Shah during the revolution,” observes Lebanese journalist Elias Harfoush in the Beirut-based newspaper Dar al-Hayat.
By the time the Shah belatedly flew into exile, there was no room left for political moderates. They were quickly and crudely pushed aside by religious extremists – just as Mousavi and his colleagues may now be pushed aside by a secular-minded movement that has been driven beyond compromise toward a rejection of all that Ahmadinejad symbolizes.
“In my opinion the number [of people] who want to see greater freedoms far exceeds those who just want to see Mr Mousavi take power,” Mehrdad Khonsari, a former Iranian diplomat, told Al Jazeera two days into the protests.
As he fled Iran, “the Shah saw the crowds from above in bewilderment,” recalls the Iranian writer Nooshabeh Amiri, “They were shouting: We do not want you. He could not take it and left the country.”
Today, she says, alluding to Ahmadinejad, “the new shah has chosen to commit suicide, rather than see, listen and leave.”
History is full of such ironies.
ISLAM IN CRISIS
History is also dense with overlapping layers: longterm evolutionary passages that are obscured by the sequence of brief events that define them – the shape of the forest hidden by its trees.
The longterm passage for the Muslim world has been one of relentless decline and growing paralysis for more than 500 years. Apart from Turkey, which had an insistently secular government until recently, and Malaysia, which enjoys the global business connections of a large Chinese minority, no predominantly Muslim nation has successfully entered the ranks of modern industrialized nations.
Islamic societies led the world in science, technology and mathematics until the 16th century. Since then, and especially since the Protestant Reformation and ensuing Enlightenment opened up a new epoch of intellectual curiosity and discovery in Europe, they have steadily lost ground to the West.
A United Nations study in 2002 found that Spain alone publishes more foreign books every six months than the total number of works that have been translated into Arabic, the language of the Koran, in the past 1,000 years.
“I often ask myself,” a young Saudi bureaucrat told me in 2003, “why our leaders always talk about our achievements a thousand years ago, and avoid mentioning where we are in the 21st century.”
In 1979, Iran returned Islam to the foreground of geopolitical events. But it did so by forcibly cranking the clock back to the puritanical past, rather than moving it forward into a period of reform that might have ignited a Muslim enlightenment.
Nonetheless, the drama of the Iranian Revolution sent shock waves throughout Islam, inspiring similar reactionary movements – and murderous factional strife – almost everywhere. For more than a generation, secularized Muslims withdrew into fearful silence. And with them, a factual understanding of the universe vanished from discusson and debate.
The chief spokespersons for revolutionary Islam were more interested in the urgings of blind faith than the cautionary evidence of documented facts. Among other things, they and their followers blithely denied that the Holocaust had occurred, or that Muslims were involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The documented account of both events clashed with a faith-sourced conviction that the United States was the Great Satan, behind every act of violence, and that the tragedy of Israel’s founding was a Western lie whose principal aim was to seize control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
For the fundamentalist Shi’ia disciples of Khomeini – or their equally anachronistic Sunni rivals, the ideologues of Saudi Wahabism – documented facts were speculative. Truth was to be found only in the strictest rendering of inflexible religion.
THE REVOLUTION INSIDE-OUT
Today that conviction is being turned inside-out. The Islam of Khomeini and Ahmadinejad is on the defensive, at bay to the most consistently powerful force on the globe: the sheer desire to be modern.
Ahmadinejad controls the levers of official violence, and he may well succeed in holding off the day of reckoning. But each delay will also have the effect of pushing inevitable changes further and further toward unamiguous secularism.
“There will be always people who will support those like Mr. Ahmadinejad, in the same way that many Americans supported Mr. Bush or support Christian fundamentalists,” says the exiled Iranian writer Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. “But that does not mean that the Iranian people prefer a theocracy to a pluralistic country with freedom of religion and expression for everyone.”
The extraordinary role of women in the current street demonstrations, she contends, offers decisive proof that the tide has turned: “If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women.”
Beyond its own borders, Iran has been an essential bellwether of prevailing Islamic thoughts and deeds for 30 years. Wherever the protests lead, say many informed observers, their impact will be felt across the globe.
“I think the new generation of activists will definitely be inspired by what they see on the Iranian street,” says Gamal Fahmy, a leading Egyptian reformer. “What’s happening in Iran isn’t happening on Mars,” he told the Associated Press. “Egyptian activists will feel they can replicate it in their own country.”
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5