Teaching Comparative

Iranian Political Culture

I was searching for other things when I came across this May 31 article from the International Herald Tribune.

You may not begin to teach about Iran again for 7 months. So why should you pay attention to this article?

How about asking your students next February (or whenever it's appropriate), to evaluate the article's main premise (that Ahmadinejad has taken on some of the reformers' causes and that the reformers have taken on some of Ahmadinejad's approaches to politics)?

There ought to be enough examples in the next few months (even -- another of the reporters' assertions -- at the glacial pace of change in Iran) to confirm and/or contradict reporter Michael Slackman's thesis. So, go to the whole article, hang on to it if it looks useful, and sometime next year ask your students to read it and write a letter to Mr. Slackman about his assumptions and predictions. (Maybe you ought to mail the letters to him and see how Slackman responds.)

Behind Ahmadinejad's tough talk, a quiet evolution in Iranian politics

"... the Khatami era has passed, and now this party sits on the sidelines, celebrating, mourning actually, in a cramped basement. Elements of a new Iran continue to emerge in many ways in spite of, not because of, those years with Khatami at the helm. In the end, Khatami and his conservative opponents had the same end in mind: to preserve the theocratic system.
 
"Instead, change in Iran is driven from the bottom up - slowly, stubbornly, but effectively, no matter how repressive or punitive the rulers choose to be. It is a cliché, but the phrase on the lips of weary Iranians in Tehran is 'evolution, not revolution.' No one seems to have the stomach to want to start over, to have the mad free-for-all that follows a revolution. So the change is glacial in pace, but it moves forward. Political analysts in Iran say that hard-liners of today are promoting ideas that were considered to be from the reform camp two decades ago...

"... Ahmadinejad, the tough talking, Holocaust-denying, apparatchik [who] advocates of change insisted ... was going to roll back the clock to the earliest days of the revolution.

"But even if he wanted to, he has not been able to. There has been a tightening of political speech and a general sense of unease... But in political terms, opponents in Iran have taken a page from each other's books. Ahmadinejad has emerged, at least rhetorically, as a defender of women's rights, trying for example to have women allowed into stadiums for the first time since 1979. The effort was blocked, but it was something that Khatami never attempted in his eight years in power... the advocates of change have set aside their lofty talk of religious democracy and social freedoms and are instead focusing on the issues that have come to define the president: security and the economy and nuclear development..."

posted by Ken Wedding @ 1:18 PM