[Marxism] Letter from Iran

[Louis Proyect]

The Nation.
Letter From Iran
By Robert Dreyfuss

This article appeared in the May 19, 2008 edition of The Nation.
May 1, 2008

Across the street from the sprawling shrine to Fatima al-Masumeh, the 
revered sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam, a group of campaign 
workers on a rooftop are busy unfurling wall-sized election posters for 
a conservative candidate in Iran's March parliamentary election. We're 
in downtown Qom, a city of 1 million about 100 miles southwest of 
Tehran. Qom is Iran's religious capital, the wellspring for a host of 
fundamentalist clerics who've ruled Iran since 1979, and it is an eerie 
place. Unlike some other cities in Iran, where urban professionals, 
merchants and the middle class try to push back against onerous 
restrictions on freedom of expression and women's dress, there's little 
evidence of that in Qom. Women are cloaked head to toe in black 
garments, and turbaned mullahs on motorbikes are a common sight.

Under a brilliant blue sky, mourners are lining up to enter the shrine 
and pay their respects to Fatima, whose remains are entombed inside an 
Oz-like green-mirrored vault. Among the mourners, in formation behind a 
green banner, are a phalanx of grim-faced, muscled militiamen, members 
of the Basij corps, wearing black T-shirts and black headbands. The 
Basij is an estimated million-strong volunteer paramilitary force that 
serves as an adjunct to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and in 
2005 the Basijis voted en bloc to help elect hard-line Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad president.

I'm standing in the inner courtyard of the shrine, a vast public space 
surrounded by vaulted enclaves, towering minarets and spectacular 
entrance halls bedecked in blue, green and gold tiles. With me is 
Muhammad Legenhausen, 55, a New York-born, ex-Catholic professor of 
philosophy who converted to Shiism, changed his name from Gary and moved 
to Iran in the 1980s. Legenhausen tells me he teaches philosophy at four 
universities and institutions in Qom. At the powerful Imam Khomeini 
Education and Research Institute, he also serves as an aide to Ayatollah 
M.T. Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely seen as the chief backer of President 
Ahmadinejad and who has even been mentioned as a possible successor to 
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran's next Supreme Leader.

It's true, says Legenhausen, that Mesbah-Yazdi was the power behind 
Ahmadinejad's 2005 candidacy. "He was concerned that the reformers had 
opened things up too far," Legenhausen says, with an odd twinkle in his 
eye, in his distinct New York-accented English. "On that, he agrees with 
Ahmadinejad 100 percent." But how, I ask, can you work for someone who 
supports a conference to deny the Jewish Holocaust? "Oh, that!" he says. 
"When we heard about that, Mesbah-Yazdi and I just rolled our eyes. That 
was all Ahmadinejad's doing. We said to each other, 'What can you do?'" 
He shrugs, as if to imply that this was just Ahmadinejad being Ahmadinejad.

full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/dreyfuss