Patience With All Things in Iran
President-elect Hassan Rouhani may challenge the status quo—or become a part of it
Patient resilience has long been a characteristic of the Iranian people. In times of adversity—and the increasing authoritarianism of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards allies, combined with the corrupt and inefficient populism of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his band of brothers, has certainly been one such time—the Iranians wait. And usually, instead of challenging the foe head-on, they try to deliver a stinging blow using the limited tools that adverse times allow them.
Engineering elections in Iran, it turns out, is more difficult than what Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his allies in the Revolutionary Guards had imagined. With Friday's elections a day away, every indication is that a candidate's chances of victory is inversely correlated to their professed or perceived closeness to Khamenei. His son's father-in-law, Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, pulled out when even the regime's own published polls showed him with no more than low-single-digit support. Khamenei's other favored candidate, Saeed Jalili, hitherto in charge of Iran's nuclear negotiations—and praised by sites close to Khamenei as a "living martyr" for the leg he lost in the Iran-Iraq war—has also failed to garner the kind of support the regime hoped. Even among Khamenei's closest circle of advisors, Jalili has been ridiculed for offering nothing but empty slogans.
As expected, Iran's regime has engineered the presidential race.
An 'Epic' Mess in Iran
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wants an 'epic' election. He may get one, but not the kind he expected.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wants an 'epic' election. He may get one, but not the kind he expected.
Hillary Mann Leverett and Flynt Leverett respond to Abbas Milani's review of their book.
The American Voices of the Islamist Regime in Iran
Two former U.S. officials make the case for accommodation
How did two former members of the National Security Council come to support a repressive theocracy?
Iran’s ‘Cyber-Jihad’ Claims Another Victim
The Iranian regime's “cyber-jihad” began in June 2009, a perverted response to the massive protests that followed that year's presidential election. The government saw the three million peaceful demonstrators who poured into the streets of Tehran and other cities as a threat, and they determined that “social media” was the culprit. The gruesome murder last month of Sattar Beheshti in a secret prison in Tehran is a stark reminder that the use of the word jihad—holy war—was not a metaphor, but a warning to the opposition.
A Tour of Egypt’s Half-Finished Revolution
I arrived in the Egyptian town of Edfu on a Friday in early February. The temple there, a wondrous reminder of the Egyptian pharaohs’ obsession with eternity and architectural monumentalism, was eerily quiet and empty of tourists. But the silence was more than filled by the blaring sound of the Friday sermon, broadcast over loudspeakers at unavoidably high volume.
How Ahmadinejad’s Regime Tried—and Failed—to Break One Protester's Spirit
As the world grants an audience to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, we would be better served to look upon Samiye Tohidlou. Samiye is a child of the Iranian revolution, born in 1979, when the current regime came to power. She comes from a family of educators; her father was a teacher who declared, after the arrest of his daughter, that he had been a staunch supporter of the revolution.
Desperate Dictatorship
Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival By Maziar Bahari with Aimee Molloy (Random House, 356 pp., $27) Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran - A Journey Behind the Headlines By Scott Peterson (Simon & Schuster, 732 pp., $32) After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successor By Saïd Amir Arjomand (Oxford University Press, 268 pp., $24.95) Political Islam, Iran, And the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair By Ali Mirsepassi (Cambridge University Press, 230 pp., $85) I. For the regime in Iran, opacity in politics, dissimulation in discourse, and the obfuscation
