-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 6
Iranian voters go to the polls today in an election being discussed in apocalyptic terms, as Iran’s next great awakening. Much of the popular excitement centers around Zahra Rahnavard, wife of reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, also known as Iran’s Michelle Obama. The 1979 revolution has brought conflicting results for women. It’s created sexual hypocrisy and fear of liberated women, as Janet Afary describes in her new book Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. But it’s also raised the average age of marriage and opened up opportunities for women. Rahnavard represents a slow awakening of the latter strain. In her dramatic unveiling, she recently went onstage holding her husband’s hand—the first time any woman has done that since the revolution. In college, she studied art and wore a miniskirt, but reluctantly. She “abhorred” sexual freedoms flaunted by her fellow students, writes Afary. After the revolution, she started a feminist magazine but always wore a chador. In her writings and speeches she popularized the term “second sex” and fought for laws against sexual abuse of women by relatives. If her husband wins, she may end up the most visible advocate for women the Muslim world has ever had.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 59
TV images of street protests following Iran’s disputed election offer perhaps the strongest argument against U.S. interference as a tool for democratization. The footage shows vibrant, vigorous dissent of a kind not seen in Iran since the revolution: protesters moving through the streets like a human wave, ignoring the batons of riot police and shouting their support for opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the loser according to official tallies that give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote. Whether the election was rigged, whether the protesters succeed in reversing the results, they have already won a huge victory by disrupting on their own the political status quo in a nation that Anne Applebaum rightly calls “a classic example of managed democracy.” This is the kind of organic democratic movement that is both more satisfying and more lasting than elections imposed at the point of a gun.
For women, too, Iran seems a model of how change that comes with frustrating slowness, yet with a clear understanding of local realities and historical context, can be particularly rewarding and durable. This is evident in the life story of Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s wife, who Hanna notes has stirred great excitement during the campaign, appearing in posters holding her husband’s hand, a revolutionary event in Iranian politics. Yet Rahnavard’s route to feminist activism has been neither direct nor short. Born Zohre Kasemi, her religious zeal drove her to rename herself Zahra after the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and Rahnavard, which means “she who is on the (Islamic) path.” A painter and art history student at Tehran University, she opposed the authoritarianism of the shah, but later supported Ayatollah Khomeini. She founded several Islamic women’s groups and edited a women’s magazine, where she used her influence “to propagate Islamist values in Iran and abroad, working in particular against Iran’s feminists,” writes Janet Afary, author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. It wasn’t until the 1990s, Afary writes, that Rahnavard began working to lift restrictions on women’s employment and noting that they were treated as a second sex in Iran. Since Muhammad Khatami appointed her head of al-Zahra Women’s University in 1997, she has fought unsuccessfully for tougher laws restricting violence against women by male relatives. During the campaign, Rahnavard traveled around the country, sometimes alone, advocating for expanded rights for women in custody battles, as well as better education and job opportunities. At a recent press conference, she wore a denim shirt beneath her black chador and heavy makeup, a violation in Iran. Asked if she saw herself as Iran’s Michelle Obama, Rahnavard said no. “I am a follower of Zahra (the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad),” she said in English, adding that she respects “all women who are active.” The answer captures her particular brand of feminism, which is no less authentic for being authentically Iranian.
In the west, we like dramatic change and we like it fast. Shock and awe and then, right away, the toppling of the dictator’s statue and the mission accomplished banner that becomes a glossy advertisement for triumphant democracy (Get yours here!). But real, thoroughgoing democracy, especially in places as radically different from America as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, takes a long time. It isn’t important that Iranian women throw off their head scarves in unison tomorrow; in fact, as others have noted in response to Obama’s Cairo speech, head scarves should probably rank near the bottom of the list of things we think about changing. Women like Rahnavard prove that wearing a chador doesn’t make you a wilting violet, and being a feminist doesn’t make you secular or western. By expanding our definitions of what a feminist is, what an Iranian is and—after this weekend—what a democracy is, we may have a better chance of achieving the freedom we seek in the rest of the world. And if Rahnavard’s popularity during the campaign is any indication of the pulse of the Iranian street, we haven’t heard the last of her, or the rights and freedoms she advocates.
