I have an essay in the new issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in which I review Laura Secor’s excellent new book Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran and also examine Tehran’s role in the changing political landscape of the Middle East—especially in the Syrian catastrophe. You can read the essay here.
Tag: Iran
Why Iranian Dissidents Support the Nuclear Deal—In Their Own Words
In my new article for In These Times magazine I discuss the important International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran report High Hopes, Tempered Expectations: Views from Iran on the Nuclear Negotiations, which features interviews with an array of Iranians—former political prisoners, filmmakers, political scientists, civil rights lawyers, playwrights, journalists, actors, economists, novelists, publishers, theater directors (some of them belonging to two or more of these categories, former political prisoner being the most common)—about the nuclear agreement.
Go here to read the article. If you tweet it, please give the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran a shout-out (@ICHRI).
Teaching John Stuart Mill in Iran: A Conversation with Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein is of course best known for his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—his books, lectures and media interviews on the subject over the last three decades—and for the considerable controversy it has generated.
Less known is that for many years he also taught political theory. It might come as something of a surprise that among his favorite works is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. This might come as a surprise since Finkelstein is well to the left of most admirers of the iconic nineteenth-century liberal thinker. Of course Mill was also a socialist and a feminist—indeed an early one (see Martha Nussbaum’s comments at the end of this interview). But in postcolonial studies Mill is widely regarded as an imperialist and a racist. An ambiguous and contested legacy, to be sure—which is part of Mill’s enduring hold on us.
Finkelstein recently taught a short course on Mill’s On Liberty in Iran. There’s a whole literature devoted to this phenomenon. Norma Moruzzi has written about reading Hannah Arendt in Iran. Ali Paya and Mohammad Amin Ghaneirad have mapped the multiple spheres of influence that Jürgen Habermas enjoys in Iran. The Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo has published a book of conversations with Isaiah Berlin. (I myself have written a short book on Iran’s engagement with liberal thinkers.) When leading political thinkers (of varying persuasions) from Europe or North America—from Habermas and Antonio Negri to Richard Rorty and Immanuel Wallerstein—visit Iran, their lectures are major events and occasion considerable buzz. (For more on this, see Mehran Kamrava’s book Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, Farzin Vahdat’s God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity, and Mehrzad Boroujerdi’s Iranian Intellectuals and the West.)
But Finkelstein did something a bit different. His students weren’t the usual liberal-minded suspects—who represent a significant swath of Iran’s educated classes, incidentally (a phenomenon that is underestimated and trivialized by many Western leftists, which I regard as a form of Left Orientalism). It would have been easy for him to teach the depredations of U.S. and Israeli policy in such a context—but it also would have been incredibly boring. He did something far more interesting. He taught Mill to largely conservative-oriented students in an institution that cranks out apparatchiks for the Islamic Republic.
That is just wickedly cool. Here’s our recent conversation about that experience.
The interview was filmed on April 24, 2014, as part the series of conversations with our guest lecturers that our Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver produces.
Is ESPN’s Documentary about Bahrain Iranian Propaganda too?
We are interested in seeing how the PR agents of Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family will try to spin this documentary produced by the U.S. sports channel, ESPN, as Iranian propaganda.
If you haven’t already seen Al Jazeera’s report on the brutally repressed and resilient democracy movement in Bahrain, you can watch it here.
Striking the Right Balance – BBC Style
Just heard this extract from BBC Radio 4’s World this Weekend aired on Sunday via a listeners complaint read out on the Feedback programme today.
Shaun Ley: The World This Weekend, this is Shaun Ley. Hello. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has used a news conference this lunchtime to describe his re-election as President of Iran as an epic moment. There have been more protest by opposition supporters and criticisms from Iran’s neighbours.
Daniel Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel: It is now high time for the international community to stop immediately the very dangerous and relentless campaign of Iran to achieve nuclear capabilities.
That’s the view from Israel. We’ll be hearing a US perspective and the son of the former Shah joins me live.
Its a good example of how the selection of expertise on the BBC frames its news and current affairs output. As the listener pointed out in his complaint, none of Iran’s actual neighbours were in fact consulted by the programme. Only Israel, the US and the son of its former puppet.
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