How Secular Is Post-revolutionary Tunisia?

Not very, according to Graham Usher's dispatch: "The Reawakening of Nahda in Tunisia" (MERIP, 30 April 2011). A few days before the publication of this article, moreover, the Financial Times reported: "Politicians . . . agree that the Islamist party [Nahda] could well emerge as the single largest in the assembly. Secular parties, both liberal and leftist, are fragmented while traditional parties are just learning how to run for genuine elections." Tunisia is said to be among the most secular countries in North Africa and West Asia. But even here the balance of ideological and organizational forces does not appear to favor secular leftists after the revolution.

Post-Vanguard

First Ben Ali, and now Mubarak. The empire has failed to stop the momentum of the Arab revolt that started in Sidi Bouzid. It is a time of great transition in West Asia and North Africa. What kind of transition will it be?

Samir Amin fears that, in the case of Egypt and perhaps elsewhere if not in Tunisia, it may result in the ascent of religious obscurantists into power, bringing about a new alliance of religious forces with the military establishment, a kind of Pakistanization so to speak. Aijaz Ahmad, on the other hand, hails the revolutionary wave as an upsurge of "secularity" as well as of democracy. Both appear to miss the most striking feature of what is going on: the absence of any vanguard ideology or vanguard party, religious or secular.

Some have named this absence "post-ideological," but that does not quite capture the fluidity of the moment. Ideologies are at work in the intifadas in the region today -- what is clear is that none is in hegemony. No single ideology is in the vanguard, nor is any political party seeking to be the vanguard party of the kind that led 20th-century revolutions. Competing political currents all appear to sense that people are not looking for a charismatic leader, a new Lenin or a new Khomeini. There is a refreshing absence of the quintessential iconography of past revolutions: larger-than-life images of the leader of the revolution.

The question is if the leaderless revolts, without any vanguard party or ideology, can fully dismantle the ancien regimes, which are decapitated but are otherwise more or less intact, establish new ones, and defend and develop them.

Taliban and the Rights of Women

The dispute between Gita Sahgal and the "Human Rights for All" campaign on one hand and Moazzam Begg and Amnesty International on the other hand is a red herring, which is the reason why it has been "taken up with relish by Britain's self-styled 'decent left' of journalists and commentators, whose superior moral compasses led them to support the invasion of Iraq." All parties directly involved in the dispute profess that they are in favor of women's rights, though they may differ here and there on what exactly the said rights consist of.

But the thing is that women's rights, or lack thereof, in Afghanistan cannot decide the most important questions that Westerners have to ask themselves: will the NATO quit Afghanistan, and, if yes, when?

Under NATO, women's rights will be protected only to the extent that they don't conflict with the military logics of the parties in combat. After NATO's withdrawal, women's rights will be protected only to the extent that the parties governing post-NATO Afghan territories respect them. That probably means that Afghan women will enjoy only such rights as granted by allies of Iran-Russia-India in one part of Afghanistan and Taliban-Pakistan in another part of Afghanistan -- for decades to come.

In either case, with or without NATO, it is not possible for Sahgals, Beggs, or human rights organizations of the West to make the level of women's rights higher than it is given the prevailing objective and subjective conditions of Afghan society. It would help speed up the NATO departure once Western activists admit their inability to make a difference for Afghan women for such a realistic admission would help the Western public concentrate on the only questions on which they have at least some say.

Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics

The best way to understand the Islamic Republic of Iran is to see it not as "theocracy" but as "Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics."

The power elite of Iran don't care about Islam as such (Islam, after all, is diverse, and some varieties of it, as conceived by Nader Hashemi, Mohsen Kadivar, Ahmad Sadri, and the like, are perfectly compatible with liberal democracy). What they care about is their revolution and their republic and their ideology (in which Islam does play a part but an increasingly smaller one). As IRGC General Mohammad Ali Jafari reportedly said:

حفظ نظام جمهوری اسلامی ایران از ادای نماز واجب‌تر است

They love their politico-economic order much more than prayers.

Unlike the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, whose legitimating ideology came from outside (Western Europe) and was instilled from above (the Marxist-Leninist Party), though, their ideology is one that has organically grown out of Iranian history, which is what is going for them.

