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| Volume XIV, Fall 2007, Number 3 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism
by Danny Postel. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006. 130 pages. $10.00.
Babak Rahimi
Assistant professor of Iranian and Islamic Studies, University of California, San
Diego
I first met Mohsen Sazegara in his office at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
(WINEP), one of the leading neoconservative think tanks in Washington, D.C. In 2005, Sazegara
had accepted a fellowship at the institute to do research on the Iranian dissident movement, in
which he had actively participated since the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997. As one of the
founders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and a prominent Iranian journalist twice imprisoned for
his political activities in 2003, Sazegara was primarily known to me for his campaign to hold a
popular referendum on Iran's theocratic constitution. In November 2004, this idea had received
widespread support among reformist activists in Iran and dissidents in exile like Reza Pahlavi, son
of the late shah, though some were suspicious of Sazegara's earlier links to the regime.
After a brief chat about Iran's upcoming 2005 presidential elections, Sazegara suddenly began
to praise President George W. Bush, describing him as a "wise leader" who truly understands the
democratic movement in Iran. According to Sazegara, American and Iranian leftists in the United States are out of touch with Iran's aspiration for democracy and still stuck in the anti-imperialist
mentality of the Cold War era. For Sazegara, neoconservatives like Patrick Clawson and Michael
Ledeen are key defenders of Iran's democracy movement, whose support is crucial to bringing
change to the country. While Western leftists continue to overlook Iran's struggle for democracy
by obsessively denouncing U.S. imperialism, a loose association of Iranian activists in exile - best
represented by liberal feminist writers like Azar Nafisi, Stanford political scientist Abbas Milani and
pro-monarchists like Manoucher Ganji - is increasingly establishing ties with neoconservative
circles in Washington. With regime change in mind, they advocate a series of democracy-promotion
schemes that primarily include the support of non-violent popular uprisings (Nafisi and Milani)
and possibly an actual U.S. military intervention (Ganji). Central to their belief is that the Islamic
Republic is now a tired authoritarian entity facing considerable pressure from liberal opposition
forces. And since the theocratic government in Tehran is essentially incapable of reform, a liberal
democratic order in Iran can most effectively be realized through Washington-led democracy promotion
tactics.
With this background in mind, Danny Postel's Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran is
particularly thought-provoking. It brings to light a new interpretation of contemporary Iranian
politics that offers an alternative to neoconservative democracy promotion. The book also offers a
self-critical look at the politics of the Left, holding liberals responsible for their lack of solidarity
with Iranian democrats in their struggle against authoritarianism. Postel examines the way in which
liberal Iranians are reclaiming liberalism for Western liberals by re-reading Western theorists "with a
Persian horizon in mind" (p. 8).
"Universal values" inherent to liberalism - civil liberties, human rights, freedom of expression,
women's rights and secularism - are now being realized in Iran's national struggle for democracy.
According to Postel, the title of the book reflects the "actual crisis of legitimation and the intellectual
ferment taking place in Iran today" (p. 8). Such ferment heralds the "renaissance of liberalism"
led by intellectuals and political activists who are closely reading authors such as Kant, Mill,
Habermas and Rorty and resurrecting liberal thought in a non-Western setting.
This collection of essays and interviews is divided into four chapters. The first offers a good
description of progressives' failure to recognize the democracy movement in Iran. Although part of
the reason for this is a lack of understanding of Iran's "complex multiplayer drama," Postel is quick
to point out that this failure is due to the Left's fear of U.S. meddling in Iranian politics. They know
what happened in 1953, when the CIA led a coup to topple the Mossadeq regime. Nevertheless,
Postel accuses Western leftists of failing to show solidarity with Iranian democrats. Unlike the
1970s and 1980s, when American and European progressives gave their full support to prodemocracy
movements in Chile, El Salvador, Indochina and Nicaragua, the Left has largely remained
silent on Iran. As a result of this apathy, neocons have been able to steal the leftists'
tradition of support for democratic movements around the world. Postel's objective, he claims, is to
regenerate the Left's tradition of civic activism and build transnational ties with other liberal
democratic movements around the globe. In the case of Iran, this can be done by bringing "Iranian
activists to North America on speaking tours to raise awareness and resources for the movement
there, to help it get more exposure in the Western press, and to build the kinds of personal bridges
that those of us who've been involved in solidarity work over the years know are so essential" (p. 28).
Chapter two begins with a somewhat uncritical look at Azar Nafisi's best-selling memoir,
Reading Lolita in Tehran. Using Nafisi's model of everyday struggle against totalitarian rule
through reading "great literature," Postel considers the possibility of rereading classical liberal
texts as a way to remind Western leftists of their heritage. Western liberals have become defensive
because of the Bush administration's attempt to entangle liberal ideals with U.S. imperialistic
ventures in the Middle East. The task at hand is to reassert those liberal values that we in the West take for granted. In this chapter, Postel redefines liberalism as a "radical political project" that
remains unfinished. In what he regards as the rise of "liberal Third-Worldism," Iranian liberalism
can offer Western liberals a new opportunity to understand themselves by demonstrating solidarity
with fellow liberals around the world.
