I apologize for the length of this review, but both it and the book it reviews are essential reading if you care about Iran.

-Potosi

Today's Review From
The New Republic Online

Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope
by Shirin Ibadi

<<>
Read today's review in HTML at:
www.powells.com/tnr/review/2006_06_01

Voice your opinion by posting a comment on the Powells.com blog:
www.powells.com/blog/

<>>

Don't Hold Your Breath
A review by Vali Nasr

Since the Nobel Prize committee recognized Shirin Ebadi's tireless
efforts on behalf of Iranian women, children, and political dissidents,
she has become the international face of Iran's struggle for democracy.
A judge during the Shah's time, Ebadi found herself, like many
other women of her generation, pushed to the margins by the revolution's
turbaned rulers. She became a lawyer and a human rights activist,
building a career solely devoted to unmasking the absurdities
of Iran's theocracy and fighting its archaic laws, violations
of women's rights, and mistreatment of dissidents. All this is
chronicled in her memoir. The book is a powerful condemnation
of the dictatorship of the ayatollahs, at its best when it recounts
the suffering of those whom Ebadi represented. The gross injustices
and the everyday cruelties of the Islamist regime in Iran would
be comical were they not so tragic.

But the narrative loses its poignancy when it shifts to the writer
herself. As commendable as her efforts on the part of the victims
of injustice in Iran have been, Ebadi's confused rendition of
Iranian history, which vacillates between celebrating the revolution
and condemning its consequences, makes it difficult to regard
her as a symbol of democracy. Still, it is possible to look beyond
her perplexing tentativeness and regard her story as emblematic
of the paradox of a revolution that mobilized, educated, and ultimately
frustrated Iranian women. Revolutionary fervor promised to break
down traditional patriarchy, but in its place there appeared new
discriminations. Ebadi hopes that the unfulfilled promises of
revolution will finally bring a fury down upon the Islamic Republic
and fracture its pious edifice. But this hope, however fond, is
a distant one -- more distant than Ebadi seems to understand.

To point out that the Islamic Republic falls grossly short of
Iranians' expectations is to belabor the obvious. To a moderately
informed reader, the tales of woe in Ebadi's book will seem nearly
as predictable as they are horrid. Less obvious is a deeply troubling
question that lurks in the background. What led Ebadi and her
generation of educated Westernized professionals to get themselves
into this bind, to be "hypnotized" by the ayatollah's revolution?
Why were their rights and their freedoms so cheap in their eyes
that they so hastily traded them for the will-o'-the-wisp promise
of a revolutionary utopia? "I'd rather be a free Iranian than
an enslaved attorney," she cavalierly told a baffled judge who
reminded her that the revolution she was championing would destroy
her career. What accounts for the tragic mistake of her generation,
for the grand delusion that subjected the Iranian people to the
ignominy of discrimination and tyranny?

Even now, some twenty-seven years after the Iranian revolution,
Ebadi displays more acrimony toward the regime that recognized
her rights and made her a judge, I mean the Shah's regime, than
for the one that has stripped her of those rights, ended her career
on the bench, executed her brother-in-law, and put her in prison.
"I had reclaimed a dignity," she fondly recalls about her euphoria
on the day of the revolution, one that she "had not even realized
[she] had lost." She condemns theocracy, to be sure; but she remains
enamored of the revolution that brought it into being. She shows
empathy for its makers, even for violent terror groups such as
the Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization, whose history is soaked in
blood. How can those who speak for democracy also continue to
idealize an anti-democratic revolution? Perhaps this is part of
the Iranian problem.

Reading Ebadi's story, one wants to think of Mandela or Havel,
except that there is no happy democratic ending to her tale. Three-quarters
of the way through the book, she notes plaintively: "I am often
asked, Why do Iranian young people simply not rise up? If their
discontent is so deep, their alienation so irreversible, if they
are 70 percent of Iranian society, what explains their complacency?"
It is a good question. Indeed, it is now the question on everyone's
mind. Why have the youth, not to say the broader freedom-loving
population, not charged the barricades in Tehran? And in the time
since Ebadi wrote her memoir, such a charge has become even less
likely. In the presidential election in 2005, which was supposed
to have energized pro-democracy voices and isolated the clerical
regime, a clear majority of Iranians voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
a favorite son of the fanatical paramilitaries. Stepping beyond
Ebadi's message of hope, then, it is fair to ask whether her tale
of woe and horror, of courage and youthful rebellion against tyranny,
really explains Iran today.