Photograph of Iranian protesters by Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 1
If you're wondering why there isn't reliable polling data to help settle the question of whether the Iranian election was a farce, the Washington Post offers all sorts of (contradictory) opinions:
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty argue that reliable polling is possible, that they did it, and that the results were strongly in Ahmadinejad's favor. But Jon Cohen points out that their poll was completed in May, before the contest got really heated, and that even then more than half of the respondents said they hadn't made up their mind yet (so the 2:1 number Ballen and Doherty cite was only among people who had decided who they were voting for). Meanwhile, Mehdi Khalaji says "reputable polls" showed Ahmadinejad losing ground in the weeks before the election, but doesn't get specific.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
So Iran's Guardian Council has agreed to do a partial recount of the votes, according to the New York Times and other sites, in response to street riots and protests larger than any in the country since 1979. If you haven't yet seen pictures of what's taking place, you have to check out this gallery from The Big Picture. (The image of the protestor helping the injured riot officer is amazing.) As everyone else has already noted, too, it's fascinating that social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have helped fuel protests and fervor. It's become a cliche that Twitter is an ideal news tool in moments like this (you can clamp down on reporters, maybe, but you can't silence every single Tweet); but we hear less about how Facebook personalizes the narrative, bringing faces and stories to what's taking place, allowing for actual debate, in some cases, and maybe in others just stoking more anger, for better or for worse. I'm sure many PhD students are hard at work on studying how on-line identity—which is so different from in-person identity, according the theoreticians like Sherry Turkle and others—shapes these moments of national fervor or political resistance; I'm already hungry to know more.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
Yes, Vanessa, you are right that the Iranian elections are an argument against "U.S. interference" as a tool of democratization—if, by that, you mean U.S. military intervention. However, they are an excellent argument in favor of more peaceful forms U.S. democracy promotion, by which I mean radio programs like Radio Free Europe's Radio Farda, support for human rights websites (such as the excellent iranrights.org) based outside the country and training and other kinds of support and training organized by the National Endowment for Democracy and similar groups. The point of such exercises is to help and assist indigenous movements, and they only work in places where the indigenous civil society is already strong (in Ukraine, for example, but not in Belarus). This is the sort of thing that the U.S. used to be rather good at, but lately has become less interested in; the decline began towards the end of the Bush administration, and has now, unfortunately, accelerated. The Obama administration has so far expressed little enthusiasm. Perhaps Iran will change their thinking.
One further point: Even the Bush administration didn't advocate "democracy at the point of a gun," as you put it; in fact the elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq, held under U.S. military supervision, were extremely popular with Afghans and Iraqis. Much less popular were the weak governments those elections subsequently produced. But the cause of their weakness was not democracy; quite the contrary.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
A friend urges me to tell you that you might want to check out this weekend's call to stand with the people of Iran. Groups are gathering on Sunday at 3 p.m. in select cities to show support for protesters in Tehran. From the Facebook page:
There will be no speakers, no signs, no slogans that might appeal to some and offend others. Just a mass of people, wearing green, and in doing so letting our brothers and sisters in Iran know that though they stand against a powerful regime, they do not stand alone.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 2
I experienced yet another burst of joy on behalf of Iranians today as I read this dispatch about the meaning—and more importantly, the feeling—of the post-election demonstrations. The piece, by an Iranian student named Shane M., is very good until the last four paragraphs, when it becomes astonishing. The writer paints an image of a country surprised by itself—by its own spirit and audacity and modernity and intellectualism—and by the dramatic pace of change that was supposed to unfold slowly, almost imperceptibly, until it snowballed. The demonstrations and their attendant forced mixing are described as impromptu street parties, with boys dancing in the headlights of parked cars and a girl hanging out a window like Daisy in the Dukes of Hazzard. “Everyone watched everyone else and we wondered how all of this could be happening. Who were all of these people? Where did they come from?” Shane asks. “These were the same people we pass by unknowingly every day. We saw one another, it feels, for the first time.”
I haven’t been to Iran, though I have tried, and will keep trying, to get there. But in my conversations with Iranians in the U.S. and Afghanistan, I’m always struck by the immense, coiled power that the country—and Persian culture more broadly—seems to hold at its center. There’s that big intelligence, a profound spiritual and aesthetic awareness and a worldview that feels seasoned by centuries of experience, as if the Iranian people were truly the inheritors of their ancestors’ memories. This is why, especially in the case of Iran, I’m against U.S. intervention (and by that I do mainly mean military intervention, Anne, but I mean other things as well, of which more in a minute). It’s not that I’m a pacifist. It’s that I think real change takes time, and that if any country contains within its borders the ingredients of democratic revolution—and if any country understands the merits of a slow burn—Iran does. I don’t think Obama should take up the cause of the protesters more forcefully because I don’t think that will help them. It will weaken their argument, giving cover to the old guard, as others have said, to write them off as Western puppets, which is profoundly not the case. This is an indigenous upwelling of political and social feeling whose strength and longevity have surprised even Iranians, as Shane tells us.
I completely agree, Anne, that there is room for softer forms of U.S. intervention in Iran and places like it. I appreciate the work of Radio Farda and other outlets and groups, including those funded by the U.S. and other Western governments. But like you, I think we’ve lost our touch at this, and I think that ham-handed attempts at StratCom, like some the Bush administration rolled out in Iraq, hurt more than they help. (It should be said that paying Iraqi journalists for positive stories was a Pentagon initiative, and part of the problem here is, of course, the total Pentagon-ization of our foreign policy, which I think is part of what you're driving at when you say we've gotten worse at this kind of thing of late.) That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be more funding, effort and energy devoted to these efforts—I think there should be.
