Yet in the current demonstrations we are witnessing not just the end of the first stage of the Iranian democratic experiment, but the collapse of the structural underpinnings of the entire Islamic approach to modern political self-rule. Islam’s categorical imperative for both traditional and fundamentalist Muslims ””“commanding right and forbidding wrong” ”” is being transformed.
This imperative appears repeatedly in the Koran. Historically, it has been understood as a check on the corrupting, restive and libidinous side of the human soul. For modern Islamic militants, it is a war cry as well ”” a justification of the morals police in Saudi Arabia and Iran, of the young men who harass “improperly” attired Muslim women from Cairo to Copenhagen. It is the primary theological reason that Ayatollah Khamenei will try to stop a democratic triumph in his country, since real democracy would allow men, not God and his faithful guardians, the mullahs, to determine right and wrong.
Westerners would do well to understand the magnitude of what is transpiring in the Islamic Republic. Iran’s revolution shook the Islamic world. It was the first attempt by militant Muslims to prove that “Islam has all the answers” ”” or at least enough of them to run a modern state and make its citizenry more moral children of God. But the experiment has failed. The so-called June 12th revolution is the Iranian answer to the recurring hope in Islamic history that the world can be reborn closer to the Prophet Muhammad’s virtuous community. Millions of Iranians said in the presidential election, and more powerfully on the streets since, that they want out of Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream, which has become a nightmare.
One didn’t have to wait for Iran’s collapse to know Islamic government would be a fiasco, Pakistan’s been demonstrating that since its founding.
At the risk of sounding simplistic, Islam is in sore need of a “reformation.” Islam, shariah law, the hadith (sp?), etc. are not compatible with a representative democracy…you can’t have a balance. Turkey is a prime example where they have emphasized secularism, however, the only religion that is truly tolerated is Islam. Iran is at war with itself. In Iran we have a medieval theocracy a war with its populace who want to live free in the 21st century.
The difficulty, #2, is that the Christian Protestant Reformation was an attempt to return to the Christianity of the early centuries, however that goal was envisioned by the reformers. In the case of Islam, the Wahhabi of Saudi Arabia and the Ayatollahs of Iran are attempting to re-create the early centuries of Islam, and doing it reasonably well. What is needed is the development of a modern Islam which leaves aspects of its early centuries behind.