Ramin Jahanbegloo is a past fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy (October 2001-August 2002, <http://www.ned.org/forum/past.html>). So, what can you expect? :->
That doesn't mean, though, all Jahanbegloo says can be safely dismissed. Jahanbegloo maintains, among other things: "Marxism was propagated in Iran by the upper middle class and rich families, who were politically against the Pahlavi regime and intellectually the most prepared to embrace new ideas and to implement them in the Iranian social sphere. From the 1930s until the end of the 1960s Marxism was the doctrine that provided the Iranian elite with an intellectual grounding for a rupture with Islamic traditions"; and "Most important of all was the lack of sufficient awareness among most Iranian Communists about the force of religion and the strong social networking of the Islamist groups in Iran. What the Iranian Communists lacked was an appreciation of Islam as an important social-historical factor in the formation and consolidation of the Iranian masses. Iranian Marxists, despite their ambition to be close to the masses, never spoke the language of common people; they were hopelessly out of tune with the traditions and idioms of the people" (Danny Postel, "Ideas Whose Time Has Come: A Conversation with Iranian Philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo", Logos 5.2, Spring/Summer 2006, <http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_5.2/jahanbegloo_interview.htm>).
The way Jahanbegloo puts it oversimplifies the matter, ignoring the Mojahedin-e Khalq (who did not claim they were Marxists but whose interpretation of Islam was influenced by the Marxist tradition) for instance, but there is a truth to his assessment (some Iranian and Iranian studies scholars and activists of the Left, who are not so dismissive of Marx and Marxism as he is, provide evidence pointing to the same problems that he mentions).
However, exactly the same thing -- that they are of elite class backgrounds, do not speak the language of common people, and so on -- can be said about Iran's liberals, who moreover lack an economic program that addresses working people's interests (which all Iranian Marxists and Islamist leftists who were influenced by Marxism even as they rejected it, both those who joined and opposed the Islamic Republic, tried to develop, whatever their differences, whether or not they succeeded in really doing so).
> Moreover, the fact that they are able to bring in all these Western
> speakers to lecture makes Iran sound a lot more open than I thought it
> was so it would definitely be better for us to understand what exactly
> is the problem these movements are dealing with.
Danny Postel and Scott McLemee are right that Iran's public sphere is livelier than America's, for sure. :-> But I take an exception to the line of thinking that has us equate cosmopolitanism with being conversant with only Western philosophy, which after all is but one component of the collective intellectual past and present of humanity.
Whether or not Iranian liberals like it, Iran is in the Middle East, close to Russia, dependent on export to China, Japan, etc., seeking friends in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, etc. What do Iranian intellectuals think of their Arab, Russian, Asian, African, and Latin American counterparts of various philosophical schools and political orientations? That's the true measure of cosmopolitanism in Iran. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>