In John Hughes’ smash 1985 film, The Breakfast Club, five teenagers
from different social cliques spend a Saturday together in detention.
There is the jock, whose identity is wrapped up in athletic
achievement. There is the nerd, who is book smart and socially awkward.
There is the moody basket case who wears black and broods about death.
There is the equally moody rebel, who smokes and swears and defies
authority. And there is the princess, whose clothes are hot, whose
manners are cold, and whose lunch speaks volumes about the rarified
social atmosphere in which she moves. While the others bring sandwiches
– if they bring anything at all — she brings sushi, elegantly
arranged on a fragile Japanese dish. The others don’t even recognize
what she’s eating, and when she explains what sushi is — "rice, raw
fish and seaweed" — the rebel mocks her for her willingness to eat it.

Using
food to trace the rigidly hierarchical world of American teen culture,
the scene expects the audience to see sushi as fundamentally alien,
exclusive and unappetizing. The Breakfast Club asserts that
sushi-eating symbolizes a distasteful elitism that we all recognize,
but that we do not ourselves create, maintain or like.

Such
symbolism would never work today. In the short decades since Hughes’
hit film, sushi has become a staple of American culture, a familiar,
accessible and immensely desirable food that can be found in
supermarket aisles and fast food outlets as well as high-end
restaurants. Far from signaling the snobbery of those who eat it, sushi
today belongs to the masses. Approximately 30 million Americans
regularly eat sushi, including the Simpsons, the country’s favorite
animated family. And it isn’t just Americans who have developed a
passion for sushi. A taste for Japan’s signature delicacy has also
sprung up in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and China.

A
refined delicacy that is fast becoming a popular menu item around the
world, sushi says something important about how wealth, taste and the
market interact on an international scale. As Sasha Issenberg argues in
The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy,
sushi both reveals the "complex dynamics of globalization" and proves
what many critics regard as a singular impossibility, that "a virtuous
global commerce and food culture can exist."

Issenberg knows how
counter-intuitive his claim is: After all, we tend to associate sushi
with the hushed, ritualized elegance of Japanese culture, and we often
regard the sushi bar as a welcome escape from the hard economic bustle
of daily life. The immediate experience of eating sushi is, for many,
one of transcendent sensual calm, at once richly evocative and
profoundly removed from earthly things.

But for Issenberg,
that’s the point. In its striking beauty, sushi has the quality of art,
and often seems to come from nowhere to exist purely as an irresistibly
gorgeous, edible creation. Yet despite appearances, every piece of
sushi has a distinctly modern, highly sophisticated economic history –
and in its journey from the sea to the market to the restaurant, from
living fish to marketable good, it has much to tell us about how
balanced, healthy world markets can be created and maintained. As such,
Issenberg argues, "the new sushi economy has challenged the way we see
the globe."

A Jet-age Commodity

For Issenberg, the story
of the sushi economy is the story of tuna. Originally reviled in Japan
(so greasy it was only good for cat food), the bluefin was the
beneficiary of a post-World War II shift in the Japanese diet toward
heavier, fatty meats. The overwhelming popularity of the bluefin’s
buttery flesh meant that by the early 1970s, the Japanese had
overfished their waters and were on the lookout for new sources of
their favorite dish. The moment coincided with the rise of Japan
Airlines (JAL), which was doing a tidy export business but needed to
find something to fill its freight cabin on return flights. In an
inspiration that would change the culinary profile of the planet, a JAL
executive partnered with the fishermen of Prince Edward Island, Canada,
who caught plenty of bluefin, but who had no use for it. Devising a
means of gently freezing bluefin to preserve it during the long journey
back to Japan, JAL inaugurated the era of global sushi.

Issenberg
devotes considerable time to charting Japan’s internal sushi economy,
with special emphasis on Toyko’s Tsukiji market, where fish imported
from around the world are auctioned daily to bidders well versed in the
arcane science of evaluating meat they have not tasted. At Tsukiji, we
learn, a single bluefin regularly goes for $30,000 or more at auction;
once all but worthless, bluefin has become one of the world’s hottest
and most wholesome commodities. Detailing how Tokyo’s Narita
International Airport has become — paradoxically — Japan’s most
important fishing harbor, Issenberg explains how even in Japan, sushi
is a jet-age commodity. While sushi’s roots go back hundreds of years
to an era when fish was packed in rice to ferment and preserve it, the
nigiri and maki that signify sushi today are only as old as the
technological means of transporting highly perishable fish swiftly and
efficiently from one end of the world to the other.

