Being There

“The bor­ing truth about the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion is that the rich are still rich, and the poor are still poor. The only real change is that the mid­dle class was largely destroyed. True or not, the poor feel that Iran lost the war with Iraq and the clergy are to blame. What you have left is an alliance between rad­i­cal mul­lahs and the secu­rity ser­vices. Together, these two groups can do things like help ter­ror­ists abroad and try to acquire a nuclear bomb– actions which allow them to pro­claim that the rev­o­lu­tion is still alive. But their sup­port is increas­ingly thin, and the soci­ety at home is headed in a com­pletely oppo­site direction.”

In other Words, the bat­tle between East and West was not being fought between the United States and Iran but inside Iran itself, between Iranians.”

…the issue of “fun­da­men­tal­ism” in Iran, and the West’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with it, was about to be over­taken by larger shifts in the political-historical land­scape that few could yet fathom.

This change was a long time com­ing. In fact, some Iran observers were sur­prised by the swell of sup­port for the Mousavi from young, urban, and middle-class Ira­ni­ans. We should not be sur­prised. The move­ment toward cul­tural and polit­i­cal mod­er­a­tion has long been brew­ing. Shortly after The Ends of the Earth was pub­lished, reform­ers under Khatami cap­tured 70% of the vote and a major­ity in the Iran­ian par­lia­ment. The women and young peo­ple who voted for Khatami’S Sec­ond of Khor­dad Move­ment almost a decade ago are still vot­ers today. Fol­low­ing the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion of most pro­gres­sive can­di­dates, the elec­tions which brought Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad to power were largely boy­cotted. This time around, how­ever, things were dif­fer­ent. Although he is more con­ser­v­a­tive than most Iran­ian pro­gres­sives, sup­port coa­lesced under Mousavi. Like in the United States, new tech­nol­ogy ener­gized and engaged pro­gres­sive Ira­ni­ans, and played a piv­otal role in Mousavi’s cam­paign. Urban Ira­ni­ans were ready for change — a smooth, demo­c­ra­tic one.

But, as Kaplan says, it is not the city that makes a coun­try mod­ern, it is the town. Rural and urban Ira­ni­ans live in dif­fer­ent worlds. Iran is a coun­try of young peo­ple, where the cities mod­ern­ized at an extreme pace under the Shah (even­tu­ally con­tribut­ing to the 1979 rev­o­lu­tion), and a dis­con­nect exists between the city and the coun­try. At the same time, the city and the coun­try are increas­ingly in contact. Migration has swelled Tehran alone to more than 13 mil­lion and put strain on nat­ural resources. In the last decade, lit­er­acy rates, and the expec­ta­tions that go with edu­ca­tion, have risen. Recently, how­ever, infla­tion has hit hard. The con­di­tions seem sim­i­lar to those which lead to the 1979 revolution. The elites of Iran are con­ser­v­a­tive, coun­try peo­ple, who over­threw the Shah. They will not let mod­ernism hap­pen easily.

At the time of this post­ing, a crack­down is underway. It appears all per­mits to for­eign jour­nal­ists have been revoked and reporters will face jail if they con­tinue to oper­ate, as did one Globe and Mail reporter. Demon­stra­tions are sched­uled to take place today, and a gen­eral strike tomorrow, with or (likely) with­out gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion. Young peo­ple in Iran will risk their lives to make their voices heard. The world needs to watch, lis­ten, and learn: this is a con­flict that will define how human­ity nego­ti­ates the tran­si­tion to modernism. Will the regime back down?  Will the assem­bly of experts (the rul­ing clerics) intervene? How will the needs and desires of the city and the coun­try be balanced?  Will East and West meet peacefully?

For cov­er­age on the state of affairs in Iran, see Andrew Sul­li­van at the Atlantic. The CBC has two reporters in Tehran.