My back-of-the-napkin calculation, however, says that about 20% of the Iranian population, largely of economically upper strata, are liberals who are tired of this politico-economic order and its legitimating ideology. Give Iran a couple of decades in which its social dialectic can unfold without foreign intervention, and liberals are likely to grow more numerous in the country as it undergoes its capitalist development; and liberals inside Iran might eventually transform the country in a way that liberals outside it would like, through passive revolution (much as the AKP has done in Turkey, which too was once ruled by men of the Jacobin mentalité).

Meanwhile, the duty of Iranian patriots, even liberals in exile, is not to let imperialists bomb Iran.

Sex, Drugs, Islam, Communism, and Terrorism

How does the ruling class destroy liberty, often in the name of liberalism, today? By exploiting fear, especially specters of Sex, Drugs, Islam, Communism, and Terrorism. The ruling class defines each of these categories in such a way that each becomes a mixed bag of defensible and indefensible. To take just one example, in the category of terrorism, class justice and propaganda of the Western powers insidiously merges together national liberation movements such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (defensible) and Al Qaeda (indefensible).

Hassan Nasrallah: Israel Is at an Impasse

OutRage!ous Censorship of "Gay Imperialism"

The reader of Critical Montages has long been familiar with the problem of Islamophobia in general and its unfortunate manifestations on the (broadly defined) Left in particular in the age of the "war on terror." The reader is also well acquainted with queer variants of it, such as attempts at gay-washing of Israel. Left-wing criticisms of these phenomena, especially by queers of color themselves, are indispensable to our struggle to displace the hegemony of liberal imperialism.

One such queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism," a collection of essays titled Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, however, is being censored in Britain, apparently by Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who evidently felt his sensationalist brand of activism and rhetoric ought to be above critical scrutiny and got the publisher of the book to take the book out of circulation. For more information about this OutRage!ous censorship, see:

• Johanna Rothe, "Out of Place, Out of Print: On the Censorship of the First Queerness/Raciality Collection in Britain" (MRZine, 15 October 2009)


• Aren Aizura, "Racism and the Censorship of 'Gay Imperialism'" (MRZine, 23 October 2009).


• Umut Erel and Christian Klesse, "Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality" (MRZine, 24 October 2009)

How can leftists beat this censorship? In addition to the actions recommended by Aren Aizura, I suggest a couple more, in the short term:

• Hold public forums to discuss the censorship of queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism."


• Open up your journals, classrooms, and so on (if you work in publishing, education, and related industries) to discussion of this problem.

In the long term, though, we need to work on creating a Queer Left, informed of Marxist Feminism, capable of discussing such questions as religion and sexuality in proper historical materialist fashion (i.e., supplying missing materialist foundations to Foucauldian critique of the dominant discourse on sexuality).

The Scandal of Privatization in Iran

Probably the worst thing that the Islamic Republic of Iran has done for its working people is to educate its young economists at "the most prestigious Western economics departments." The horror, the horror! It's not the Western fashion in clothing but economics that the IRI should have kept out, but, as Sohrab Behdad has argued, the idea of Islamic economics met its demise soon after its rise -- much like the idea of socialist economics, I may add.

Despite the resurgence of gharbzadegi in its economics, though, hardly any privatization worth its name has been going on in Iran: "a main buyer of government assets over the last decade has been the para-governmental sector, which includes state banks, government-linked investment and holding companies, religious foundations, and pension funds" (Mohammad Khiabani, "The Great Tehran Expo Privatization Scandal You've Never Heard Of").

That is largely thanks to the Western sanctions, I suspect. It is probably also thanks to the political culture of Iran. Get ten Iranians to speak up, and you'll probably get twenty contradictory opinions about how thing are and why they are as they are in Iran, at least about fifteen of which are conspiracy theories. Nothing changes very fast in a country like that.

Be Fire with Fire

Imperialists are obviously not up to the task when it comes to fighting al Qaeda and its ilk. Nor are international leftists, no matter how many tracts against imperialism and Islamism they publish. I suggest that, more often than not, it takes a mass Islamist organization to liquidate terrorist Islamist cells and neutralize international Islamist jihads: Avi Issacharoff, "Hamas: We Killed Head of Al-Qaida Affiliate in Gaza" (Haaretz, 15 August 2009). "Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire." -- Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, Act 5, Scene 1

Mahmoud & Esfandiar's Excellent Adventure

Khanome Yoshie finds Mahmoud & Esfandiar very trippy.

