Book Review: Akbar Ganji The Road to Democracy in Iran

´Much of what needs to change in Iranian culture relates to the superstition, dogmatism, conformism, and prejudice that have permeatged our society, particularly in the Shia seminaries. Rejecting these aspects of the dominant religious culture in no way implies rejecting religion. Indeed, a considerable number of democratic reformist activities in Iran hold deep religious beliefs. But without reform of these aspects of religious culture in Iran, democratic change will fail´.

Akbar Ganji, the author of this quote, has an interesting intellectual story, but not unique for non-democratic regime stories. With a lower class background, he was member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and at times, bodyguard of the ayatollah Khomeini, followed by a career in diplomacy and as a journalist. After investigating the so-called Chain of Murders, targeting intellectuals killed the regime, among which Dariush and Parvaneh Farouhar, he spent six years in Evin prison. Following his release he turned into an active supporter of democratic change in Iran.

The Road to Democracy in Iran, a collection of essays published by Boston Review Book, with foreword by Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani, outlines the main directions that will lead to democracy in Iran. The essays are based on general ideas - such as human rights and the open society as featured by Karl Popper, a familiar reference among Iranian intellectuals - and do not contain a detailed platform of step-by-step changes. However, it assigns to intellectuals the role of forerunners both in terms of spreading and explaining ideas and pushing forward the democratic change: ´Intellectuals must always strive to lessen other people´s pain, even though they suffer on this path. And they must live in a way that prepares them to tolerate and survive the pain of insult, exile, imprisonment, and even torture´. Indeed, they ´must live´ which also implies that in many situations the intellectuals can be as weak as those that do not enjoy this status. Resisting torture and blackmail is not unfortunately a matter of belief in your ideas and education, it has to do with a moral code that is not the priviledge of the very educated. Ganji related perhaps to his own experience in prison but realistically speaking, under the duress of lack of freedom and torture there is no guarantee of integrity.

A modern - post-ayatollah - Iran advocates for the separation between religion and politics, with the priviledges of the ruling class abolished - (...) it is our goal in Iran to revoke the privileges that rules have taken for tjhemselves and their relatives´; the usual outcome of populist dictatorships that start as a way to increase the access to power to the less privileges and ends up as an elite which separates from the same people it claimed to represent - and the ´gender apartheid´ eliminated. Talking about the peculiar situation of women rights in Iran, I often wonder why there is not a higher awareness and outrage in the Western media about that. The label of ´apartheid´ is so easily used when it comes to various political contexts, but for the case of a country where women are the victims of violence - with morality patrols openly attacking women whose dress code do not conform the rules set by the religious men - and their rights restricted - including of entering a stadium -  it seems that there is not enough to provoke the outrage. Among others, there is no international mechanism that can force Iran to respect women rights, as the Islamic Republic is not member of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. 

In a new, democratic Iran, religion is rather a source of solace for spiritual needs than the only solution for all problems, including political and economic. In any case, Akbar Ganji is supporting a ´modernist Islam´ that ´considers the rational mind a tool for finding the truth in the holy book and in hadith, but also for apprehending other sources of knowledge´. 

The Road to Democracy in Iran has the merit of setting the basis of the possible political and intellectual change in the country. It is though rather an intellectual manifesto than a clear program that settle the details of the change. Obviously, from the perspective of the elites and the everyday operation of the political - and religious - establishment, there are many more details that need to be considered which are clearly not the object of this book. 

From many respects, it is good and hopeful to read such books as it promises a post scriptum to the dictatorship of the mullahs. The clear terms and content of this afterwards is yet to be written, hopefully by people that believe in democratic change, hopefully among them many women. 

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: Children of Paradise. The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, by Laura Secor

What man can do to man for the sake of ideologies, religion or just because he have been given the power to do so it's inimaginable. I've read about the Gulag experiences, about what happened during the Shoah, about the Chinese Revolution or the Latin American dictatorships. Also, extensively about the fate of individuals sent to Evin prison in Iran, especially during the so-called 'Green Revolution' (I would avoid to use the word 'revolution' without brackets as, actually, nothing really changed after those events). Hobbes' 'Homo homini lupus' sounds like a very elegant description of what fellow man can inflict to another creature.

