Daniel Aaron Lazar » AP Iran

Islam and democracy: Uneasy companions

Dan Lazar — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:52:31 +0000

Islamist spokesmen and leaders of the revived Islamist mainstream are bending over backwards to give reassurances that they will promote a peaceful, pluralistic and tolerant version of Islam. The rights of women and religious and ethnic minorities will be respected, they say, and the people’s democratic verdict will be accepted if they lose elections.

Whatever their doubts, most democrats in the Arab world reckon that Islamists who say they will abide peacefully by the rules of the game must be allowed—indeed encouraged—to participate in mainstream politics: far better than forcing them into a violent, conspiratorial underground. All the same, the well of mistrust on both sides runs deep.

Many liberals still think the Islamists, however mild they sound today, are bent on taking over in the long run, would abandon democracy once they got into power and would use every sort of chicanery and violence to achieve their goal.

Two articles on the relationship between Islam and democracy in light of the 2011 “Arab Spring”

Iran shows off captured US drone on state television

Dan Lazar — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 20:51:11 +0000

Perhaps Iranian political culture would be less fixated on conspiracies if certain nations would not secretly invade Iranian airspace.

Iran and the United States in the Cold War

Dan Lazar — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:56:53 +0000

Few outside countries have more at stake in the evolution of Iran’s political situation than the United States, which has been in a state of open enmity with the Islamic Republic for more than three decades. Threats of Iran-backed terrorism, Tehran’s apparent nuclear ambitions, and its evident aim of destabilizing American allies—chiefly Israel—are perpetually high on the list of US concerns in the region. Why is Iran so important to the US? What explains the enduring animosity between the two countries? Answers to these and other questions about the United States’ position in the region today can be found by looking back to the Cold War.

BBC & CNN on Iran

Dan Lazar — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 03:35:12 +0000

A note on checks and balances in Iran (Aug 2009)

Insight: Checks and balances for Iranian re-elected president – CCTV 080909

Zakaria & Guests discuss how Iran will weather the Arab Uprisings of 2011

IRAN / KARIM SAJADPOUR+HOOMAN MAJD / FAREED ZAKARIA !

Zakaria & Soros discuss Iran 2011

GEORGE SOROS on FAREED ZAKARIA GPS, CNN. February 20, 2011

Rafsanjani loses post as chair of Experts

Dan Lazar — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 03:16:46 +0000

Mr Rafsanjani had chaired the Assembly of Experts, which selects the supreme leader and supervises his activities, for the past four years. But he was criticised by hardliners for being close to the opposition.

Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani was selected to replace him, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

Mr Rafsanjani said that for the sake of keeping the country united, he would not stand against Mr Kani.

“If he was ready and accepted responsibility, I would certainly not nominate myself, so that we could eliminate the differences and this sacred institution would not be damaged by my side,” he said.

He warned that divisiveness was becoming “very serious” and said the country should be “vigilant to keep people united”.

Mr Rafsanjani had chaired the Assembly – an elected body of clerics which has the theoretical power to dismiss the supreme leader – since 2007.

But he was stripped of his role as a leader of Friday prayers after criticising a crackdown on opposition protests after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed 2009 re-election.

Mr Rafsanjani remains the chairman of the Expediency Council, a committee which arbitrates disputes over legislation among state bodies.

Struggles of the Rentier State

Dan Lazar — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:45:46 +0000

THE president of Iran is a powerful communicator. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke live to the nation last month, he managed to combine seductive reasoning, patriotic appeals and more than a hint of menace. For once, though, he left even his most fervent supporters unmoved, for he was announcing the beginning of the end of subsidies on which millions of them depend. These measures are the gamble of his presidency—and may be the most important economic reform in the Islamic Republic’s three-decade history.

Iran Rev Compared to Egypt “Rev”

Dan Lazar — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:56:40 +0000

Steve Inskeep talks to Dr. Abbas Milani about how events in Egypt compare to the 1979 Revolution in Iran. Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and has just finished a biography of the Iranian monarch called The Shah.

A power struggle in Iran

Dan Lazar — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 06:20:31 +0000

In the summer of 2009 Iran’s divided conservatives came together to save the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after his disputed re-election provoked huge street protests by the reformist Green Movement. To have lost Mr Ahmadinejad to a liberal “plot” would, they judged, have imperilled the Islamic Republic which succours them all.

All the same, many conservatives are far from enamoured of Iran’s president. Challenging him, however, is turning out to be a different matter.

More on the power struggle from The Economist

The Last Ayatollah

Dan Lazar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:52:48 +0000

The Green Movement’s bloody street protests may not have toppled Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—but they will.