---

Mahmoud & Esfandiar's Excellent Adventure
MRZine Editor

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose daughter is married to a son of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the President's Chief of Staff.  Mr. Mashaei is known for actions that have appalled certain conservative quarters of the Iranian political establishment, such as attending a ceremony in Turkey where women danced and hosting a ceremony in Tehran where women drumming dafs brought out the Qur'an (don't ask me why this is controversial).  He is also known for making such fascinating remarks as the following, according to Etemaad:

• "The age of Islamism is over.  It's not that Islamism doesn't exist or isn't growing.  Islam exists but its time is up.  The age of horseback riding is over now, though horses exist, and so do riders. . . .  Of course, it isn't completely finished, but it's getting there."

• "Iran today is a friend of the American and Israeli peoples.  No nation in the world is an enemy of Iran, though, of course, we have enemies, in fact, faced with the most dastardly enemies in the world."

After the controversial 2009 presidential election, the first thing the President of Iran did was to appoint Mr. Mashaei as First Vice President, causing uproar in the aforementioned conservative quarters, which the president initially ignored.  Ali Khamenei, the Leader of the Revolution, had to write a letter telling the president to cancel the appointment of Mr. Mashaei, characterizing it as "contrary to your interests as well the interests of the government."  Eventually, Mr. Mashaei was compelled to resign from the post, after more than a week's resistance on the part of the president, who then defied the disapproval of the conservative establishment to appoint Mr. Mashaei to his present post.

Mr. Mashaei is apparently incorrigible, however.  Here's his latest bombshell, according to Etemad-e Melli today: "Of the 24 million Ahmadinejad voters, 20 million are critical of the system.  These 20 million people are even more critical of the system than the 13 million Mousavi voters, since those 13 million only question the Ahmadinejad administration, whereas these 20 million are saying No to all the past years before Ahmadinejad."

Whoa!

Iran's reformist media have assiduously followed Mr. Mashaei's excellent adventure, a few episodes of which have also been briefly carried by some of the Western media.  Both the Western and Iranian-reformist media fail to ask an obvious question, though: is the man who has stood loyally by Mr. Mashaei throughout his wild ideological trip the kind of guy for whom the guardians of the system, lay and clerical, military and civilian, would work in disciplined cooperation to pull off a massive conspiracy for a massively rigged election?

Imagining a New Political Majority in Iran

The change that has come to Iran since the end of the Iran-Iraq War is more or less in line with the kind of change that has come to much of the rest of the world (though each nation's change is of course inflected with its own peculiar material and cultural conditions before the beginning of the neoliberal regime of accumulation): a package that combines economic liberalization, cultural liberalization, and political liberalization.

That is not a desirable package, from the point of view of historical materialism, though liberals are happy with it and social democrats adjust themselves to it.

In theory, it should not be impossible to construct a new political majority in Iran taking supporters from both the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei camp and the Rafsanjani/Mousavi/Khatami camp, under a program that puts premium on resistance to economic liberalization, creates space for "rooted cosmopolitan" culture, and develops a strategy to deepen democracy, empowering directly elected leaders (the presidency and the parliament) to eclipse indirectly elected leaders (the Leader and the Guardian Council) as well as promoting democratic participation and political education of the popular classes. But I have yet to see any social force in Iran proposing anything like that.

Ahmadinejad to Face a Vote of Confidence?

Now, finally good news for Greens in Iran ("Ahmadinejad Throws Resignation Out as Majlis Weighs In," Press TV, 27 July 2009):

As pressure piles up on the Iranian president to return to parliament and obtain a vote of confidence for his Cabinet, more than 200 Iranian lawmakers add voice to the matter by questioning his approach toward domestic politics.

The majority of the 290 lawmakers, riled up over what they see as the president having excessively delayed the reversal of his first deputy choice despite the direct intervention of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, required on Monday that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "rectify his conduct".

Just as Mohammad Mossadegh had trouble lining up and maintaining the support of the right (e.g., Kashani) and the left (e.g., Tudeh) of Iranian republicanism, so does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some things never change in Iran. By the way, do you know that Parivash Fatemi, the widow of Hossein Fatemi, who served as Mossadegh's Foreign Minister and was the driving force behind his oil nationalization program, says that Hossein Fatemi's aspirations were fulfilled in the ninth government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, characterizing Ahmadinejad as a man of "obvious courage and daring," whose love of his country and people makes him the second coming of Fatemi?

