Streets of Tehran

Foolish though it may seem, I tend to be instinctively
sceptical about religions in which men have all the
power. No matter what the theological justifications,
any religion whose decision-making forums and prayer
meetings are wall-to-wall male strikes me straight away
as problematic. I am sure that Islam, for instance, has
many redeeming factors, but so long as it shuts women
out of political power, it is, to borrow a phrase from the
scriptures, deeply fucked.

Having said that, I’m wary of simplifying the current
political conflict in Iran. It would suit most of us in ‘the
West’ very nicely if this played out as a battle between
the forces of good and evil, of oppression and liberty,
of preachy old men in robes against hip kids in jeans
with cellphones. I suspect it’s a lot more complex than
that. For one thing, it would suit the capitalist agenda
of the United States extremely well if the Islamic state
of Iran was replaced by a more Westernized model
welcoming to foreign investment. For another thing,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hugely popular
among the working classes and poorer people of Iran.
For another thing, his chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi,
is not exactly a crusader in shining armour but the
creature of sophisticated vested interests keen on
wresting power from the uncouth upstart Mahmadinejad.

We in the relatively atheistic West tend to underestimate
the significance of religion as a political factor. We also
tend to sympathize a lot more readily with people who
look and seemingly act like us—hence the media’s
identification with the street protesters in Tehran.
Personally I’d be happy to see Iran’s whole superstructure
of ayatollahs and ‘guardians’ toppled and replaced with
something genuinely democratic; and I don’t doubt that
some unsavoury things are being done in Ahmadinejad’s
name. But we need to remember that through our media
(including technologies like Twitter) we are getting only a
partial picture. The full picture, were we able to grasp it, is
more likely one of a nation evolving no differently and no
less turbulently than did, say, England in the 17th century
or France in the 18th; insofar as we qualify as intelligent
observers, we would do well not to automatically identify
with Cromwell or Robespierre.