[ spotlight ] The Dublin-based Hassle Merchants' new music video, "Let's Start a War," is for those ready for some hardcore politics in their rock.

In just under three minutes, the video offers a biting examination of the interplay between the United States, oil corporations, and Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and Iraq. Arresting text-graphics interspersed with graphic documentary footage challenge prevailing views in the West about the U.S-Iranian relationship and the corporate interests that guide American foreign policy decisions.

Musically, "Let's Start a War" is as aggressive as the video.

Rough-hewn guitar riffs flood a track built upon super-tight drum rolls and never-ending bass. Screeches of frustration rip through the noise with lyrical blows that drive home the ironies of U.S. foreign policy and its media narrative: "Travel miles into their land/Then they attack/We defend."

Hassle Merchants made headlines in Ireland last year when their song "Run Rabbit Run" was chosen as the theme music to a web series, "Punk Economics," created by lauded Irish economist David McWilliams. The best-selling author, who predicted the global economic collapse as early as 2003, launched "Punk Economics" in late 2011; to date its episodes have cumulatively received more than 800,000 views on YouTube.

The band headlined Ireland's largest independent music festival, Knockanstockan last year. "Dublin's Hassle Merchants are one of Ireland's most thrilling live acts," wrote Brian Marconi of the Irish Mail on Sunday.

The group will embark on a North American tour in March 2013 that includes dates at famed indie rock haunts Arlene's Grocery in New York City and the Middle East club in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

You can find out when and where Hassle Merchants will be performing "Let's Start a War" and other tracks from their new EP A Hard Pill to Swallow on Facebook or ReverbNation, and download their songs on the Hassle Merchants iTunes page.

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Clash with judiciary chief Sadegh Larijani latest front in mounting internal conflict.

[ comment ] With eight months to go until the end of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, his clashes with hardline members of the Iranian regime have become a fixture of the Islamic Republic's political scene.

As he was giving his eighth and final speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 26, agents of Tehran's prosecutor-general arrested Ali Akbar Javenfekr, his senior press adviser and head of the Islamic Republic News Agency. Javanfekr -- also managing director of Iran daily, which has been engaged in a war of words with the president's detractors over the past two years -- was taken to Evin Prison, where many Ahmadinejad opponents have been incarcerated.

Furious, Ahmadinejad held a press conference upon his return from the United States to announce that he would arrange a meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ai Khamenei to discuss the issue of his counselor's arrest. Several weeks have now passed and Javenfekr remains at Evin, where the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, has barred Ahmadinejad from visiting him.

How could the forces that united to suppress millions of Green Movement supporters in the aftermath of the disputed June 2009 presidential election now place such extreme pressure upon Ahmadinejad? Of those who chanted "Ahmadinejad is not my president" and "Where is my vote?" dozens were killed and hundreds injured by security forces. At Friday Prayers the week after the election, Khamenei voiced his unambiguous support for Ahmadinejad. And the judiciary handed down lengthy prison sentences to many hundreds of officials of parties, journalists, and civil society activists who claimed that the president's reelection had been rigged.

To answer the question, we must go back seven years. From 2005 to 2009, Ahmadinejad worked diligently to attract support from the pillars of right-wing power in the Islamic Republic. In addition to Khamenei, he won over many others by clashing with liberal university administrators, emphasizing anti-Western rhetoric, and promoting Iran's nuclear program. He earmarked millions of dollars for the Basij -- the paramilitary wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- named several military officers to ministerial posts in his cabinet, and developed a congenial relationship with the Eighth Majles. He attained the backing of conservative clerics by increasing the budget of the Qom Theological Center by tens of millions of dollars.

The rising of millions of citizens in protest against what was widely seen as a fraudulent vote count further unified the regime's various conservative factions. Ahmadinejad's presidency had yielded them substantial political and financial dividends during the previous four years. There was no reason not to expect that to continue over the next four.

The Moslehi affair and its aftermath

But Ahmadinejad turned the tables. By spring 2011, Ahmadinejad had reduced the number of military officers in his cabinet, sought to replace them with new ministers of whom the hardline Majles did not approve, and reduced the Qom seminary's budget drastically. Yet he was careful to avoid direct confrontation with Khamenei, who thus continued to express his support for Ahmadinejad, despite his disapproving of most of the new officials named by the president. Ahmadinejad recognized that the Supreme Leader's priority was to keep quarrels between the Guards, the Majles, and the executive branch to a minimum to uphold the regime's strength and legitmacy.

Then, in April 2011, Ahmadinejad's base of support within the political system crumbled when he boycotted his presidential post and stayed home for 11 days, after the Leader ordered the reinstatement of Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi, whom Ahmadinejad had forced from office. Khamenei allowed the increasingly dissatisfied hardliners to take a measure of revenge against the obstreperous president. Several members of Ahmadinejad's office and political camp were incarcerated and reportedly tortured.

By fall, the wrangling had become even more public. In November, agents dispatched by the Tehran prosecutor's office assaulted the Iran offices, threw Javanfekr to the floor, and handcuffed him. Tear gas was used against newspaper staffers who came to his aid. On that occasion, Ahmadinejad was able to intervene in time to prevent the transfer of his counselor to the detention center, a feat he could not reproduce from New York last month. The effort to humiliate the president had succeeded.

Disagreements turn into animosity

Since Iran lacks a democratic framework and free elections, it doesn't have the capacity to resolve political fights by testing the opposing sides' popularity and appeal. In-fighting thus plays out with true belligerence.

The president, who had never asked for permission to visit prisoners at Evin, now wanted one in order to visit his counselor there. But judiciary chief Larijani denied the request with the demeaning declaration, "Your visit is not suitable." He called on Ahmadinejad to spend his energies on trying to fix Iran's severely troubled economy, rather than on visiting Evin Prison.

This internecine conflict appears to have spun out of the control of the Leader, who still repeatedly requested that the various organs of government not publicize their disputes. In a recent trip to Bojnourd, he declared, "The responsibility of officials is the maintenance of solidarity and sympathy, coordinated planning, recognition of legal bounds, and to refrain from blaming each other.... The political roles of the Majles, the administration and the president, and the judiciary are distinctly delineated in the Constitution -- thus all officials must act according to their legal duties."

Fully aware of the depth of animosity that has developed within the regime, the Leader explicitly told Ahmadinejad and his enemies, "Be concordant in aims, approaches, and appearances." But the events of the past week seem to demonstrate that Khamenei will not be able to smooth over the frictions in the eight months between now and election day, undermining his authority as the Faslol Khattab, the "Ethical Mediator."

Ahmadinejad, infuriated that Larijani had barred him from visiting Evin, wrote an open letter to the Leader, published in an array of media outlets, in which he accused Larijani of "illegal acts," "meddling in election procedures," and "political" motives. He said that there was no indication that any judiciary action had been taken against certain "special persons" involved in illegal appropriations -- a clear reference to Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani's older brother, Javad Larijani, who heads the judiciary's human rights office. In June, the administration had published a number of documents online pertaining to the illegal appropriation of public and private land by the elder Larijani dating back to the early 2000s.

It has been widely reported that Ahmadinejad has gathered dossiers on a large number of senior Iranian officials. Last fall, Majles deputy Mohammad Khoshchehreh said that a team from the president's office had removed numerous such dossiers from the Information Ministry. The Shaffaf News website referred to an article in Iran that stated the Ahmadinejad administration was in possession of 140,000 documents on 214 Islamic Republic officials. The daily had threatened that the government would publish those documents if "necessary."

In a retort to Larijani's declaration that his presence at Evin would not be suitable, Ahmadinejad wrote, "Would it be acceptable that this servant find approving payments into the judiciary's enormous budget unsuitable?" The president thus flaunted his control over the government's pursestrings and threatened to cut off the judiciary's funding.

The day after Ahmadinejad's letter was published, the Majles passed a bill to call him in to be questioned, for what would be the second time this year. The following day, an open letter from Sadegh Larijani appeared on several websites. Adopting an unusually informal tone, Larijani wrote, "Your story reminds one of that of a sultan who would confiscate people's property and lands by force, while he warned them that they should respect the sultan's property and lands."

Lessons for the West

If predictions that Ahmadinejad will be impeached are overblown, still his position has been severely weakened. No one in the regime will accept him having any effective say in foreign policy. And because of how he won reelection and the way in which the protests were suppressed in 2009, he has been unable to win any significant support among the people.

Only Khamenei can credibly call for negotiations. Any effort by Ahmadinejad to exert influence in international affairs would now face vehement attack and certainly be defeated. The animosity to Ahmadinejad runs so deep that many in the regime would readily accept the continuation of crippling sanctions as long as it keeps him from having any political success.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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Part 1: The Fork in the Revolutionary Road | Part 2: The Long Shadow of Iran's Summary Executions

Establishment of theocracy in Iran facilitated by disoriented democratic leaders.

Ultimately, Iran ended up with a Shia version of the caliphate -- Velaayat-e Faghih, the rule of the jurisprudent -- due to failed democratic leadership, a failure that continues to the present because Iranian political groups on the whole continue to see themselves as innocent victims and other groups as traitors. But just about every group bears a heavy responsibility and must clear the air if Iran is to avoid a repetition of the errors that landed it in a theocracy. In this section, my focus will be on the pivotal and utterly destructive role played in the establishment of the Islamic Republic by the groups I have most respected: the democrats of the National Front, and especially its Islamist offshoot, the Freedom Movement, which was led by Mehdi Bazargan until his death in 1995.

Iran became a theocracy in February 1979, long before the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was put to popular vote in a flawed election that December. The path was paved earlier, in 1978, as the Shah used deadly force in response to the unrest in a country that was on the verge of explosion. A generation-long period of repression had gutted the political system of intelligent, experienced politicians and withered the democratic institutions that were supposed to permit the application of social intelligence to solving difficult national problems.

Finally, after a series of prime ministers came and went, the Shah was ready to compromise and approached the secular National Front, the only moderate, democratic political grouping to enjoy widespread respect and support in the country. But on November 5, 1978, Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the National Front, met with Ruhollah Khomeini in Paris and issued a declaration that utterly confused and demoralized Iranian democrats and represented the first of the monumental political blunders that have in effect removed the National Front from Iranian politics.

The declaration labeled the "monarchical system" without any "legal or sharia" footing and promised that the "National Front while this monarchical system remains will not accept any form of government." This statement, which was a call for the collapse of the constitutional system by a political body whose signature principle had always been constitutionalism and adherence to the rule of law, evidenced a breathtaking moral and political disorientation. And the declaration went even further, stating that "Iran's national government must be based on" three principles, the first being Islam and the other two, as an afterthought, "democracy, and independence." The declaration threw the National Front into disarray, and drastically limited its ability to take the initiative until it was too late. In fact, during the critical three months following the declaration, a divided National Front collaborated with Khomeini, following the lead of its offshoot, the Freedom Movement, led by Bazargan.

On January 12, while still in Paris, Khomeini formalized the activities of his partisans, which included moderate Islamists like Bazargan, by creating an all-male, pointedly nonsecular body called the Islamic Revolutionary Council. The National Front tacitly accepted the authority of this council even though it excluded the entire spectrum of political groupings in Iran aside from Khomeini's circle of close allies.

Then in February, Khomeini appointed Bazargan interim prime minister on the basis of the recommendation of his own partisan Islamic Revolutionary Council and of what Khomeini claimed was his "sharia right." The day after this unconstitutional appointment, he not only elaborated his political philosophy in unambiguous terms -- he had "guardianship of the sharia" and could appoint rulers -- but also what that guardianship meant politically -- "In Islamic jurisprudence, rising up against the divine government is rising up against God."

It was not the appointment itself that turned Iran into a Shia caliphate, however, it was Bazargan's acceptance of the appointment, also endorsed by the National Front, which agreed to join Bazargan's government. What Bazargan and the National Front conceded when they accepted the appointment decree was its ideological terms: Khomeini's theocratic vision.

In Tunisia, after the departure of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the remaining political leaders in the discredited, but constitutional, interim government as well as respected politicians outside of it were under enormous pressure from a public deeply concerned with issues of democratic integrity and representativeness as plans were made to transition to an elected government through a credible process of drafting a new constitution. The interim government did refuse to permit theocrats who aggressively rejected the rules of the democratic process to run for office, but otherwise, all groups, secular or Islamist, were encouraged to -- and did -- participate. Tunisians were also concerned not to rush momentous national decisions. And the interim government postponed the voting to give time for civil society to organize itself -- for newspapers to be established, for example, and for political campaigns to coalesce -- but also to give itself time to prepare for the extremely difficult task of running a credible election.

Bazargan's draft constitution and the judiciary

Iranians now know that issues of representativeness, democratic integrity, and time and resources for careful deliberation were no concerns of Khomeini. But many have not quite appreciated the fact that these issues were also no concerns of Bazargan, whom they trusted to navigate the country to democratic rule.

Khomeini's theocratic vision was powerfully reinforced in March when Bazargan conducted a referendum that presented Iranians with the false choice of voting yes or no to an Islamic Republic before they were given an opportunity to understand what they were voting for. It was not until June 14 that Iranians finally got their first look into key details of Khomeini's theocratic vision. That's when Bazargan presented to the public a draft constitution, which moderate Islamists in Iran, to this day, misrepresent as democratic.

In Bazargan's draft, which was composed secretly by people handpicked by Khomeini and his closest partisans and later approved by Khomeini himself, the judicial branch was to be "established according to the standards of Islam" in order to dispense "Islamic justice" (chapter 3, article 18). The draft constitution left no doubt that by "Islam" and "Islamic" were meant Jafari Shiism, which the draft declared to be the country's official school of interpretation. The social reach of the other four traditional Sunni schools of Islam were explicitly limited not only to private affairs and religious training but, significantly, to governance in "local assemblies" in places where adherents of such schools were in a majority.

Thus, since the draft declared that Islam was to be involved in governance and that official Islam is Jafari Shiism, the draft in effect restored the judicial branch to clerics, that is, Jafari Shia legal experts. In Iran's preconstitutional period (and for some years afterward), the judiciary was a pillar of clerical power in part because clerics derive their religious authority juridically, that is, from claiming to be privileged interpreters of the sharia, the sacred law of Islam.

By the time the draft constitution was presented to Iranians, Khomeini's intention of establishing a fully theocratized judiciary was hardly a matter of speculation. In March, Khomeini had unconstitutionally swept aside the country's existing professional judiciary and created the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, whose judges were clerics like "Chief Justice of the Sharia" Sadegh Khalkhali, directly appointed by Khomeini, who by June had already sentenced hundreds of people to be executed in proceedings that define lack of due process. By then, it was also clear that the jurisdiction of this new Islamic judiciary extended to all areas of social life, not just religious ones.

Bazargan's draft constitution and the Guardian Council

However, the most lethal attack on democracy in the draft was the provision of a Guardian Council of legal experts and mojtaheds, clerics of a rank high enough to interpret sharia, in order to make sure no law in the country would go against the principles of Islam -- again, understood as Jafari Shiism.

The draft included some limitations on the power of the clergy on the council. The parliament was to select the clerics from a list offered by the grand ayatollahs (the highest-ranking mojtaheds in Jafari Shiism); the clerics would constitute a minority of five members out of a total of 11, and council decisions would require a two-thirds vote.

Nevertheless, the granting of clerical oversight in the council codified an explicit rejection of democratic principles: political legitimacy as grounded in people's sovereignty -- that is, their ability to think and act independently, and the sanctity of the person instead of a particular interpretation of the purported will of God or of some religious text by a group of privileged "professional" interpreters. In other words, the draft constitution gave a class of self-authorized monopolist interpreters of a particular current of religious thought the right, in principle, to act as the guardians and betters of Iranians.

However, the draft also gave clerics the power to exercise that right because three of the other six members of the council were to be selected by the parliament from among the chief justices of the country's judicial branch, which was restored to Jafari Shia legal experts -- which is to say, clerics -- who presumably would model themselves after Khalkhali, who was working hard to realize Khomeini's vision for an Islamic judicial branch. In short, Bazargan's draft constitution gave clerics eight of the 11 council seats, surpassing the two thirds needed to veto acts of parliament.

The idea of the Guardian Council and Iran's democratic heritage

In addition to being profoundly antidemocratic, the Guardian Council in Bazargan's draft also dishonored Iran's democratic heritage. It was a throwback to a similar one supplemented in 1907 to Iran's original constitution in a reactionary wave following the accession to the throne of the autocratic Mohammad Ali Shah of the Qajar dynasty, who even before his accession had worked to get rid of the constitution. He had a powerful ally in the ultra-traditionalist Fazlallah Nuri, a high-ranking cleric and Khomeini role model, who had correctly understood that the original constitution was taking the axe to the traditional source of clerical power: the clerics' supposed privileged link to the divine, which ultimately helped legitimize the rule of the shahs. By mid-1907, Nuri was the most outspoken ideologue behind the Shah's opposition to constitutionalism and democratic rule, and he openly decried such basic principles of democracy as "equality before the law and freedom of the press" for being "contrary to Islam."

It is of tremendous significance for understanding the history of democracy in Iran to note that Nuri's sermons and pamphlets received extensive public responses not only in the democratic press of the time, but also from constitutionalist clerics of equal or higher rank in Tehran and Najaf. Nuri pointedly failed to sway the democrats or the most influential clergy.

