Iran activism: Giving it my best shot.

Ok, so I’ve been doing some digging, and I haven’t really found anything yet that the average American could actually do for those millions of Iranians we watched marching down their nation’s streets a few months ago, demanding that their votes count for something, fighting the tyranny that marks their daily lives.

What I have found so far comes down to two things:

1. Keep yourselves informed – It stands to reason that we will be better positioned to actively support the Iranian people the next time they rise up (and I do believe there will be a next time, and that it will likely happen sooner than we think) if we are better informed about who they are, what matters to them, and what life in Iran is really like. When Americans consider Iran, we often find that we’re dealing with a lot of misperception and myth, left over from the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis, and fed by our current society-wide apprehension concerning anything with the word “Islam” attached to it (not to mention our fears, justified or not, of a “nuclear Iran”). You’ll find my own recommendations for books that you might find useful here, here, and here, and here are a few articles to catch you up on current circumstances.
   • A piece from the Sept 30 Foreign Affairs about the election, and the radicalization of Iran’s power elite: “The real struggle, however, is the conflict among the hard-liners themselves, many of whom operate behind the headlines in unseen corners of the state machinery. Although Iran’s opposition movement has witnessed an unprecedented surge in public support, the election and its aftermath mark a radicalization of the system not seen since the early days of the Islamic revolution.” (It’s kind of a depressing read — it’s worth noting the last two lines: “this time, the regime must contend with an embattled opposition that is backed by mass popular support. As the last few months have proven, it is a movement that cannot be easily bullied into submission.”)
   • An interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi
   • A response to hearing Ebadi speak - I was struck by the fact that Ebadi emphasizes the imperative of simply getting to know each other (and surely the Muslims of Iran function as a sizeable Other for American society): “Psychology tells us that when we do not understand something, we become afraid of it…and once that fear is instilled in us, it develops into a hate for the source of that insecurity.”

     Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kiri-westby/we-cannot-let-fear-turn-i_b_318062.html

   • Writer Hooman Majd (and what a writer!) in Newsweek, traveling through Iran in the lead-up to the election
   • A statement by Iranian-American academics concerning US-Iranian negotiations and Iranian human rights abuses (some context by Andrew Sullivan, here).
   • An article about divisions in the clerical class – it’s from back in the midst of the upheaval, but it’s some interesting background
   • Background the Iranian system of government
   • Facts and figures
2. Women are the key – back at the height of the upheaval, I kept noticing all the women out in the streets, and I remember reading that, in fact, it was the Iranian women’s movement that stands at the center of the slow, steady establishment in recent years of the kind of civil society required to produce that kind of massive, sustained protest. I continue to read things (for instance, the two Ebadi pieces, above) that indicate to me that women will, in fact, play a crucial role in any real reform that might happen in the future. I don’t know enough about this part of the story yet, but I’m going to keep looking into it, to see what I turn up — but it seems to me that if you support organizations that work for women’s rights in Iran, you might well be backing the right horse (and I’ll try to find a few of those for a later post!).
   • A piece giving some good context from the NY Times — published a few months before the election
   • An NPR report on Sussan Tahmasebi, a leading Iranian women’s rights activist – she discusses the impact of the women’s movement on the discourse leading up to the elections
   • A HuffPo piece on the impact of women on the protests – from the immediate post-election period
   • The One Million Signature Campaign – the heart, I’m given to understand, of the Iranian women’s movement

Excellence – in book form.

I recently reviewed After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (Lesley Hazleton), for the Dallas Morning News. Had it been up to me, this is what the review would have looked like:

OMG!! THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD!! IF THIS BOOK WERE A PERSON, I WOULD MARRY IT!! GO READ THIS BOOK!!1!

Ahem.

But as it was not up to me, the actual review went something like this:

“Reading these voices from the seventh century,” [Hazleton] writes of her source material, “you feel as though you are sitting in the middle of a vast desert grapevine, a dense network of intimate knowledge defying the limitations of space and time.”

One might easily say the same of this remarkable book. Surely anyone with an interest in the Muslim world or U.S. foreign policy should pick up After the Prophet at the first opportunity — and so, too, should any reader interested in a story of human passion and consequence, told with consummate skill.

The full review is here; the website for the book is here.

Now, really: Go read this book!! OMG!!

Iran follow-up: If you want to help.

In addition to bearing witness (see previous post), many of us are moved to help in a more material way, so I thought I would re-post some suggestions made by Nico Pitney (he of the Huffington Post, who asked President Obama a question posed to him by an Iranian citizen, and was then attacked by Dana Milbank and a few others in the mainstream media, who seem bound and determined to act like ill-educated 10 year olds). Read Nico’s blog – he’s doing yeoman’s labor, and I am deeply, deeply grateful for it. (And I worry that he’s not getting enough sleep, but I don’t imagine there’s much I can do about that).

(July 7, 2009) 9:49 AM ET — Haystack. As I mentioned the other day, tech guru Austin Heap has developed a new tool to bust through Iran’s Internet censorship wall. Now, he needs our support.