For close to a decade now, Iran has been tantalizing and baffling
the West. No other country in the region is so close to and so
far from democracy. With its youthful, literate, and Web-happy
population, with thousands of activist NGOs, with more women in
universities than men, and with a measure of cultural dynamism
that is unique in the Middle East, Iranian society has stood in
sharp contrast to the clerical leadership that is suppressing
it. Persian is today, after English and Mandarin Chinese, the
third most popular language online, where one can surf tens of
thousands of Iranian blogs. Offline, hundreds of widely read newspapers,
magazines, and periodicals host thinly disguised intellectual
and political debates. Iranians also get their news and views
from a myriad of international sources. The BBC's Persian website
at one point received 450,000 hits a day. On satellite television,
Iranians watch everything from CNN to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

There are lively discussions about Western thought. Full-page
debates over postmodernism often adorn the pages of popular dailies,
while seminars and lectures regularly discuss Western thinkers
from Hegel to Samuel P. Huntington. Iran's spirited book market
has for many years now dwarfed the oft-repeated statistics showing
the paltry quantity of translations in the far larger Arab world.
Foreign tomes that seem as if they might be helpful in prying
open Islamic orthodoxy are particularly popular. There have been
more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than
into any other language, and these have gone into multiple printings.
(One is by the current conservative speaker of the Iranian parliament.)
In some areas of mathematics and physics, such as string theory,
Iranian research centers rank among the best in the world. Iranian
cinema has in recent years become a powerful force at home and
abroad.

What this dynamism signals is that the revolution is over. Such
a conclusion is inescapable. But it is not all that one needs
to know. It does not follow that this new cultural energy will
lead to a new political energy. The expectation that a democratic
opening must follow this cultural revival has turned to disappointment.
Iran's youthful cultural dynamism has not only failed to produce
democracy; it has failed even to produce a credible pro-democracy
movement.

In truth, Iran has been an improbable candidate for a flowering
of democracy. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 created the only
Islamist state to result from a successful Islamic-fundamentalist
drive for power. An idealized Islamic order enforced by an all-powerful
state was the point of this revolution. Democracy had nothing
to do with it, not even rhetorically. Still, in the quarter-century
since Khomeini came to power there has been significant progress
toward democracy, permitted (and manipulated) by a regime hungry
for legitimacy as revolutionary zeal has drained away like water
from a cracked pool. Iranians have embraced many democratic practices,
participated in elections at local and national levels, and believed
that their votes affect political outcomes. In 1997 a reformist
cleric, Mohammad Khatami, won the election in a landslide after
the unelected Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei openly endorsed
Khatami's conservative opponent. Iran is the only country in the
Middle East where two heads of state have stepped down after the
ends of regular terms and retired undisturbed to their homes.

Since the Shah fell in 1979, there have been nine presidential
elections and seven parliamentary elections. While clerical rulers
vet candidates strictly and shut out thousands of them, citizens
take the campaigning and the voting seriously. The voting age
is fifteen. An entire generation has now grown up with ballots
and promises from politicians, with the lofty ideals of democracy
as well as its more mundane mechanics. It is not uncommon for
far-flung villages to have elected councils. The deep flaws in
the process have not prevented Iranians from learning about democratic
practices and internalizing democracy-friendly values.

Ironically, this tendency is strongest among the poor and pious
masses, who form the clerical regime's broadest base of support.
These plain folk have always taken elections seriously, rallied
and voted enthusiastically, and accepted the legitimacy of their
results without question. So Iran is not saddled with the problem
of democratic practices hitting the impenetrable rock of traditional
values. The Iranian constitution vests sovereignty in God, but
Iranian politicians look to the people for their mandate. Even
the conservative wave that recently swept the hard-line Ahmadinejad
to power relied on the ballot box. The problem is not with the
embrace of democratic practices, but with their full and effective
enshrinement in politics.