But we’re not there yet. We’re not even where we were during the Cold War. Although you can now follow the activities of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (so they say, though I can’t locate their page), we are just beginning to learn how to use the newest forms of new media, and we still don’t know what story to tell about ourselves when we start tweeting. As for democracy at the point of a gun, I would never suggest that Afghans and Iraqis were anything but overjoyed to vote. But the fact remains that in both those places, we didn’t let political change happen at its own pace, and when a political system doesn’t evolve organically, the forces opposing change get a boost. You could argue that we couldn’t afford to wait for organic democracy to emerge in Afghanistan or Iraq. But that unfortunately doesn’t bring those countries closer to what I hope Iran will achieve at some point: an internal democratic revolution that can be claimed and celebrated as authentic and indigenous to the core.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 16
Hanna, thank you for the necessary astringency of your last post about the "Neda" video and the construction of a martyr mythology in the blogosphere’s reporting on Iran. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the entire unedited Neda video on YouTube; it feels too close to a snuff movie. Assuming this graphic clip really does document a young woman’s death at the hands of paramilitary snipers—something we lack the reporting to confirm—what gives us the right to watch it and forward to and fro as proof of our solidarity with the forces of democracy and reform in Iran (something that, as you point out, Mousavi is far from representing)? I wouldn’t want my own death, or that of someone I loved, to be instrumentalized in that way. (We don't, for example, treat the deaths of U.S. soliders abroad as YouTube-able moments.) And the fact that “Neda” is a young and pretty woman somehow adds to the ickiness of disseminating the scene of her murder (if that is indeed what the clip shows) as a propaganda tool.
There’s a quote from a Harvard professor billing himself as an “expert on the Internet” that appeared in two different NYT pieces on Iran last week: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.” Power plus half-baked inanity make for a perilous combination, which is why I can’t help but be wary of the #iranelection fervor that’s been swelling my Twitter feed for the past week. The popular uprising in Iran has been thrilling to witness, and new technologies like Twitter are exciting both as tools for evading censorship on the ground and as platforms for citizen journalism abroad. But however freely flowing, information is only valuable insofar as it can be trusted. Western sympathizers convinced they’re manning the virtual barricades by turning their Twitter avatar photos green, resetting their locations to “Tehran,” and feverishly forwarding a graphic unsourced video of a young girl’s death strike me as both touchingly enthusiastic and dangerously inane.
Photograph of Iranian protesters by David McNew/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 4
Yes, Dana, you're absolutely right that the Neda video, in which a young Iranian woman is shot and killed during the post-election protests, is a snuff movie. "And the fact that 'Neda' is a young and pretty woman" has absolutely played a part in the YouTube clip's rise to infamy. This isn't to diminish the content of it. It is a horrifying, saddening, frantic look at a woman dying in the street.
But I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about here. We're talking about the something else the video becomes when its focus and attendant narrative take on the qualities of martyr and myth. The video becomes something else altogether, something that, more often than not, is more about us than the subject itself.
We watch the video not purely for political reasons, but also because we are curious. About life, and death, and what happened. And in that, it becomes a form of entertainment. We fetishize it, its story, and its characters. And it's fair to wonder about why we do that, what purpose that serves. The vitriolic comments Dana's post received suggest that some are hell-bent on holding on to one meaning of the story. But it's not that simple. The video itself spawns a collective narrative through which we all speak in myriad, conflicting voices.
No, like a "true" snuff movie, the video was not created for the purpose of entertainment. Although why it was created, at least for now, remains something of a mystery. One man stood over Neda and videotaped her while she died. Somebody else uploaded it to the Internet. Now, we disseminate it. It plays before our eyes, enigmatic, and we imbue it with meaning.
It reminds me a bit of the character of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, a dead girl whom everybody fetishized, in death more so than in life.
Photograph of Iranian protester by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 4
According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday; this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.
I happen to be in Guatemala at the moment, so it’s pretty easy for me to imagine a place in which the vast majority of people live lives untouched by Google or Facebook. But in general it's pretty hard to imagine one’s way into a different social and technological context; far easier to conjure the college kid texting from Tehran than the family of Ahmadinejad supporters who lack indoor plumbing. From here the discussion over the Twitter Revolution, and the perhaps more fervent discussion over the fact that there is no such thing as the Twitter Revolution, looks to have little to do with actual events in Iran. (Add this post to that pile, I suppose.) Yet even those who acknowledge the conversation to be insular defend its existence. Ethan Zuckerman, one of those Harvard Internet “experts” Dahlia was talking about, says that despite Twitter’s anemic presence in Iran, it’s “helping people globally feel solidarity and it's keeping international attention on what's happening. It's giving people a sense of involvement that they otherwise wouldn't have, and I think that's very important.”
But what if that sense of solidarity is built on an incomplete view of the country and a simplistic take on its political economy? And isn't there something childlike—something ever so slightly The Quiet American—about seeking "a sense of involvement" instead of acknowledging that there are limits to what outsiders can accomplish? I’m having trouble seeing the value in an illusory sense of efficacy.
On a different note, nearly every piece I’ve read about Twitter finds room to note how “banal” it is; I’m left wondering to what tweets are being compared. Are people’s water cooler conversations so much more riveting than this? There seems to be a much higher standard for small talk when it's typed rather than spoken.
