You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Submit your comments on this article
Home Front: WoT
Ledeen: The Light and Dark Sides of the War on Terrorism
2005-10-20
In a formal cabinet meeting chaired by Iran's new president’s first deputy, the ministers printed and ratified an agreement with the Shiites' 12th Imam. In his opening remarks, Parviz Davoudi, Ahmadinejad' first deputy suggested that the cabinet ministers should sign an agreement with 12th Imam, the same way they signed a pact with the new president. The ministers collectively agreed and so there is now an agreement between the two! The ministers then questioned how the 12th hidden Imam will sign the agreement!

The solution was resolved when the government's cabinet ministers agreed to ask Saffar Harandi, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance how president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned to take the letter to the holy Imam. Next Thursday night, Saffar Harandi dropped the signed agreement to the Jamkaran well, a spot that Moslem religious groups believe is where the Shiite 12th Imam is hidden. This well is also the resting place for tons of letters and requests from Muslim pilgrims.

A short while after the cabinet ministers' collective agreement, the government spent 70 billion rials to feed the needy pilgrims of Jamkaran Mosque. At the Transportation Minister's suggestion, this money would be spent to reconstruct the roads leading to Jamkaran and to allocate large amount of money for other similar projects. There was strong criticism on this from all fronts and even Ahmadinejad seemed very offended. He said that this government was not in power to build roads and that it should be thankful to 12th Imam's blessing for being in power.
We are talking about some of the highest-ranking officials in the Islamic republic. So far as I know, this is not political satire, it’s reportage. And the point is obvious, isn’t it? We are not dealing with people like us (although a couple of the more hyper columnists at, say, the New York Times might well suspect that there are lots of evangelicals who secretly aspire to this sort of behavior). The Iranian people are suffering enormously at the hands of this regime, whose president "was not in power to build roads" and owes its legitimacy to a vanished religious figure at the bottom of a well in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

And for those who thought that Iranian "elections" somehow gave a form of democratic legitimacy to the president and his cabinet, read it again. It’s the 12th imam, not the people of Iran, who bestows power.

There are two groups of people who ought to be made to read this account several times: those European pseudo-diplomats who think that you can reach a rational modus vivendi with the mullahs; and the innumerable failed diplomats and elected officials (I am thinking, as I so often do, of Senator Richard Lugar and his buddies on the Foreign Relations Committee, who do not deign to take testimony from critics of the Iranian regime) in this country who keep on calling for normalization with Iran. We’re talking about real fanatics here. Fun reading, yes, but they kill a lot.
Hopping my usual high horse here, I reiterate my contention that personal liberty, not democracy per se, is what distinguishes our side from their side.

Unless it goes through a number of contortions, Islam — of virtually any flavor — is incompatible with democracy due to its insistence that rights not only derive from God (a belief we share) but that only holy men are qualified to interpret God's will, a belief we discarded about the time of John Calvin.

Islam originated in a culture that was fundamentally different from that of the West. Alexander's men bitched when he tried to adopt the court practices of the Persians, arguing that free men didn't kowtow, not even to their king. Islam demands to rule, a tradition that probably originated with Sargon I, while a thousand years before the Profit appeared on the scene civilized man had already worked around to the idea of the king as a referee among other free men. Have a look at the arguments Homer relates among kings and their subordinates, then read Tacitus' critique of the worst of the Roman emperors. Gregory of Tours' Franks were a loutish, scheming lot, but no one was bumping his forehead to the floor at the approach of a Chilperic. When the idea of divine right monarchy did show up, King Charles' subjects chopped his head off. Louis XIV got away with it, mainly because of his wardrobe, I think, but it didn't work so well for Louis XVI.

There were lots of quibbles about which men were free, and what kind of powers the king had, and often the concept was honored in the breach, but the idea remained, often not even expressed because it was so ingrained. The usurpation of human dignity that was common in the East was only sporadically a feature of parts of the West. Now we have to contend with four or five thousand years of inertia, and unless we push the point that democracy is an effect, not a cause, we're not going to bring the Wonderful World of Islam into the modern world. They'll always be ruled by holy men, with djinns and efrits and such lurking in closets and under beds and beturbanned imams calling for jihad because God demands to rule every aspect of every person's life. They'll just be doing it in parliaments.
Posted by:tipper

#5  Louis XIV got away with it, mainly because of his wardrobe, I think,

I would argue that it was because he threw fabulous parties, but otherwise Heah, heah!
Posted by: trailing wife   2005-10-20 23:11  

#4  be a cold f*cking day in hell before I bow to any islamist punk imam.
Posted by: Frank G   2005-10-20 15:48  

#3  From my simpleton point of view, the problem with Islam is the "I'm right, you're wrong, (and hence in most cases you must die)" attitude. If they only got over that hurdle, the rest would fall into place, including the democracy thingie and personal liberty. Humility is the key.
Posted by: Rafael   2005-10-20 14:53  

#2  There were a LOT more checks and balances in the Louis XIV regime than people (specially non-French) know and also much more than in your average Muslim sultanacy (1).

(1) Hint: When a minister was suspected of stealing from public treasure or when people tried to poison him, he couldn't just have all suspects and their relatives to the third generation be impaled and do away with it like it would have happenned in Turkey. He had to have them tried and some were released. Many of teh actions perpetrated openly by your average sultan (or Arab dictator) would have cased Louis XIV to be declared demented or unfit to rule and deposed.
Posted by: JFM   2005-10-20 11:05  

#1  Unless it goes through a number of contortions, Islam — of virtually any flavor — is incompatible with democracy due to its insistence that rights not only derive from God (a belief we share) but that only holy men are qualified to interpret God's will

That actually ain't the problem. The problem is the core belief in Islam that humanity is not capable of governing itself. I'm not talking about morality and religious ritual -- Judaism and Christianity both have their own codes for those, but also recognize that people have the ability to agree upon a set of rules outside of those from the divine and that those rules -- unless unjust in very specific and limited ways -- are as morally binding as the core requirements of the religion.

The Islamic theory is that man-made laws are meaningless; the only meaningful law is sharia. *THAT* is incompatible with democracy.

Following that's the "inshallah" attitude at its philosophical core. The Judaic and Christian tradition is that God made the physical laws and, excepting very limited examples of miracles, He also obeys them. The Islamic tradition is that everything happens because Allah wills it so; if the same thing happens every time you try X it's because Allah made the same decision every time.
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2005-10-20 08:04  

00:00