Iran had a democratic opening of sorts with Khatami's first election,
by a 70 percent majority, in 1997. People expected that their
electoral rejection of the dour senior clerics and their war with
the world would make civil society, people power, and cultural
opening the hallmarks of the future. Khatami, with his talk of
"the dialogue of civilizations," the rule of law, and the status
of women, seemed to be the man for the hour. After all, citizens
had been able to vote for a reform candidate against the wishes
of the top clerics -- and the result had stood. This emboldened
the forces of Iranian civil society to demand fundamental changes.
And this led to a short-lived "Tehran Spring," as Ebadi puts it,
during which the language and the style of politics began to change.
By 1998, there were 740 newspapers in circulation, and political
debate became rampant, and revolutionary dogma was openly challenged
by calls for intellectual and artistic freedoms. The demand for
change even extended to clerics such as Ayatollah Hossein-Ali
Montazeri, Khomeini's onetime heir apparent, and to his student
Mohsen Kadivar, who openly criticized the Islamic Republic's authoritarianism
and spoke of reconciling Islam with democracy.

But Khatami failed to live up to expectations. He spoke of democracy,
but he did little to implement it. His emphasis on the rule of
law in the absence of constitutional reforms had the effect of
tightening the grip of the country's unelected clerical rulers,
who used the judiciary and the appointed Guardian Council -- as
well as allies in the media, parliament, and various government
agencies -- to stiff-arm reform. The ineffectual Khatami repeatedly
lost ground on press freedom, the rule of law, individual rights,
and other matters. During his eight disappointing years in office,
the Guardian Council blocked fully one-third of Khatami's legislative
agenda.

Nor was the regime afraid to break heads. In 1999, in Iran's version
of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the security forces, along with
shadowy paramilitaries such as the Basij militia, brutally suppressed
pro-democracy student demonstrations. During violent attacks on
university dormitories and later on street marches, several students
were killed and many more were injured. The attack was a turning
point. Khatami faced a choice: he could call for an end to dictatorship
and stand with his followers in the streets, like Boris Yeltsin
atop a tank in Moscow in 1991, or he could back down. He chose
the latter course, chastising the students for breaking the law
and telling them to go home. Thus the march toward democracy became
bogged down in a losing war of attrition with Iran's wily, ruthless,
and stubborn clerical rulers.

Looking back on those years of hope giving way to despair, it
is possible to conclude that perhaps most observers of Iran got
it wrong. Reform was not the only game in Khatami's town, and
an enthusiastic pro-democracy movement was not fated to take charge
of Iran's future. In the end, the Khatami era proved to be less
about democracy than about a surging wave of reaction. The ruling
clergy read Khatami's victory as a warning that Iran was moving
on a course which, left unchecked, would destroy the Islamic Republic.
They launched an effective counter-mobilization, taking the battle
to the reformists, beating them soundly, and emerging from the
struggle stronger and more confident.

This is the Iranian regime that we are dealing with today. When,
in 2003, students demonstrated to mark the anniversary of their
1999 rising, they found scant enthusiasm for taking on the regime
and its brute force. A year later, when reformist parliamentarians
protested the Guardian Council's banning of 3,600 candidates (including
eighty incumbents) in advance of the parliamentary elections,
hardly any demonstrators showed up. Few heeded the then-jailed
dissident Akbar Ganji's call for a boycott of the presidential
elections in 2005, and no more than a handful could be found holding
a vigil outside the notorious Evin prison during Ganji's much-publicized
hunger strike. Ganji's bold challenge to theocracy is popular,
but few are willing to accept the risks of protesting for it.
The undercurrent of desire for democracy remains strong, but the
democracy movement is a fizzle.

A visitor to Tehran can easily find parties where alcohol (and
drugs) flow freely, and where young men and women mix without
regard for draconian morality laws. But fun-loving kids eager
to explore the extremes of hedonism and social freedoms do not
make heroes. They are a far cry from their elders, who a generation
ago challenged the Shah with a brazen idealism gleaned from Mao's
little red book. The youngsters who braved the Shah's army were
revolutionaries in the true sense, willing to risk all for a utopian
ideal. Iranians today seem to want regime change, but at no cost.
They value freedom, but they value stability more.