Ayatollah Watch

Liberals are trying very hard to read tea leaves, assiduously canvasing clerical opinions: Ayatollah Watch. Now their only hope is that enough unelected clerics would side with Rafsanjani to rein in the elected layman Ahmadinejad -- ironic.

Iran Jews in Israel Prefer Ahmadinejad

Alas, Mr. Mousavi can't get any break. This just in from the Jerusalem Post:

Jul 6, 2009 23:58 | Updated Jul 7, 2009 2:34
Iran Jews in Israel prefer Ahmadinejad
By CARRIE SHEFFIELD

Despite unrest and violence following last month's presidential elections in Iran, some Jewish Iranians living in Israel and abroad say life in the Islamic republic is better under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than it would be under challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.

At a conference of Iranian Jews in Jerusalem on Monday, leaders of the Mashadi Jewish community said that despite Ahmadinejad's blustery rhetoric against Israel, Iran is a safe place for Jews to practice their religion.

"Ahmadinejad speaks badly about Jews, but he is preferable to Mousavi," said Shlomo Zabihi, a Mashadi rabbi. The current government is relatively stable and provides a safe environment for Jews, he said.

Monday's event marked the first meeting of the Global Mashadi Jewish Federation, an umbrella organization of community and religious groups preserving the historical and cultural identity of Jews from Mashad, Iran's second largest city, with a population of about 2.5 million.

During the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many Mashadi Jews fled to the United States, primarily New York City - where some 6,000 Jews with ties to Mashad now live. There are almost no Jews in Mashad today, though an estimated 25,000 still live in Iran, concentrated in Teheran.

"They've found it very safe and pleasant, no problems," said Bahman Kamali, founder of the federation. "Actually, the regime during [the time of reformist president Mohammad] Khatami and the regime now have been very good with Jewish people. There has not been any problem."

Kamali said Ahmadinejad's calls for the destruction of Israel were not the same as condemnation or encouragement of violence against Jews in the Diaspora.

"There's a distinction between the two because Iranians, they respect the religions that have books, Christianity, Judaism," Kamali said. "They respect people freely going to the synagogues and praying there without any problems."

He doesn't think the Jewish community in Iran will face persecution stemming from political unrest following the disputed elections.

"I'm not concerned about that," said Kamali, who downplayed the political involvement of his group. "The purpose of this conference is not political. It's only our heritage, that we are proud of to be from Mashad, Iran, and we would like to preserve that."

Iran: Beyond Electoralism

To get what they want, both Ahmadi and Mousavi voters need to develop an ideology that lets them go beyond electoralism. Winning elections in a class society doesn't mean being able to make major changes, whether voters are looking for more economic justice (Ahmadi voters) or more freedom (Mousavi voters). This is true in any class society, but it's especially so in Iran, with its complex system of checks and balances.

In Iran, you have to win not only the presidency and a majority of the parliament but also a majority of the Assembly of Experts, an elected institution charged with electing or recalling the Leader of the Revolution, who in turn has the power to decide the composition of the Guardian Council.

Beyond the aforementioned elected offices, you have to win over or neutralize the power of those in civil society and the bureaucracy who do not subscribe to your agenda, whether cultural or economic. This applies to all societies.

In Iran, the bourgeoisie do not own the state as in the case of most other class societies, rather they are subordinated to it, but they still wield considerable influence over politics, and they can also use their economic power directly through the market rather than the state, e.g., causing capital flight, withholding investment, and so on. How to counteract that is no easy question.

Cultural obstacles to changes of the sort that Mousavi voters want are more diffuse than economic obstacles, crossing class lines. One Zogby poll of Iranians, conducted in 2006, revealed that 36% "want the country to become more religious and conservative," a slightly larger group than those who want it to become more liberal and secular (31%). It takes a lot of cultural work to convert those fence-sitters in the middle into political actors who actively support change, rather than passively giving consent to the status quo, and to neutralize the veto power of the 36 percent.

Iran: This Is Not a Revolution

Let the Iranian people solve their conflict on their own. Defend Iran -- including both sides of the conflict -- from the Western powers. Then, one day, the Iranian people will perhaps choose a man -- or even a woman -- who is truly worthy of their fidelity, someone who thinks like Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and is capable of synthesizing the aspirations of those who voted for Mir-Hossein Mousavi (freedom) and those who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (faith and democracy) and uniting people behind the new synthesis.

