Roger Cohen, NY Times columnist who has covered Iran extensively has written an excellent piece which winds up concluding that it's time for the Iranian Republic to emerge - note what's been left off of that descriptor, Islamic. Yes it's time to dump this theocratic thugocracy, time to dump this emerging military police state cloaked in a transparently fake, cracking veneer of religion, in favor of a true secular republic.
It has come to this: The Islamic Republic of Iran killing the sons and daughters of the revolution during Ashura, adding martyrdom to martyrdom at one of the holiest moments in the Shiite calendar.
Nothing could better symbolize Iran's 30-year-old regime at the limit of its contradictions. A supreme leader imagined as the Prophet's representative on earth - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's central revolutionary idea - now heads a militarized coterie bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people. A false theocracy confronts a society that has seen through it.
The emperor has no clothes.
According to reports, that wish represents a growing segment of the protest movement. A segment which considers Mousavi to be out of step with it's goals of overturning the religious elements within the heirarchy of the gov't apparatus. Yes, a growing segment of protesters demands separation of religion and state. Enough of the fake pose of religiosity . We've all seen the tragedies and brutality of the last six months to know that any veneer of religious virtue has been wiped away from this regime. It has been exposed for the entire world to see once and for all. There's no going back. There's no sweeping these crimes under the carpet. These crimes have been documented and absorbed into the souls and psyche of anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention. And the soul recoils from what it has witnessed!
The result, three decades on from the revolution, is precisely this untenable mix of a leadership invoking transplantation from heaven as it faces, with force of arms and the fanaticism of militias, a youthful society far more sophisticated than the death-to-the-West slogans still unfurled.
Something has to give, someone has to yield. If the Islamic Republic is incapable of honoring both words in its self-description - that of a religious and representative society - it must give way to an Iranian Republic.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Cohen goes on to describe how Ayatollah Montazeri had criticized what the Islamic Revolution has turned into and that he initially envisioned the role of the Supreme Leader as being one who interprets God's word, but not one who actually exercises executive authority.
Montazeri had been instrumental in 1979 in the creation of the system of Guardianship of the Jurist, or velayat-e-faqih, placing a leader interpreting God’s word atop circumscribed republican institutions. But he later apologized for his role in the establishment of the position and argued that he had conceived of it as exercising moral rather than executive authority.
His anger came to a head after the June 12 election, hijacked by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Montazeri then declared: "Such elections results were declared that no wise person in their right mind could believe, results that based on credible evidence and witnesses had been altered extensively." He lambasted what he called "astonishing violence against defenseless men and women."
I witnessed that violence — a putsch in the spurious name of God’s will grotesquely portrayed by Khamenei as a glorious democratic moment — and it was clear at once that Iran’s leadership had taken a fatal turn. It had shunned the pluralistic evolution of the Islamic order in favor of a lockdown by the moneyed cadres of the New Right, personified by the Revolutionary Guards with their cozy contracts and pathological fears of looming counter-revolutions of the velvet variety.
Cohen goes on to propose that it is time for the supreme leader's office to fulfill Ayatollah Montazari's vision for it. It's time for the supreme leader to execute the role of "moral authority and suasion" without having "direct executive authority."
In other words separation of religion and state. Without that, Cohen sees no respite from the political upheaval now rocking Iran. I don't see any chance of it happening, but who knows, maybe a miracle will occur.
What a great article. I advise reading it and re-reading it.
And let's hope we shall see the dawning of a (Secular) Iranian Republic sometime in the near future.
Power To The People!
moon