With Nuri's proactive and very public support, in mid-1908, the Shah annulled the parliament, executed constitutionalist leaders, and had Russian Cossacks bombard the parliament building. These actions ushered in the most acute stage of the Constitutional Revolution, the civil war and the horrific siege of Tabriz, whose citizens fought the forces of despotism for a year before constitutionalists around the country were able to mobilize and in 1909 march on Tehran. The Shah was exiled ignominiously to Russia. And Nuri, seen as the chief ideological enemy of constitutionalism and democracy, was tried in a court that included clergy, and hanged.

Thus, by the end of the Constitutional Revolution, Nuri's reworked traditionalist argument for heavy-handed, direct clerical oversight of the parliament was lost. Afterward, the mainstream clergy as a class -- including the highest-ranking clerics who enjoyed the widest acceptance among both peers and followers -- occasionally talked about the issue, but never seriously pressed it.

Clerical support for the Constitutional Revolution is sometimes said to reflect ideological confusion or fear of reprisal from secularists. Both factors were influential, but so were others of greater importance. During the decades leading to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the highest-ranking Jafari Shia clerics were concentrated in the cities of today's Iraq, then under Ottoman rule. These clerics were shaken out of their insularity in part as a result of the intellectual and physical battles that Ottoman reformists and democrats were waging against their sultan, who justified his absolute rule by reference to his religious role as the caliph. In this environment, Shia clerics were reexamining their long-standing subjection to religious intolerance under the Sunni Ottomans in terms of the political arguments for freedom being made by Ottoman reformists.

But perhaps more important, Shia clerics also understood that the few remaining independent Muslim-ruled states were on the verge of collapse, occupation, and dissection in their confrontations with European colonialists. Economically and militarily, Muslim states had repeatedly proved unable to meet the challenge of European countries, which through their own earlier democratic revolutions and reform movements had freed human capacities that had not begun to be tapped in countries like Iran.

Thus, many clerics of the period not only understood the need for, but were engaged in ideological and political reform. Some left the ranks of the clergy altogether -- some even abandoned their religion -- and some attempted reforms of Shiism from within. Clerics were integral to the Constitutional Revolution and after 1906, when Iran became a constitutional monarchy, many clerics participated in elections and parliamentary deliberations. Had conditions been conducive to continued democratic practice (free exchange of ideas in the press, free deliberations in the parliament, and so forth), Iranian clerics might well have been able to use the opening created by the Constitutional Revolution to engage more fruitfully with democratic ideas.¹ At the very least, the public would have been educated about the range of clerical opinions on important political issues and about the precise philosophical and scholarly expertise that clerics claimed for their views.

At any rate, Iranian democrats -- in part out of deference for the clergy, especially the constitutionalists among them -- also did not make a production out of their rejection of Nuri's patently antidemocratic Guardian Council article, especially given the fact that clerics were already present in the Iranian parliament as elected members. In practice, that article was gradually ignored by subsequent governments, some of which were not only democratically elected but led by the country's champions of democracy, such as Mohammad Mosaddegh.

In parliamentary systems, this history establishes a constitutional precedent. In legal documents of parliamentary systems, people may be referred to as "subjects" to some monarch, but only in deference to cultural tradition. It is understood that people are persons, that is, sovereign citizens, not because it is written in legal documents but because it is written in the country's history, which shows debates were had, battles perhaps were fought, and an issue was resolved.

Likewise, in the parliamentary system of Iran, the Constitutional Revolution, as well as the long history of desuetude of the patently antidemocratic Guardian Council article in the supplement by progressive and mainstream clerics as well as by legitimate democratic governments, represented a constitutional precedent and a landmark of Iran's democratic heritage.

Khomeini belonged to a group of particularly insular clerics who followed Nuri's lead, never digested this democratic, constitutional precedent, and were determined to discard it. When Bazargan accepted Khomeini's appointment to run the unconstitutional parallel government, he did not discard just the constitution; he also discarded all the historical precedents surrounding it. In other words, he accepted Khomeini's Nuri-based, ultra-traditionalist legal argument for the appointment and conceded nothing less than the right to rule and to appoint rulers to clerics. By exhuming the idea of the Guardian Council in the draft constitution, Bazargan codified that antidemocratic concession and profoundly dishonored Iran's democratic heritage.

Back to Tunisia

By the time Bazargan's draft constitution was presented to the public, the National Front had left his interim government, reorganized itself, and was opposing the draft. But of course it had already conceded too much, having publicly declared its rejection of the country's constitutional framework and its own secular principles, then acted on those declarations by expelling Shapour Bakhtiar when he accepted the premiership from the Shah, joining an unconstitutional interim government appointed by a cleric who claimed to have a divine right to appoint rulers, and finally dignifying with its presence in the interim government the inane yes/no referendum on an Islamic Republic. In other words, it had emerged from its long post-Mosaddegh hibernation unequal to the task of protecting the people's most fundamental democratic rights. It was out of practice, disoriented, and poorly led. But unlike Bazargan's Freedom Movement, the National Front was not part of Khomeini's core team of partisans who planned and executed policies designed to manipulate Iranians into adopting an Islamic theocracy.

And perhaps it is this absence of a concerted and carefully planned effort to manipulate Tunisians that marks the greatest difference between the Tunisian and Iranian revolutions. Moderate Tunisian Islamists of course have their ideological goals, but they are not subverting -- and have not been permitted to subvert -- the rules of democratic practice in order to impose their vision on the people. They are making their case and have to respond to weighty countervailing arguments. The result is a better-informed Tunisian citizenry.

In Iran, Bazargan and Khomeini had different Islamist visions, but they shared the goal of maneuvering their political and ideological opponents out of the most important decisions of which all Iranians needed to be a part.

In Part 4, I will recall the conclusive manipulations -- again led and facilitated by moderate Islamists -- that ensured Iran would be a theocracy.

1. Of course, conditions were anything but conducive. Among the factors that made conditions inimical to the practice of democracy in a society that had just emerged from despotism were World War I, foreign territorial occupation and political intervention, a weak central government in financial disarray, widespread lawlessness, and then of course the autocratic rule of Reza Shah that undermined civil society and insulated the clerics in their conservative seminaries.

End of Part 3

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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A life spent fixing.

[ profile ] Shoush Square is one of the oldest of Tehran's major squares. The rectangular plaza at its center is roughly the size of a soccer pitch. Here though, the spectators are always rushing by, in taxis, private cars, small vans, and motorbikes -- a primary means by which the city's many thousands of small merchants run their errands. Filling the heart of the square, tired-looking women and men puff on cigarettes.

The din is maddening, a cacophony of automobile horns, coughing motorcycles, loud shouts. In a corner, away from the epicenter of noise and dirt, a man waits in anticipation under the scorching late summer sun.

Ali, age 44, leans against one of the buildings that encloses the square; beside him is his faded blue Moto Guzzi, age 20. He squints at a small ad in the paper. His lips betray his slow struggle to make out the words.

Bike tires and inner tubes lay in a chaotic arc around him. An old toolbox takes up one side of the double-pocket burlap satchel that straddles his motorcycle's metal pannier. In hand-sewn letters, each satchel pocket reads "Mobile Bike Repair."

Ali is thin-framed and his skin is tanned dark by the sun. His craggy face is covered with several days worth of silvery stubble, within which a permanent smile seems to have been chiseled. He gestures toward the people in the center of the square, and says, "They're mostly burnouts.

"They're castoffs, no one bothers with them. Even the government doesn't pay them any attention. I think addiction comes from the blood. When parents are addicted, their offspring are drawn to it and become addicts too.

"I've dealt with such people since I found myself. Most people around me are of this kind. But I never became addicted and was never interested. I've never enjoyed nor developed a fondness for any kind of smoke. I have no time for such things. I am a simple worker, like the rest of my family. Our effort has always been to take some bread home. I can't even imagine that other fate, ever."

Ali starts work every day at eight in the morning and goes till nine at night. He visits the bazaar, the intercity bus terminals, and Shoush and Gomrok Squares, where the motorbike traffic can build to such an intensity that it resembles ants on a frightened anthill. They practically drive through each other, he says. He keeps an eye out for cycles with flats, or anyone who glances at their bike wearily. He gets to them in seconds and helps them out.

He folds his newspaper, and then carefully folds it several times more until it fits in his palm. He says, "I've been a mobile motorbike repairman for eight years now. Before, I used to repair car sound systems. But sound system theft became so rampant that you could get new ones almost for free, and the customers for refurbished ones disappeared. My work faded off. Slowly, I got into motorbike repair."

The continuous braying of the horns and throbbing rumble of traffic are suddenly overlaid with loud curses, the screams of a fight. But that soon dies off and the usual soundscape of the square reasserts itself.

Ali continues, "Motorbike repair is more varied than sound system work, and I enjoy some aspects of it. Practically all my clients are transient. I mean that they are mostly just visiting the area on business and don't live nearby. I have no permanent clients, except for friends and relatives. But the income isn't too bad. Sometimes I don't get a client for days, and then some days I have a bunch."

The areas where he works are among the most polluted in Tehran, which in turn suffers from some of the worst air pollution in the world. He cruises about for hours, from the hottest days to the coldest, taking the occasional break in spots where he can easily be seen.

Tucking his now palm-sized newspaper into his shirt pocket, Ali slips out of his shoes and sprinkles his bare feet with water from the bottle he carries. "To take the heat off." He smiles. "Thinking is free and guilt-free. In fact, the only right I have in my life is to have my thoughts. I am free and I can spend my free time as I will. I sit for hours and consider the unknown future, and how things turned out so chaotic. I review my memories of where I have come from, and then I feel my heart cringe as I look at those around me and see how they silently suffer."

He points to the lines on his wrinkled forehead and adds, "I don't think just of myself. I think of my family, my neighbors, of the passing woman worried about the simple cost of bread and how she is going to secure nourishment for her children. I worry about those who spend their hard-earned pittance on meth and opium in order to loose their worldly worries for a few moments. My wrinkles are from these thoughts."

Born in a village in the country's heartland, he abandoned school at the age of nine and went to work for a prominent family near his home. His father, a herder, worked for a man in an adjacent village.

Sweat now covers his forehead like morning dew. A few drops slip down from his temples, which he mops with his sleeve.

"My family inherited drudgery from our father. We had no land, no livestock, not even a chicken. We only earned by our brawn. That is a very difficult way of putting food on the plate. You have to check your brain out, hold your tongue, keep your head down, and prepare your ears for orders from left and right, then work like a machine, like one but faster.

"When I was a shepherd, starting at a very young age, I knew nothing but how to take orders from others. Once I had to descend a mountain in the dead of night, around two a.m., to deliver salt to a bunch of older shepherds my father's age. My mother became very indignant. But that's how it is. When a person is submissive, he will be abused by everyone. Sometimes I think that I would have made something out of myself if I had continued with school, but I despised school. Our teacher was constantly looking for excuses to beat us. I was a villager and in his eyes stupid, nor did my parents have any worthy views. Our school was in the adjacent village. It had 25 pupils and I attended for just two years, after which I joined my brother working for this or that other villager where we would get a share of the harvest. Then I turned to herding and eventually headed to Tehran."

Ali and his family left the capital soon after the Revolution, when he was 11 years old. They took residence in a house abandoned by a movie theater owner who had fled the country for fear of extrajudicial punishment by Islamic vigilantes. The house was divided into quadrants by simple brick partitions to accommodate four families. Ali lived there with his two sisters, brother, and parents. His father took a janitorial job in a commercial complex. Ali himself became a hired hand in an electronics shop. and his older brother, a house painter's apprentice. His sisters, both younger, were enrolled in school.

Five years after moving to Tehran, their father passed away, and only a year later their mother died too. Ali, then 16, and Hassan, 18, assumed responsibility for providing for the education of their sisters, Zahra and Zohreh.

He shades his eyes and looks up toward the sun as it reaches its noon apex. Then he turns around, still shading his eyes, and gazes into the middle of the square. Some of the people there have fallen asleep, using their shoes, stacked on top of each other, as pillows. Most of those still awake sit with cigarettes dangling between their lips. Ali fidgets a bit and sits down. He hasn't had any customers yet.

He says with a grin, "I am a war veteran. The Iran-Iraq War. I turned 18 and it was time to start military service. The war was already a couple of years old. I was sent to the front, but fortunately my brother, who was the eldest male child and also had the guardianship of our sisters, was exempted.

"I spent two years at the front. Most of the soldiers at the front were eager for martyrdom. I wasn't. I worried about the ruin that would befall my sisters if I was killed.

"When I visited Tehran on temporary leave, I would make some money fixing car sound systems and started doing that full time after my service was over. Later I got a job in a motorbike garage. But it was not worth my time. I would work dawn to dusk but was paid a fixed amount regardless of how many clients I would take care of. They always wanted me to work faster and cut my lunch hours short for a five percent raise so that they could make a lot more profit off of me. So I quit that and got a job in a kitchen. My shift lasted late into the night, but the pay wasn't bad. Then for some reason I lost my appetite and even with all the food around me, I couldn't eat. I was skin and bones.

"By that time we had had to move to a much less secure part of the city because of trouble keeping up with the rent, so I left that job too. I tried many different jobs that way."

With their sisters' encouragement, Hassan married a neighboring young woman. After the wedding, the newlyweds moved to a tiny house outside the city and Ali took on more of the responsibility for his two sisters. Soon after, Zohreh came down with multiple sclerosis and another crisis struck -- most of the equity they thought they had in their home vanished.

Ali looks down, remembering. His wrinkles are so deep that it would be hard for a passerby to tell if he was frowning or smiling. "A gentleman showed up with a stack of papers saying that he was hired as an attorney by the building's owner to reclaim his property. They served us lots of papers and took many actions. At the end, they paid 200,000 tomans to each of us and threw us out. There was nowhere to turn to, whether those actions were legal or not. They said that the fact was that we didn't own that building.

"After that, we rented a place near Khorasan Square in the south of the city. M.S. had paralyzed both my sister's legs by then. The expenses for her care rose so much that my other sister had to pitch in from her income. No government agency was willing to help. So my sister Zahra had to quit her job in a dentist's office in order to take care of Zohreh at home. The burden of all the expenses, household and medical, fell onto my shoulders. My brother, Hassan, had lost his job and was battling serious money problems of his own and wasn't able to help."

Ali currently pays 3,000 tomans a month rent for a two-room apartment of about 100 square feet, with shared kitchen and bathroom; there was a million-toman deposit. Married two years ago, he and his wife live in one room and his sisters in the other. His wife, six years younger than Ali, works in a small beauty salon. Although they would like to have children, they have put it off due to their present living circumstances. Ali says he doesn't want to create another person only to witness its suffering. He lacks the capital to establish a repair shop and as an employee at someone else's establishment, he wouldn't make half the 800,000 tomans per month minimum he needs to support himself and his family.

Suddenly, Ali stands up and points to something. Waving his hands up and down, he rushes to the edge of the street and approaches a man sitting on an elderly Honda. After they talk a bit, he fetches his hand pump and puts air into the bike's rear wheel. As he returns to his stuff. I can see a 500-toman bill in his palm -- worth about 40 cents according to the official rate of exchange at the time, closer to 15 or 16 cents at the market rate. He pulls out a bluish metal box from his bike's satchel and pushes the damp bill into it.

The smile on his face expands to reveals both rows of his white teeth. He sits back down on the sidewalk.

"I don't have issues with my life. I am not complaining about having to repair motorbikes without a permanent shop, and for having to use all my income to pay for my family and my stricken sister's needs. I put up with life's ups and downs. But my 36-year-old sister, paralyzed up to her neck, needs the basics of a life. Because of the embargo on drugs, specialty medicine can't be found and equivalents made here are as effective as rain water. [Ed.: While there is, in fact, no official embargo on pharmaceutical exports to Iran, sanctions restricting international financial transactions have effectively cut off the supply of many foreign medical goods to Iran.] I don't have the money to have drugs sent me from Dubai, like the son of the [Supreme] Leader. My sister has had three attacks in six months and each episode has worsened her disease. When I ask for help, the response is, 'Get her admitted to Kahrizak clinic.' That place looks good from afar, but I've been to its wards. It is a slaughterhouse.

"When you take your sick there, it means it's the end of the line. My 38-year-old sister has wasted her life nursing for our sister; she has not been able to marry. Thank God, I have a good spouse. She helps out with the extra money she brings in. She treats my sisters like her own, and is careful not to cause them any anguish."

Ali yearns to return to the village of his birth, although he has nothing there except a half-ruined mud house. If he could only save about 30 million tomans -- around $10,000 at the market rate -- he could repair the place, purchase a few sheep, and get into raising livestock. He says his spouse agrees. They would live far from the crowded city, where he feels the corruption and lies pressing down on him. He would set up a nice wooded bench in the corner of the yard so his ill sister could breath fresh air instead of the fumes of Tehran.

He shifts a bit on the pavement.

"Who could have imagined that this is how our lot would end up after the Revolution. Imam Khomeini had lofty ideas. He was the only one I loved, and when he left, he took everything with him. Iran will never be what it could be. It has fallen into the hands of a bunch of thieving people who think of nothing but their personal well-being. Siphoning off everyone's wealth is their main purpose. They falsely beat their chests in the name of religion while the parents of those here roll in their graves."

Abi Mehregan is a pen name. Abi is on the staff of Iran Labor Report and covers poverty for Tehran Bureau.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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By fueling identity politics and undermining civil society, Western economic pressure actually helps prop up the system.

The sharp devaluation of the rial, its ongoing instability, and the subsequent decline in purchasing power and real wages cut across class lines. While discrepancies in wealth and income affect the severity of risks to which Iranians are exposed, the ongoing currency crisis affects practically the whole of society. Mass layoffs in Iran's industrial sector and a petition of complaint about economic conditions addressed to the labor minister that bears the signatures of thousands of workers have coincided with sizable protests by Tehran's bazaaris. Middle-class Iranians meanwhile continue to see their savings eroded and money transfers with their kin in the diaspora increasingly difficult to arrange due to sanctions aimed at international financial transactions.

