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Iran, Jews & pragmatism - -

By Roger Cohen

Op-Ed Columnist

Iran, Jews and Pragmatism

Published: March 15, 2009

LOS ANGELES

Readers' Comments

The Persian New Year, or Norouz, is celebrated this month, often with great extravagance. Among its traditions is jumping over a bonfire while declaiming: “Take away my yellow complexion and give me your red glow of health.”

One way of looking at Iran’s particular calendar, its language and Shiite branch of Islam is as forms of resistance against the Arab and Sunni worlds. Shiism has been a means to independence. The defense of Farsi against Arabic took the form of a medieval epic, “Shahnameh,” by the poet Ferdowsi.

I have, in a series of columns, and as a cautionary warning against the misguided view of Iran as nothing but a society of mad mullah terrorists bent on nukes, been examining distinctive characteristics of Persian society.

Iran — as compared with Arab countries including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — has an old itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The June presidential vote will be a genuine contest by the region’s admittedly low standards. This is the Middle East’s least undemocratic state outside Israel.

Another Iranian exception is that it had its Islamic Revolution three decades ago. Been there, done that. So its lessons are important.

From Egypt to Algeria to Afghanistan, Islamist movements are radicalized by dreams of everlasting dominion. Democracy is feared because it may prove to be their means to power. In Iran, by contrast, life is a daily exercise in difficult compromises that temper Islam with modern society’s demands. Iran is emerging from extremist fervor as clerical absolutism and pluralism spar.

While Bernard Lewis, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, posits an epochal clash between “Islamic theocracy and liberal democracy” whose outcome will be decisive, I don’t see any victor in this fight. Rather, a variety of compromises between the two forces will emerge, as in Iran.



    
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