An argument worth reading (from Newsweek)

Kandahar (2001)

Dan Lazar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:41:23 +0000

A conundrum: the Islamic Republic of Iran, no friend of Western-style liberty, somehow nurtured (well, permitted) the great humanist cinema of the 90s. We’ll let the political scientists explain that one, and just note that men like Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami have directed on their own, and encouraged in others, films whose stripped-down, but never simple, artistry touches souls around the world. The stories are often about children —poor ones, blind or lame ones —who fight long odds not to triumph but simply to survive.

Read the rest of this film review

31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution

Dan Lazar — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:57:38 +0000

Jason Rezaian offering a dispatch from Tehran for Slate

Show Trials in Iran

Dan Lazar — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:52:42 +0000

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions.

Laura Secor on Iranian Show Trials (2009, 2 pages)

Laura Secor on Iran Elections

Dan Lazar — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:53:10 +0000

Journalist Laura Secor details the recent suppression of the post-election Mousavi opposition in Iran and the intellectual roots of the detention, torture, and forced confessions hoisted upon civil leaders over the preceding decades.

View the video from the American Academy in Berlin

THE SUNNI-SHIA SPLIT

Dan Lazar — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:31:13 +0000

In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims – who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia.

And yet this dispute did not begin violently. Arguably, it was not at first a political or theological schism either, but a personal disagreement. And the two groups agree on many of the fundamentals of the religion.

So how did this profound split develop?

Listen to Melvyn Bragg conduct this round table discussion

The New Democrats: An intellectual history of the Green Wave

Dan Lazar — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:01:16 +0000

What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism–a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century.

Shiism, like most religions, is no stranger to heated schisms. Shia and Sunnis split over the question of whether Muhammad had designated his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor (Shia believed he had). Some Shia, called Alawites, believe the only divinely designated successor was Ali, while another group, Zaydis, believe there were four imams. A large, intellectually vibrant third group is known as the Ismailis because it believes the line of imams ended with the seventh, Ismail. And the largest Shia sect is called the Ithna Ashari–or the Twelvers. Dominant in Iran, they believe in twelve imams and posit that the last imam went into hiding some 1,100 years ago. His return, bloody and vengeful, will mark the redemptive dawn of the age of justice.

Read more about how the election protests have a deeply-rooted religious and intellectual history

2009 Iranian Presidential Elections

Dan Lazar — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:30:39 +0000

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mousavi in Tehran.

From the BBC

Wikipedia

Who Cares Who is the President of Iran? from Slate

BBC Video on Election Protests

On the Iranian Baby Book (and Youth Voters)

Newsweek predicts the fall of Islamic theocracy—though not necessarily the current regime—in Iran. The regime, based on the “divine” appointment of a supreme leader, now faces more dissent than ever: Top clerics are divided, and there are millions of Iranians who no longer believe in the government’s ideology. It will now be able to maintain power only by military intimidation. When it comes, the end of a 30-year experiment in political Islam will make waves across the Muslim world

A profile of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei describes how the idealistic Shia cleric who loved poetry about oppression has become “that cold, hard weight of authority” he once chafed under. His complicated relationships with other members of the government go back decades, and his “indulgent” support for President Ahmadinejad suggests power has given him “tunnel vision.”

The Weekly Standard argues that whatever happens in Iran, the Islamic Republic as we know it is over. The government’s decision to announce the election result so quickly—without even making reasonable efforts to have it appear genuine—”shows how insular and insecure Khamenei, a politicized cleric of some intellectual sensitivity, has become.” Questions about the future of a “supreme leader” in Iran were being discussed before this month’s election, and Khamenei’s handling of the situation has all but ensured he’ll be the end of the line.

The Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University offer this analysis of the numbers.

Everything you know about Iran is wrong

Dan Lazar — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:19:04 +0000

Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Read on From Zakaria in Newsweek

Iran: A Familiar Face to Challenge Ahmadinejad

Dan Lazar — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:47:04 +0000

Will Mohammed Khatami run for a third term as president of Iran, or won’t he? That’s the question dominating the political conversation in Tehran ahead of the June poll, in which hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who succeeded the reformist Khatami in 2005 — is standing for reelection. Pressure has been mounting on the former President to run again, with many seeing him as the only candidate able to defeat Ahmadinejad. There has even been an unprecedented public “Invite Khatami” campaign whose nostalgic theme song ends, “This time, we will truly appreciate your presence.”

Read on from Time magazine

IRAN’S 2008 PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS: A TRIUMPH OF THE SYSTEM

Dan Lazar — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:11:06 +0000

Read this analysis by Raz Zimmt

Raz Zimmt is a research fellow at the Center for Iranian Studies and a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Strap on Your Helmets–We’re Going to War…Again

Dan Lazar — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:03:57 +0000

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker discusses on the latest developments between Iran and the United States regarding Iran’s nuclear power program. Hersh writes that the Bush administration has clandestine plans for a possible major attack on Iran.

Listen Here

Read the article Here