Still, the idea that even a sharp and sustained economic decline will provoke a groundswell of protests escalating into revolution reflects an ignorance of Iranian history and politics -- a failure, more specifically, to appreciate the significance of identity politics in determining political legitimacy and the detrimental effects of sanctions upon the functioning of civil society.

Sanctions and identity politics

It is tempting to assume that a crisis such as the current one cuts across the lines of identity politics. Yet it is precisely during periods of structural crisis when the importance of identity politics is elevated. The manner in which blame is assigned, solutions are prescribed, and coalitions are forged will hinge upon the sociopolitical identities of the actors involved. The notion that the legitimacy of politicians is reducible to an index of economic prosperity or hardship is oversimplistic.

Talk of sanctioning Iranian society into a revolution and unleashing "serious public discontent" often downplays the ideological significance of the fact that it is foreign governments and institutions that are imposing this state of affairs. The trumpeting of sanctions by the Obama administration and the European Union and the efforts to further expand their scope, even as news of their impact upon the everyday lives of Iranians spreads, works not only to vindicate the Islamic Republic's continuing invocations of Western imperialism, but also to arouse the sense of national degradation and aborted progress at the hands of foreign intrigue that features in the shared imagination of many Iranians. The awareness that shortsighted domestic policies have exacerbated the currency crisis and inflation does little to cloud the optics of foreign hegemony.

When coupled with the specter of a "preemptive" military strike and the jingoistic rhetoric of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is not hard to see why many Iranians would view the unfolding state of affairs through a nationalist lens. The urban crowds who reject the moral geography of the Islamic Republic with the chant "Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life is only for Iran" are hardly empowered against the ruling establishment by foreign interventionism.

The oppression that has seen the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic's ruling system wither among women and middle-class youth, for example, does not override the sense of national belonging and identity that members of these social categories share. Instead, they are likely to displace their antipathy toward their own government onto the foreign powers that are unabashedly wreaking havoc on their daily lives.

This is not the first time Western observers have failed to recognize the significance of identity politics in Iran, opting instead for a neat correlation between economic standing and political legitimacy. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was unexpectedly elected president in 2005, commentators made much of the notion that it was due to rising levels of poverty or inequality and discontent among "alienated rural masses." Yet, as scholar Djavad Salehi-Isfahani recently noted, the level of inequality remained stable over the two terms of Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, and had even begun to narrow as of 2003. Booming oil prices had also seen poverty levels decline as Iran's per capita GDP increased by 4.6 percent per year between Khatami's first election in 1997 and Ahmadinejad's in 2005.

The extent to which the political affinities of urban centers and lesser-developed areas diverge along class lines was also widely overstated. In the second round of voting in 2005, when the electorate was left with the choice of two conservative candidates, most voters in rural areas actually voted for Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani despite the fact that he was widely regarded as a wealthy exploiter of the Revolution and a symbol of governmental corruption. If Ahmadinejad's message of spreading economic wealth and "ending corruption" did not connect with these rural voters, it was because they are largely ethnic minorities with no desire to dignify an ultra-orthodox candidate likely to continue denying them cultural recognition.

The continued imposition of sanctions and threats of war from aboard are likely to further mute opposition voices. It is in conditions like those at present, after all, that the Islamic Republic can more authoritatively reiterate its brand of identity politics by invoking America as an ever-present threat while dispensing with dissenters as "infiltrators" (noofoozi) and perpetrators of "sedition" (fetneh).

Sanctions and civil society

Today, some ideas in Iran are literally not worth the paper they are printed on. The devalued rial has sharply raised the cost of imported paper, even as the government has restricted subsidies for such purchases. Referred to as the "paper crisis" in Iranian media, this development has seen some 100 independent publishers go bankrupt, while those that promote establishment views continued to be subsidized.

It is unlikely that widespread frustration will translate into sustained popular protests and broad-based opposition without critical dialogue and a collective vision of what is being pursued. Precisely what segments of Iranian society will take to the streets in large numbers, and what will be their threshold for tolerating the violence that awaits them? What concessions or policy changes would some segments be more responsive to than others?

International sanctions are tearing at the fabric of public discourse through which these questions might be addressed and a collective oppositional voice thus coalesce -- a point made by many opposition figures. The Green Movement, with its ideological thrust, will not suffice to articulate this voice when circumstances have elevated economic turmoil as a matter of national concern. In fact, a paradigm shift may be required whereby a discourse that focuses on economic rights and justice comes to increasingly complement, if not surpass, the emphasis upon civil and political rights by which the Green Movement was (and remains) largely driven.

The recent anti-riot maneuvers by security forces in the streets of Tehran, however, demonstrate the resistance that faces any such paradigm shift (much less its physical manifestation in the streets). The recent bazaar protests triggered by the decline and instability of the rial established a precedent linking sanctions to street protests -- a precedent whose repetition the state will endeavor to prevent.

This show of force also signals a departure from the traditional easing of the political climate in the lead-up to elections, customarily including the relaxation of press restrictions to help generate popular interest and boost voter turnout. However, the recent closure of the reformist Shargh newspaper, along with that of Reuters' Tehran bureau, indicates the mounting political tension -- directly attributable to the economic fallout from the sanctions regimen and the acrimony between Ahmadinejad and his political opponents it has exacerbated. Even the official media has not been exempt from this fallout, as demonstrated by the arrest of Ahmadinejad's senior press adviser, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, head of the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency and Iran daily.

Finally, as sanctions diminish the capacity of civil society inside Iran, they also serve to isolate Iranians from international forums and their overzealous application now effectively bars middle-class Iranians from transferring money abroad. Combined with a devalued rial, this not only puts the roughly 35,000 Iranian students enrolled outside the country at risk of having to discontinue their studies (as many already have), it prevents others from participating in foreign gatherings where they could engage in critical dialogue and share their insights about circumstances inside Iran. The recent biennial of the International Society for Iranian Studies in Istanbul is a case in point: many could not afford to be there, while others were intimidated by the slandering of the event in the newspaper Kayhan, a mouthpiece for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This is the reality critical voices endure today: a worsening economy and threats of war have rendered the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic all the more sensitive to opposition, reflected in the profligate manner in which it monitors, harasses, and imprisons lawyers, intellectuals, artists, labor organizers, former politicians, and anyone else who has engaged in what might be considered dissent.

That Iran can be sanctioned into social upheaval and revolution is, ultimately, a prospect that does not survive analysis. All that may be forecast with some degree of confidence is that popular anger and frustration with the Islamic regime will not preclude anger and frustration with the foreign governments that have systematically subjected Iranians to economic adversity and anguish.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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The heterogeneous nature of the pre-1979 Iranian groove is often obscured by Western bids to cash in.

[ music ] Back in 2008, I received a text message from a record-collecting acquaintance of mine asking if I had gotten a copy of the new Waking Up Scheherazade LP compilation. "You gotta get this record," my friend said, "but whatever you do, don't read the liner notes." I had not yet picked up the LP but had spotted its cover -- which boasted of "Arabian Garage Psych Nuggets From the 60's and Early 70's" -- on a recent flip through the new arrival bins at a favorite record store in New York City.

With my interest piqued, I snagged a copy on my next trip. Scanning the back cover, I was surprised to see the familiar name of Kourosh Yaghmaei -- the Iranian master of fuzz guitar and somber psych melodies -- among the names included on the list of "unheard Arabian" tracks. Certainly, the Kourosh song on the compilation ("Del Daare Pir Mishe," transliterated on the album as "Dil Dasa Per Mesha") was a longtime favorite of mine; I had been introduced to it by my mother, herself a rock 'n' roller, in my youth. Just as certainly, however, it was neither "Arabian" nor "unheard."

My attention eventually turned to the liner notes that accompanied the vinyl. It didn't take long for me to notice what my friend had warned me of:

It's amazing that in the record collecting universe, the world of 60's rock & roll...gets bigger and bigger as time goes on. Different areas are mined by our Sam Spades and Christopher Columbuses, new worlds are opening all the time and we are discovering tons of amazing unheard music in the most remote places.... We are just now realizing to what extent the western teenage world had an effect on these 'old worlds.' As far as Arabian/Islamic lands go, it might creat [sic] a fantasy of old time deserts, camels, sheiks, sultans, harems, flying carpets, or more recently war and terrorism, but we don't ever think of beat/garage/teen rock & roll...until now that is.

Despite its 2008 release, the sort of Orientalist fantasy projected by the compilers of Waking Up Scheherazade isn't surprising: flying carpets, sleazy harems, and coy Scheherazades have been among the most lasting and recalcitrant tropes of Middle Eastern and Muslim life in European and American pop music culture. In 1962, for example, American singer Ray Stevens scored a major hit with a song entitled "Ahab the Arab" that jauntily describes Ahab, the "sheik of the burning sands," on a quest with his camel Clyde to find Fatima, a dancer in the Sultan's harem. The song reached number five on the Billboard chart, and brought Stevens such inordinate success that he performed and rereleased it a number of times, well into the 2000s.¹

The success of "Ahab the Arab" came not long after a series of albums by the so-called "Sultan of Baghdad" Mohammed El-Bakkar and His Oriental Ensemble. This series, cowritten by New York record executive Sidney Frey, featured barely clad ladies on their covers.² Before either "Ahab the Arab" or the "Sultan of Baghdad," however, came the granddaddy of all Islamo-sploitation hits -- a Tin Pan Alley standard entitled "The Sheik of Araby." Written in 1921, "Sheik" was recorded and performed countless times by artists as disparate as Gene Krupa and the Beatles; it was even referenced in The Great Gatsby.

Despite their similar trappings, there is one substantive difference between these earlier hits and Waking Up Scheherazade. The former were largely American novelty songs written and produced for American audiences, whereas the latter were largely recorded in the 1960s-1970s by Iranian and Arab artists for Iranian and Arab audiences -- audiences whose aesthetic worlds were far removed from the one conjured by Scheherazade's bootlegger.

Waking Up Scheherazade is not the only compilation of its kind to recently appear. Over the course of the past three years, there has been a deluge of releases of classic-era Iranian pop, rock 'n' roll, funk, and soul on the vinyl market. These releases -- which include unauthorized compilations such as the Raks Raks Raks LP and collections of obscure groups such as the Rebels and funky sitar legend Mehr Pouya, as well as authorized and licensed reissues of superstars such as Googoosh³ and Kourosh Yaghmaei⁴ marketed to hipsters the world over -- sit in record stores and online sites among similarly packaged gems and rarities.

As a music fanatic and longtime record collector, the sudden appearance of compilations featuring Iranian pop music took me by surprise. Over the years, thanks to generous family members and my own voracious appetite for trawling dusty record crates, I had managed to find a handful of scratchy, old Iranian 45s -- the vinyl format of choice in prerevolutionary Iran. But I had seen the Iranian pop scene go largely unnoticed by the burgeoning reissue labels that were unearthing wild sounds from across the globe.

The appearance of these compilations, not to mention their popularity among record collectors and fans of obscure sounds, raises a number of questions: What is the history of Islamo-sploitation fantasy in pop music, and at what point and to what ends has it merged with the marketing of pop music from around the globe? How can we understand the recent rush to reissue both popular and underground Iranian grooves? What does the "discovery," appropriation, and repackaging of Iranian music mean for the legacy of this popular culture?

Iranian music is not alone on the reissue scene. For those uninitiated to this niche market, a brief history lesson is in order. The past two decades have given rise to a number of labels that cater to an expanding market for those fanatical about rare and obscure music.⁵ Yet this is not the first wave of interest in so-called "world music"⁶ (including music from Iran) by American and European audiences.⁷ In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a number of recordings by Iranian musicians -- usually on instruments such as the tar, santur, and dombak -- were released by labels looking to market "authentic" classical and folk forms to cosmopolitan music fans equally eager to experience "traditional" cultures for themselves. This obsession with "authentic" cultural experience has marked Western audiences' interest in global sounds until the present day.

Largely curated by an emerging subclass of anthropologists known as ethnomusicologists, exemplary records of this type include an Iranian classical music series released by French record label Musiques Traditionnelles Vivantes. Notably, the series included records by luminaries such as setar virtuoso Dariush Talai. The overall vibe here is of a barely preserved but dying authenticity. Talai and his cohorts are presented as relics from an earlier age, to which listeners are granted access through vinyl. The notes to Talai's first French release claim that "the last of the ancient masters are in danger of passing out of existence, and their knowledge vanishing along with them." Given this framing it is perhaps not surprising that, despite being released in 1979, the notes provided by the Musiques Traditionnelles Vivantes series offer significantly more in the way of ancient Persian history than they do on the turbulent revolutionary context in which Iranians -- musicians included -- then found themselves.

By the mid-1980s, this ethnographic era gave way to a veritable pop phenomenon: the so-called "world music" craze. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Western pop stars such as David Byrne and Peter Gabriel produced and marketed music forms from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to increasingly appreciative audiences. At the same time, these stars used the global sounds that they were championing elsewhere in their own music -- often without properly crediting or compensating their sources. This trend provoked mixed responses. On the one hand, corporate record chains and mom-and-pop shops alike began to feature "world music" sections for the first time, throwing Afrobeat CDs next to Bollywood soundtracks next to Bob Marley's Legend. On the other hand, some scholars and music fans protested that the nascent market was a dehistoricized and "thinly veiled form of musical imperialism."⁸

In 1995, an LP/CD release called Cambodian Rocks on the New York-based label Parallel World marked an epoch-making shift in the world music market.⁹ With fuzzed-out music by Rolling Stones-influenced 1960s-era Cambodian garage bands compiled by an American English teacher in Japan, Cambodian Rocks featured decidedly pop music, influenced as much by the indigenous forms long championed by ethnomusicologists as by James Brown, Ennio Morricone, and the Kinks. This collection differs from professionally curated albums like the Musiques Traditionnelles series in another important way: the compilers of Cambodian Rocks (and as a result, their listeners) had no idea what any of the bands or songs were called. They had even less of an idea as to how they might find information about the scene from which these songs came. But information was beside the point. The influence of Cambodian Rocks among collectors serves an exemplar of the emergent aesthetic preference for the truly esoteric. The music on Cambodian Rocks, however, was mysterious only to its compilers and self-made market. Indeed, many of the songs featured on the compilation were already well known to Cambodian audiences.

In subsequent years, the marketing of mystery -- a variant on ethnomusicology's quest for the exotic and unknown -- has come to overlap with the logic of a different record collector tendency: the fetishization of the rare. Hip-hop heads looking for the perfect unheard beat rub collector elbows with garage rock aficionados searching for Beatles influence under every stone. It is in these complicated economies that reissue labels run (mostly) by enthusiastic -- if often underinformed -- young Americans and Europeans churn out records of varying quality promising the listener previously unheard musical terrain. It is in this context that the classic age of Persian pop music has recently been introduced.

On another record digging expedition -- a few months after buying Waking Up Scheherazade, but before the wave of Persian pop reissues had truly begun -- I stumbled across an unexpectedly familiar face on the cover of a new LP. I was prepared to flip right by the album, but the sight of the woman staring back at me was too uncanny; I knew this face. It took me a few moments to register what I was looking at. It was a double LP compilation titled Pomegranates, and the face peeking out at me from between Aretha Franklin and Jane Birkin reissues was none other than iconoclastic 1960s-1970s Iranian pop icon Ramesh. I flipped the album over and found a number of the heavyweights of Iranian pop on the Persian-language track list: Googoosh, Kourosh, Ramesh, Dariush, and Marjan, among others. I skimmed the record for more information and noticed that unlike the unauthorized Waking Up Scheherazade -- which is released by the fictitious "Ali Baba and His 40 Records" label -- the Pomegranates compilation is officially licensed by London-based Finders Keepers Records from copyright holders Taraneh and Caltex Records.

Pomegranates comes replete with appreciably more sophisticated liner notes than those of Waking Up Scheherazade. The notes begin, "Like many other countries, the Sixties and Seventies were a time of tumult in Iran, bringing growth (via petrodollars) and freedom (under the banner of socioeconomic development) while exacerbating inequalities within the country." Compiled by Iranian Americans Arash Saedinia and Mahssa Taghinia (the latter of whom also wrote the liner notes), Pomegranates is, according to Saedinia, an attempt to produce an album that would appropriately introduce and contextualize the aesthetic world of prerevolutionary Iranian pop for a generation of young diaspora Iranians whose only access to the music was through shoddily produced CD reissues. Three years after the record was released, Saedinia stated that with Pomegranates, he and Taghinia had "wanted to reclaim the music and give it the kind of care it deserves."¹⁰

The reissues that followed in the wake of Pomegranates have too infrequently fulfilled the promise of this compilation. Instead, they have largely followed the template fashioned by earlier trends in global music excavation. Compilations such as Persian Funk (Secret Stash), Persian Underground (bootleg -- "Persianna"), Zendooni (Pharaway Sounds), Rangarang (Vampisoul), and Raks Raks Raks (bootleg -- "Raks Discos") give the listener mixtape-style collections of prerevolutionary Iranian music, alongside reproductions of art from the original vinyl, and liner notes of varying quality. The liner notes featured on the majority of these releases cater mostly to audiences (if not compilers) who tend to have little knowledge of 20th-century Iranian history. The narrative evinces wide-eyed wonder that such sounds could ever be produced in an Iranian context. The notes to Persianna's collection of songs by 1960s beat band the Rebels exclaims that the songs "will have you scratching your head in disbelief as to how this sound found itself within Persian record stores in the 1960s and 1970s." This disbelief is coupled with a swashbuckling musical adventurism, with compilers patting themselves on the back for being Columbus-like discoverers of "new old worlds" of music.

