In January of this year Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel published an anthology of essays, interviews and documents related to the Green Movement and the course of political reform in Iran. Nader Hashemi is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Denver. Danny Postel is an editor for The Common Review. Oxford University Press published Hashemi's doctoral thesis Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy--an original and ground-breaking work on the evolution of democracy in the West and the current course of democracy in the Muslim world. It provided a badly needed refutation to Samuel Huntington's anti-Islamic alarmist diatribe The Clash of Civilizations.
In this recent publication Hashemi and Postel contribute an introduction and two pieces for the work, but the remainder comes from noted historians, political activists in and out of Iran, and journalists. Among the historians are Ervand Abrahamian of CUNY, Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University, and Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. Activists include Grand Ayatollah Montazeri's student Ayatollah Mohsen Kadivar, who now teaches at Duke, Nobel Prize Winner, Shirin Ebadi, and prominent Iranian political scientist Hossein Bashiriyeh, who lost his job at Tehran University in 2007. Journalists like Roger Cohen, Stephen Kinzer, and Laura Secor contribute pieces. The combined effect is a history of the Green Movement that includes much of Iran's revolutionary past and a vision of the future of the Green Movement in their struggle for justice and a voice in the ancient civilization of Iran.
The book is papaerback and retails for $18.95, although numerous online bookstores and e-editions go for $9-$11.
The book is organized chronologically with the following sections:
Part I Democracy in the Streets: The Birth of a Movement
Part II Beyond "Where Is My Vote?"--A Green Vision Takes Shape
Part III Confronting Setbacks, Rethinking Strategy
Part IV A Luta Continua: The Green Movement's Second Year and the Struggle for Iran's Future
This book is well designed to give someone with minimal knowledge of Iran's current politics and recent past a comprehensive overview of the last couple years and the historical context that shaped them. Numerous details and stories emerge beyond the wrenching pictures that began the summer of 2009--with the post electoral drama that captivated our attention until Michael Jackson died. I highly recommend this very accessible paperback to familiarize yourself more deeply with a nation that has a central role to play if we are ever going to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Here are some samples to tease you...
On the Presidential candidates who ran against Ahmadinejad:
Mousavi is a hardcore socialist in his economic platform and a social reformist in his politics. Mehdi Karroubi is far to the right of Mousavi in his economic liberalism and social conservatism. Mohsen Rezaee is even farther to the right of Karroubi inhi social conservatism but to his left in his economic platform.
This came from an essay by Hamid Dabashi in Part 1. It underscores some of the complexity of politics within Iran, and that while Rezaee is from the Revolutionary Guard--his economics reflect much of the enduring populism of the Iranian Revolution. Many recent critics have claimed that Ahmadinejad's ruling clique is actually more corrupt than any regime since the Revolution.
In January of 2010 an Iranian trade unionist came to the US to explain the Green Movement and build support. He goes by the psudonym Homayoun Pourzad and he is one of the primary contributors to Iranlaborreport.com. Through a labor connection of mine I was able to attend a closed door briefing he put on in Washington DC. An interview of him is in Part II. Here's a response to the question as to why so many in the US Labor Left support Ahmadinejad:
Well, the problem with that argument is that it assumes everyone in the world who rants and raves against the US and Israel is somehow progressive. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--these men are all more truly anti-American than any leftist. But the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and his ilk is all demagoguery, as far as we are concerned. Either it is in the service of power politics, or else it is just a fig leaf to hide the disgrace of their own politics, which in all these cases is profoundly anti-Left and anti-working class.
Later...
When I tell people in Iran that there are some progressive groups in America that support Ahmadinejad, they think I am pulling their leg.
In Part III, Muhammad Sahimi's essay, "The Political Evolution of Mousavi," provides great insight, and a great deal of background on the political factions within the Revolutionary government. It traces Mousavi's early political development following Mehdi Bazargan, the first Revolutionary Prime Minister and the writings of Dr. Ali Shariati--one of the ideological fathers of the Iranian Revolution. Shariati died before the Revolution in 1977. Sahimi covers the political battles between Khamenei, leader of the conservative wing of the Iranain Revolutionary Party (IRP), and Mousavi. The conservatives repeatedly sought to get rid of Mousavi who became prime minister in 1981. Throughout the Iran/Iraq war, however, Khomeini kept Mousavi in place and refused his attempts to resign despite his expressed opinions that no more could be accomplished in the war after 1982:
Mousavi has been widely praised for his management of Iran's economy during the war with Iraq. Despite meager annual revenues of only $6 billion from oil exports, the immense expenditures for the war, a rapidly growing population, a brain drain and sanctions by the United States, there were neither shortages of essentails or high inflation.
Finally, in Part IV Nader Hashemi's article channels Edward Said for the future of the Green Movement. In "Strategies of Hope: Edward Said, The Green Movement and the Struggle for Democracy in Iran," Hashemi applies Said's "Strategy of Hope" from 1997. On the concept of moral isolation, the Green Movement's challenge is to educate the US and the West in general about how threats of attack make their job to morally isolate the current regime from at least some of its' base of support even more difficult:
The Green Movement must do more to publicize its views internationally, especially throughout global civil society, by focusing on how the threat of US/Israeli military strike undermines the internal struggle for democracy in Iran and generally how Western policy toward Iran, both in the past and the present, has more often strengthened political authoritarianism than Iranian democrats.
Later...
The more important task, however, with respect to "morally isolating" the Iranian regime lies in the internal dimensions of this endeavor. A small but loyal percentage of the population, for a variety of reasons, still buys into the regime's propaganda, ...
Hashemi's contributions to analyzing the development of democracy hold great value. The path to democracy in the West was far from a straight line and it took centuries to arrive where it is. It is important to value the quest for democracy in the Muslim world and do all we can to help them. For the US, that means mostly just getting out of their way and discontinuing our support for antidemocratic forces, and our policies which strengthen authortarians directly or indirectly.
I hope I've given you enough reasons to get a hold of this book. It has a great deal of material, and if you find one author less compelling, there's another just a few pages away.