More confusingly, freedom, of a sort and up to a point, is something
that the regime is willing to grant them. As the election in 2005
drew near, leading conservative contenders began promising greater
cultural freedom but no political reform. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,
the ex-president and billionaire oligarch, and Mohammad Bagher
Ghalibaf, the Revolutionary Guard general and student-suppressing
police commander, re-invented themselves as moderate and pragmatic
strongmen willing to tolerate a modest cultural opening while
safeguarding social and political stability. These Putin-like
figures adopted secular and youthful themes and ornamented their
campaigns with pop music and stylish dress. Ghalibaf's transformation
was particularly jarring. He traded his uniform for a suede jacket,
hip glasses, and a beard trimmed down to Armani-style fuzz. Rafsanjani
and Ghalibaf made headway into the reformist base of support,
but they failed to win the big prize.

Iran's youth -- 30 percent of the country's population is between
fifteen and twenty-nine years of age -- is not a monolith. Not
all are driven by the desire for looser mores. Vast numbers need
jobs that an economy ravaged by revolution, war, and a crushingly
bloated public sector cannot give them. Since Khomeini's death
in 1989, Iran has tried to reform its economy by investing in
infrastructure and pursuing privatization. Many among the elite,
but also the middle class, have benefited from this change --
but not so the legions of the poor and unemployed. Iran still
has unemployment of close to 20 percent. The income per capita
is a quarter of what it was in 1979, and on average Iranians eat
less protein than they did before the revolution.

Greater room for entrepreneurship (and a measure of corruption)
has energized the private sector. The newly rich, clerics and
businessmen alike, quickly changed the dour face of revolutionary
Iran with conspicuous consumption and an appetite for things Western.
Khomeini-style austerity became a thing of the past. But beneath
the glitz there remained the frustrations of the poor, by some
accounts as many as 40 percent of the population. While the affluent
may have turned their attention to political freedoms, those who
felt left behind amid the economic reforms nursed resentment at
the growing economic disparities, and also at the cultural freedoms
that they associated with the wealth at the top. This anger would
lend itself to the anti-reform backlash and decide the presidential
elections of 2005.

The clerical rulers grasped the social dynamics of the 1990s better
than the reformists did. The regime understood that the multitude
of Iranian poor wanted not freedoms but jobs. Economic reform,
and not political reform, would therefore be the key. Senior officials
began to talk of a Chinese model: economic restructuring to generate
growth, but not political change. And so the Islamic Republic
overnight became development-oriented. When the conservative establishment
formed a political party to contest the parliamentary elections
in 2004, it was called the Developers' Coalition. More astute
elements in the regime saw development as a still-distant goal,
one that would for a time widen rather than narrow the gap between
rich and poor. They saw a quick fix in manipulating the anger
of the poor against the rich, constructing a populist platform
-- much like those of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales
in Bolivia -- in order to garner the votes of the poor. With oil
prices high, populism seemed more feasible than ever.

Enter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is a fanatic, a throwback to the
zealotry of the Khomeini years, who had plied his trade in the
dreaded paramilitaries until he was recruited as the populist
face of the conservative reaction. Throughout his campaign, Ahmadinejad
traveled to poor provinces and promised to end social and economic
disparities. He blamed economic problems on the private sector
and its reformist supporters in government, and he promised to
end privatization, protect state subsidies, alleviate poverty,
invest in infrastructure, and create jobs. It hardly mattered
that his harangues made little economic sense. They were precisely
what those whom economic change had left behind wanted to hear.
Ahmadinejad showcased his humble two-bedroom home in a poor neighborhood
of Tehran while his supporters handed out CDs showing Rafsanjani's
gilded lifestyle. Ahmadinejad wanted to be seen as one of the
revolution's downtrodden masses, the so-called mostazafin, fighting
the fat cats whose greed and corruption had betrayed the revolution's
populist goals.

