So Close To and So Far From Democracy

In a review of Shirin Abadi’s “Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope“, Vali Nasr looks at the paradox of modern Iran – the most literate and culturally dynamic society in the Middle East, ruled over by religious fanatics – and finds little sign of that democratic revolution from within that we’ve all been waiting for:

For close to a decade now, Iran has been tantalizing and baffling the West. No other country in the region is so close to and so far from democracy. With its youthful, literate, and Web-happy population, with thousands of activist NGOs, with more women in universities than men, and with a measure of cultural dynamism that is unique in the Middle East, Iranian society has stood in sharp contrast to the clerical leadership that is suppressing it. Persian is today, after English and Mandarin Chinese, the third most popular language online, where one can surf tens of thousands of Iranian blogs. Offline, hundreds of widely read newspapers, magazines, and periodicals host thinly disguised intellectual and political debates. Iranians also get their news and views from a myriad of international sources. The BBC’s Persian website at one point received 450,000 hits a day. On satellite television, Iranians watch everything from CNN to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

There are lively discussions about Western thought. Full-page debates over postmodernism often adorn the pages of popular dailies, while seminars and lectures regularly discuss Western thinkers from Hegel to Samuel P. Huntington. Iran’s spirited book market has for many years now dwarfed the oft-repeated statistics showing the paltry quantity of translations in the far larger Arab world. Foreign tomes that seem as if they might be helpful in prying open Islamic orthodoxy are particularly popular. There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language, and these have gone into multiple printings. (One is by the current conservative speaker of the Iranian parliament.) In some areas of mathematics and physics, such as string theory, Iranian research centers rank among the best in the world. Iranian cinema has in recent years become a powerful force at home and abroad.

What this dynamism signals is that the revolution is over. Such a conclusion is inescapable. But it is not all that one needs to know. It does not follow that this new cultural energy will lead to a new political energy. The expectation that a democratic opening must follow this cultural revival has turned to disappointment. Iran’s youthful cultural dynamism has not only failed to produce democracy; it has failed even to produce a credible pro-democracy movement. […]

What, then, of the search for democracy in Iran? It seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. There is no other country in the region more suitable for the nurturing of the sapling of democracy. Iranians want democracy, and they cherish democratic practices. But there is no simple and straight path to democracy in Iran. The battle lines are unclear, and as the elections last year showed, open political contestation has favored populist authoritarianism over democracy, albeit through the ballot box. Talk of democracy in Iran is rife, especially in the West; but the reality is that Iran now has a stable authoritarian regime, and there is no obvious way to dislodge it.