Originally
devised to keep the Japanese in tuna, the transport system that evolved
around bluefin has helped sushi spread far beyond Japan. Issenberg maps
the rise of regional sushi cultures in California, Texas and middle
America (Oklahoma, it seems, is one of sushi’s newest hot spots). And
in a chapter that holds special resonance for big-city sushi lovers,
Issenberg follows world famous sushi chef Nobu from Japan to Peru to
the U.S. to the Bahamas and beyond, examining how he first reinvented
sushi in his own idiosyncratic image and then standardized his brand
via his growing chain of restaurants.

Working backward from
restaurants to suppliers, Issenberg studies the fishing economy of
Gloucester, Mass., where centuries-old fishing traditions have met with
modern management in the form of True World Foods, a distributor
founded by the Moonies that is now one of North America’s top suppliers
of fresh sushi-grade fish. He also takes us to Port Lincoln, Australia,
where innovative ranching enterprises have made local fishermen some of
the richest people down under.

Through detailed, highly
localized accounts of restaurants and chefs, fishermen and middlemen,
markets and appetites, Issenberg casts sushi as an enormously positive
example of globalization. An exceptionally unusual ethnic food that has
kept its integrity while spreading its appeal, sushi melds the
hunter-gatherer purity of long-line fishing; the sophistication of
state-of-the-art transport; the hands-on, humane exchange of the
auction; and the immense act of international trust undertaken by the
millions who are willing to eat raw fish without knowing its origins or
history. An index to a nation’s worldliness, sushi expresses not only
the sophistication of a country’s taste, but also an equally
sophisticated confidence in the procedural purity of an industry with
great potential for corruption and adulteration.

Sushi thus
offers a refreshing opportunity to rewrite the depressing story about
globalization to which we have become accustomed in recent years. This
story tends to see the expansion of global markets as coming at a steep
cost. As we grow increasingly global in our preferences, processes and
possessions, the story goes, we lose our ties to local variants of the
same; globalization tends to be equated with standardization and
diminishment, with a flattening out of vital cultural specificity and
an exploitative disregard for traditions. As Thomas Friedman, perhaps
our primary teller of this tale, has put it, globalization amounts to a
struggle for balance between the Lexus and the olive tree, between the
manufactured world of international commerce and traditional economies
grounded in nature, custom and place. Too often, the story goes, as
global markets expand, it is the ways, beliefs, languages, styles and
cuisines of particular locales that are lost. As the Lexus sells, the
olive tree dies.

Crab and Couscous, and Spam

Friedman
says he was eating sushi when the idea for The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(1999) came to him, so it’s only fitting that sushi would serve as the
proving ground for Issenberg’s attempt to offer a signal instance of
globalization that balances the competing claims of world-scale
commerce and cultural particularity. And, indeed, Issenberg is at his
most fascinating when he outlines how sushi is at once preserved and
reinvented in every new market it meets: Crab and avocado found their
way into rolls in California, because that’s what was available. In
Brazil, California rolls are made with mango rather than avocado, again
because that’s what’s available. In Singapore, one can find California
rolls with both avocado and mango — and one can also find curry rolls
and halal sushi bars. Hawaiians retain a World War II-era taste for
sushi made with Spam. In Marrakech, one can eat maki made with couscous.

Contradicting
the scare stories proffered by other recent chroniclers of global
foodways (think Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s
The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Issenberg serves up a singularly appealing
picture of how our almost insatiable globalized hunger for new
experiences, new things, new services — and, crucially, new foods –
might be able to co-exist with our increasingly urgent desire to
preserve local traditions and protect the environment. Combining a
hunter-gatherer purity with a sophisticated international market
organized around swift transit and state-of-the-art refrigeration,
wealthy consumers and artisan chefs who continually reinvent sushi
according to local tastes and ingredients, sushi seems to reconcile the
conflict between the Lexus and the olive tree. Sushi extends the
possibility that we might actually be able to have our globalization
and eat it, too.

As Issenberg tells it, sushi sounds too good to
be true — and maybe it is. Toward the end of the book, Issenberg
outlines how the growing global passion for sushi has led to massive
overfishing of bluefin. As the market for bluefin expands, the bluefin
population shrinks — a circumstance that has led to rising prices,
unenforceable quota systems and ruthless international piracy.