Why do these compilers -- many of whom are, after all, well aware of the popularity of rock 'n' roll, soul, and funky beats the world over -- profess such disbelief at the pop world of 1960s and 1970s Iran? A further reading of the liner notes reveals that their incredulity lies in part in their perception of postrevolutionary Iran. The Persian Funk comp -- probably the most fly-by-night release among the ones I mention here -- displays a historical perspective typical for these reissues: "It seems hard for most westerners to imagine today, but in the middle part of last century, the Iranian government was very supportive of the western way of life...the Shah and his organization encouraged art, music, and film in Iranian society."¹¹ The notes remain conspicuously silent on the Pahlavi state's "support" of art, music, and film through the rigorous censorship and imprisonment of artists who protested measures taken by his regime. In either case, the implications of this quote are clear: the listeners of the compilation are assumed to be "westerners" who can't imagine that pop (or for that matter underground) culture could exist in Iran. The notes on the Rangarang compilation drive the point home: "it may seem hard to believe, with the Islamic Republic of Iran swathed in controversial breaches of human rights...but a little over 30 years ago it was all glitz and glamour, rock and roll."

Certainly, no history of Iranian pop music could ignore the cataclysmic change brought on by the 1979 Revolution, after which few of the musicians featured on these reissues stayed in Iran. Those who didn't flee -- notably, Googoosh until 2000 and Kourosh Yaghmaei through the present day -- were not able to record or perform their music in the Islamic Republic. Regardless, the merger of the assumption that Iranian pop emerged as a consequence of Western pop music with massive historical blind spots (created by rose-colored nostalgia for the "glitz and glamor" of the Pahlavi era) has created a dangerous political amalgam. On the one hand, the product mirrors an imperialist logic whereby "Eastern" pop culture could never be imagined to exist without the influence of "Western" pop culture. On the other, it reinscribes the most retrograde forms of nostalgia found in the Iranian diaspora.

Among the major problems in the historical narrative presented by these releases is the strict but unexplored dichotomy presented between "Western music" and classical Iranian forms. The success of this era of Iranian pop is viewed as the express result of a culturally liberal political atmosphere that allowed musicians to learn from British beat bands and American soul singers, and then apply what they had learned to a classical idiom. Like most pop music from that era, however, the story is neither so neat nor so linear. Pop musicians in Iran were influenced by the lush Italian pop of the Ennio Morricone school (Googoosh in particular was taken by this influence), the beats and rhythms of Bollywood and Indian pop, the fuzz guitars of Turkish psych, and the nearly global appeal of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones among countless others.¹² Despite what some of the people reissuing these records would have the listener think, the story of Iranian pop music is not linear -- from West to rest and then suddenly crushed -- but rather, like the music itself, one dominated by too many melodies and countermelodies to be captured in full in any one document.

1. Fans were so enamored of Clyde the Camel that Stevens brought him back for an appearance in a novelty Christmas song released just a few months after the initial success of "Ahab." Four decades later, Stevens attempted to replicate his greatest success with a 2002 recording titled "Osama, Yo Mama."

2. El-Bakkar, a Lebanese-born musician and actor, had first found fame portraying the Oriental rug salesman in the long-running Broadway production of Fanny. His Fanny costar Nejla Ates was featured as the nearly nude exotic beauty on his album covers.

3. The Googoosh compilation is released by Finders Keepers Records, a London-based label.

4. The Kourosh reissue is, as far as I can tell, the only Iranian artist retrospective that went straight to the source -- the musician himself -- for authorization and information. Released by hip-hop-linked reissue label Now-Again, which is based in the United States, the reissue's packaging features numerous previously unseen photos and extremely informative liner notes put together with major contributions from Yaghmaei himself. To hear Now-Again label head Egon discuss the process of getting in touch with Yaghmaei and compiling the reissue, listen to the podcast interview conducted by Wax Poetics magazine.

5. Examples of current labels include the aforementioned Finders Keepers Records, Sublime Frequencies Records, and Mississippi Records, among others. Both Finders Keepers and Sublime Frequencies have websites that list their releases. For an important scholarly article on the emergence and success of these labels, see David Novak, "The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media," in Public Culture 23, no. 3 (2011): 601-34.

6. The term "world music" is credited to 1950s Wesleyan University-based ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown. As a catchall category in American and European markets, "world music" (and its closely related cousin "world beat") gained popular traction in the 1980s.

7. For a comprehensive history of some of the trends outlined here, see Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997).

8. Novak, "The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media," 604.

9. All information on Cambodian Rocks has been culled from Novak's article and from the Cambodian Rocks page on the Discogs website. Novak contends that this release in particular marks a sea change in the production of "world music" for American and European audiences.

10. This quote is from a conversation I conducted with Saedinia in July 2012. In that conversation, Saedinia further maintained that "with Pomegranates, we really did try to do something that would be a robust exploration of the music, giving [listeners] a lot of the different flavors. After discovering the music ourselves, we had a strong impulse to turn Iranian kids on to the music as well as introduce it to fans of global pop sounds."

11. Persian Funk goes on to inform the reader that "in 1979 religious leaders throughout Iran grew angry with what they perceived to be the Shah's attempt to wipe out Islam from their country. This sparked the Iranian revolution that put the anti-western Ayatollah Kohmeini [sic] in power."

12. The curators of some of these releases often unwittingly reveal their ignorance of these myriad layers of influence. For example, Mehr Pouya -- whose LP Jumbo Africa was recently bootlegged -- played an instrument that was not indigenous to Iranian classical music, the sitar. The notes to the reissue of this record seem to be unaware of this, and instead blandly state that "Abbass Mehrpouya was one of Iran's top sitarists before passing in 1993." Of course, this claim is not untrue, but it nonetheless gives the impression that the sitar was common to either Iranian pop or classical music -- it wasn't. I would argue that the globalized impulse that influenced George Harrison of the Beatles and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to experiment with the sitar is likely part of the reason that Mehr Pouya also did so during the same years as Harrison and Jones.

B|ta'arof is a print magazine about the collective history and experience of Iranians across generational and geographic borders. This article was originally published in the Fall 2012 issue. For more information, please click here.

Copyright © 2012 B|ta'arof

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"I'll eat your liver!"...and other thoughts to chew on.

[ dispatch ] As my taxi driver pulls onto the highway from Imam Khomeini International Airport, I ready myself for a conversation all the way to central Tehran. Cab fare in Iran more often than not buys you a performance covering the driver's views on the hot topics of the Islamic Republic: inflation, corruption, and sex.

Which is why, in the early hours of the morning, I am relieved to discover my cabbie, Mosafa, just has breakfast on his mind. "You are my guest!" he says, pouring us two glasses of tea from a thermos as he drives 75 miles per hour, straddling lanes. Handing me the tea, he pops a sugar cube between his front teeth. "A hundred years ago there was a fatwa to boycott sugar because the Shah gave the trade to Belgium," he explains. "But another mullah said it was not haram [religiously prohibited] to use it like this," he says, sipping tea though the sugar cube.

Suddenly, he pulls over at a rest stop and triumphantly opens his trunk to reveal a prepared breakfast of cheese, pomegranates, and fresh sangak, all neatly laid out on a little Persian carpet. Perched on the edge of the open trunk, we eat and listen to the call to prayer from the four gigantic minarets of the Behesht-e Zahra complex, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, is buried.

"That's where the 12th Imam sleeps!" Mosafa says sarcastically. Shia Muslims believe that the Mahdi, the 12th successor of the Prophet Muhammad, did not die in the tenth century but was "hidden" until his reemergence on Judgment Day. "He returned in 1979," Mosafa jokes. "But the innocent lost and the greedy won."

Approaching a working-class district of south Tehran, its hotchpotch concrete buildings painted with the faces of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, we watch an argument unfold beneath an adjacent traffic light. A woman is applying makeup in her rearview mirror, oblivious to the green light ahead of her. The man in the car behind impatiently beeps his horn, prompting her to casually put away her lipstick, lean out her window, and scream "Yabo!" at him -- donkey. "You father's a donkey!" he angrily retorts, but she is long gone.

On the Chamran Motorway, named after an Iranian NASA scientist-cum-Islamic revolutionary, I hail a passing cab, which stops 150 feet down the road and deftly reverses back to me against the oncoming traffic. The driver, Amin, used to be a senior engineer at IranAir, but lost his job last year after the domestic carrier was put on the sanctions list. "Now I drive this car and smuggle in air parts though Dubai and Turkey part-time," he explains in perfect English, thumbing his earlobe. "Iran's domestic planes would not get off the ground without the black market. They use old Russian planes or Boeings that have just been patched up since the early 1980s. It's very dangerous for the people."

The skills of the average Tehran taxi driver are often depressingly surplus to the job's requirements. It is not uncommon to meet engineers, lawyers, and even doctors behind the wheel of a cab. Most have lost their jobs due to the broad economic malaise caused by sanctions and monetary mismanagement by the outgoing Ahmadinejad administration. "We had privatization in the 1990s, but the businesses just went into the hands of people in government," Amin says. "It could be Sepah [the Revolutionary Guards], the mayor, or the politicians. Somebody is always taking a cut."

By way of demonstration, he slaps the outside of the door of his Peugeot. "Ten million rials of every assembled car in Iran goes straight to the Supreme Leader's office," he says. "The ideology has all gone; it's only about money now. People at the top don't know how much longer they may be in their positions, so they are racing to fill their pockets."

But Amin does not place sole responsibility for Iran's problems on its leadership. Sanctions play a role, as well. "Do the Americans and the Zionists think that putting us into poverty will change what our leaders do?" he says, letting out a humourless laugh.

Returning home in the evening, I am picked up by a young driver named Reza in a domestically manufactured Khodro, souped up with alloy wheels, stereo subwoofers, and flashing aqua-blue lights around the dashboard. Speeding around the now empty streets of uptown Tehran, he blasts out pounding house music and chain smokes Bahmans. Then comes the boasting about how much sex he has in his taxi and, warming to his inventions, a story about how a girl once paid him a million tomans to make love to her in the back seat. On the motorway we pick up speed, causing the car to rattle as Elton John's "Sacrifice" blares from the sound system. Catching up to a car of young women, Reza shouts the lusty catchphrase "I'll eat your liver!" at them, laughing hysterically as he flies by. "Jigaret ro bokhoram."

"You like kubideh?" Reza abruptly inquires. He's asking about minced kebab, an Iranian favorite. I give a perplexed nod. "Everyone cheats with kubideh now. They should be only lamb, onion, lots of fat, and no eggs. Because of the inflation, people are putting in sawdust," he says irritably. "Everyone is a cheater in Tehran today."

Thankfully, our journey reaches its end and I ask how much the fare is. "Ghabel nadare [for you it costs nothing]," he responds, adhering to the Persian rules of ta'rof, the codified exchange of blandishments to demonstrate one's hospitality, humility, and generosity. "Ta'rof nakon!" I reply -- don't do ta'rof -- itself a form of ta'rof.

Finally, he asks for 15 tomans, a high fare. I curtly hand it over. Taking the cash, Reza winks and says, "There are no fair prices in Iran anymore."

Photos by Ian and Julia (homepage, November 2008) and camshots (above, April 2006) via Flickr.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

Prize Package of the Decade

Over half a million dollars staked on unique research project

Basij chief Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naghdi offered an award of 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of gold to anyone who can prove that another government on Earth is "more criminal" than that of the United States. The commander of the Islamic Republic's national paramilitary organization made the remarks at a ceremony held to mark the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran.

"We will give a prize to any historian or researcher who can prove there is a more criminal country in the world than the U.S.," Naghdi said, adding that analysts seeking the prize would have until the Persian calendar year 1400, which begins in March 2021, to make their case.

The general concluded, "These researchers have ten years to research this topic and prove it, and we know they will not be able to perform this task because no matter how much we researched the matter we could not discover anyone more criminal than the U.S."

In Friday trading, gold closed in the New York market at $1,676.90 per ounce, making the Basij international legal affairs research prize worth approximately $590,000 at press time.

Quote of the Day

"The administration fully welcomes your notice [and] won't engage in domestic quarrels and disputes, and will patiently tolerate all unkind behavior as before."

-- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, posted on the president.ir website a day after the Supreme Leader declared the airing of political conflicts ahead of next June's presidential election to be "treason." Ahmadinejad has been in a heated dispute with judiciary chief Sadegh Larijani, who denied the president permission to visit his incarcerated press adviser, Ali Akbar Javenfekr, in Evin Prison. In his letter to Khamenei, Ahmadinejad pledged to focus on resisting what he characterized as the West's "full-fledged economic war" against the Islamic Republic.

Video of the Day

Tape of a conversation between Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and President Lyndon B. Johnson that took place on May 18, 1965. In the recording, recently released by the Johnson Library, the two leaders discuss the Shah's escape from an assassination attempt the previous month.

Statistic of the Day

9,719,000

-- Number of illiterate Iranians above the age of six, according to Literacy Movement Organization of Iran chief Ali Bagherzadeh. Out of that 15 percent share of the total population, about 3.5 million people are between the ages of ten and 49, considered the economically "productive" range.

Preconditions of the Day

Renounce Israel, disband CIA, and Iran might talk

Despite his conviction that there is no more criminal nation on Earth, General Naghdi declared that Iran is ready to sit down at the negotiating table with the United States, so long as it meets a few conditions first.

The Basij commander said that the United States must demonstrate that it has foresworn its "beastly nature," close its military bases in 50 countries, bring home its warships from the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, and disband the Central Intelligence Agency so that it can no longer stage coups around the world against governments that are not to its liking.

"The U.S. must publicly announce it will no longer support Israel [and] close its prisons at Guantánamo Bay and other parts of the world," Naghdi added. If the United States takes those steps, he said, "it can finally prove its worthiness to have relations with the wise Iranian nation."

The general went on to say that the United States has repeatedly been defeated in what he called its "plotting" against the Islamic Republic. "If they do not believe in the power of God and the transcendent," he stated, "they can believe in the experiences they have gained in their encounters with the Iranian nation."

Link of the Day

http://www.farhangnews.ir/content/11876

-- Farhang News says that the female host of a Qur'an show on the state-run Seda o Sima radio network is "causing a stir" by advising callers on proper scriptural pronunciation "in a seductive manner." Scroll to the bottom of the Farsi website's report for an audio clip.

Social Studies of the Day

Hojatoleslam Hossein Dehnavi, described as a professor and "expert on family issues," talks with Raja News about gender relations in the West (hojatoleslam is a clerical rank just below that of ayatollah):

In the Western lifestyle, girls and boys become girlfriend and boyfriend for two to three years and afterward, if they feel they are suitable for one another, they become engaged without informing their families -- because family is not that important in the West. Then they remain engaged for a few years, and because they have no religious restrictions they have all sorts of relations with one another.

Of course, after the age of 18 they also do not have any legal restrictions and after a few years of engagement they decide to get married, but because in the West the law is on the side of women -- in other words, their social classification is women, offspring, dog, and then men, and the feminists have exerted a lot of pressure in this regard -- consequently they don't get married and they only live together. And they might live together for the rest of their lives because they cannot officially wed to due to the legal ramifications.

I feel I have to point out here that some people say our divorce rate is higher than the Westerners'. [This] is 100 percent wrong. It is not the case because in the West [often] no marriage takes place to be registered and [still they] compare their divorce rates to ours.

For example, a serious problem that they have [in the West] is the problem of children without guardians. In other words, the children conceived through unislamic and inhumane relations -- when they are born, they [the parents] hand them over to the state and their government is therefore faced with a serious problem.

Another one of the problems of the Western lifestyle is the illegitimate relations that young boys and girls have in their roommate stage. In this stage, they have no commitment to one another; therefore women have all sorts of relations with other men and men with other women.

An official with the Tehran City Council Health Commission stated in August that Iran now has the fourth-highest divorce rate in the world. Earlier this week, Hemayat daily ran a feature on how the Iranian divorce rate has quadrupled over the past 15 years. According to a study published in 2009 by Tehran's Shahid Beheshti University, 90 percent of nonarranged, or "love," marriages in Iran end in divorce, compared to 15 percent of those arranged under parental supervision.

Photos of the Day

Part 1: The Fork in the Revolutionary Road | Part 2: The Long Shadow of Iran's Summary Executions | Part 3: The Abandonment of Democratic Principles

How "democrats" like Bazargan and Bani Sadr helped pave the way to dictatorship.

From before the election, An-Nahda, a moderate Islamist party, vowed and at every step demonstrated its commitment to democratic principles. After winning a strong plurality of 41 percent of the seats in the assembly, An-Nahda warily formed a coalition with two equally wary secular parties. The coalition gave itself a year to complete deliberations about the constitution. Those deliberations aired regularly on radio and television, and were discussed and debated at length in the broadcast and print media and online by a broad cross section of the Tunisian society.

The preamble to the constitution was approved several weeks ago by one of the most important committees of the Constitutional Assembly. Much of the debate that led to it had to do with the role of Islam and sharia in politics. In the compromise language of the third paragraph, the constitution is said to be "[f]ounded on the fundamentals of Islam and its open and moderate aims, and on the lofty and humanistic values inspired by the civilizational accomplishments of the Tunisian People."

