At 08:25 PM 6/25/2009, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>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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