IRAN EXPERT SEES IRANIANS YEARNING TO SPEAK AND LISTEN
10/24/02
eurasianet.org
Young people in Iran, who comprise a disproportionately large part of Iran’s population, are anxious for political change that promotes a more open society, a leading expert on Iranian affairs told an Open Forum in New York on October 24. Younger Iranians are particularly bitter, the expert added, over efforts by conservative clerics to limit access to information about the outside world.
Author and journalist Afshin Molavi, who has covered Iranian developments since 1992, analyzed the "current Iranian predicament," in which un-elected, conservative-controlled state institutions are battling against reformists led by President Mohammed Khatami to set Iran’s development agenda. Molavi focused on two Khatami legislative proposals – one that would subject the conservative-dominated judiciary to stronger constitutional oversight, and another that would place limits on the ability of the clerical Supreme Council to overrule policies approved by the president and parliament. The fate of Khatami’s proposals could prove a turning point in the overall struggle between conservatives and reformists, he suggested.
Molavi said most Iranians currently are preoccupied with their individual economic circumstances. Many yearn for better jobs and economic prospects. This makes sense in a country where half the population is under 21 and where officially unemployment ranges between 16 and 20 percent. But Molavi also sees a trend in which Iranians are starting to believe, somewhat less concretely, that free expression and access to news from the rest of the world are basic to domestic progress and stability.
"They’ve experienced secular authoritarianism, they’ve experienced religious authoritarianism," Molavi said. "I wouldn’t say that they have come overwhelmingly to embrace democracy but they seem to have reached the conclusion that some form of open society is the way to go."
Molavi has long documented the plight of Iran’s younger generation. During the Open Forum, Molavi spoke about his recent book, Persian Pilgrimages, which chronicles his visits to shrines around Iran during 1999 and 2000. Perhaps the most salient trip he recounted took place on a "visa pilgrimage." Young educated Iranians, he said, face such bleak job prospects that taxi drivers in Iranian cities often hold master’s degrees. So they frequently go to United Arab Emirates or Syria to seek visas at foreign embassies, primarily Canada’s, in what Molavi says "has almost become a rite of passage" for the young intelligentsia. (Young Iranians without advanced education, he noted, often travel more harrowing routes to Bosnia, which for a period did not require visas of Iranian visitors.) Molavi described his hitch with the "visa pilgrimage" as a snapshot of the dynamics dividing Iran: on a flight to Damascus, he said, elderly Iranians making a religious pilgrimage sat in front while job-seekers sat in back.
While the United States has officially declared Iran an enemy and refused to openly support Khatami, Molavi found that many young Iranians crave American freedoms (as distinct from popularly understood American ideology). He told a story about going to a "hard-liners’ rally" at Tehran University calling for the trial of a student playwright who had written jokes about Islamic teachings into a play about college exams. Molavi said he approached one of the participants, who then asked him if he had come from the United States. When Molavi said that he had, a crowd began to gather as the rally participant peppered him with more questions. Finally, the presumptive hard-liner asked: "How can I get a green card?"
Of all the political and social indignities for which Iranians blame the religious government, Molavi said, the cutoff of free information causes the most bitterness. He recalled that Iranians clamored for foreign newspapers and books, ranging from pro-democracy treatises to biographies of ancient Persian rulers to picture books celebrating the Backstreet Boys, in the spring of 2000. But Iran’s history of censorship remains intact under the clerics. Part of Molavi’s book recounts a visit with jailed journalist Akbar Gangi, who went from supporting the revolution in 1979 to condemning the clerics. "Our revolution was an act for freedom but we did not follow through," Molavi recalled Gangi saying. In January 2001, Gangi went to jail for 15 years after a "show trial" made much of his attendance at a Berlin conference where one woman danced and another stripped in protest of the clerics’ repressive policies.
If Khatami’s legislation prevails over the Supreme Council, Molavi said, the president would be in a position to fire judges who ordered the suspension of newspapers that published controversial views. However, the fate of Khatami’s legislation is hard to predict, and censorship has been part of Iranian history for centuries. Molavi said that if the clerics block the legislation, writers are likely to take refuge in "allegory, symbolism and satire" as they have since at least the 14th century.
Whatever happens with Khatami’s legislation, Molavi said, restlessness for more openness in Iranian society stretches from émigrés who accuse Khatami of acquiescing to the clerics, to merchants who crave more trade, to students who are more boldly satirizing their society. "People use the [intellectual] spaces given them" to express pro-democracy ideas, he said. Some seminarians have called for a separation of religious and political life; one well-known philosopher has contended that interweaving religion and politics "can pollute the faith." In this context, Iran is changing, though the pace of that change is hard to predict.
Molavi expects the legislation, if conservative elements tolerate it, to be the most revolutionary act Iran will see in the next couple of years. While many of Iran’s millions of frustrated citizens would support institutional change, he said, they have probably not developed "organized cadres" to support a revolution. At the same time, he said, Iran’s demographic tilt toward youth and chronic underemployment make change in the long term much more likely. And more openness and debate figure to define that change. |
