The Ayatollahs' Democracy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Understand Iran

Last night I started reading Hooman Majd's new book, The Ayatollahs' Democracy. I had to force myself to put it down and go to sleep, and today all I can think about is getting back home and reading more. As was the case with The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, Majd's first book published in 2008, I am enthralled, even at about 20 pages in. In the very beginning he makes the clear distinction that the Green Movement, the force-to-be-reckoned-with led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, is not a revolutionary group of people looking to overthrow the regime, but rather a civil rights movement. I think that's a clarification often lost here in the US.

As someone from a very small town in the middle of cornfield in the heart of the USA, I've had a lot of people ask me the same question when they find out about my interest in Middle Eastern politics: "How did someone from a place like that get into something like this?" I also suspect there is a reluctance to believe a girl wearing a minidress and a huge smile can really be that fascinated by the Islamic Republic. Well, let me tell ya, it didn't just happen. I was woefully unaware of Iranian politics during high school, besides the Iran-Iraq War, which I often referred to when talking about the US invasion in 2003. When Iran did make it into my line of vision, I was immediately terrified by the nuclear "threat" that was reportedly lurking in Tehran. Ahmadinejad? A total madman, I was sure of it. I even wrote a paper my freshman year delineating the threat a nuclear Iran posed to the world at large. Oh, silly, naive me.

But in 2007 Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University in New York. In his introduction, the school representative tore the leader apart, which was really a petty and insulting thing to do, considering they invited him there to begin with. Ahmadinejad held it together, responded with one of his clever sideswipes while keeping that smile on his face, and moved on. I was fascinated. I even found that, well, a lot of what he said there and at the UN made sense. It wasn't all nonsensical babbling about how there was no Holocaust and Israel needed to be destroyed. So, I did my typical Bridey thing: gathered speeches, subscribed to Iranian news sites, and bought any books on Iran the local Walden's Books had in stock.

That's where it started. I dove in at the onset of the Ahmadinejad presidency in 2005. It was a good place to start, now that I look back, because there was a clear shift in policy. From there I read about the Islamic Revolution, about the Iran-Iraq War, about the Rafsanjani, Khamenei, and Khatami presidencies, the nuclear debate -- anything I could get my hands on. Old CIA documents from the 1980s, IAEA reports, transcripts of speeches from both Supreme Leaders. Everytime I learn one thing, I see three more paths down which I need to go to learn even more. And 3 years on, I'm more obsessed than I ever have been. Obsessed enough to want to go there; in fact, when I told my mom I was going to Kenya, she was immediately nervous, and said, "Wouldn't you rather go to, I don't know, Iran?"

When the 2009 election happened, of course, a lot of people decided to jump on the bandwagon. Insert face palm here, please. People who just started at that point are usually totally ignorant of the political situation. They have no context in which to put the opposition movement. They don't know, for example, that Mousavi was Prime Minister and ally of Ayatollah Khomeini, or that he was instrumental in keeping the nuclear program open. They see "opposition" and think "regime change", which are just not interchangeable. My only hope is that, in the near future, people start digging a little deeper in order to understand what the current situation means. Of course, The Ayatollah's Democracy is a great place to start!