Every side in the debate had to pay a heavy price for this compromise language. The moderate Islamists disappointed their conservative adherents by not stating unequivocally that the constitution is merely a modern garb for the sharia. Secularists bemoan the reference to Islam, even though it does not name a privileged school of interpretation or define a professional priest class with a monopoly over the interpretation of religious texts.

Iran's current constitution was not examined in a constitutional assembly. On August 3, 1979, the Islamic Revolutionary Council decided to have elections for a deliberative body to debate the draft constitution. The goal was neither to cede power to this elected body, nor to elect a constitutional assembly. Rather, the goal was to create an Assembly of (legal) Experts with the narrowly predetermined goal of debating and approving Mehdi Bazargan's draft constitution. Referencing Bazargan's earlier referendum for an Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini and fellow clerics argued successfully that the most credible legal experts for an Islamic republic would be experts of the divine law -- that is, clerics. But not to leave matters to chance, Khomeini partisans demanded and ensured an extremely low number of deputies, 75, divided among the country's regions with the transparent goal of weighting the assembly against population centers and in favor of conservative rural areas. Bazargan had wanted a constitutional assembly, but he accepted the Assembly of Experts idea proposed by a fellow moderate Islamist on the Islamic Revolutionary Council. The elections were riddled with gross irregularities at every level and succeeded in producing a comfortable majority of 55 clerics in the assembly.

Final touches: American hostage-taking and referendum on new constitution

This unrepresentative Assembly of Experts was given a mere two months to debate the draft. However, having "won" an absolute majority in the assembly, Khomeini partisans decided to do away with the subtleties of Bazargan's draft constitution. And shortly after the first meeting of the assembly, it was unceremoniously discarded with the goal of composing a new constitution from scratch, without changing the time frame.

The brand new constitution composed by these experts took the antidemocratic ideas of Bazargan's draft to their logical conclusion and imposed a crude Shia form of caliphate on Iran, worked out in Khomeini's writings on the rule of the jurisprudent. According to Khomeini's version of this idea, the person best qualified to rule is the leader of the people's self-appointed betters and guardians, who are also self-authorized monopolist interpreters of the Jafari Shia school of Islam. In the draft, not only is the parliament, or Majles, subject to extensive oversight by a beefed-up Guardian Council, but a supreme jurisprudent becomes the ultimate authority of the state.

Iranians had been given no say in the secret initial drafting of Bazargan's constitution; nor were they given a say in the composition of the assembly or its mandate, those decisions having been made for them by Bazargan and fellow members of the country's interim parliament -- the central committee of Khomeini's political organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Council. Many potentially popular candidates were prevented from participating in elections according to rules and rulings Khomeini's various Islamic revolutionary bodies were able to make up as needed in a constitutional vacuum; some of the very few independent people elected to the assembly were disqualified, again, in the same constitutional vacuum that permitted the Islamic Revolutionary Courts by October 14 to execute more than 600 people.²

The experts in the assembly, under tremendous pressure to be done with the process, churned out the brand new constitution within the allotted two months because they knew time was against them. Even as early as March 1979, Iranian civil society was showing signs of alertness and cohesion. The forced veiling of women in government bureaucracies "suggested" by Khomeini and enforced through intimidation, the undemocratic passages of the draft constitution, and the closure of dozens of popular magazines and papers like Ayandegan were protested, sometimes by very large crowds.

Although critics were muzzled and terrorized, and protests were regularly met with brutal attacks by armed thugs, opposition to the new constitution was spreading, beginning to organize, and becoming louder.

It was at this critical juncture, right before the constitution was put to popular vote, that on November 4, militant Islamist students affiliated with clerics in Khomeini's circle occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took the diplomats and staff hostage, ostensibly to protest the Shah's admission into the United States for medical treatment.

In a catastrophic decision serving his short-term opportunistic goal of eliminating secular and other political opponents and of guaranteeing the passage of the constitution in the upcoming referendum, Khomeini first tacitly and then forcefully sanctioned the hostage taking.

Bazargan's service to Iranians

Until this point, each of Khomeini's attacks on democracy was led and facilitated by Bazargan and his Freedom Movement, moderate Islamists on whom many Iranians had depended to help navigate the country toward democracy. On streets around the country in 1978-79, Iranians had given voice to their desire for freedom from tyranny so that the nation's policies would reflect their will. In other words, they wanted democracy, the ability to rule themselves. During the Revolution, Khomeini had given forceful expression to what Iranians wanted: an end to dictatorship. But Khomeini had no democratic credentials and needed those of the National Front and Bazargan's Freedom Movement, an Islamic off-shoot of the National Front.

Without the blundering policies of the National Front in 1978-79, which offered unconditional support to Khomeini during the most critical period of the Revolution,³ and certainly without the Freedom Movement's collusion with Khomeini, which extended for nearly a year after the fall of the Shah, his bigoted worldview would have likely met immediate resistance or at least would have been recognized more clearly and much sooner by a wider swath of society.

By gratefully accepting Khomeini's appointment to head an interim government, Bazargan not only delivered the fatal blow to the existing constitutional order, thereby removing all constitutional checks on the power of Khomeini, who gave his sanguinary partisan clerics carte blanche to kill and terrorize with impunity. By accepting the appointment, Bazargan also accepted its theocratic basis: Khomeini's claim that, as a high-ranking Jafari Shia cleric, he had "guardianship of the sharia" and therefore a divine right to rule and appoint rulers in the absence of the last Shia imam.

Having demolished the constitutional order, Bazargan and his interim government were in charge of the executive branch, with the Islamic Revolutionary Council -- the central committee of Khomeini's political organization, formed earlier in France -- acting as interim parliament. Bazargan's democratic sensibilities did not compel him to demand the formation of a representative national congress in the absence of a legitimately elected parliament, and he saw no moral impediment to working in a council making national decisions that was closed to women and the entire range of political perspectives in Iranian politics aside from those of Khomeini partisans.

These initial attacks on the sovereignty of Iranians were followed within two months by Bazargan's yes/no referendum on an unknown form of Islamic theocracy, a referendum he had the effrontery to present to Iranians as democratic. Subjected to the news of executions in the hundreds and other horrors unleashed by the Islamic Revolutionary Courts operating in a constitutional vacuum of Bazargan's making, the "referendum" deprived Iranians of a chance to form and organize a semi-functioning civil society before they could review and understand what they were voting on.

Bazargan then offered the country a draft constitution in which the subjection of Iranians, in principle and in practice, to the will of their self-appointed religious betters in a Guardian Council was codified into law, thereby dishonoring perhaps the most important precedent of the 1907-1909 Constitutional Revolution and a landmark achievement of Iran's difficult journey to democracy.

Bazargan further disenfranchised the country's citizens when he ran the elections not for a fully empowered and representative constitutional assembly of people's deputies reflecting the diversity of Iranians, but a small Assembly of Experts -- by which was meant clerics who saw themselves as monopolist professional interpreters of Islamic law -- with a crash two-month mandate to create a theocracy.

However, even Bazargan understood that Khomeini's tacit and then forceful endorsement of the embassy hostage taking was not just an act of war and an attack on the very idea of diplomacy, endangering fundamental national interests and with the potential to provoke a retaliation that would bring unimaginable suffering upon the Iranian people. He understood, as well, that it was designed to create an acute national crisis that would allow Khomeini and his partisan clerics to arrogate unbridled emergency powers to go after undesirable political groups.

So two days after the embassy seizure, on November 6, Bazargan resigned, arguably making his only service of national importance to Iranians after the Revolution.

This "service," of course, came at a price. The resignation was internationally perceived as a humiliating insanity plea for Iran as a nation. It succeeded in presenting the hostage taking not as an aberration in the operations of a functioning state representing the will of its people through its deliberative bodies, but as the mindless act of frenzied forces that had usurped state control.

After Bazargan's resignation, the Islamic Revolutionary Council, now led by Abolhassan Bani Sadr, another moderate Islamist, took overt charge of the government.⁴ The council put the draft constitution to another ill-conceived, hasty referendum, whose execution evidenced even less concern over electoral integrity than its predecessor. And while the country was preoccupied with the possibility of a cataclysmic war, the constitution was approved -- just as the Islamic Republic of Iran itself had been -- by 98 percent of the vote.⁵

This formative revolutionary period set the stage for the commission of heinous act after heinous act, a record of inhumanity that has left deep scars on all Iranians, at home and abroad.

In Tunisian Constitutional Assembly, opponents debate and deliberate

As I write this, Tunisia is in its formative revolutionary period. And although the Tunisian experience bears no resemblance to how in 1979 democracy was subverted by Iranian leaders, many Tunisians with whom I spoke were frustrated with all the parties in the Tunisian Constitutional Assembly: An-Nahda and its secular partners and the opposition. Some argue, quite persuasively, that the different parties are unclear or inconsistent.

But, again, looking through the lens of the Iranian Revolution, I remain very hopeful. Tunisia's political groups are in uncharted territory, and they are groping their way, which is more or less the slow, messy way democracies work. An-Nahda and Islamists on the one hand and the secularists on the other are, perhaps for the first time, talking with each other and learning to see themselves through the eyes of people with whom they disagree. In other words, Tunisian Islamists and secularists in a country with a long Islamic cultural tradition are having critical discussions of the sort that Islamic-majority societies have rarely had the chance to have.

Thirty-three years ago in Iran, Iranian politicians -- specifically, moderate Islamists and secularists who claimed allegiance to democracy -- failed abysmally to create conditions for such a conversation. Instead of deliberation, force and terror were allowed to determine issues. And Iranians have been reaping the painful fruits of those failures in vision and leadership.

In the meantime, neither nationalist religious groups nor secularists in Iran, or abroad, have engaged in honest self-examination and clearing of the air through the kind of intense but respectful communication with opponents that is taking place in Tunisia.

1. If this figure is extrapolated to Iran, assuming a population of 39 million in 1979, it should have had a constitutional assembly with no fewer than 700 members.

2. "Report on massacre rejected Khomaini calls a halt to executions," Globe and Mail, October 19, 1979, p. 3.

3. The leaders of the National Front, under Karim Sanjabi, joined Bazargan's government. They resigned in mid-April 1979 and finally began distancing themselves from Khomeini.

4. Bani Sadr may have played the greatest role in the collapse of the constitutional order in 1979. He was involved in negotiations that led to Sanjabi's three-point declaration associating the National Front with Khomeini in ways that violated the organization's fundamental principles and stands out as the single greatest error in its history. If he is to be believed, Bani Sadr was one of the most effective voices against a meeting between Shapour Bakhtiar as prime minister and Khomeini. And finally, Bani Sadr was an author of Bazargan's draft constitution.

5. Bakhash, Shaul, "Chapter 1: Historical Setting," in Iran: A Country Study, 5th ed., edited by Glenn E. Curtis and Eric Hooglund, p. 56 (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, 2008; available online).

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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"Everyone wants to go back," says one former student.

[ feature ] In 1978, the Tehran American School closed its doors after 24 years in operation. J. Thom McInnis, a high school senior at the time, had a part-time job working for Pan Am. "I remember evacuating many of my schoolmates and their families those last days when I worked at the airport," he says. "I remember fathers throwing their children over the heads of the crowds at the airport in a bid to get closer to the front of the line for those limited seats out of the country."

For Anthony Roberts, author of Sons of the Great Satan, the sudden departure from Iran came as a shock. "I was angry. I was pissed off. I didn't understand it because I was a teenaged boy. Now that I am older, I understand it was the loss that really made me angry." Overnight, his whole world abruptly changed. He was separated from his closest friends and uprooted from the place he'd come to call home.

When I left Iran, I didn't know what happened to any of my classmates for 30 years.... It wasn't like so-and-so went off to this college and so-and-so went off to that college. It was like 24 hours. You can pack one bag. You have to leave now. Nothing set up on the other end. You're just going home to set up with relatives and go on from there.

Social networking brought the former classmates back together. They started reaching out to one another and now have several active groups on Facebook. Roberts says, "For some of us there were tears. It was like a 30-year-old weight lifted from us."

Paul Stevenson, who now teaches linguistics and grammar in Iraqi Kurdistan, was excited to go to Iran as a teenager. He was interested in language and enjoyed the chance to learn Persian. He talks about the special dynamics of the students at the Tehran American School. "The intensity of our relationships was stronger because we didn't have the rest of American society to live our American lives. School was a very, very big deal. It was a lot of fun being there. We'd get there early. There were plenty of after school activities."

He explains that, like most teenagers, he was too absorbed in his own life to notice the growing political unrest around them.

"If you really wanted to know what was going on in Iran at the time, you needed to talk to the elementary school kids," says Jonathan Lee, who was "a very mature 12" at the time he lived in Iran. Many of his classmates had parents in the State Department who worked closely with the Shah's government. Adults spoke in front of them, he explained. They thought they were too young to understand. "We'd get on the bus every morning and compare notes."

Despite his young age, Lee explored every corner of Tehran using his father's expense account to hire taxis. "For some odd reason, Iranians thought I looked like a young Cassius Clay. We had doors opened up for us because everywhere we went people saw this young black American kid who looked like Muhammad Ali. Everywhere I went, a crowd gathered."

When American Bell International (now AT&T) evacuated its employees and their families, Lee was excited to return to the States. Soon after he started school, however, things changed. With the hostage taking at the U.S. Embassy in November 1979, Iran became Americans' enemy number one. Lee states, "I was not an American kid who lived in Iran; I was the Iranian. I got picked on constantly."

T. Lilly Littlewater's father was in the U.S. military. Her neighbors were families with people who worked for the Shah. "I hate to think of what happened to the people we left behind," she says. When she was older and asked her father what had happened to them, he wouldn't tell her. "You don't want to know," he said.

"My father really believed he was serving his country. When we left Iran, he was a changed man. He never recovered."

Despite the fact that most led lives fairly isolated from Iranian society and had few if any Iranian friends, many of the former students of the Tehran American School developed life-long ties to the country. "I feel exiled from what I consider my second home," says Littlewater.

What they miss about Iran is not all that different from what any Iranian in the diaspora misses. They miss eating labu, roasted beets, sold on the side of the road. They miss the mountains, hiking and camping. They miss bread cooked over open flames in ancient ovens. They miss their friends and the community they formed together.

Lee comments, "Why do people fall in love with Iran? Anyone who has spent time there will say it's the people and the country."

Littlewater adds, "Both my parents were American Indians. One of the reasons Iran was so relatable to me was because it is so ancient, like my culture. Our cultures aren't really similar though. The similarity is in how ancient and how valuable ancient cultures are to this world.... I felt very comfortable there."

As a teenager in Tehran, Anthony Roberts listened to Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, dosing himself with readily available hashish and rotgut alcohol. "The good old Tehran daze," he says. He and his friends found ways around restrictive parents, tense family situations, and the unfamiliarity of their surroundings. In many ways what he describes is not unlike what many urban teenagers experience today. "I get freaked out when I see these young Iranian kids playing Pink Floyd and stuff like that. Because I think they are in the same emotional state we were in back then," Roberts says. "Depressed. 'Woe is me.' That music is kind of the freedom of it, too. Of course, they are more depressed than we were. We didn't get depressed until we felt unsafe."

The collapse of the Shah's regime came as a surprise to many of the students of the Tehran American School, and their parents as well. They had witnessed growing social discord, but nothing that made them feel the society was on the brink of revolution. Littlewater remembers what her family's Iranian housekeeper, who she describes as a gentle woman, said to her one day, "We are going on to the streets, and we are going to protest the Shah. We are going to kill the Shah."

Roberts recounts the day the man who ran the neighborhood store started ignoring him. "He had turned that corner. He was done with Americans. He wasn't going to be rude to me, just pretend I wasn't there."

Because of his (un-American) love of soccer, the young McInnis made many Iranian friends at neighborhood pick-up games. He learned to speak fluent Persian in the homes of his new buddies, and even helped to make huge cauldrons of ash (porridge) for the Shia celebration of Ashura (pictured below). When his father was transferred out of Iran in the spring of 1978, he managed to convince his parents to let him stay behind to graduate. It wasn't until that autumn that he noticed a change and the "friendly people" he knew became openly aggressive.

On Facebook lately, the alumni of the Tehran American School have been talking about Argo. Who's going to see it in Atlanta? Omaha? L.A.? Chicago? They long for a glimpse of the lives they left behind, even if it's sensationalized. They want to see their own experiences reflected in the film. Online, many share their stories of harried evacuations, some noting the kindness and protection offered by their Iranian neighbors.

After leaving Iran, McInnis joined the military and was quickly given the task of using his fluent Persian and knowledge of Tehran to track the escape of the group of State Department employees featured in the film.

I fielded calls from Iranians, friends, and former employees of the U.S. government and American companies still in Iran.... Using my knowledge of the streets and bus systems of Tehran, I plotted the group's day-to-day and house-to-house movements on a large map until they finally reached the relative safety of the home of a Canadian diplomat on November 10, 1979.

All of the alumni with whom I spoke, even those who had experienced anti-American hostility firsthand, shared warm memories of the country and its people. Littlewater calls her time in Iran "a gift." In social encounters, she often speaks about her experiences living there and every once in a while even changes a negative opinion or two.

In an essay on his experience in Iran, McInnis writes,

It's easy for many to condemn what they do not know or understand. But for those of us that lived there and became friends with the people, their music, their food, their customs and their country, we know that there are many good people in Iran, and we hope for the day when peace and sanity will prevail and the doors to their homes will once more open to us.

While their online message boards reflect an array of opinions on all things Iran-related, including Argo, sanctions, and the prospect of war, the former students I spoke with long for nothing more than peace and a chance to return to a country that left a deep mark on them. "Everyone wants to go back," Lee says.

