Iran: Media once again misled us

Abbas Barzegar

I have been in Iran for exactly one week covering the 2009 Iranian election carnival. Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad would win. Even when I asked Mousavi’s supporters if their man could really carry more than capital, their responses were filled with an Obamasque provisional optimism — “Yes we can.”

So the question occupying the international media, “How did Mousavi lose?” seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran. Of course, the rather real possibility of voter fraud exists and one must wait in the coming weeks to see how these allegations unfold. But one should recall that in three decades of presidential elections, the accusations of rigging have rarely been levied against the vote count. Elections here are typically controlled by banning candidates from the start or closing opposition newspapers in advance.

In this election moreover, there were two separate governmental election monitors in addition to observers from each camp to prevent mass voter fraud. The sentimental implausibility of Ahmedinajad’s victory that Mousavi’s supporters set forth as the evidence of state corruption must be met by the equal implausibility that such widespread corruption could take place under clear daylight.

As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting.

The failure to properly gauge Iran’s affairs is hardly a new phenomenon. When the 1979 revolution shattered the military dictatorship of America’s strongest ally in the region few experts outside of the country suspected that the Islamic current would emerge as the leading party. But in Iran, even the secular intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad, author of the infamous Occidentosis predicted the collapse of the regime at the hands of Islamic movement well over a decade before the fateful events of 1979. The maverick French philosopher, Michel Foucault, also made the right bet as he reported the events from the street — an insight that his many admirers still shy from. Since the revolution, academics, intellectuals and pundits have predicted the imminent collapse of the regime. As of today, they have done no better.

Such anomalies can only be explained by a longue duree. Iran is a deeply religious society. Of the Shah’s mistakes nepotism, autocracy, and repression were fought by communists and liberals for decades with no success, but it was his attack on the religious establishment that led to his almost overnight demise.

Since then common Iranians have applied their ideals through the ballot box. In 1997 as the ashes of the Iran-Iraq war settled and the country saw a decade relative stability, voters came out in mass to support the former president-cleric Khatami against his rival, Natiq Nouri, a senior member of the establishment. Western reporters saw this in terms of a grand generational divide: Young freedom loving liberals against elder conservative clerics. But it was really a vote for the ideal of honesty and piety against allegations of entrenched corruption. Many of those same Khatami supporters voted for Ahmedinajad yesterday, though Khatami’s face was on every one of Mousavi’s campaign posters.

In the future, observers would do us a favor by taking a deeper look into Iranian society, giving us a more accurate picture of the very organic religious structures of the country, and dispensing with the narrative of liberal inevitability. It is the religious aspects of enigmatic Persia that helped put an 80-year-old exiled ascetic at the head of state 30 years ago, then the charismatic cleric Khatami in office 12 years ago, the honest son of a blacksmith — Ahmedinajad — four years ago, and the same yesterday.


*Published by the Saudi-based ARAB NEWS on June 14.