Although the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the most fanatically Muslim of regimes, there is hope that Iranians, fed up with corruption and constraints that they rightly connect to the mullahs who represent a mental underclass, will begin to see, or are seeing, Islam in a new light. And they have the possibility of doing so -- a possibility denied to the Arabs. The Arabs’ entire civilizational being is wrapped up in Islam, so that Islam and 'Uruba, or 'Uruba and Islam, are regarded as inseparable. But the Iranians are in a very different situation, because Iran has a long pre-Islamic history, one that is given great attention. And because many of its physical remains still exist, any Iranian can, if he wishes, ride in mental triumph through Persepolis, and consider how passing brave it is to be a Persian. Not a Muslim, mind you, but a Persian. The great hope is that this other identity will reassert itself. It is, after all, an identity that predates Islam, and is one that sometimes has been in opposition to Islam: see how Firdowsi, by writing his epic of the Persian kings, the Shahnameh, managed to help Iranian culture withstand the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Arabs that in so many places effaced, or reduced to almost nothing, the pre-Islamic or non-Islamic portions of this or that people's or region's history.
I long ago mentioned that perhaps there would be, fantastical as it may seem, a return to Zoroastrianism in Iran. This return would not be based on anything intrinsically attractive about that faith, but rather on the fact that it was Persian, Iranian, before Islam (the "gift of the Arabs") came along to dislodge it and to send into exile some Zoroastrians (who in India were known as the Parsis, or Persians), and to reduce the dwindling remaining population of Zoroastrians to a status of dhimmi. That status was written about, and then observed close up, by the British historian of Zoroastrianism Mary Boyd.
In exile, Iranians are often quite different from Arabs. They are much more open, much less hysterically wedded to defending Islam. Alone among the Muslim countries of the Middle East, Iran has a long and separate existence; it is not merely one of those countries that we call "a tribe with a flag."
If anything is to be salvaged from the nonstop viciousness of the Khomeini regime, and that of Khomeini's epigones, it is that damage has been done, among thinking Iranians both in exile, and in Iran, to the status of Islam.
And that is a good thing -- for Iran, and for Infidels.
It is unlikely that those countries that are either Arab, or that have nothing but Islam -- I am thinking of Pakistan, which was founded, which exists, only because of Islam, to be a "land of the pure" -- will be able to create a sufficient number of people who can connect the economic and political and social and moral and intellectual failures of their own states and societies to Islam itself, but those Muslims who possess another identity, a non-Arab identity, can have hope.
And despite the current fanaticism in Iran, if that regime is humiliated and wounded, even if there is a brief period, possibly a few months, of rally-round-the-flag stuff even by Iranians who should know better but cannot help themselves, the Islamic Republic of Iran will be shaken, and permanently weakened. Such a humiliation could take the form of an attack on the nuclear project. After all, if the Islamic Republic of Iran ever does manage to produce such weapons, its prestige among the primitive masses will be sky-high, and the advanced Iranians will -- even if today some of them argue against such an attack -- find their cause set back, with the most fanatical Muslims safely in the saddle for a long time to come.
That's not the main reason for making sure that the Islamic Republic of Iran does not manage to produce such weapons. But it is an independent and very good reason: to hasten the day when the hold of Islam over Iran, over Iranians, is shaken sufficiently, so that other possibilities are discussed, are considered, are possibly even taken up.
Posted by Hugh at June 22, 2008 7:05 AM
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What advanced Iranians? They all left like cowards when the Shah was being tossed out. Now they enjoy themselves in the West off Swiss bank accounts while whispering sweet nonsense into ears such as yours, Fitzy. Appeal to their sense of Persian honor or history? If that ever even existed, it has long been consumed by 1,400 years of Allah and public execution by crane.
The only thing that holds Iran together is Islam and their hatred of the Great Satan and Jews.
Posted by: Bingo [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 22, 2008 8:30 AM
One could also point out that Persia was not conquered by the Ottoman Empire. At its greatest extent in 1603, the Ottomans held the western 20 percent of Persia and lost it that year. That established, roughly, today's Western boundary for Iran/Iraq. The Arab conquest to the east [634-715] covered most of the lands between Mecca and Dehli. While the religion held, the Arabs were genetically subsumed in a century.
Posted by: spinoneone [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 22, 2008 8:46 AM
There are, of course, Iranians and Iranians. There is Hamid Dabashi, who is of the chomsky-said-ward-churchill school, but as a trimmer, eager to please others in a lifetime of careful job-seeking and promotion (his Ode To Edward Said is all about how Said made it possible for the likes of Hamid Dabashi to become a professor at Columbia -- and how right Dabashi was). Although surrounded in the MEALAC (Middle Eastern) Program)at Columbia by assorted khalidis and massads, and having left -- like so many professors nowadays -- dreary old literature for the teaching of exciting brand-new "cinema," in his case "Iranian cinema," which necessarily includes Kierostami, s who if he knew Dabashi's views, his books, his Ode To Said, would despise him even more than you and I, dear reader, do.
On the other hand, there are many more Iranians in exile, not necessarily plutocrats bewailing their lost banknotes, as Nabokov in "Speak Memory" describes the view in the West of Russian emigres, but Iranians who left when they realized what the Khoneini regime was all about, and now, in London and Paris, in New York and Los Angeles, think -- if they choose to think -- now this way and now that. Some, of the Left, will pretend to themselves that the whole problem would never have happened if only the beastly British had not inveigled the dumb dutiful Dulles brothers to do their bidding and overturn "weepy Mossadegh" (as he was always described in Time magazine) -- that, in their mythology (the stuff credulously swallowed and then regurgitated by, for example, Stephen Kinzer in his "All the Shah's Men"). Others will tell themselves that if only the Shah had been smarter, or less vainglorious, or Savak less brutal, or the ancien regime less corrupt...things would have been different, for the primitive Muslim masses who rallied to Khomeini, who listened to his videocassettes registered in Neauphle-le-chateau, who burned down the cinema Rex with hundreds inside, who marched in the cities against the Shah, and against the Shah's "favoring" of non-Muslims and the non-Muslim behavior of his courtiers...
But others will not be consoled with such alternative pasts, and will begin to see, as Ataturk saw with the dying Ottoman Empire, that the problem was, and is, Islam. Iranians not only have an alternative identity to emphasize, or to elevate, that which predates Islam, but they also have a narrative that makes the "gift of the Arabs" a foreign gift, one that can be now looked at askance, for whatever else has happened in Iran, the contempt for the "desert Arabs" remains , and the same insistence that can be found in Turkey, by those eager to explain to surprised -- filled with some confusion, some consternation, at the vehemence with which Turks assure them that "we are not Arabs, we hate the Arabs" can be found in Iran.
A poster above takes me to task becausee he thinks among Irnanian exiles there are many more like Hamid Dabashi. I think there are more, or potentially more, Madame Nafisis. And in Iran itself, among the (always-small) thinking classe, or rather, among those who think, and who have remainied to endure the misery and the monstrousness, many must by now be re-thinking, not the "perversion of Islam" or the "distortion of Islam" that some in the West think is represented by the Islamic Republic of Iran, but rather the whole history of Iran, and what might have become of it, what could still become of it, if Islam is constrained as a political force, or even, by a mass movement, abandoned altogether for something -- Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, anything anything at all to escape, Houdini-like, the mind-forged manacles of Islam.
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