After he won, Ahmadinejad further cultivated the image of the
humble outsider, refusing to travel in the presidential jet or
with a motorcade. He once flew commercial to a provincial capital
with his entourage of twenty, and then took a taxi to the governor's
office. He promised to transfer wealth to the poor and to raise
their standard of living. He threatened to scuttle Tehran's stock
market, and he slashed interest rates -- measures that he claimed
favored the poor, but which led to devastating capital flight.
Parliament blocked his idea for an extravagant "marriage fund"
to help struggling young people form families, but his constituency
cheered his effort. Most of his fiery speeches denouncing Israel,
doubting the Holocaust, and confirming Iran's determination to
plod ahead with its nuclear capability are given to cheering crowds
in small towns in far-flung provinces.

This political provincialism is not necessarily a sign of naïveté.
Ahmadinejad understands that Tehran's political significance has
shrunk, that Iranian politics has become increasingly local. He
knows retail-level electoral tactics -- which probably mattered
more than ideology for his victory -- and that in the provinces
bread-and-butter concerns dwarf the debate over democracy. Unlike
the Eastern European communist rulers who had lost their peoples
by the 1980s, Iran's hardliners know that they have a solid and
zealous 18 to 20 percent base among die-hard elements drawn from
war veterans, paramilitary cadres, and their families. Ghalibaf
assembled focus groups to branch out from there by capturing the
mood of the middle class and urban youth, but Ahmadinejad's skillful
use of populism proved him the better strategist.

Since the 2004 and 2005 elections, conservatives have mostly
left the middle classes and urban youth alone, so as to focus
on appeals to the poor. Ahmadinejad even conceded to a reformist
demand by declaring that women could attend soccer matches in
stadiums (Iran's most prominent public places), thereby angering
senior clerics. Many student leaders, as well as Ganji, Iran's
leading dissident, have been released since Ahmadinejad's election,
as if to say that the reformists simply do not concern him. (This
may be changing, though: last month Ramin Jahanbegloo, a well-known
intellectual, was jailed on a trumped-up charge of espionage,
but more likely for having criticized the theocracy.)

Not all Iranian youth are secular. Many share the regime's values.
The past decade has seen a resurgent folk piety, especially among
the young, which deviates from Khomeini's puritanical, anti-ritualistic
version of Islam. In recent years, major holidays such as Ashura
have taken on the quality of youth festivals, sometimes mixing
devotional practices with Westernized music, to the ire of purist
clerics. Most notably, there has been a growing devotion to the
Shia messiah, the twelfth imam or Mahdi, whom Shia Muslims believe
was miraculously hidden from ordinary human perception one thousand
years ago, to return at the end of time. Signs of devotion to
the Mahdi are ubiquitous in Iran today -- most noticeably among
otherwise Westernized young people. Some years ago I visited the
Jamkaran Mosque outside the clerical city of Qom. The mosque gained
fame when Ahmadinejad, soon after his election, dedicated millions
to its repair and sent an official to pledge the government's
commitment to hastening the return of the Mahdi, who is said to
have once appeared at Jamkaran. The faithful flock to the mosque
from near and far, much like the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe
in Mexico. During my recent visit, Jamkaran was teeming with young
people, many in up-to-date Western clothes and hairstyles; and
only Ahmadinejad seems to have grasped the political implications
of this youthful religiosity.

Faced with such cagey hard-line rivals, the reformists fell into
a long debate over whether to call for a voter boycott (as urged
by the jailed Ganji). And by the time the reformists realized
that they would have to take the election seriously, the conservatives
had defined the race. The best-known reformist candidate, Mohammad
Moin, was a reconstructed revolutionary with a checkered past
but no charisma or imagination. Worse yet, reformists had no plan
for rallying the diverse groups that should have voted for them.
Too many candidates were chasing the same reformist voters, who
also harkened to appeals from moderate conservatives such as Rafsanjani
and Ghalibaf. And so more or less reform-friendly candidates arguably
took sixteen million of the twenty-seven million first-round votes,
but divided they fell. Moin, the top clear reformist in the race,
finished fifth.