Iran: This Is Not a Revolution
by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Political power is never good or bad, never really just or unjust; political power is arbitrary, discriminatory, and most of the time violent.  In Iran, the ongoing demonstrations sparked by the election results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicate that such power can never really be monopolized by the state.  Iran's civil society is fighting; it is giving blood for a just cause.  It is displaying its power, the power of the people.  Today, Iran must be considered one of the most vibrant democracies in the world because it is the people who are speaking.  The role of the supporters of the status quo has been reduced to reaction, which is why they are lashing out violently at those who question their legitimacy.

In all of this, the current civil unrest in Iran is historic, not only because it has already elicited compromises by the state, but also because it provides yet more evidence of the way societies can empower themselves against all odds.  These brave men and women on the streets of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and other cities are moved by the same utopia that inspired their fathers and mothers three decades ago: the utopia of justice.  They believe that change is possible, that protest is not futile.  Confronting the arrogance of the establishment has been one of the main ideological planks of the Islamic revolution in 1979.  It is now coming back to haunt those who have invented such slogans without necessarily adhering to them in the first place.

And yet the current situation in Iran is profoundly different from the situation in 1978 and 1979.  First, the Islamic Republic has proven to be rather responsive to societal demands and rather flexible ideologically.  I don't mean to argue that the Iranian state is entirely reflective of the will of the people.  I am saying that is it is not a totalitarian monolith that is pitted against a politically unified society.  The fissures of Iranian politics run through all levers of power in the country, which is why the whole situation appears scattered to us.  Whereas in 1979 the bad guy (the Shah) was easily identifiable to all revolutionaries, in today's Iran such immediate identification is not entirely possible.  Who is the villain in the unfolding drama?  Ahmadinejad?  Those who demonstrated in support of him would beg to differ.  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?  I would argue that he commands even stronger loyalties within the country and beyond.  The Revolutionary Guard or the Basij?  Mohsen Rezai, one of the presidential candidates and an opponent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is contesting the election results, used to be the head of the former institution.

The picture becomes even more complicated when we take into consideration that some institutions of the state such as the parliament -- via its speaker, Ali Larijani -- have called for a thorough investigation of the violence perpetrated by members of the Basij and the police forces in a raid of student dormitories of Tehran University earlier this week.  "What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?" Larijani asked.  The fact that he said that "the interior ministry . . . should answer for it" and that he stated that the "parliament is seriously following the issue" indicate that the good-vs-bad verdict in today's Iran is more blurred than in 1979.

There is a second major difference to 1979.  Today, the opposition to Ahmadinejad is fighting the establishment with the establishment.  Mir Hossein Mousavi himself was the prime minister of Iran during the first decade of the revolution, during a period when the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was president.  Mohammad Khatami, one of the main supporters of Mousavi, was president between 1997 and 2005.  Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, another political ally, is the head of the Assembly of Experts and another former president.  They are the engineers of the Islamic revolution and would never devour their project.  When some commentators say that what we are witnessing is a revolution they are at best naive and at worst following their own destructive agenda.  The dispute is about the future path of the Islamic Republic and the meaning of the revolution -- not about overthrowing the whole system.  It is a game of politics and the people who are putting their lives at risk seem to be aware of that.  They are aware, in other words, that they are the most important force in the hands of those who want to gain or retain power.

Thus far the Iranian establishment has shown itself to be cunningly adaptable to crisis situations.  Those who have staged a revolution know how to sustain themselves.  And this is exactly what is happening in Iran.  The state is rescuing its political power through a mixture of incentives and pressure, compromise and detention, due process and systematic violence.  Moreover, when push comes to shove, the oppositional leaders around Mousavi would never question the system they have built up.  As Mousavi himself said in his fifth and most recent letter to the Iranian people: "We are not against our sacred regime and its legal structures; this structure guards our independence, freedom, and Islamic Republic."

---

Born in Istanbul and educated at the University of Hamburg, American Universtiy (Washington DC), and Cambridge, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam lectures on politics and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.  The author of Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Hurst/ Columbia University Press, 2007/2008) and The International Politics of the Persian Gulf (Routledge, 2006), he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.  He was also elected Honorary Fellow of the Cambridge European Trust Society at the University of Cambridge.  His latest publication Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic is now available for worldwide distribution from Hurst & Co., Amazon.com, and Columbia University Press.