Roberts shares his wishes for Iran:

I wish they could celebrate their poetry and their culture and play rock and roll without hiding. I wish young girls could go out on the streets without being stopped about their hejab. I wish they didn't have to go through all that.... I don't want to see war. I don't want to see these sanctions. To me they are just another form of war. Economic warfare. It's a blockade. Where will that lead?

related reading | The House in Shemiran | Argo, The Canadian Caper & A Young Third Culture Kid

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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Translated literally, bi khial means "without intention." In practice it means not committing to anything or worrying about consequences, a sort of existential limbo that might have delighted Sartre or the Buddha, but which is maddening for anyone used to keeping appointments.

Even my friend M, who was brought up in the United States but had been back in Iran for just six months, displayed advanced signs of bi khialwhen I arrived. Keen to catch up on the gossip, I called her. The following day she called me back. "I am dying to see you," she exclaimed above the roar of traffic. "What are you doing for supper? I am just off to a meeting, I'll call you when I am done at around 5 p.m.?"

I waited. The hours passed. The next day she rang. "So sorry about last night," she said, her footsteps clattering. "My meeting ran late and then stuff happened and then I was in the mountains for dinner and there was no reception."

This sort of exchange, I noticed, characterised by varying degrees all my social interactions. At first I was frustrated: how was I supposed to meet up with anyone when it was impossible to make plans? I put this question to one of my cousins, who laughed. "Listen," he said. "This is Iran. Don't take life so seriously. Everything will come right, inshallah. You know Kamin-jan, bi khial."

So I learned to relax and take things as they came, the kind of living-in-the-moment espoused by yogis and self-help gurus. And it was surprisingly easy to let go of schedules and expectations when it meant that I, too, was absolved of responsibility. Instead I learnt to be unfazed when my cousin, a notoriously fickle character, said "Hey, shall we go to Dubai this weekend?." I replied, "Sure," safe in the knowledge that the trip would never happen.

Just as important, I had finally found the perfect way to deflect the sometimes-unbearable pressure of family relations; having always taken seriously the implied duty of visiting all the family elders and accepting invites from all the family's youngsters, my previous trips home to Iran had been packed from beginning to end with family parties. At these gatherings, barely-known members of my extended family would sit around examining me from head to toe, commenting loudly on my weight (too heavy), the shape of my eyebrows (too bushy), and my defiant disregard of the importance of finding a husband "before it's too late" (too unnatural). I would sit politely and smile compliantly, eating all the delicious food on offer instead and so return to London after a few weeks in Iran fatter and paler from having never managed to escape the clutches of my family to take to the mountains that towered so enticingly outside the window.

I now promised my legion of aunts that I would visit them in Shiraz "any day now" and then failed to show up, distracted by a party or a hiking trip in the mountains. The Alborz mountain range, whose skirts the city is busy climbing, has some lovely trails through mountain villages such as Darband and Darakeh. As a child I went hiking with my family there every weekend. In the lower reaches of both villages, restaurants now proliferate, overlooking -- and sometimes straddling -- the mountain pathways and streams that trickle down from the peaks. Daybeds are set on the tinkling waters themselves, and, after a day of sweating in Tehran's polluted streets, I spent long warm evenings lolling there, enjoying the fresh mountain breezes, the city laid out beneath us.

For me being bi khial meant the pleasure of pure laziness and the seduction of a complete lack of responsibility. But for those who live in Iran and who don't have the reassurance of a flat in London and a British passport and bank account, it is a visceral reaction to living under an authoritarian regime, in a world of sanctions and threats of war. In Iran, being bi khial is sometimes the only way to survive.

This article first appeared in Conde Nast Traveller's UK edition last month. Photos courtesy of Sevil Soltani.

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Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

Devotional Story of the Day

Construction of shrines out of control, says senior cleric

Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi has spoken out against the increase in the number of shrines in Iran dedicated to the offspring of the Shia Imams, known as imamzadehs, since the 1979 Revolution.

The ayatollah said that shrine-building results in the loss of faith among the people. "Some individuals claim dream-visions to exploit the sentiments of the public and build new shrines, and we need to be cautious about these individuals," he declared.

Imamzadehs -- the term is used for the shrines, as well as for those to whom they are dedicated -- are popular sites for pilgrimage and prayer. Some traditional Shiites also believe that they possess healing and other miraculous powers. Like much else in Shia practice, the inspiration to build an imamzadeh classically comes via dream, or khab dide -- seen in sleep.

The State Endowment and Charitable Affairs Organization, whose governor is appointed directly by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reports that it oversees more than 8,000 shrines.

Earlier this year, the conservative Siyasat Nameh website reported that over the past three decades, approximately 300 new imamzadehs were added annually around the country. "The number of imamzadeh [shrines] at the beginning of the Revolution was 1,500, and unfortunately this number has reached 10,500," the report stated.

A spokesman for the Endowment Organization recently confirmed that the number of shrines in Iran is now seven times greater than than the figure in 1979, and that Mazandaran province alone has 1,062. Imamzadehs are one of the most important sources of income for the charitable institution.

Quote of the Day

"I am of course ready to press the button if necessary. As long as I am prime minister, Iran will not have the atomic bomb. If there's no other way, Israel is ready to act."

-- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview that aired on Israel's Channel 2 Monday night. The interview appeared as part of an hourlong report that described how, in 2010, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for a unilateral strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The order was withdrawn after it was opposed by then IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and then Mossad director Meir Dagan.

Video of the Day

A panel discussion that took place last month in New York that addresses a report issued by the Iran Project, "Weighing Benefits and Costs of Military Action Against Iran," available here (PDF download). The panelists are former Ambassador William H. Luers, director of the Iran Project, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to improve communication between the U.S. and Iranian governments; Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; Admiral (ret.) Eric T. Olsen, former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command; and Professor Austin Long, codrafter of the report with Luers. The report's preamble states, "The paper draws no final conclusions and offers no recommendations. It offers an objective description of some of the prerequisites for thinking about the use of military force against Iran: the need to establish clear objectives, evaluate the capacity of the U.S. military to achieve those objectives, plan an exit strategy, and then weigh the benefits and costs of the military options." In the recording above, after introductory comments, the substantive discussion begins at the 12-minute mark.

Statistic of the Day

54 trillion tomans

-- The Iranian budget deficit for the Persian calendar year 1391 (March 2012-13), according to Majles deputy Gholam Reza Mesbahi Moghaddam, head of the parliament's Programs and Budget Commission. At the official rate of exchange, that is equivalent to approximately 4.3 billion dollars.

Government Roundup of the Day

Evin Arcade? Impeaching Majles leadership?

* Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said that Tehran Municipality is ready to buy the Evin Prison complex and build something in its place such as an amusement center. "The municipality has submitted a written request to the judiciary," the mayor stated, adding that the response was "initial readiness" to move ahead with the project. "We hope to this feat accomplished as soon as possible."

* Majles deputy Hossein Ali Haji Delagani said that following the "inappropriate conduct" of the parliament's Presiding Board in confirming the receipt of a motion to question President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a number of lawmakers are preparing a motion to impeach presiding board. He added that several lawmakers walked out of the Majles yesterday in protest at the board's decision to move ahead with summoning the president for grilling.

* Bank Melli released the names of debtors who have failed to repay loans of a billion tomans or more. Among those named by the bank are two Majles deputies: Mohsen Kouhkan and Iraj Nadimi, who received a loan of nine billion tomans five years ago to build four high-rise condominiums for fellow legislators -- a project that has still not been completed. Kouhkan stated his belief that the delay in repaying the loan benefits the bank as it will receive more interest, eventually.

Photos of the Day

Press Roundup provides a selected summary of news from the Farsi and Arabic press and excerpts where the source is in English. Tehran Bureau has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Any views expressed are the authors' own. Please refer to the Media Guide to help put the stories in perspective. You can follow breaking news stories on our Twitter feed.

Free Expression Story of the Day

Online activist Sattar Beheshti reported dead of torture in prison

Sattar Beheshti, 35, who was arrested last week in his hometown of Robat Karim and incarcerated in Tehran's Evin Prison on national security charges, has died after being subjected to torture while in custody, according to reports by several opposition websites. Beheshti has been described as a worker and his family's sole breadwinner who spoke out on labor and human rights issues via Facebook.

The conservative Baztab website reported, "Sattar Beheshti, who was arrested by FATA [cyber] police, has died while being interrogated." An account that appeared on the Kaleme website -- affiliated with Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, about to enter his 22d month of extralegal house arrest -- stated, "According to eyewitnesses who had spoken to family members held at Evin Prison, Beheshti had been severely beaten and tortured while under interrogation. Bruises and torture marks were noticeable on the political prisoner's body, face and head."

Beheshti's sister told the website that officials contacted her husband and told him to buy a grave and collect the body of his brother-in-law, which was apparently transferred to the forensics facility at the Kahrizak detention center. "We know nothing else," she said. "We don't know why they killed him, or what exactly happened. We don't know what happened. My brother was well when he left the house. He left on his own two feet. Everyone saw that he was healthy. My brother didn't even take headache pills.... They said he had heart problems!"

Established in January 2011 to "prevent espionage and sabotage," according to an official statement, Iran's cyber police force now has units in every province in the country. Officers with the unit responsible for Robat Karim, a town 15 miles southwest of the capital, raided Beheshti's home on Tuesday, October 30. In addition to placing him in custody --"violently," according to one report -- they confiscated his computer and notepads. For more on the Islamic Republic's crackdown on free expression online, see Oppression 2.0: Iranian Discontent in Cyberspace and A Kafkaesque Realm of Cyber Censorship.

Before his arrest, Beheshti wrote in a post, "They threatened me yesterday that my mother would wear black because I don't shut my mouth."

Headline of the Day

"Rafsanjani Calls for United Participation of Reformists in Presidential Election"

-- From Iran's semiofficial Mehr News Agency. The head of the expediency Discernment Council and former Iranian president -- whose son Mehdi and daughter Faezeh are currently incarcerated on anti-state charges -- met with members of a group identifying itself as the "Reformist Front" and "called for the united participation of the reformists in the presidential election" that will be held next June.

According to Mehr's report, Reformist Front spokesman Majid Mohtashami "said members of the front will meet with former president Mohammad Khatami in the near future to hold talks about the presidential election. The Reformist Front has announced that it will support Khatami if he decides to contest the election or will field only one candidate in the case Khatami refuses to run for the presidency."

Khatami shocked many of his political allies and Iranians generally when he voted in the elections for the Majles held this past March. He had repeatedly urged supporters of reform and democracy to boycott the elections unless the state met certain conditions, such as releasing all political prisoners and permitting a free press and unfettered political expression; none of those conditions were met.

The country's most prominent reformist parties -- the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organization, and National Trust Party -- have all been banned for more than two years. The two reformist candidates in the 2009 presidential election, Mousavi and former Majles Speaker Mehdi Karroubi, have both been under house arrest since the pro-democracy street protests of 25 Bahman (February 14) last year. Mohtashami is secretary-general of the Freedom Party of Iran, a relatively obscure group. It is unclear who the other participants in his Reformist Front are.

Video of the Day

A look at how Iranian state media covered the U.S. presidential election; Press TV is the English-language subsidiary of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. The clip begins with a report on President Barack Obama's successful bid for a second term, in which the host states that the United States "has a two-party system in which there is no chance for third parties to challenge for higher office." This is followed by an interview with Moufid Jaber of Beirut's Middle East Center for Studies and Public Relations, who opines, "Obama now has much less restraints than he had in his first term, because now he doesn't have a third term to worry about. So his approach concerning Iran and Syria is going to be much more flexible than it was before."

Geopolitical Analysis of the Week

"Reasons and Obstacles of a Military Attack by the Zionist Regime Against Iran"

-- Title of a report published on the Iranian Intelligence Ministry's website Tuesday and subsequently reposted by several state-aligned outlets. Beyond its use of the Iranian regime's standard epithet for Israel, the report, according to the Washington Post, "is otherwise devoid of the ideological tone that characterizes most ministry reports and that has been the Iranian norm for decades." The report addresses in unusually sober terms the international dispute over the Islamic Republic's uranium enrichment activities and the transparency of its nuclear program more broadly. Dismissing the prospect of military intervention would, it states, be an "unforgivable sin.... One of the options is to take diplomatic and political measures and use the potentials of international bodies, which is a necessary and less costly option." It observes, as well, that Obama's position is distinct from the rhetorically bellicose one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that the U.S. president "hopes to solve this issue peacefully and through diplomacy."

Photos of the Day

From diabetes to epilepsy, foreign-made medicines for dangerous maladies vanish from Iran.

[ series ] On Vali Asr Street, in a lower-income district of southwest Tehran, a 30-year-old man storms out of a pharmacy. Arash, a bachelor with long hair and a substantial mustache, lives with his father, for whose heart medicine he has been searching fruitlessly.

International sanctions, intended to compel Iran into reversing the development of its nuclear program, have brought not only straitened economic conditions for ordinary Iranians, they have made access to a host of vital pharmaceuticals difficult or impossible.

Arash says that his father had a heart attack a year ago. "His doctor prescribed Carnitine for him when he was released [from the hospital]. The doctor said that it is very beneficial for his heart muscles."

He says Italy produces the kind of heart medicine his father needs. "It comes as pills and in liquid form. But neither exist [here] these days." He says his father has tried domestically produced versions, "but they are not useful. They don't have the effect of imported drugs."

Arash believes sanctions are to blame for his inability to locate the Italian-produced drug. "Clearly, this is the result of the sanctions," he says. "When three or four months ago I could purchase this medicine easily, and since I can't buy them now, then what could be the reason? What happened during this period? We got sanctions imposed!"

He describes three different ways the government could make the medicine available. "First, develop the ability to produce effective drugs itself, or import the required expertise from the West, or third, import the medicine directly."

"Of these three things, none is about to happen," he concludes.

The European Union and the United States have both declared that they have not prohibited the export of medical goods to Iran in their sanctions protocols. Last month, when the E.U. ratified a new package of sanctions against Iran that effectively prohibits most financial transactions between Iranian and European banks, it explicitly excluded humanitarian assistance and medicine. Last month, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control altered its licensing regulations to ease the export of medicine and medical supplies to Iran. Even so, many Iranians say the ban on financial transactions and a prohibitive exchange rate keep the situation from improving for them.

Mahmoud, a pharmacologist in his 50s, works at a 24-hour pharmacy. He requests that neither his real name nor even the approximate location of his pharmacy be revealed.

"The shortage of medicine started slowly about a year ago," he says. "Imported drugs became rare, and then distributed in rations. Though not as abundant as before, they would show up, and if a person was patient, he would get some."

He adds, "But in the last few months the shortage has become a crisis." In July, he says, "medicine supplies diminished dramatically, and patients had to have medicine held aside for them through connections."

It is 11 in the evening and the pharmacy is quiet, though every once in a while Mahmoud has to tend to a client. I ask him if pharmacies are hoarding scarce medicines. "No, they don't hoard. They get three or four packages of each medicine, and they hold them for their regular customers. It is the distributors that offer limited quantities to pharmacies."

In Mashhad, the country's second-largest city, Elham, a 60-year-old physician who also works at a pharmacy, confirms her colleague's description. "By way of an example, a distributor allocates 400 packages of a medicine for the whole city of Mashhad and divides that between all the pharmacies," she explains. "We have between 20 and 30 distributors, who are all private."

I ask her about domestically made medicines.

"Domestic production, too, started to decline by early September. Usually there would be periodic shortages of one or two drugs. That had become normal since the economic crisis started three years back. It happened all the time. The supply of a few drugs, fewer than the number of fingers on a hand, would now and then decline. It wasn't like now, when all medicines have become rare."

She says that among the most important domestic medicines to become scarce are female contraceptives. But is the shortage related to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's statement this past summer that if the state's population control policy continues, Iran will face an increasingly aging and ultimately declining population?

"Of course many thought that the shortage was due to Khamenei's warning. But it wasn't related," Elham says. She says that the morning-after pill -- popularly known as Oorjancie, urgency -- has almost entirely disappeared from pharmacy shelves. "It's impossible to find any."

Elham mocks Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's health minister and the first female cabinet member since the 1979 Revolution.

"A few days ago, Mrs. Vahid Dastjerdi asked, 'Why do they baselessly claim that [contraceptive] medicine has been prohibited? Was Oorjancie prohibited? This is the pharmacies' ploy to create a black market.'" Elham states emphatically, "This, while those of us who work in pharmacies know that this medicine is in fact unavailable. Really, no medicine reaches any of the pharmacists for them to start a black market!"

Vahid Dastjerdi is an associate professor and a member of the Scientific Commission on Women's Health and Reproduction at the University of Tehran. In October, according to the semiofficial Fars News Agency, she announced, "The production of conception prevention drugs...has not been restricted. The pharmacies who say those things may be intending to start a black market, or have a special agenda..... We have no shortages of pregnancy prevention drugs, and they are all at the public's disposal. They are among the most inexpensive pills and can be procured easily."

But Elham's description seems to better reflect the reality of the situation. Ali, 20, a waiter in a café on Enghelab Avenue says, mischievously, "Really? There are no Oorjancies? This can't happen!" He breaks into a wide, sarcastic smile.

All of the anti-pregnancy medicines that have been available in Iran are domestically produced, so why the shortage? I raise the question with Nasser, a pharmacology student in his final semester of graduate school. He does his research for his dissertation in the morning and then works a shift in a pharmacy.

"The fact is that even domestic medicine can't be produced from heavenly ingredients," he says. "Usually, their basic ingredients have to be imported. Therefore, the sanctions have not only made imported drugs scarce, they have also made it impossible to produce domestic ones."