But
the depletion of bluefin has also provoked a remarkable redefinition of
delicacy that may prove Issenberg’s thesis after all. As quality
bluefin gets harder to find, Japanese sushi bars are looking for ways
to replicate the gorgeous look and feel of tuna, with its bright red
flesh and velvety texture — and they are turning to two unlikely
sources: horse meat and smoked venison. As strange and even
unappetizing as that may sound, it’s an innovation that is true to the
spirit of modern sushi, which is anchored in a fish that was once
regarded as inedible, and which makes a marketable virtue of local
culinary traditions grounded in convenience. Raw horse is a delicacy in
some parts of Japan. Known as basashi, it is served sashimi-style with
soy and ginger — and is even incorporated into ice cream. Perhaps the
next chapter in the world’s evolving sushi economy will include
expanding its culinary boundaries beyond the sea.

Knowledge@Wharton
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm;jsessionid=9a30bddb5ebc31221454?articleid=1791&CFID=33790030&CFTOKEN=92940134&jsessionid=9a30bddb5ebc31221454#

Why are you such a fat bastard?” said the posh salesman to
the barrow-boy trader, who admittedly looked like he’d been on the notoriously
unsuccessful “all-pie” diet. The recipient of this rather innocuous insult
swung around in his seat and with perfect comic timing delivered the oft-used
but still classic response: “Because every time I shag your wife, she gives me
a biscuit.”

While Oscar Wilde may not have viewed this exchange as witty enough to include
in his more sophisticated works, it got the surrounding traders guffawing. The
salesman blushed, mumbled some unheard response, then tried to laugh along in a
half-hearted fashion. But he knew he’d just got a public arse-whipping.

When I
first entered the City and was asked which skills were required on the trading
floor, I used to say: analytical ability, diligence and, of course, a
ruthlessness Chairman Mao would be proud of. But after more than a decade in
this game, I can say, with hand on heart, that it’s in fact quick-witted
playground banter that wins friends and influences people.

For analysts like me, gaining the respect of the salesmen and traders is vital
because they will trust you only if they think you can handle pressure.

Although a well-timed “your mum” joke when surrounded by Essex boy traders may
not be the perfect indicator of your prowess under pressure, it’s better than
most.

Hence, we must pity the spotty geek who has a great analytical brain but
blushes and stutters at the drop of a hat. Salesmen and traders alike will
assume he’s a ­pointless loser who should write notes and emails – and let me
tell you, I didn’t get where I am today writing notes and emails.

I achieved my tremendous success through the far more important skill of
repeating tedious cliched comebacks in a superficially confident way – as one
colleague found to his cost the other day.

Colleague: “You’re talking big now, but you wait till we’re on the golf
course.”

City Boy: “Son, if you even dream of beating me, you’d better wake up and
apologise.”

Colleague: “Actually, I’m waiting for you to apologise.”

City Boy: “OK, you go check the temperature in Hell then come back to me.”

Colleague: “You little prick.”

City Boy: “Don’t believe everything your sister says.”

So my advice to anyone going into the City is to put away those financial
theory books and hone your p***-taking skills. That’s because my experience
suggests that while you can take the stockbroker out of the playground, you
certainly cannot take the playground out of the stockbroker.

Writer: Anyn

from article city boy of LondonPaper, August 20 2007

One day, I’ll get tired of hearing her constantly repeating the same
things, and to please her I’ll marry a man whom I oblige myself to love. He and
I will end up finding a way of dreaming of a future together: a house in the
country, children, our children’s future. We’ll make love often in the first
year, less in the second, and after the third year, people perhaps think about
sex only once a fortnight and transform that thought into action only once a
month. Even worse, we’ll barely talk. I’ll force myself to accept the
situation, and I’ll wonder what’s wrong with me, because he no longer takes any
interest in me, ignores me, and does nothing but talk about his friends, as if
they were his real world.

When the marriage is just about to fall apart, I’ll
get pregnant. We’ll have a child, feel closer to each other for a while, and
then the situation will go back to what it was before.

      I’ll begin to put on weight like the
aunt that nurse was talking about yesterday - or was it days ago, I don’t
really know. And I’ll start to go on diets, systematically defeated each day,
each week, by the weight that keeps creeping up regardless of the controls I
put on it. At that point, I’ll take those magic pills that stop you feeling
depressed, then I’ll have a few more children, conceived during nights of love
that pass all too quickly. I’ll tell everyone that the children are my reason
for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living.

      People will always consider us a
happy couple, and no one will know how much solitude, bitterness and
resignation lies beneath the surface happiness.