What Western Leftists Lost in the Iranian Elections

. . . is a chance to gain the trust of Muslims, such as Al Musawwir, regarding Western leftists' commitment to truth, democracy, and class solidarity:

Wittingly (for the most part) and (a few) unwittingly, the "western" left is, in essence, siding with the elite, upper classes, against the working class. Now, why are they supporting these elites -- well, the twisted logic is that this has "politicized the Iranian people" and that civil strife of this kind is good, even if the cause they are supposedly fighting for is not real "fraud or no fraud". This is like saying, that running towards a mirage is good, hey, at least you are running, it'll get you energized. That is the kind of nonsense one would expect from those who engage in psyop destabilization, because their aim is to create a chaotic situation, and then swoop down and take the spoils.

Strange as it may seem to some, these days, Muslims are, probably on average, better at being historical materialist than Western leftists, who prefer fantasy to reality.

Be Like Rostam

Had I lived in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic republicans running Iran today would have killed me at worst or put me under house arrest at best, like Iran's Red Princess Maryam Firuz in her last years, because I'm a socialist. But still and all, a majority of the masses supported, and still support, the Islamic republicans, because they are populist Muslims, not socialists.

In the history of social revolutions, it often happened that leftists helped to bring about social revolution (socialist or nationalist), and then, after the overthrow of the ancient regime, a faction of revolutionaries (usually centrists) liquidated left-wing and right-wing revolutionaries as well as defenders of the ancient regime.

That's what happened in Iran, too. The revolution did in its leftists, as well as rightists. But, over all, the Iranian Revolution has done more good than bad for a majority of Iranians, making Iran the best country -- the most democratic! -- in the Middle East today.

The fate of leftists in many countries (excepting Cuba) is often the fate of Rostam: serve the rulers who are unworthy of your support, because the nation ruled by the unworthy rulers still must be defended from its many enemies.

Ervand Abrahamian: Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived

This is the aspect of Iran that one does not learn from most corporate media or even left-wing media.

The real answer [to the question of why the Islamic Republic of Iran has survived] lies not in religion, but in economic and social populism. By the early 1970s, Iran had produced a generation of radical intelligentsia that was revolutionary not only in its politics -- wanting to replace the monarchy with a republic -- but in its economic and social outlook. It wanted to transform the class structure root and branch. The trailblazer was a young intellectual named Ali Shariati, who did not live to see the revolution but whose teachings fueled the revolutionary movement. Inspired by the Algerians, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, Shariati spent his short life reinterpreting Shi'ism as a revolutionary ideology and synthesizing it with Marxism. He produced what can be termed a Shi'i version of Catholic liberation theology. His teachings struck a chord not just among college and high school students, but also among younger seminary students. These budding theologians could easily accept his teachings (except his occasional anti-clericalism). One theology student went so far as to describe Imam Husayn as an early Che Guevara and Karbala' as the Sierra Madre. Most of those who organized demonstrations and confrontations in the streets and bazaars during the turbulent months of 1978 were college and high school students inspired mainly by Shariati. His catch phrases -- which had more in common with Third World populism than with conventional Shi'ism -- found their way, sometimes via Khomeini, into slogans and banners displayed throughout the revolution. . . .

This populism helps explain not only the success of the revolution but also the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. The Republic's constitution -- with 175 clauses -- transformed these general aspirations into specific inscribed promises. It pledged to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, slums and unemployment. It also vowed to provide the population with free education, accessible medical care, decent housing, pensions, disability pay and unemployment insurance. "The government," the constitution declared, "has a legal obligation to provide the aforementioned services to every individual in the country." In short, the Islamic Republic promised to create a full-fledged welfare state -- in its proper European, rather than derogatory American, sense.

In the three decades since the revolution, the Islamic Republic -- despite its poor image abroad -- has taken significant steps toward fulfilling these promises. It has done so by giving priority to social rather than military expenditures, and thus dramatically expanding the Ministries of Education, Health, Agriculture, Labor, Housing, Welfare and Social Security. The military consumed as much as 18 percent of the gross domestic product in the last years of the shah. Now it takes up as little as 4 percent. The Ministry of Industries has also grown in most part because in 1979-1980 the state took over numerous large factories whose owners had absconded abroad. The alternative would have been to close them down and create mass unemployment. Since most of these factories had functioned only because of subsidies from the old regime, the new regime had no choice but to continue subsidizing them.

