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3 Ahmadinejad held hostage to bazaar
politics By M K Bhadrakumar
In the geography between the Arabian Sea
and the Levant, there is only one country where it
is possible to fancy that an elected government
could tumble because of the price of tomatoes in
the bazaar - Iran.
These are turbulent
times in Iran. Tehran has passed through such
times before. In the late 1980s, a court in Berlin
issued a warrant against then-Iranian president
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for allegedly authorizing
the dispatch of hit squads from Tehran to
murder Iranian dissidents
living in the West.
The Western world
demonized Rafsanjani then, much in the way
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is today. But Tehran
seems to have weathered the latest Western attempt
to engineer dissension within the Iranian regime.
The importance of Ahmadinejad
The main thing about Ahmadinejad that
irritates Washington is his immense popularity
within Iran. It renders absolutely nonsensical any
talk of "regime change" in Iran. Ahmadinejad sets
a standard of personal integrity and simplicity of
lifestyle that is rare among the political elite.
Mammoth crowds throng to listen to him at public
rallies wherever he goes. He identifies with their
sorrows and dreams. He is easily accessible. He
lives in their neighborhood. This has never
happened before - not even during the time of
Mohammed Mossadeq in the early 1950s.
Ahmadinejad is the first "populist" leader
Iranians have known. He is restoring to an extent
the "connectivity" of the Iranian regime with the
voiceless millions in Iran. This connectivity was
snapped during the past two decades since
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini passed away in 1989.
Since then, Iran's ruling elite, especially the
religious establishment, began incrementally
deviating from the ideals of Ali Shariati that
inspired the storm troopers of the Islamic
Revolution who poured into the streets of Tehran
chanting his name in the tumultuous winter of 1978
leading up to the revolution the next year.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once
said, "I have no religion, but if I were to choose
one, it would be that of Shariati." One of the two
or three foremost Islamic thinkers of the last
century, Shariati's radical blend of Islam and
Marxism electrified a whole generation of Iranian
revolutionaries like Ahmadinejad.
It is a
different matter whether radical Islamic
egalitarianism, which is redistributionist and
anti-imperialistic, is workable in today's era of
globalization. But that doesn't stop Ahmadinejad
from trying. (It doesn't stop Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez, either.) The premise of his polemic is
simple: the predatory West motivated by
Machiavellian considerations of power and profit
seeks to dominate the Muslim world and seeks to
transfer its resources. This makes conflict
inevitable.
To Ahmadinejad, Islam is an
ideology and a cultural identity. He is traversing
a moralistic maze that is fundamentally more
political than religious. From the US point of
view, that makes Ahmadinejad extremely dangerous.
No one like Ahmadinejad has appeared on the
political landscape of the Middle East since
imperial Britain choreographed the region's
destiny almost a century ago.
There is
also a philosophical angle to it. Shariati's
thoughts were profoundly influenced by his
affiliation with Sorbonne University, Marxism,
Sartre and French author and essayist Frantz
Fanon. His lectures in Tehran University to ardent
followers like Ahmadinejad, until his tragic death
in his early 40s at the hands of the shah's secret
police, focused on popular revolts against
"foreign domination, internal deceit, the power of
the feudal lords and wealthy capitalists" (to
quote from Shariati's classic essay "Red Shi'ism
vs Black Shi'ism").
Equally, Shariati was
unsparing in his criticism that Islam "left the
great mosque of the common people to become a
next-door neighbor to the palace of Ali Qapu in
the Royal Mosque". [1]
All through
Shariati's writings one can see that he harnessed
religion to revolutionary politics. He tried to
assimilate Shi'ite hopes for a better world
through the return of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi,
with the revolutionary agendas of mass struggle
and historical progress. In fact, Shariati wrote
that the return of the Mahdi would bring about a
"classless society".
In Ahmadinejad's
fusion of Shi'ism and revolutionary fervor, too,
political struggle becomes a beautifying myth of
heroic valor and triumph of the will. In his
scheme of things, too, the prospects of true
justice are inextricably linked with the return of
the Mahdi, which, in turn, can be hastened with
worldly action in the imperfect world of "now".
"Our revolution's mission is to pave the way for
the reappearance of the 12th Imam," Ahmadinejad
has proclaimed.
But in terms of the
geopolitics of the region in which Iran is
located, viewed from the US perspective, "all this
owes more to the examples of [Maximilien]
Robespierre and [Josef] Stalin than
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