Beneath the reformists' tactical confusion lay strategic and philosophical
confusion. Their pro-democracy message was an uncertain trumpet,
as they wavered between calling for complete change and saying
that reform of the Islamic Republic could suffice. Should theocracy
be mended or ended? Reformists could not say. They held study
groups on the constitution, but they split over what constitutional
change should mean. Some, including professors and secular lawyers
such as Shirin Ebadi, spoke of a new liberal and non-theocratic
constitution. Others, such as the Ayatollah Montazeri, wanted
to rescind only those post-Khomeini changes that had strengthened
the position of the Supreme Leader. Some even looked back at Khomeini
with nostalgia as an honest man of the people.

Ebadi's memoir is a palimpsest of reformist equivocations. In
her view, democracy includes neither those who never supported
the revolution nor the millions whom the revolution turned into
refugees and forced into exile. Iranian expatriates -- including,
one would presume, her expatriate co-author, Azadeh Moaveni --
stand outside her vision of Iran, as if they are traitors. "When
someone leaves Iran," writes Ebadi, "it as though that person
has died for me." In a chilling passage, she describes erasing
the names of friends who fled Iran from her address book and never
putting pen to paper to write them. Exile in Ebadi's eyes is a
scarlet letter, forever excluding those who fled from the revolution
that she celebrates. Her democracy movement is a meanly limited
group of former revolutionaries whose folly brought Khomeini to
power and who now want to move beyond his legacy.

The democracy debate in Iran has never concerned itself with
lunch-pail issues. During the elections it was left to the obstreperous
cleric Mehdi Karroubi -- a relic of the early years of the revolution
and an adviser to the Supreme Leader, who has lately gravitated
toward reform -- to put forward an economic argument. He promised
that if elected, the government would give every Iranian the equivalent
of $50 a month. That is hardly a substitute for a coherent economic
policy; but the proposition was attractive to many voters in a
society with rampant unemployment. Karroubi can be credited with
bringing many more people than expected to the polls, and also
for taking votes away from the main reformist candidates by presenting
a reformist version of Ahmadinejad's populism.

Reformists were slow to realize that by the end of Khatami's term,
democracy meant not prosperity, but gridlock and ineffectual government.
A proreform businessman told me the sordid and paradigmatic story
of the Imam Khomeini International Airport, supposedly a showcase
and a gateway to world trade and tourism. Shortly after Khatami
opened it in 2004, the Revolutionary Guards closed its runway,
complaining (in a weird foreshadowing of the ill-fated Dubai ports
deal in the United States) that the airport's Austro-Turkish management
consortium had dealings with Israel, and that this posed a threat
to Iran's national security. In reality, the Guards coveted the
lucrative contract and wanted to run the new airport as they had
the old one. The airport stayed closed for nearly a year as costs
piled up, and an embarrassed Khatami had to cancel a state visit
to Turkey, and the transport minister faced impeachment by a parliament
where Revolutionary Guardsmen and veterans hold 30 percent of
the seats. My interlocutor ended by observing that it might be
good to have the Guards' commander as president, for then at least
it would be clear who was running the show. Some even seem to
think that the men at arms might be better managers: after all,
they managed to build nuclear projects despite sanctions.

Businessmen crave order, of course, and their potential regard
for the man on horseback is hardly confined to Iran: witness the
history of Latin America, or perhaps more to the point, the current
situation in Pakistan, where a pro-business general enjoys Western
allies. On the eve of elections, Iran seemed to be gripped with
a Bonapartist fever. There were even veiled appeals to the legacy
of Reza Shah, the autocratic modernizer who founded the Pahlavi
dynasty in the early twentieth century and pulled the country
by its bootstraps into the modern world. With the poor wanting
jobs and business wanting effective governance, where was democracy?
Conservative candidates boasted that they could work with the
Supreme Leader and get things done. The reformists could guarantee
no such thing. The pragmatic choice was to vote conservative.

