As spring turns into summer, Iran will continue making headlines with its march to acquire nuclear weaponry. And as tension mounts, the inverse rule of distance in geopolitics will come into effect.
This rule predicts those furthest from Iran—for instance, the leadership aspirants of Canada’s federal Liberal party and their supporters in Toronto—will insist the entire problem of Iran is the making of George W. Bush and his cabal of neo-conservatives in the U.S.
Since most Canadians have as much trouble distinguishing between Vimy and Vichy as did John McCallum when he was minister of national defence in the former Liberal government of prime minister Jean Chretien, I suspect it will not be difficult for a paper like the Toronto Star to convince a majority of its readers that Iran is being set up by American imperialists who own the Republican party.
Conversely, a majority of Iranians—far from Toronto—will despair for their own future, and that of their children and grandchildren, knowing all too well that nuclear weapons will make their leaders feel invincible and extinguish any hope of regime change in Tehran.
A corollary of this hypothesis is that the greater the ignorance of the distant “other”—in this case, the politics and culture of Iran under its religious leaders bequeathed by the founder of the Islamic Republic, the late Ayatollah Khomeini—the more insistent becomes the need to romanticize it and vilify the U.S., a view that happens to be in solidarity with such model rulers of prospering democracies as those of Cuba, Iran, Libya, Venezuela or Zimbabwe.
But for anyone who wants to get acquainted in a hurry with Iran as a legacy of Khomeini, the sensible thing to do would be to listen to some Iranians who escaped the dungeon of the ayatollahs. They could start by acquiring a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.
Nafisi teaches literature at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She left Iran in 1997 after being expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil.
The simple rule for understanding the present-day Muslim world begins with listening to women who speak out about it, who have either escaped or are taking great risks from within the societies into which they were born.
Women bear the double burden of gender and what patriarchal Islam makes of them.
Nafisi is an enchanting writer from a culture that produced a galaxy of poets and writers. Her story of Iran is a struggle for survival with memory and decency in a country where the certainty of religious dogma led the authorities to “hang people in the streets and put a curtain across the sea to segregate men and women.”
There is much worse, as readers of Nafisi will discover. This is a country where religious leaders hold power and have made of death and dying a cult of martyrdom; where young men were sent into battle to walk straight into enemy fire and clean minefields by blowing up themselves.
Nafisi maintained her sanity by reading and teaching literature in a land whose leader once condemned a writer (Salman Rushdie) to death.
Reading Nafisi in Toronto, the apathetic and self-virtuous might just have some twinge of recognition that for most Iranians—and the same goes for Iraqis, Darfurians, Afghans—American neo-conservatives actually appear as the only sliver of hope amidst dark nights of despair.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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