Chapter three is a commentary on Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson's, Foucault and the Iranian
Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (2005), which offers the first English translation of
Foucault's writings, letters and interviews on the Iranian revolution. Following Afary and Anderson,
Postel links Foucault's postmodernist critique of liberalism with Islamist autocratic ideology, arguing
that the French philosopher's support for the Islamists stems from his enmity toward modernity's dark
side. Foucault was blind to the dangers of Islamism, presuming that the Iranian revolution promised a
whole different "regime of truth" (p. 64). The most interesting section of this chapter is Postel's
recognition of the impact of Foucault's works on young Iranians in the postrevolutionary era.
Chapter four consists of an interview with the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was
imprisoned in 2006 for plotting a "velvet revolution" in Iran. Jahanbegloo explores themes such as the
history of Iranian Marxism and the future of liberalism in Iran. He explains why Marxism has been
largely absent from the intellectual landscape of the post-revolutionary era: much of pre-revolutionary
fascination with Marxism was limited to Stalinism and pop-cultural heroes like Che Guevara. With the
collapse of Soviet communism and the failure of Islamist utopianism, Iranian intellectuals have now
"returned to earth, to the here and now, after decades of ideological looking for salvation in
eschatological constructions" (p. 9). Liberalism, with its universal aspiration for the attainment of truth
and human dignity, has found a new home in Iran.
Postel also invites us to consider the project of democracy promotion through NGOs, international
civic associations, women's-rights groups and those citizen activists in the West who can support
Iran's dissident groups at the grass-roots level. Given the current entanglement of liberalism with U.S.
military interventionism and some of the NGOs' close ties with Washington, it is not easy to support
Iranian democrats without having the regime accuse them of collaboration with foreign governments.
As Negar Azimi has successfully argued (in The New York Times Magazine, June 24, 2007), recent
attempts by Washington to promote democracy in Iran since the State Department's allocation of a $75
million budget to advance freedom and human rights have largely been counterproductive. Iranian
authorities now arrest anyone they suspect of spreading "propaganda" against the regime.
Jahanbegloo was the first major casualty of Washington's policy of democracy promotion, and now
five other Iranian-American scholars and journalists have been detained, Haleh Esfandiari of the
Woodrow Wilson Center being the most high-profile. Postel's idealistic stance for building solidarity
fails to offer a practical solution to this dilemma.
Postel's book presents an odd vision of romantic activism, attempting to motivate rather than
simply explain. A strange form of Orientalism runs through these pages: uncorrupted and virtuous
natives have the natural disposition to recover the nearly forgotten liberal virtues of an advanced
Western civilization oblivious to its own natural greatness. The reference to Nafisi's memoir, Reading
Lolita in Tehran, is central to Postel's subtle Orientalist thinking. Nafisi describes how reading banned
books under totalitarian rule provided her and her students the ability to create a temporal realm of
freedom through the power of imagination, in which the crushing weight of the outside world would
disappear. But, as Hamid Dabashi (in Al-Ahram Weekly, June 1-7, 2006) and Fatemeh Keshavarz
(Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, 2007) have shown, Nafisi's work is replete
with Oriental biases. Dabashi argues that Nafisi's book is a tale of "selective memory" that reductively
depicts Iran as a violent and vile country because of its "Islamic" disposition against women, hence
cultivating American public opinion in favor of military intervention. For Keshavarz, Nafisi's memoir
deliberately ignores women's agency and their active role in the Iranian public sphere, even during the
darkest period of the regime's rule in the 1980s.
Postel tends to exaggerate the influence of Iranian liberalism and at the same time downplay
other democratically minded movements led by religious reformist intellectuals and activists.
Abdul Karim Soroush, Alavi-Tabar, Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, Mojtahed Shabestari, Mohsen
Kadivar, Ayatollah Hussain-Ali Montazeri and Ayatollah Youssef Sanei are hardly mentioned in
Postel's book. (In his interview with Postel, Jahanbegeloo briefly makes reference to these thinkers
and finds it suprising that they too have been influenced by thinkers like Kant and Popper.)
Soroush has produced some of the most powerful critiques of Islamist authoritarianism. In contrast,
Postel overemphasizes the importance of Jahanbegloo, a liberal philosopher who does not have a
wide readership in Tehran or beyond. Soroush and Kadivar have many more followers; they are
admired by both secular and religious democratic activists, and their books are read by activist
women and students in diverse reading groups. Both Iranian and non-Iranian liberal intellectuals
have been in constant contact with reformist thinkers like Soroush, and a vibrant exchange of ideas
and networking have taken place between secular and non-secular democratic activists since the
election of Khatami in 1997. Why not mention them in the book?
Not only does Postel exaggerate the reach and popularity of liberalism in Iran; he deliberately
marginalizes religious reformists, who contest the ideological assumption that secularization is
essential to democratic modernity. This reduces the Iranian democratic movement to a mere
secular-liberal experience.
Despite my objections to Postel's argument, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran forces us
to ask a crucial question: What is the best way to promote democracy in Iran? For the most part,
Washington needs to recognize the possibility of diverse forms of democratic modernities, which
may or may not include the normative process of secularization. With more than 100 years of
democratic aspirations and revolutionary movements led by both religious and secular groups, Iran
already has a strong democratic tradition that is bound to pose serious challenges to the future of
authoritarian rule. The most powerful dissident current in the Islamic Republic is likely to emerge
not from the liberal Iranian community but rather from the pro-democracy religious factions within
the system (especially those based in the Qum seminary), who pose the most serious challenge to
the legitimacy of the Islamist state. Iran's future democracy will likely emerge from an implosion of
the state, as in the former Soviet Union, rather than an explosion caused by a "velvet revolution"
instigated by liberal Iranians.
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