Before he ran for president, Ahmadinejad had briefly served as
mayor of Tehran, a position that he owed to his Revolutionary
Guards backers. His stint in the mayor's office was an opportunity
to re-package an inexperienced militant as an effective administrator.
He fought public corruption, used the Guards' slush funds to give
garbage collectors and bus drivers a raise, and built sports complexes
and parks in poor neighborhoods. His patrons in the Guards helped
him to ease Tehran's nightmarish traffic with new highways through
previously restricted military zones. While Ahmadinejad has always
been an ideological firebrand -- through a career dedicated to
doing the bully work of the Islamic Republic and following fringe
radical groups and their extremist views -- this is not what made
him president. What mattered more were the signs that a president
favored by the powers-that-be could succeed where Khatami had
failed. And so Ahmadinejad transformed himself into the can-do,
no-nonsense public executive.

The election results left the reformists devastated. Ahmadinejad
finished second to Rafsanjani in the first round, but won the
two-man runoff with a whopping 62 percent. And it was a high-turnout
election, the kind in which the reform vote should have figured
largely (Khatami's landslide in 1997 was the highest-turnout election
in Iranian history). While evidence that clerics and Guards officials
had illegally helped Ahmadinejad was plentiful, there were no
big protests. It was also clear that, even allowing for the irregularities,
Ahmadinejad had done better than expected, and won by a genuinely
wide margin in the runoff. As Tehran resident Mohammad Ghouchani,
the influential editor of the leading reformist paper Shargh,
put it, in 2005 "reformism lost to democracy."

After the elections, things did not look good for the reformists.
Their two main factions took nearly a year even to agree to meet,
with the goal of crafting a common platform. Meanwhile, the slide
toward marginality has continued as the conservatives ride high,
confident in the knowledge that they have beaten the reformists
at their own game. The reformists now find themselves shut out
of all political institutions, their hopes of using the presidency
to open the system in tatters. Purges have driven professionals
with reformist leanings out of the government bureaucracy. Their
replacements are dour, dyed-in-the-wool hard-liners who lack experience
and competence but burn with ideological zeal and a desire to
make a reformist comeback impossible. The new culture minister
has been especially virulent, proudly embracing book censorship.
The nuclear watchdogs of the International Atomic Energy Agency
have felt the chill wind too, as faithful hard-liners have replaced
the familiar diplomats managing the nuclear negotiations.

The reformists in Iran are simply unprepared, intellectually and
organizationally, to confront a conservative regime that enjoys
the legitimacy of popular election. Ahmadinejad's populist rhetoric
will likely lose its charm as his inexperienced government fails
to deliver, but high oil revenues and the rally-'round-the-flag
effect of nuclear tensions with the United States may disguise
and forestall the effects of that disillusionment for some time.
Appeals for liberal-democratic change will have a hard time being
heard in a time of national crisis, more so now that the United
States has announced plans to spend $85 million to promote democracy
in Iran.

What, then, of the search for democracy in Iran? It seems to be
everywhere and nowhere at once. There is no other country in the
region more suitable for the nurturing of the sapling of democracy.
Iranians want democracy, and they cherish democratic practices.
But there is no simple and straight path to democracy in Iran.
The battle lines are unclear, and as the elections last year showed,
open political contestation has favored populist authoritarianism
over democracy, albeit through the ballot box. Talk of democracy
in Iran is rife, especially in the West; but the reality is that
Iran now has a stable authoritarian regime, and there is no obvious
way to dislodge it.

It will be difficult to make up for the opportunity that was lost
during the Khatami years. Building a viable movement for full
and politically secular democracy will take time. It needs organization
and coalition-building; but above all it needs a convincing and
uncompromising message -- one that breaks absolutely with the
legacy of the revolution and the nostalgia for its promise, and
rejects any half-hearted attempts at reforming the theocracy.
(There is an Islamic case, as well as a secular one, for a complete
break.) In this task Shirin Ebadi can offer no guidance. Hers
is the perplexed voice of a hopelessly inbetween generation, torn
between the intoxications of its youth and the realities of an
ugly present. It will remain for others to see more clearly what
she sees only through a glass darkly.

Read the review online at:
www.powells.com/tnr/review/2006_06_01

COPIES NOW AVAILABLE*
Hardcover (New) $24.95
Adobe Reader Ebooks (Adobe Reader Ebooks, Microsoft Reader Ebooks and Palm Reader Ebooks) starting at $14.36 (List price $17.95)
www.powells.com/tnr/biblio/1400064708