[lbo-talk] Tell them we are democrats (was: freedom to swim)

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Thu Jun 25 17:25:49 PDT 2009


At 04:53 PM 6/25/2009, Dennis Claxton wrote:


>And exactly no one suggested that. Saying people are asking for a secular
>government is not the same as saying they are opposed to Islam.

good god this conversation is so marked by its fuckstainery, I often want to cry.

"Since the sixteenth century, the era of the Safavids, the dynasty that instituted Shiism as the state religion of then Persia, the clergy have wielded significant influence over internal affairs. Though they never formally took charge until the revolution, their intimate relations with pious, powerful merchants, and moral authority at Friday prayers made them a major political force for centuries." (Moaveni, p 96)

People here seem to think that the theocracy of present day Iran has been its entire history. So, obviously, it must be some teensy minority that happens to know a history otherwise and thus might, gasp, want things to be different.

I haven't even gotten into the finer fucking point of Shiite Islam, or clerics in Qom who spend their days discussing whether or not the Islamic Republic has become too theocratic, that it is no longer embracing the democratic traditions of Islam, and would it or would it not be better to return to the the ideals of a Republic. They _debate_ questions of whether rulers ruled through divine right of God or whether they were to rule according citizen election.

Do these debates happen publicly, in the newspapers, of Saudi Arabia? Do the mullahs openly discuss these things, along with the citizenry that actually pay attention?

Or how about that the reformist are from more traditionalist backgrounds than the people who vote for them. That there is a strain of clergy in Qom who oppose the Islamic regime. do you think that happens in a country that is so overwhelmingly opposed to secularism, or might it rather happen in a country whose people would prefer to move toward secularism.

Why is all of this going on in Iran, and it doesn't seem to happen in other regimes. Historically, the clerics had been seen as central to resistance to injustice. because they raised their voices against the repressive ruler of the moment. That the mullahs were historically understood, in Shiite Islam, as a buffer, as men who spoke on behalf of ordinary people *in opposition to injustice*. As such, while they might not be rulers, because they were thought to care about ordinary people and their struggles, then they could often amass people to turn out in oppositional force, or quell their concerns and massage them into acceptance of their rulers.

Will the fuckstainery stop and let that sink in, just a little.

That the debate among clerics is over whether or not Shiite Islam is, at root, so in tune with justice, a god mandated, a priori voice of the people, that it's certainly possibly to have a democratic theocracy versus those who have come to believe that it cannot (witnessing the history of the regime) and those who hope to find some compromise in between.

and that, what Moaveni says is that what she learned in her reporting is that Iranians are secularists, far ahead of the clerics with their arcane debates over the finer points of theology, debating over a 'hadith' that reformist said did not speak to 95% of the matters of daily life --it has nothing to say about poodles! -- or of even dire issues such as whether to stone adulterers. So, how could the Koran possibly be a source of law? As such, wouldn't electoral, representative democracy make far more sense? The hard-liners insist that, by fatwa, they would make sure that the 95% of daily life was prescribed and proscribed, according to their will.

That people have discovered that nothing of the sort is happening, that the mullahs have become their enemies, that they enrich themselves and order murders and make lecherous passes at women such that no cab driver in Iran would be shocked if you told him.

Why on earth should you think that a history such as this would make the majority into loving theocrats, people who couldn't possibly imagine a secular state. That its suspect that someone like Moaveni might write that "most Iranians" are secularists, which you can see in the history of their voting record.

"Though Iranians alternately loathed and pitied themselves for their ill-fated revolution, they had at least come full circle. A secual government, a full separation between mosque and state, they were able to conclude, was the only answer. This conviction could be traced through voting records. Politicans who talked about a more accountable, less ideological government roundly won eletions. But it was such aq palpable truth, so implict and freely discussed, that it scarcely required documentation. I absorbed it fully on my first visit to Qom, the power capitalist of the mullahs, the search from where Khomeini ruled Iran." (2000, p 97, Lipstick Jihad)

Why on earth should you or michael determine that you can divine the recent vote on the basis of ignorance of all these things? Why should voting for Imadickinajar naturally be understood as support of theocracy, but maybe something very different, that can't be understood through your Western eyes, that might require paying attention to something other than your digestive system as your head cruises straight up your ass right on through to your cranium where you can floss your teeth with the detritus collected along the way.

godamned, the banks of this river are craggy. ha ha ha.



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