In three decades the regime has come close to eliminating illiteracy among the post-revolutionary generations, reducing the overall rate from 53 percent to 15 percent. The rate among women has fallen from 65 percent to 20 percent. The state has increased the number of students enrolled in primary schools from 4,768,000 to 5,700,000, in secondary schools from 2.1 million to over 7.6 million, in technical schools from 201,000 to 509,000, and in universities from 154,000 to over 1.5 million. The percentage of women in university student populations has gone up from 30 percent to 62 percent. Thanks to medical clinics, life expectancy at birth has increased from 56 to 70, and infant mortality has decreased from 104 to 25 per 1,000. Also thanks to medical clinics, the birth rate has fallen from an all-time high of 3.2 to 2.1, and the fertility rate -- the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime -- from 7 to 3. It is expected to fall further to 2 by 2012 -- in other words, Iran in the near future will achieve near zero population growth.

The Islamic Republic has bridged the chasm between urban and rural life in part by raising the prices of agricultural goods relative to other commodities and in part by introducing schools, medical clinics, roads, electricity and piped water into the countryside. For the first time ever, villagers can afford consumer goods, even motorbikes and pickup trucks. According to one economist who, on the whole, is critical of the regime, 80 percent of rural households own refrigerators, 77 percent televisions and 76 percent gas stoves. Some 220,000 peasant families, moreover, have received 850,000 hectares of land confiscated from the old elite. They, together with the some 660,000 families who had obtained land under the earlier White Revolution, form a substantial rural class that has benefited not only from these new social services but also from state-subsidized cooperatives and protective tariff walls. This class provides the regime with a rural social base.

The regime has also tackled problems of the urban poor. It has replaced slums with low-income housing, beautified the worst districts and extended electricity, water and sewage lines to working-class districts. As an American journalist highly critical of the regime's economic policies admits, "Iran has become a modern country with few visible signs of squalor." What is more, it has supplemented the income of the underclass -- both rural and urban -- by generously subsidizing bread, fuel, gas, heat, electricity, medicines and public transport. The regime may not have eradicated poverty nor appreciatively narrowed the gap between rich and poor but it has provided the underclass with a safety net. In the words of the same independent-minded economist, "Poverty has declined to an enviable level for middle-income developing countries."

In addition to substantially expanding the central ministries, the Islamic Republic has also set up numerous semi-independent institutions, such as the Mostazafin (Oppressed), Martyrs', Housing, Alavi and Imam Khomeini Relief Foundations. Headed by clerics or other persons appointed by and loyal to the Supreme Leader, these foundations together account for as much as 15 percent of the national economy and control budgets that total as much as half that of the central government. Much of their assets are businesses confiscated from the former elite. The largest of them, the Mostazafin Foundation, administers 140 factories, 120 mines, 470 agribusinesses, 100 construction companies and innumerable rural cooperatives. It also owns the country's two leading newspapers, Ettelaat and Keyhan. According to the Guardian, in 1993 the foundation employed 65,000 and had an annual budget of over $10 billion.5 Some of these foundations also lobby effectively to protect university quotas for war veterans and together they provide hundreds of thousands with wages and benefits, including pensions, housing and health insurance. In other words, they are small welfare states within the larger welfare state. (endnotes omitted, Ervand Abrahamian, "Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived," Middle East Report 250, Spring 2009)

In some respects, left-wing media have more trouble foregrounding the gains of the revolution than even corporate media due to their own perceived socialist propaganda needs. Leftists tend to think that the way to win over workers of Iran is to hammer on only or mainly human rights violations or remaining socio-economic problems, though there is no evidence that their approach is doing any good to their own political prospect (as it doesn't help leftists speak to the experience of working people), let alone the working people of Iran (as it doesn't help working people take an objective look at their own country in comparison to others outside the core of the capitalist system and think strategically about how to make more social change to their benefit). Instead, why not properly recognize the gains of the revolution as such (as Ervand Abrahamian does above) and seek to defend and develop the remaining gains, win back the ones that have been eroded or taken back by the ruling class, and make new gains?

Psychiatry with Islamic Characteristics

What would Foucault say about Psychiatry with Islamic Characteristics?