Nasser says that the main ingredient of emergency contraceptive pills is levonorgestrel. "Iran doesn't produce this," he explains. "Iran doesn't produce ingredients for any standard drugs. Even something like ranitidine [the generic name for Zantac], is not produced in Iran, nor is omeprazole [used to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease] and many others."

Referring to the government, he says, "It claims that it produces the main ingredients of a series of specific drugs, I don't know what, and that it is producing anti-cancer drugs with domestically made ingredients, and also medicines against M.S. It claims too, that it has decoded the secrets of synthesizing azithromycin."

I ask him to tell me more about it. "Azithromycin is an antibiotic," he says. "A couple of months ago they trumpeted that they have decoded its production secret. That's just one drug, while we see 300 standard drugs [missing]."

Nasser introduces me to his dissertation adviser, Mohammad, who studied in Great Britain. I ask him about what drugs he knows have become impossible to find in recent months. He says Clidinium-C, which is used against gastric cramps, is not available. Worse than that, he adds, is the disappearance of vital blood pressure medicines such as Triamterene-H.

Where do Iran pharmaceutical companies import their main ingredients from?

"Respectable companies, generally procured from Germany -- companies such as Sobhan and Bakhtar. But since Germany imposed sanctions, their business has deteriorated. Bakhtar Pharmaceuticals is practically out of business." He says that according to one of his closest friends, who works at Sobhan Pharmaceuticals, the company recently had to furlough their entire staff for a month due to lack of ingredients and income.

Mohammad says, "I don't know why Germany and other countries do not supply Iran with medicines and basic ingredients. Perhaps they [are willing to] do so, but Iranian companies don't have access to enough foreign currency to purchase them."

With September oil exports dropping to 860,000 million barrels per day, a 60 percent falloff from last year's average of 2.2 million, the Iranian Treasury's foreign reserves have been severely depleted. In addition, in the month leading up to October 3, "Black Wednesday," the Iranian rial crashed in open-market trading from 18,000 to 40,000 to the dollar.

The government has announced that it will provide importers of medicine, as an essential good, hard currency at the official exchange rate of 12,600 rials to the dollar. Yet even the health minister has criticized the Central Bank for not making available an adequate amount of foreign currency for healthcare-related imports. "We have not been able, in any way, to obtain the amount of international currencies that medicine importers need to offer necessary drugs," Vahid Dastjerdi said a few months ago.

She had previously declared that the Central Bank had exchanged only one seventh of the foreign currency -- around 300 million dollars -- needed for the country's foreign medicine requirements. In recent years, Iran has imported roughly two billion dollars worth of medicine annually.

"Basic ingredients from India and China...," Mohammad begins, then interrupts himself. "I just thought of something. I believe we have foreign currency issues, because if we didn't, we could procure all the basic ingredients from India and China. But we see all medicines becoming scarce," he says. "Thus, our problem is not directly a problem of importing medicines due to the sanctions; our problems are due to the economic sanctions pushing the Iranian currency into crisis. We have financial problems. We don't have foreign currency to pay China to give us basic ingredients."

Why don't importers use international monetary exchanges to meet their currency needs? "With a dollar above 35,000 rials, they can't avoid losing," Mohammad replies. "They can buy the ingredients, but they would have to sell their products at new [higher] prices, because medicine is under price control. Ahmdinejad's government can't provide foreign currency, nor will it allow drug prices to be raised." He qualifies his remarks. "Of course, there have been some price increases, but few. Amoxycilin was raised from 6,500 rials to 8,000 rials, and gelophen from 5,000 rials to 8,000."

My next stop is a pharmacy near Vanak Circle. I ask a young pharmacy assistant, Maral, how many times a day someone comes in for medication only to find it unavailable.

"Quite a few," she replies. "Half of the clients. If not half, then at least one third go back empty-handed."

Which medicines in particular have become scarce? "Foreign drugs are unavailable for diabetes -- truly nonexistent," says Maral. "Most patients are dissatisfied with domestically made diabetes medicines. Diabetes medicine is a day-after-day matter, which the diabetic patient must use constantly. Three to five times a day."

What happens if a patient doesn't? "His blood sugar will rise and he will pass away!" she says with a smile. Shaken, I ask, "What do you mean? He'll die?"

"Yes, it means that his blood sugar will not be regulated. It will increase and he will die. It's that simple." Maral adds, "Domestically produced versions are plentiful, but they are not controlled properly. In fact, patient's lives get shortened.... I see that the vital foreign drugs we're missing are metformin and glibenclamide, which, as I said, are for diabetes, causing patients to live only ten years instead of 20 more years."

She takes care of a customer and then looks over to see if I have any more questions. I ask if there are other lifesaving drugs that have also disappeared.

She names the blood pressure medicine that Mohammad previously mentioned to me. "Triamterene-H is totally nonexistent. But luckily, it can be temporarily substituted for with another one. Foreign psychoactive drugs no longer exist. Especially those who have epilepsy, their conditions can only be controlled by drugs we import, such as Liskantin [one of several Western brands of the anticonvulsant primidone]. If the patient doesn't take the proper drug, he will have an epileptic seizure."

And what are the effects of that?

"An attack can occur all of a sudden," Maral explains. "You might fall, hit your head somewhere, and have a concussion and die. You might be sitting behind a desk and suddenly you'll fall. Aside from that, a significant number of brains cells are destroyed with each epileptic attack. Your IQ and memory will decline. If you take this foreign-made medicine, your epilepsy will be managed, but if you don't, you will definitely have a seizure."

Can Iranian drugs manage epilepsy?

Maral replies, referring to Western-produced primidone, "See, patients would take two doses per day and their conditions were under control. Now that pill doesn't exist, so they go and take two Iranian-made ones and still have attacks."

Why is that?

"Because they lack quality. A patient would have to take four now in order to not have an attack. When he takes four, firstly, the drug's side effects increase, and furthermore, the patient is anxious that he may have another attack, and this stress is very harmful to an epileptic patient."

End of Part 1

related reading | Sanctioning Iran: Implications and Consequences | Health Group: Sanctions Put Tens of Thousands of Iranian Children at Risk

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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The talks have stalled since June. The Iranians may have been waiting to see if Obama won reelection and, now that he has, they will reengage. But Washington may also need to do something to reinvigorate the talks.

Diplomatic efforts so far have been based on small confidence-building measures, which have had disappointing results. So the Obama administration may want to consider a bolder proposal, such as outlining a comprehensive resolution to the impasse over Iran's disputed nuclear program. At the moment, there is a wide gap between Tehran and the P5+1 powers -- the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia -- so a proposal could also initially serve to marshal world opinion for tougher action if Iran does not comply.

What does Obama's reelection mean for prospects of a military option? What about the timeline of dealing with Iran?

Obama's strong preference is to resolve the dispute through diplomacy, centered on economic and diplomatic pressures to persuade Iran to compromise. But in the second presidential debate, the president also pledged, "We're not going to allow Iran to perpetually engage in negotiations that lead nowhere." And he has vowed that the United States will prevent the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapon, implying the military option.

Obama has strong-armed the Israeli leadership into accepting his approach. And his strategy was eventually endorsed by both Congress and his Republican opponents. Obama has also warned that Iranian proliferation could spark a nuclear arms race in the region. So he also has to deliver a result, one way or the other.

But making a decision to strike Iran, if diplomacy stalls, will not be easy. The natural tendency is to keep on talking as long as the other side is willing to engage. After the Iraq war, any decision to go to war based on U.S. intelligence assessments may also be difficult for a president to sell.

The timing is still unclear. Obama has so far refused to set a deadline or draw the kind of red lines demanded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Obama administration now estimates that it could be a year or more before Iran decides whether to enrich uranium beyond 20 percent -- high enough for a weapon. In the meantime, the Islamic Republic could accumulate sufficient nuclear material for a small arsenal before making any breakout moves.

The military option could include shadow warfare, such as cyber attacks, which the Obama administration has reportedly already used against Iran. The question is whether such measures will be enough to induce Iran to compromise or slow Iran's enrichment capabilities.

What are the prospects for a direct U.S.-Iran dialogue, either parallel or separate from the current international framework?

Washington will remain open to direct U.S.-Iran dialogue on a wide range of issues, but its strong preference will be for the nuclear issue to be resolved within the framework of the P5+1. But the Obama team will also not want to undermine international unity by appearing to go behind its partners' back.

The most fruitful form of U.S.-Iran dialogue would be secret meetings between trusted representatives of the two governments to explore whether a broader deal is possible. But a behind-the-scenes dialogue would be different from Track II meetings.

Since the last round of talks in June, has anything changed to increase pressure on Iran -- the economic crisis, sanctions, Syrian escalation?

Iran has come under considerable new pressure since the June talks. The United States and European Union have enhanced sanctions. Washington is convinced that sanctions significantly contributed to the increasing sense of economic crisis in Tehran. In September, the rial plunged some 40 percent in a few days. The coming months will be a testing time for the long-held U.S. view that sufficient economic pressure would lead Iran to compromise. Iran is often intransigent, despite the hardships.

On Syria, Washington sees the growing crisis as problematic for Iran. But Tehran is not necessarily convinced that President Bashar Assad will fall.

This article is presented by Tehran Bureau, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as part of the Iran project at iranprimer.usip.org.

Part 1: The Disappearance of Lifesaving Drugs

The most vulnerable could pay a grave price for the standoff over Iran's nuclear program.

[ series ] "For anyone or any group to say sanctions don't target the people of Iran is childish."

So said Fatemeh Hashemi of the Foundation for Special Diseases in an interview with Al Jazeera last month. The head of the major Iranian charity group continued, "They're well aware that sanctions put people under pressure, not the government.... If a drug can't be imported at all, or only in insufficient quantities, it is the people who will be traumatized." She said that the constriction on imports of medicine and medical equipment is imperiling the health of up to six million patients.

In a letter sent to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in mid-September, Hashemi, daughter of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, wrote, "The importation of medicines that can't be produced in Iran and certain basic ingredients have become impeded, and it will lead not only to the scarcity or complete absence of certain medicines, but also to the halt of production at several drug manufacturing plants in Iran within a month or two." She called on Ban to act to prevent further harm to the ill in Iran.

In a U.N. report made public in October, the secretary-general observed, "Even companies that have obtained the requisite license to import food and medicine are facing difficulties in finding third-country banks to process the transactions."

Patients with cancer, muscular dystrophy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) are among those most at risk, according to Mojtaba, the proprietor of a 24-hour pharmacy in east Tehran. He talks to me in particular about ALS, a neural system disease that damages the brain and the spinal cord. It leads to a slow loss of muscle control and eventually near-total paralysis. Most of those stricken with it don't survive for very long -- British astrophysicist Stephen Hawkins is a renowned exception. ALS medication, whose production requires advanced technological processes, has never been manufactured in Iran, which relies entirely on its importation.

I ask Mojtaba what happens if an ALS patient loses access tot he medication. "Paralysis sets in your body," he replies. "Suddenly your legs loose strength, and eventually your body weakens to the point that you can't inhale or exhale."

He adds, "You also have to include hemophiliac patients. If they miss their drugs, they will have unstoppable bleeding. There is an enzyme in the blood that helps it coagulate. People with hemophilia don't have this enzyme -- drugs make it up for them. Imagine what would happen if there was no drug available?"

All I can do is to shrug in resignation.

"A cut on a hemophiliac's hand will not stop bleeding, not tomorrow, never. He will bleed until he dies," says Mojtaba.

I ask him how things currently stand in terms of access to medicine, especially for those with such critical illnesses. "Fortunately we have not reached the condition where the ill have to be turned away from hospitals, being told, 'Go away and die, there are no drugs available for you.' But drugs with the quality of foreign-made ones don't exist any longer. At least I don't see any. High-quality domestic drugs have become rare too. Now they are being replaced by mediocre drugs. Thus, patients' response to the drugs diminishes and the probability of death rises."

In his estimation, if the current sanction regime continues, at what point will drug shortages yield a human catastrophe?

"In a year!"

He pauses and then offers an even more dire assessment. "If the rate of importation and production of drug remains as is, between six months to a year.

"It is impossible for me to think this government cares about the people. The solution is to barter oil for medicine with India. At least the catastrophe would be prevented. Indian drugs are of higher quality than domestic ones."

Payman, a young man waiting for his medicine at an adjacent window, joins our conversation. "Yes, the government is ineffectual, but we didn't have to struggle with such a catastrophe between 2005 and 2011. The E.U. and the U.S. say we have not been forbidden medicine. We are not children. When they block all financial transactions and there is no possibility of trade," he says, the truth of the matter is apparent.

"It's an insult to human intelligence," he continues. "They try to justify themselves ethically. 'We haven't prohibited medicine, we only imposed sanctions on banks.'"

Mojtaba laughs in agreement and offers an analogy. "It's like going to a pharmacy to buy medicine and the pharmacist says that he will sell it to you and you have to pay, except that he won't accept your payment! You have to pay, somehow, but he will not accept your payment in any form."

A commotion breaks out at another of the pick-up windows. A spectacled woman in her 50s is arguing with the pharmacy assistant about her order. I approach them to hear better.

The woman begs in a haunting voice, "This is a medicine for the nerves. I need it for my child in high school." The assistant responds, apparently repeating herself, "This drug has not been around for a long while."

The mother utters a plaintive Persian expression, "What kind of dirt should I pile on my head?"

Mojtaba advises her, "You should visit a few other 24-hour pharmacies. You may find a few doses."

Tears well in her eyes. "My son responds only to this drug. Other drugs don't affect him. He has been taking this medicine for many years." She adds with a sob, "What am I to do now?"

She leaves the pharmacy crying. Mojtaba turns to me. "There are a dozen of such cases each day," he says. "My job has become torturous."

I ask him what illness was involved in this case. "Epilepsy," he responds. There are "four or five different types of epilepsy, and each type requires a specific drug, but now, medicine for two types are nonexistent and they have to take drugs for other kinds. Its like using one type of antibiotic for all infections."

The incident has affected others around us. A middle-aged man says, "So, this is the land of the Imam Mahdi." Devout Shiites believe that the Mahdi, the last of the 12 classical Imams, will one day reemerge from centuries of occultation as a savior. To rouse popular support, conservative leaders in the Islamic Republic's ruling apparatus have often promoted veneration of the Mahdi.

Another lady adds sarcastically, "All thanks to Ahmadinejad for his handiwork. We have truly reached independence." She turns to Mojtaba and asks, "Doctor, isn't nuclear energy helpful for our sick?" Laughter erupts across the pharmacy.

Later, a conversation I strike up with a car salesman who is smoking outside his showroom in Shahrak-e Gharb, an upper middle class neighborhood in northwest Tehran, turns to conspiracy, as most topics with Iranians often do. Could President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by not allocating foreign reserves to the purchase of drug purchases, be trying to incite a humanitarian backlash against the international sanctions?

"I think they are playing a vicious game, because a year's medicine needs can be met with a couple of billion dollars. Iran's foreign currency reserves have declined, no doubt of that, but saying that it is unmanageable, this is doubtful. It is possible that they have intentionally created circumstances that cause drug shortages."

I ask him if he thinks that the United States would ease economic sanctions in response to international pressures over the issue.

"Improbable," he says. "The U.S. has embarked down a road which it will follow to its end. It has realized that there are two options: either wipe out Iran's nuclear program with a military attack, or through economic pressure on food and medicine. And there are no other choices on America's desk. It has chosen the latter."

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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Despite sanctions, two-term U.S. president still widely popular in Iran.

[ dispatch ] As dawn broke over Tehran this past Wednesday, international media outlets delivered the news of Barack Obama's victory over Mitt Romney in the U.S. presidential election.

"This is a very good event," says Reza, the proprietor of a traditional kebab restaurant in east Tehran. I have walked down an ornate mirrored stairway to the office where he receives me. Pictures of Imams Ali and Hossein hang behind his desk. "Obama is gold for us. Gold!

"I remember how boldly Obama asked Romney in their debate, 'It seems you are preparing for another war, to decimate people, like in Iraq and Afghanistan.'" The president didn't actually say anything like that in the candidates' three debates, but Reza's opinion is clear. He utters an expletive directed at Romney and adds, "Obama is very good for us."

He pulls out his cell phone and says jokingly, "I will send him an SMS...well, I don't have time now, but I will do it tonight and congratulate him on behalf of Ahmadinejad." He erupts into hearty laughter.

On November 7, 2008, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the first president of the Islamic Republic to congratulate a victorious U.S. presidential candidate. "I congratulate you on being able to attract the majority of votes of the participants of the election," he declared in an official statement. "You know the opportunities bestowed upon people by God are short-lived.... You are generally expected to make a fast and clear response to the demands for basic...change in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, which all people in the world and Americans want on top of your agenda." Ahmadinejad was abroad this past week, participating in the Bali Democracy Forum, and there has been no report that he has congratulated his American counterpart a second time.

Reza is so elated by Obama's reelection that he says he doesn't even mind if the sanctions continue. Imitating a style of loutish bravado known as laati in Tehran, he drawls, "How decent, these sanctions! They will serviss [abuse] the regime. With Obama back again, things will be just fine by Nowruz. I give you my oath." Chuckling, he says, "So good that you'll be a groom next year! If you aren't married already."

Separately, Maryam, 26, an English translator from the northern coastal city of Rasht, agrees with Reza. Via Skype, she tells me, "Obama is such a totally adorable personality."

Why?

"Well, I agree with his politics. He is more into doing than talking about doing." She adds with a laugh, "Besides, he is a handsome type."

