At the Huffington Post, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd writes about the current upheaval in Iran and how it differs from the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s:
But today’s protests are not a repeat of 1979. A significant difference between then and now involves the reasons behind the protests. The revolution of 1978-79 was the culmination of a gradual rejection of the Shah’s domestic policies—including his authoritarian secularism—and foreign, and especially American, influence in Iran. Revolutionaries of different persuasions, who might be labeled secular, religious, or perhaps neither—our categories fail us here—all opposed the Shah’s state-imposed secularization and modernization.
The Iranian revolution was not a religious backlash against secular modernity, as often portrayed. Nor was it an attempt to merely return to Islam. It was a challenge to an autocratic secularist regime widely perceived as connected to illegitimate and culturally distant outside economic and political interests. As historian Robert Allison has provocatively observed, “the Iranian people did not rebel against their own failed rulers but against ours.”
Today’s protests are different. This is not about the West. It is about which revolutionary political camp will prevail in 2009: the hard-liners or the moderates, with the latter representing the demonstrators. The hard-liners who took over after the revolution replaced an imperial form of secular modernity with an imperial form of religious modernity. Said Arjomand described this eloquently as a shift from “from temporal to theocratic absolutism.” Neither is sustainable.
Read the full article here.