The Daily Background

One or two readers may know that my dad, Misagh Parsa, is a professor of sociology at Dartmouth, an expert on revolutions, and from Iran himself. He just had an interesting background article about the current situation published at Gozaar, an online journal about human rights and democracy in Iran:

The Islamic regime is also vulnerable socially and culturally. After consolidating power, the Islamic regime relegated women to second-class citizenship and denied them basic social, economic, and personal rights. The regime condemned homosexuals to death and stoned adulterers. The Islamic Republic imposed a set of cultural measures ranging from dress codes to music and dancing that were incompatible with the demands of the majority of the people who had struggled to overthrow the monarchy.

The Islamic fundamentalists and the theocratic clergy have discredited and undermined their own religion by making Islam the underpinning of failed economic and political experiments. Many citizens believe that the clerics have politicized and manipulated Islam to accumulate wealth and power. The ruling clerics have squandered their religious credentials and at times resort to nationalist rhetoric and external threats to stay in power. Not surprisingly, Iranians are among the most secular people in the Middle East today. In a national poll, 83 percent declared that religious teachings were irrelevant to daily life. Seventy-five percent of Iranians do not even say obligatory daily prayers and, in effect, refuse to be coerced into heaven.

My dad, whose most-well known writings concerned the 1979 Iranian revolution, concludes that:

As currently constituted, the opposition movement appears to lack a leadership capable of transforming the protests into a serious revolutionary struggle. For example, as some protestors have been shouting “Death to dictator,” Mousavi has been urging them to shout “Allah Akbar,” that is God is great. To bring about this transformation, the movement would require a strong, secure leadership that can break away from the existing system and present a democratic alternative acceptable to the majority of the protestors who are risking their lives. The leadership must forge a broad coalition of students, women, and the rest of the population to be able to challenge the regime. The coalition must include the major social classes and collectivities in order to disrupt social and economic structures. A strong leadership must be able to mobilize both bazaaris, who have had their own grievances against the state, and workers who have been fighting for better working conditions and independent labor organizations. Such a coalition should be able to disrupt the social structure and press for democratic changes.

(The bazaaris are loosely defined as a group of merchants and businessmen.) Well, let’s hope to see it happen.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog