Iran
Fatemeh Haqiqatjoo and the Sixth Majles
On February 23, 2004, two days after the conservative victory in the elections for the Seventh Majles, for which the Guardian Council banned over 2,000 reformist candidates, including some 80 current deputies, the reformist-dominated Sixth Majles accepted the resignation of Fatemeh Haqiqatjoo.
Iran, the Vatican of Shi’ism?
The Iranian state, controlled de facto by the conservatives in the government, promotes the idea that Iran is the center of Shi‘ism. It bases its argument on the fact that Iran is a Shi‘i-run state, whereas Shi‘i Muslims in other parts of the world live in states that are dominated by Sunnis, and so Iran is free to pay near exclusive attention to Shi‘i concerns.
Abbas’s Photographs of Iran
My work is visual. It’s immediate. My photographs show the process that is happening in Iran. —Abbas
Born in Iran in 1944, Abbas moved to Algeria with his family when he was eight years old. As a young school¬boy at the École de Garcons d’El-Biar, Abbas wrote a short story entitled “A Grand Voyage” about his family’s emigration, illustrating the tale with a pencil drawing of an Air France jet flying over jagged, snow-capped mountains. “A Grand Voyage” proved to be a prescient tale, foretelling his life as a traveler — an identity he prefers to that of an exile.
The New Conservatives Take a Turn
The conservative forces that took majority control of Iran’s parliament, or Majles, in the February 2004 elections were not swept into office by a mass movement. Conservative candidates had the help of the Council of Guardians, a body of 12 senior clerics [1] vested by the constitution of the Islamic Republic with the power to overturn acts of parliament, which blocked the candidacy of over 1,000 men and women associated with the reformist trend that held the majority in the Sixth Majles of 2001-2004. Thanks to this intervention, conservatives won the majority of seats, because many Iranians were left with no one for whom to vote.
The New Landscape of Iranian Politics
After seven turbulent years in which a reformist movement transformed Iran’s political landscape as well as its international image, conservatives recaptured two thirds of the parliament in February 2004. “Victory” for the conservatives was achieved, in large part, by the intervention of the unelected Guardian Council, which succeeded in rejecting the candidacy of 2,400 reformist candidates. The “Tehran spring” — when Iranians and international observers hoped that reformists could bring about peaceful, democratic transformation of the Islamic Republic — has faded.
Neo-Conservatives, Hardline Clerics and the Bomb
Even as the US military launched a long-rumored offensive in the Iraqi city of Falluja in early November 2004, the subject of anxious speculation in Washington was not Iraq, but Iran. President George W. Bush’s victory at the polls on November 2 returned to office the executive who located Iran upon an “axis of evil” in the 2002 State of the Union address and called the Islamic Republic a “totalitarian state” during his campaign for a second term in the White House. The neo-conservatives who were so influential in promoting the invasion of Iraq have long harbored the desire to foment “regime change” in Tehran as well as in Baghdad.
Off the Grid
Air-conditioned transportation in Tehran is notoriously difficult to find. For pampered visitors such as the cultural anthropologists and documentary filmmakers from New York and Los Angeles who seem to converge on the Iranian capital every summer, a cool taxi ride to the northern parts of town recalls something of the charmed life they left behind in the United States, a life some refer to offhandedly as “the grid.”
To Deny Iran Atomic Weapons, Create a Nuclear-Free Region
The 12-year standoff between Saddam Hussein’s former regime and the US displayed a circular logic: the Iraqi refusal to “come clean” about possibly non-existent weaponry simultaneously fed, and fed off of, Washington’s belligerence toward Iraq. With most eyes on the denouement of that malign symbiosis, something similar is developing between Washington and Iran over the apparent nuclear ambitions of the Islamic Republic.
Football and Film in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Maziar Bahari opens his documentary, Football Iranian Style (2001), at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, where a large mural of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic until his death in 1989, peers down on the 110,000 soccer fans filling the bleachers. Like 75 percent of Iran’s population, most of the crowd is under the age of 25. Bahari’s lens focuses on a security guard chastising a dancing spectator and pushing him down into his seat. Undeterred, the young fan kisses the guard’s face and resumes his rabble rousing.
Last Efforts of Iran’s Reformers
Student demonstrations in December 2002 revealed yet again the depth of public sentiment favoring political and economic reform in Iran. But the loose coalition of reformists under the leadership of President Mohammad Khatami has been unable to harness this “reserve power of revolution” to push its program through to fruition. Crises engendered by the conservatives, a persistent sense of encirclement by foreign enemies and the reformists’ own failures have all contributed to the Iranian impasse.
The Fight for Iran’s Democratic Ideals
Over the weekend thousands of Iranian students continued their protests to demand political reform. Their voices were raised in support of Hashem Aghajari, the college professor who has been sentenced to death for blasphemy. But the student movement is broader than dissent over one injustice.
Ground Shifting Under Mullahs
After a court in Iran sentenced dissident academic Hashem Aghajari to death for challenging clerical rule, several thousand university students took to the streets in Tehran. They protested for about two weeks before the government threatened to crack down and declare a state of emergency. No one has forgotten the government’s hard-line response, in July 1999, to crowds rallying against the closure of a liberal newspaper. Most of the student protesters rounded up then remain in jail.
