Those who are the most implacably opposed to the Islamic Republic tend to be modernists who consciously or unconsciously think of the mythical West as the telos of humanity. The silliest section among them, such as the Worker-Communist Party of Iran, go so far as to say that the Iranians must change their alphabet from Farsi to Latin, adopt the English language as a "prevalent language of education and administration," and change Iran's calendar to the Western one, as if such changes had anything to do with liberation:
Changing the Farsi alphabet
In order to help bridge the gap that separates Iranian
society from the forefronts of scientific, industrial and
cultural progress in the world today, and in order to help
people benefit from the results of this progress and take
a more direct and active part in it, the official Farsi
alphabet should be systematically changed to Latin.
The party also calls for:
1 - English language to be taught from early
school age with the aim of making it a prevalent language
of education and administration.
2 - The Western calendar (the official calendar in use
internationally today) to be officially recognized and to be
used in official documents alongside the local calender.
("Program of the Worker-communist Party," <http://www.wpiraq.net/english/program.htm#Changing%20the%20Farsi%20alphabet>)
Their devotion to all things Western reminds me of Meiji Japan's Rokumeikan diplomacy, an attempt to impress Westerners that Japan was indeed Westernized and therefore deserving of equal rights, which failed anyway to help Japan revise unequal treaties that Western powers imposed on the country (cf. "Dancing and Diplomacy," <http://www.taisho.com/dance.html>).
Modernists, moreover, blame post-modernism for the way Michel Foucault saw the Iranian Revolution -- Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson are good examples of this line of thinking (see Babak Rahimi's sharp criticism of their book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism at <http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=25571168446358>) -- attributing to Foucault the views of Iranians he described without endorsing and even misrepresenting his view as a simple glorification of pre-modernity.
Foucault, however, was a far more level-headed realist and materialist than his modernist critics now or Iranian and Western Marxists then. The first institution he closely examined upon his arrival in Iran is its military: its history, social composition, and other crucial factors that would determine the revolution's outcome ("The Army -- When the Earth Quakes," Corriere della sera, 28 September 1978).
To conclude, post-modernism, especially of the Foucauldian sort, given its criticism of the ideology of Progress, is indeed likely to be a better philosophy than modernism for intellectual reconciliation of Islam and democracy, but it will be even more useful if f it is supplemented by the Walter Benjamin school of historical materialism. -- Yoshie