Children of Paradise. The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor is a dramatic bloody account of the post-revolutionary intellectual history of Iran. Very often, the stories about intellectual influences - both local and foreign - are interrupted by accounts of terrible beatings and torture. 

The author gathered the information during around ten years of visits in Iran, extensive study of various local sources and contacts with local intellectuals both in the country and abroad. It is not sure if she speaks Farsi as well. Secor is familiar with post-Yugoslavia which was a complex political and ethnic structure, but I don't think it applies to the complexities and intricacies of the Iranian political and religious system.

A great merit of this book is that it traced admirably the sources of knowledge that made the intellectual history of Iran, as well as the genesis of the ideas and the translations of various Western/European contexts into the local ideological web. This is one of the most facinating part of the history of mentalities, because during the 'longue durée' of the adaptation the original ideas can be completely redefined and acquire a completely new sense. In the cases approached in the book, for instance, Heidegger - a chore atheist - was adapted to some local versions of Islam - particulary the concepts of 'truth' and being', while Popper was very popular among those looking to adapt the 'open society concepts' to a mix of Islam and Marxist (Popper was originally a marxist but his major works were a permanent dispute with this ideology). Hannah Arendt considerations about the French Revolution and the role of terror in the revolutionary practice was used as a compedium of understanding the post-revolutionary Iran. The fact that theological seminaries curricula include extensive study of Plato and Aristotle might offer an interesting topic of research for a further mapping of various interpretations in different centers of religious knowledge, in Qom and in other places. 

Intellectual histories and changes of mind among people that played political roles at certain moments are as well interesting. The perceptions are part of specific contexts. For instance Mir Hossein Mousavi considered a 'reformist' used to be a couple of decades ago a strong supporter of exporting the Islamic revolution abroad.

But the intellectual reception and interpretations are taking place in a landscape bordered by extensive violence and secrecy. 

Proeminent intellectuals continue to be the direct victims of various changes and conflicts of power among the layers of the establishment. Critical voices are made redundant after forced to sign and pronounce public denunciations of their works and of their colleagues. The idea of dissent and intellectual uniqueness, so vital to creating ideas are compromised. I witnessed myself such processes and extensively encountered such terrible stories during my communist childhood and post-communist coming of age. It's terrible for the credibility of intellectuals as such, and it only serves long term the pervert aims of the ideologues. They win on the long term because the intellectuals lost their credibility, by the simple fact that they were put to prison and forced to confess. It's part of the horrible destiny of the dictatorships and especially in a country with such a huge intellectual potential as Iran it definitely diminishes the chances of in-depth, long-term democratic change.

Although the author doesn't discuss extensively the repercursions of the mixture between religious interpretations and political pressure as such, there are a lot of ideas to think about such aspects too, especially from the point of view of the dangers of theocracies. What happened in Iran - and can easily happen everywhere where religious leaders were given the right to decide in political and social matters - is that the everyday relationships and interactions are defined and punished based on a religious code. 'Under the Islamic Republic draconian moral code, nearly every Iranian was guilty of something that could carry a prison  sentence: extramarital sex, drinking, even shaking hands with members of the opposite sex. What had begun as a religious imperative had become little more than a system of universal blackmail. The right information could afford an interrogator a good deal of leverage over a political prisoner'. Therefore, not only the trust in the intellectuals is eroded, but also the normal trust between humans is for ever compromised. 

Change is hard to endeavour and cannot be long-term without the contributions of those people who loved so much the country but were forced to go out. But once those people will be in, most probably they will live the drama of being rejected or the facts that were associated with various episodes of their lives will compromise an eventual political destiny in a new context. 

Children of Paradise. The Struggle for the Soul of Iran is a good start for understanding intellectual journeys as well as some terrible personal histories of both intellectuals and everyday Iranians (after many years when I've read about it from accounts of some of the people mentioned in the book, the stories about stoning continue to haunt me deeply). It has the merit of creating a different level of discussion that doesn't focus on political and international frictions but goes into the deep roots of the post-revolutionary Iran. It is a welcomed spin that requires though more and more discussion and reflection. 

Rating: 4 stars