Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change

Preface: “Where Is My Vote?”

| ix Preface “Where Is My Vote?” Today, there is a broad public movement committed to democracy in Iran. It is supported and sometimes opposed by a diverse spectrum of Iranians from nearly every walk of life for a wide and changing variety of reasons. The vivid and widely publicized images of mass demonstrations do not represent merely a spontaneous adventure in public action, but also a coherent and self-conscious politics that has evolved within the Iranian public sphere over a long time. Historically, Iranians have tended to assert their political presence in public when they come to believe that their rights are being openly violated and their voices silenced by existing authority. Recent events in the Islamic Republic of Iran—young Iranians demonstrating peacefully en masse and risking their lives in the streets to demand, “Where is my vote?—reveal the continuity of this Iranian tradition of appearing in “public” and “shaming” the authorities. It is significant that the central demand of the protestors focused on their lost rights, which referred in this case to their missing votes. They demanded that the authorities respect their rights and shamed those in power for breach of the social and moral contract underpinning the social world. This tradition of democracy in the streets has been a consistent and powerful aspect of Iranian protest movements throughout modern times, and it constitutes an extended narrative of direct popular action in the Iranian public consciousness. The post-election events in Iran are to a considerable extent consistent with previous social events in the long history of struggle for democracy by modern Iranians. This book makes two central arguments about such moments in the popular democratic tradition in Iran. First, these moments illuminate the historical background to contemporary Iranian events, and, second, the specific nature of this long-standing democratic tradition is best understood through temporally grounded and concrete social analysis rather x | Preface than timeless speculative abstraction anchored in the “universal” philosophical assumptions of Eurocentric modernity. The exciting and serious public mobilization both during the recent Iranian election campaign, and the mass demonstrations that followed in the wake of the bitterly disappointing rigged outcome, are in themselves important social phenomena that should be carefully studied and analyzed in order to attain a more sophisticated understanding of Iranian society today and the broader Iranian historical tradition of protest. The nature of these protests, it will be noted, has always been very creative and advanced, influenced by the diversity of Iranian democratic traditions and, more importantly, by a wide array of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In the Constitutional period, activists used the printing press and the newspapers; in the National Front period— the golden age for Iranian newspapers—published dialogue and debate through multiple channels was a ubiquitous feature of the public sphere; and in the 1979 Revolution cassette tapes played an important role in communicating the Ayatollah Khomeini’s message. In recent post-election events, the use of Twitter, Facebook, and so on, is merely an updated version of what Iranians did during previous national protest movements. Therefore it would be a mistake to suggest that it was IT technology that enabled Iranians to mobilize in public on this occasion. Rather, it is the strongly engrained tradition of public and open social protest in modern Iran that made it possible. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Iranians have demonstrated their willingness to express their dissatisfaction with the state and their desire for the rule of law and democracy by publicly and courageously challenging the excesses and arrogance of the various governments they have resisted, constructed , struggled with, suffered, and lived under. This pluralistic and generally nonviolent practice has grounded its expressions of protest in recognized traditional structures via mass sit-ins (bastnishini) and strikes in the bazaars and other popular public locations. The political tradition of peaceful mass mobilization started with the Tobacco Revolt of 1891–92 and culminated in the seminal Constitutional Revolution of 1906. It was again powerfully manifested in the National Front Movement (1951–53) under Mohammed Mossadegh —a self-proclaimed intellectual and political heir to the Constitutional Movement—who led the campaign to nationalize Iranian oil. Finally, the popular democratic tradition of public protest in Iran saw its most famous and radical moment in the Revolution of 1979. This time, Iranians broke violently with the tradition of reformism that had characterized popular politics and introduced a new ideological strain by appealing to religious authenticity as a road to national salvation. Each of these powerful movements...