Wednesday afternoon, I ask Nima, 24, an IT student waiting for an empty seat in an Internet café, if he has heard the election results. "It's not been announced yet. They are not like us to announce the results overnight." He is making a deadpan joke about the announcement that Ahmadinejad had won the 2009 Iranian presidential election with 63 percent of the vote, which came within seven hours after the polls closed. In previous elections, results were announced 24 hours or even longer after the last vote was cast.

"I think Obama will win," Nima adds. I tell him that in fact Obama has won. "Well, Obama was not very different from the other one. But I like U.S. elections anyway. For example, Google did something cute, making its logo resemble a [ballot box]. I am only happy for one reason for Obama's return, and that is that the other guy looked like a real airhead."

An activist in Tehran told Tehran Bureau that, in his view, the overwhelming sentiment in Iran, among those who were cognizant of the U.S. presidential election, was positive. "There was a visceral fear of a Romney presidency in terms of a possible war," he says. "But I imagine the leadership is upset that Obama won because Obama has proven to the most effective president in the past 32 years in terms of isolating and weakening the Iranian regime. The leadership is under the impression -- rightly or wrongly -- that behind the scenes, it's easier to strike deals with Republicans."

Twenty-four hours after the announcement of the results, after most world leaders had long since congratulated Obama, an official reaction finally came from the Islamic Republic. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast stated, "The message of U.S. voters in the recent presidential elections there was to shun extremist policies, to demand the fulfillment of promises given for fundamental changes in wrong policies and expensive unilateral actions, and the need to focus attention on the internal situation in the U.S. and the lives of its people."

At the same time, Mehmanparast described the policies of "U.S. officials from both parties...in the last 33 years" as "against the Iranian people" based on "antagonistic views." He concluded, "Any evaluation of the promise of change will depend on the actual policies and decisions of U.S. officials."

While Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has so far remained silent on Obama's victory, the brothers Larijani -- judiciary chief Sadegh and Majles Speaker Ali -- who are close to the Supreme Leader, attacked Obama vehemently following his reelection.

"Four years ago too, Obama entered the arena with the slogan of change and announced that he was extending a cooperative hand toward Iran," declared Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, "but in practice, different behavior took place and unprecedented sanctions were enacted against Iran."

"A relationship with the U.S. is not trivial. But after so much coercion and debauchery against the Iranian people by the U.S., such a relationship is impossible overnight," he continued. "We believe that anytime that the U.S. cuts its losses, it will be to its benefit, and if it should bow to the nobility of the Iranian people and attain the people's trust, then it has reached mental maturity."

Ali Larijani adopted a still harsher tone, calling Obama's escalation of sanctions "economic dictatorship."

According to Thursday's lead editorial in the right-wing Kayhan daily, which is under Khamenei 's effective control, "Obama is a diminished Bush, just as the America of 2012 is a steam-shrunken 2001 America. The rate of murderous acts during Obama's reign has not been any lower than in Bush's term."

Two months ago, like most other conservative dailies, Kayhan attacked Ahmadinejad after he expressed his readiness to improve relations with the United States during his trip to New York City to address the U.N. General Assembly. "Obama is powerless to resolve important challenges like Iran and other regional issues," last week's editorial declared.

Hassan and Massoud, two men in their 30s whom I meet in a traditional teahouse, have a better impression of the American president. "I love Obama's oratory. He is unmatched," says Hassan. He mentions a report on state television which "revealed" that Obama often uses prepared remarks and a teleprompter for his speeches. Hassan asks with a sneer, "So this is Iranian TV's exposé? They must not be very busy!"

Massoud says, "One question makes me wonder. Why have Republican candidates always looked like idiots? Even their demeanors are idiotic: Nixon, Reagan, Bush -- the father and the son."

They return to the topic of the election. "Obama was so liked that he was declared the victor before votes were tallied in eight of the states," observes Hassan.

"Nonetheless, Obama didn't say very nice things in his victory speech," says Ali, 24, who has sat down at our table. "He boasted about the military. He said, 'We have the best military in the world, the most effective military in the world.'"

Hassan interjects to correct him, "No. That was at the start of his speech and that is not what he said. He said, 'We have four more years ahead of us, with the best military in the world.' Then everyone started applauding. When they were quiet, Obama continued, 'At the same time, we seek peace, a kindhearted U.S., a generous U.S.'"

"So, if the U.S. attacks Iran under Obama's leadership," says Massoud, "it means that Washington has had no other option, because he is not like Bush who had an itch for wars. In addition, the world trusts him and believes his words."

The subject turns to America's first lady. "Just look at Obama's spouse. Compare her with George Bush's wife," says Massoud. "His wife has been very important to his popularity." He adds with a smile, "Many voted more for Michele Obama than for Barack Obama."

Massoud believes that Obama's reelection will make negotiations between the United States and Iran more likely. He refers to the third Larijani brother, Mohammad Javad, head of the judiciary's human rights office. According to a report from the semiofficial Mehr News Agency, in a speech to a group of educators Larijani emphasized that such negotiations were not taboo. "If the regime's interests demanded, we would negotiate with the U.S., or with anyone else, even in the depths of hell," he declared.

Lighting a cigarette, Hassan says, "Swear to God, Obama is a decent person. On Tuesday, I wished so much to have been a U.S. citizen, just to be able to vote for him."

Thursday afternoon, I meet Ali, a food delivery driver. "I am not into these things. I can't get my head around politics," he says in response to news of Obama's victory. But then he continues, "I don't know what a Democrat or a Republican is. But with George Bush's face in mind, I wanted for someone to win who wouldn't just attack Iran irrationally. And Obama has such a personality."

Ali was a child during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. "When the war erupted, the situation was very bad. We even had shortages of potatoes. So much bloodshed. I really worried about the war. When I learned Obama had won, my mind relaxed."

What does he think of Obama on a personal level? "Look, I don't know if I like him somewhat because he is dark-skinned, but it seems that I know him," Ali replies. "One of our own. A tireless person."

Abbas, a 61-year-old retiree who used to work in the Communications Ministry, has brought his granddaughter to the park on this cool autumn afternoon. He also feels a kinship with Obama due to his race. "See, not that I want to look at it emotionally," he says. "That a dark-skinned person has managed to become the U.S. president shows him to be a successful person -- a very successful person. I am sure he is adulated in the U.S. too, and the spirits of many of his race have been lifted. I love Barack Hussein Obama's charisma."

Abbas says the president has other strengths, as well. "He has been observing the globe for a long four years. And this is the critical point." I ask him if Romney had not also observed the world during the same period. "Listen, dear, Obama had an executive position. He has been at the heart of issues. He's tuned to the treble and the bass." He adds, "He has been patient with Iran, has dealt with this regime for four years and has a mountain of experience."

Although Obama's race appeals to Abbas and Ali, some websites close to the Ahmadinejad administration such as Raja News have taken a derisive view, as reflected in the headline "The White House Remains Host to the Black President."

This tone was criticized by the Aftab News Agency, affiliated with Hassan Rowhani, former head of the National Security Council and lead nuclear negotiator during the presidency of Ahmadinejad's predecessor, the reformist Mohammad Khatami. According to an Aftab editorial, "If insult and derision serve the ideology of the journalist then they are allowed, but it is clear that when reporting Obama's victory over Romney, his race is too often evoked. The reporter and the editor, despite being aware of the moral repugnance of racism among the public inside and outside the country, don't find themselves accountable to the readers. They despise Obama, and in their attempt to satisfy a personal, despicable feeling, they believe embracing racist styles is acceptable. The end justifies the means!"

The experienced journalist Serge Barseghian, in a lead editorial for the reformist Areman daily, called Obama "the voice of change." He wrote, "Once more the voice resounded, once more votes were cast, once more a path was chosen; the voice that was heard four years ago resounded once more tonight, the night of electoral victory."

I pay a visit to another well-known reformist journalist, whose name I agree not to reveal. Is my host, who writes on foreign policy, happy with Obama's reelection? "I adore Obama!" is the response. "Obama reminds me of the founding fathers, of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln."

I ask about Obama's position vis-à-vis Iran.

"See, some say that Republicans would have been better for the regime. Their rational is that Romney felt transatlantic alliances to be incapacitating, like George Bush did. But Obama has created transatlantic alliances. He has filled the fissure between the U.S. and Europe, and this is detrimental [they say] to the Islamic Republic."

My host sighs. "How much longer are we going to look at issues in such ways? How much longer should we form our foreign policies based on discords between other democracies? We need to abandon such points of view."

What are the odds that Obama will again extend a hand of friendship to Iran in his inaugural address? "The hand of friendship talk doesn't work any more. He tried it a few times and the Leader slapped it away.

"Certainly he will suggest negotiations from a different point of view and with a different discourse. But first the Iranian presidential election has to be resolved." That takes place next June.

Despite the harsh sanctions imposed by his administration, most educated, middle-class Iranians are pleased to see Obama in the White House. But those with meager incomes whose families' livelihoods have been endangered by sanctions are not joyed by his reelection.

A few yellow vans stand in front of a private school, waiting to transport the students home. Arash, one of the drivers, gets out of his van to smoke a cigarette. I ask if the U.S. election results have made him happy. "Not at all, man," he answers. "We have to put up with these mullahs four more years. Mr. Obama imposes sanctions and that strengthens [the regime] further, and [makes] us more destitute. I wished, so wished, that Romney would come and end our misery, come and finish them off. But alas."

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau

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"It would make me ill, to not write and not speak."

Sattar Beheshti hailed from a low-income family in Robat Karim, an impoverished town 15 miles from Tehran. Maybe that's why he was targeted for arrest, torture, and ultimately death. Iranian authorities probably thought news of the atrocity would never get out, given his underprivileged background.

His sister describes their life. "My mother is ill. She has recurrent memory lapses. It was Sattar who took care of her and provided medication. Now she is all alone. She can't last without Sattar for long."

Sattar Beheshti was arrested by the Iranian cyber police two weeks ago. But he had engaged in no online fraud, hacked into no bank accounts, committed no similar crime. He was merely a blogger who dared to criticize the country's ruling system.

After all, this is Iran we're talking about -- a country where even having a Facebook account, let alone a blog critical of state policies, is considered a serious crime.

In his blog, Sattar inveighed against the Iranian government and at times the Supreme Leader himself. His efforts were aimed at uniting opposition activists in Iran and in the diaspora. Amid his pursuit of what often seemed to be a lost cause, he once wrote, "Looks like I have to keep up the struggle by myself."

I click on another sound bite. I hear Sattar's voice saying, "I'm not the least bit afraid of being caught. I am only worried about my mother. If they come up to me right now and say we want to send you to the gallows, I will tell them I will take an honorable death over a pathetic life any day. We are not living a life. We are slaves here. We do nothing but toil away."

These are Sattar's own words, uttered last month. Before the cyber police raided his home and took away with them whatever they could find that he had written.

I lay my head on the table and close my eyes. I think of what one of his friends told me on the phone: "We collected his body from the Kahrizak morgue. They told us to buy a grave and that we are not allowed to hold any memorial ceremonies for him."

A witness who saw Sattar's body at the Kahrizak coroner's office described it as bloody. It looked like blood had gushed out of his nose and head, he said; his kneecaps and feet were bloody, too. An autopsy had apparently been performed as well, offering another explanation for the presence of so much blood. While no independent evidence is available to verify this account, the coroner's office today provided a report confirming that Sattar died in police custody and that his body was bruised in five places, including his foot, hand, back and one of his thighs.

Accompanied by security agents, Sattar's family transported the corpse from the coroner's office to the mortuary, where it was washed and shrouded according to Shia burial rituals. At that time, the body cover was partially unzipped for his brother in law to identify the body.

Security agents lurked around the cemetery as he was laid to rest, videotaping everyone. Suspicious of anyone who pulled out a phone, they would step in to make sure no one was reporting to a media outlet or taking pictures.

They didn't let his family see his body. Only when they had laid him in the grave, did they let them see his face.

I could hear his mother screaming through the phone, "I received him from God and now I am handing him back. I am honored to say that Sattar Beheshti was my son."

His entire family is being subjected to tight security measures. Authorities have ripped off all the condolence banners and signs around his home, and his sister's house is under surveillance. They have confiscated his relatives' cell phones and threatened to arrest them if they give media interviews.

Sattar's courage and sincerity can be seen in this sentence that he wrote: "I cannot be silent and refrain from criticizing the government. It would make me ill, to not write and not speak."

Few knew of Sattar Beheshti before his death. He had no claim to fame. He was a pure revolutionary. He was a human being who fought for his society and his people with his pen.

His family has one request and that is to keep alive the name and defend the innocence of Sattar Beheshti.

Photos via Facebook.

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Sattar Beheshti's death underscores importance of ensuring Iranians' access to online security technology.

Yet that is the gist of what now confronts Iran's Internet generation, the young people whose courageous defiance of the engineered presidential election of 2009 brought Iranians' long-stifled aspirations for democracy and freedom to the world's attention. The situation has been highlighted by the death last week of Sattar Beheshti, 35, a Green Movement supporter who maintained a blog in which he criticized the regime and its treatment of political prisoners. A laborer living in one of Tehran's poorest suburbs, Beheshti -- despite not using his full name on his blog page -- was tracked down and arrested in early November by the Islamic Republic's cyber police. His death was reportedly the result of torture he endured during interrogation.

Beheshti's tragic death underlines the deeply besieged mentality of Iran's theocratic regime and how far it will go to suppress any voice of popular opposition. The aftermath of the 2009 election impressed on the government the grave danger posed to it by a free flow of information and an informed citizenry. An enormous amount of money was allocated to the acquisition of some of the world's most sophisticated systems for monitoring and tracking electronic communications, restricting the Internet, and jamming satellite broadcast signals.

During the Green Movement's rise, as with the Arab Spring a year and a half later, email services like Google's Gmail, social media like Facebook, video-sharing sites like YouTube, and blogging services played crucial roles in organizing street protests and disseminating news about them. Over the past two and a half years, access to a growing number of such services as well as to a vast range of news and information websites has been prohibited. Officials have prophesied that the Internet will eventually be replaced by a national "intranet" and that the widely popular Gmail will be supplanted by a locally developed and controlled email service. Gmail is a particular target because it encodes messages during delivery, which makes it difficult for the regime to monitor the content of communications on a broad scale. Two months ago, using the YouTube posting of the anti-Islamic video "The Innocence of Muslims" as a pretext, the regime blocked access to Gmail, though it backed down after a few days.

Iranian Internet users and the state's censorship apparatus now play a cat-and-mouse game around the government's so-called filtering process. Users do their best to circumvent the state's efforts through virtual private networks (VPNs) and various antifiltering applications, while the state attempts to render those countermeasures ineffectual or, whenever possible, exploit them to spy on Internet users -- for example, by promoting and administering fraudulent VPNs. The antifiltering applications supplied by Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of Voice of America/Radio Free Europe, have been especially valuable to Iranian citizens who seek free access to information. Such applications need to be updated regularly to ensure their ability to circumvent the filtering system and defend against regime attempts to hijack them.

For almost any 21st-century Iranian activist, a minimum computer security system, including firewall, antivirus security, antispyware, and timely updates to those applications as well as to operating systems and browser plugins, has become essential. It is not clear how vulnerable Beheshti's computer was, but the fact is that all the components of a basic online defense system are available free of charge over the Internet -- except increasingly not for Iranians.

Since last year, for example, two of the best-known free antivirus programs, AVG and Avast, have stopped Iranian IP users from downloading their software or updating their virus definitions -- though no sanctions mandate this. Adobe does not permit Iranian users to download its free Flash and PDF-reading systems, which are used by hundreds of millions of people across the globe. This is particularly important in the case of Adobe Flash Player, the dominant streaming video plugin. During the height of the Green Movement, Iranian activists took great risks to capture and post video clips of street demonstrations to inform the world about what was taking place inside Iran.

There is no comprehensible logic to denying the Iranian people access to such technology. Whom do these software companies imagine is going to suffer as a result? Iran's authoritarian rulers? Rest assured, the regime is not using the free versions of antivirus software to protect its multibillion-dollar nuclear and military projects against highly sophisticated malware programs like Stuxnet or Flame. Nor are its nuclear technicians unable to open the how-to videos and manuals for their uranium enrichment centrifuges because they cannot download Flash Player or Adobe's PDF reader.

The impact, however, is entirely different on ordinary Iranian Internet users, undoubtedly including Beheshti. Over the past year, the rial has lost nearly two thirds of its value against the dollar and euro, yielding high inflation in almost every sector of the economy. With middle- and working-class incomes stagnant, most Iranians are now struggling just to keep their heads above water. Even those few who can afford paid versions of security and other online applications find it nearly impossible to make such purchases. No internationally accepted credit cards are available inside the country, and the sanctions imposed on its banking system have crippled Iranians' ability to remit money abroad.

The choking off of access to essential online technology is punishing a people already subject to relentless oppression by an increasingly totalitarian system. It also signifies the larger problem of the overzealous application of supposedly "smart" sanctions that extends them far beyond their intended targets and dumbs down their effects in flagrantly counterproductive ways.

While the regime in Tehran and its loyalist beneficiaries exploit the nation's resources to circumvent sanctions, ordinary Iranians bear most of their ever-growing weight. The death of Sattar Beheshti is a reminder of the extravagant price that the overstretched sanctions regimen is exacting from the Iranian people.

related reading | The Courage of Sattar Beheshti | A Swift End for the Innocent: The Sanctions Hit Home | Oppression 2.0: Iranian Discontent in Cyberspace

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