By Waleed Shahid

The Islamic Republic of Iran is currently in a defining moment in its short yet significant 30-year history.

Haverford sociology professor Mark Gould and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship teamed up to host four professors in Chase Auditorium on Saturday for a symposium on viewing Iran through the lens of the multifaceted Iranian Revolution of 1979. The professors all presented criticism of Iran’s current governing structure in the five-hour session, attended by many tri-college professors but few students.

Professor Said Arjomand of Stony Brook University asserted that the Islamic Revolution never fully ended, neither with the establishment of the clerical state nor the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, its charismatic leader. Scratching his goatee, he argued that every revolution creates new social classes that roll back certain rights and promises formerly guaranteed during the revolutionary struggle.

In Iran, these new social classes are composed of two elements: the clerical elite and the Revolutionary Guards. The Guards are now leading Iran’s “Third Revolution,” said Arjomand and Professor Ahmad Ashraf of Columbia University.

The distinguished Ashraf, whom the other three panelists all cited as a source in their presentations, said there are three main political groups in Iran today: the religiously conservative clerics, the religiously moderate new fundamentalists such as the Revolutionary Guards, and the emerging liberal, reformist Green Movement that grew out of the alleged rigging of the Iranian presidential election this past June.

Ashraf, among others, asserted that it is the Revolutionary Guards who control many of the nation’s economic institutions. They are in fact in control of the Islamic Republic today, using Ayatollah Khamenei as a façade to legitimate their power.

“He is a hostage to the Guards,” Ashraf said. “The base is no longer the clerical conservative faction, it is the new fundamentalist Guards.”

In contrast to the conservative mullahs, the Guards, who overwhelmingly support current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, do not pay much attention to clerical socio-religious issues such as governing women’s clothing.

Anthropology Professor Narges Erami of Yale University gave a presentation on the role of the carpet-producing Bazaaris in Qom and their politics of protest. She analyzed various political slogans, advertisements, and posters of the June election as tied to Shia Islam’s themes of anticipation of the Mahdi, or Christ, communal mourning, and the use of public space. Her argument was that the Islamic Revolution taught its citizens, for better or for worse, mobilization and the politics of protest.

Professor Misagh Parsa of Dartmouth College began his lecture by giving the history of the Iranian Revolution. The revolution, the passionate professor argued, could have easily gone one of two ways: either toward a secular, socialist Iran or an Islamist Iran. He pointed to the momentous Iranian Writers Association’s poetry nights in Tehran in which two-thirds in attendance were secular, socialist, or Marxists; 28 percent, liberal democrats, and only 6 percent Islamists. Students, an essential group in the eventual fall of the Shah, did not even commemorate the June 1963 arrest of Khomeini, which Islamists view as a holiday.

“In the near future I see the establishment of an Iranian Republic over an Islamic Republic,” Parsa said with revolutionary zeal, finger pointed in the air as if he were speaking to a group of revolutionaries in Tehran. “In his public statements Khomeini never even said that he would establish a theocracy.”

Despite Iran’s strong Shia heritage and rituals, which were extensively discussed by the panelists, they are among the most secular people in the Islamic World today, said Parsa. Three-fourths of Iranians say they do not fulfill the obligatory daily prayers, news to many people in attendance.

Although the symposium was well attended by tri-co faculty and community members, student attendance was relatively low.

“The turnout of Haverford students was disproportional to the relevance and value of the symposium,” said Angelo Ngai ’13.

The students who were present fully participated, attending lunch with the panelists and tri-co professors and asking tough questions at the end of the symposium.

“The event helped erase many stereotypes about conflicts concerning Iran,” Ngai said.

Related articles

• CPGC Brings Speakers for Iran Diplomacy Talk
• Claude Wintner Symposium Held at Haverford
• Support Kidnapped Israeli Soldiers
• More Iranian Drama from Marjane Satrapi
• Letter to the Editor:
• The Bigger Picture
• Collection Addresses Plight of Afghani Women
• Swat to Offer Islamic Studies Minor
• Shakespeare and ‘Blending’ at Haverford
• Political Diversity is Good