“A lot of people have written asking how they can help without being a tech wizard,” he writes. “Well, here’s the answer: donate. In the past four weeks (three of which I took off of work) a lot has happened. First a tiny proxy list on Twitter, then a more organized effort called Proxyheap, and now Haystack, a completely custom protocol for beating the Iran governments filters.”

(July 6, 2009) 2:46 PM ET — Pregnant journalist believed to be languishing in Iranian prison. For those looking for a place to send donations, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has been doing fantastic work. Their new release is particularly distressing:

With as many as two thousand individuals, including more than two-hundred prominent personalities, under incommunicado detention in Iran, serious concerns for their health and safety are growing. There are increasing reports of extensive use of solitary confinement and torture against the detainees. While the Iranian Judiciary has announced a directive to criminalize cooperation with satellite television programs and “opposition” internet communication, authorities have continued to detain individual journalists, including Masoud Bastani, who was arrested on 5 July as he inquired about the whereabouts of his wife, Mahsa Amrabadi, a pregnant journalist arrested on 14 June, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

Iran reading list.

A few days ago I posted an Israel/Palestine reading list, and led with a lengthy explanation of why I can be trusted as a source. My bona fides when it comes to Iran are much slimmer. My academic background has provided me with a good framework for understanding events there; I’ve read a few books about the country on my own; I’ve read several more as part of my reviewing gig; I’ve followed the post-election uprising fairly closely. That’s it! But, hey, it’s a place to start.

And, I can’t help but feel that we are losing our focus on the Iranian cataclysm — what with pop stars dying, and governors abandoning their posts, and the Iranian government using every tool in its considerable arsenal to shut its people up, and the world out. So, my contribution to keeping us all aware will be the one thing I can offer: A short reading list.

All we can do, really, most of us, is bear witness. The excellent Roger Cohen wrote an amazing, moving, lyrical take on this responsibility: A Journalist’s ‘Actual Responsibility’ (via the Huffington Post’s excellent Nico Pitney): “To be a journalist is to bear witness. The rest is no more than ornamentation. To bear witness means being there — and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream…. I confess that, out of Iran, I am bereft. I have been thinking about the responsibility of bearing witness…. A chunk of me is back in Tehran, between Enquelab (Revolution) and Azadi (Freedom), where I saw the Iranian people rise in the millions to reclaim their votes and protest the violation of their Constitution.”

Most of us can’t be there. But we can read and watch and follow along, and never forget that the people who are living and dying on the streets of Iran — and occasionally being frightened or tortured into silence — are human beings who long for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In no particular order, other than chronology (but if you only read one of these, make it #5):

1. Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (2000) – Elaine Sciolino; Sciolino wrote this after years and years of covering Iran (for outlets like Newsweek and the New York Times), from being on the plane that brought Ayatollah Khomeini home in 1979 to covering the 1999 student riots that Iranians are going to be trying to commemorate this weekend (while the government tries very hard not to let them).
2. Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (2004) – Roya Hakakian;  a beautifully written memoir of being a little girl under the Shah, thrilling to the 1979 revolution, and then watching repression return. It was here that I first learned that in 1979, people went to their rooftops to yell “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great,” or more accurately in this case, “God is greater!”) as a sign of protest against the Shah — the fact that they’re doing it again sends shivers down my spine, and, I suspect, down the spines of those who helped bring the Ayatollah to power and are now being protested themselves.
3. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005) – Azadeh Moaveni; just what the subtitle says, and very well done. From the Entertainment Weekly review: “Lipstick Jihad’s tug between objective reporting and Moaveni’s subjectivity as an Iranian woman shines a fascinating light on a nation at odds with itself.”
4. Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies (2007) – Barbara Slavin; essentially an account of decades of missed opportunities between Iran and the US, showing Iran to be far from the monolith it has long been described as being. Very articulate, and well-structured.
5. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (2008) – Hooman Majd; an excellent account that combines elements of memoir and reportage, giving a really fascinating view of life from the inside, as sketched by someone who by virtue of his heritage (son of an Iranian diplomat, grandson of an Ayatollah) and gender (male; beard-wearing) is able to get further inside than the average Western-educated writer.
6. Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (2009) – Ray Takeyh; Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he knows a thing or two, and he calls the US out on its hubris and miscalculation. Interestingly, in an earlier book, Hidden Iran, Takeyh expressed a clear optimism that the oppression and closed-mindedness of official Iran would eventually lift — but that’s missing in this book, where he writes: “The trajectory of Iran’s politics… confounded the West’s anticipation of a forward historical progression…. Such presumptions overlooked not only the degree of the conservatives’ determination to retain power but also their sincere belief that they were serving God’s will.” This quote seems almost prophetic at this point — though the recent reactions of the Iranian people to the “conservatives’ determination to retain power” may have returned to Takeyh some of his optimism.

Not a book, but read this article from a recent Newsweek, written by Hooman Majd (see #5) in the lead-up to the election: Tehran or Bust. My God, he is just such a good writer.