      Until one day, when my husband takes a
lover for the first time, and I will perhaps kick up a fuss like the nurse’s
aunt, or think again of killing myself. By then, though, I’ll be too old and
cowardly, with two or three children who need my help, and I’ll have to bring
them up and help them find a place in the world before I can just
abandon everything. I won’t commit suicide: I’ll make a scene, I’ll threaten to
leave and take the children with me. Like all men, my husband will back down,
he’ll tell me he loves me and that it won’t happen again. It won’t even occur
to him that, if I really did decide to leave, my only option would be to go
back to my parents’ house and stay there for the rest of my life, forced to
listen to my mother going on and on all day about how I lost my one opportunity
for being happy, that he was a wonderful husband despite his peccadillos, that
my children will be traumatised by the separation.

      Two or three years later, another
woman will appear in his life. I’ll find out - because I saw them, or because
someone told me - but this time I’ll pretend I don’t know. I used up all my
energy fighting against that other lover, I’ve no energy left, it’s best to
accept life as it really is, and not as I imagined it to be. My mother was
right.

      He will continue being a considerate
husband, I will continue working at the library, eating my sandwiches in the
square opposite the theatre, reading books I never quite manage to finish,
watching television programmes that are the same as they were ten, twenty,
fifty years ago.

      Except that I’ll eat my sandwiches
with a sense of guilt, because I’m getting fatter; and I won’t go to bars any
more, because I have a husband expecting me to come home and look after the
children.

      After that, it’s a matter of waiting
for the children to grow up and  of spending all day thinking about
suicide, without the courage to do anything about it. One fine day, I’ll reach
the conclusion that that’s what life is like, there’s no point worrying about
it, nothing will change. And I’ll accept it.

 

Banyak orang bilang Coelho’s best work adalah Alchemist, aku dah baca 6 bukunya dia, dan Veronica decides to die, I think, is by far his best work. Tulisan diatas adalah cuplikan dari buku tersebut (hal. 19 - paperback) and it’s one of the reasons I love Coelho. He tells story better than anyone, not even my grandmother can come close.

Melihat kembali sejarah iran bagaikan membanca novel cinta dimana keindahan masa lalu menjadi sebuah nostalgia yang sangat melekat dihati sehingga sehingga dihadapkan dengan kesulitan sekarang yang begitu nyata, rakyat Iran bergandeng tangan dengan bangga berjalan berlahan kedepan. Meskipun diterjang bencana bertubi tubi, baik itu gempa, embargo politik dan pengucilan dari  barat, rakyat Iran sampai saat ini masih teguh memegang konsep Velayat-e Faqih-nya Iman Khomaini sebagai idealisme  ketatanegaraan.

Kebetulan sekali beberapa minggu yang lalu saya berkesempatan berkunjung ke negara yang sangat menarik ini, indah dalam arti dengan segala kekurangannya rakyat Iran masih setiah memegang prinsip mereka yang tidak mau mencium kaki barat. Walaupun pada kenyatanya masih ada konflik Ideologi dari pemerintah sekarang yang menjadi representasi ideologi kota Qom, dan keinginan untuk sedikit lebih bebas dari Tehran dan kota2 selain Qom.

Meski begitu banyak pelajaran yang mungkin bisa diambil pemimpin negara kita dari Iran seperti pelaksaan keadilan sosial dalam arti seutuhnya (walau miskin, rakyat Iran tidak akan pernah kelaparan karena pemerintah selalu memberi subsidi pada tujuan yang tepat) atau kesederhanaan pemimpin (Saya dateng ke rumah Iman komeini almarhum yang ditempati beliau selama berkuasa, bukan main, dia hanya tinggal digubuk kecil disamping masjid, dan dari situ dia menjalani pemerintahan, padahal dia bisa saja menempati rumah bekas diktator Reza Pahlevi yang lebih besar dari TMII)

Mungkin juga kita bisa belajar dari nasionalisme yang walau terkadang kelihatan berlebihan, tapi bisa menjadi pelipur lara akan rindu masyarakat Iran akan romantisme revolusi.

Saya tidak sulit melihat bagaimana teman2 Indonesia yang ada di Iran sangat cinta dengan negara yang mereka tinggali, saya tau pasti indahnya semangat kenegaraan dan keislaman di Iran, given enough time, I might fall in Love too, alas, 11 days isn’t long enough to melt my heart.

PS: Di bawah ini report tentang Iran yang saya pikir akurasinya cukup tinggi.

The revolution strikes back

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

An uncompromising Iran and an uncomprehending America may be stumbling to war, says Peter David

IT IS Friday prayers in Tehran. Several blocks around the university
and Palestine and Revolution Squares have been closed to traffic, as
they are every week at this time. Throughout the morning lines of
soldiers in khaki and Revolutionary Guards in green have been filing
into a vast hangar. Knots of civilians stroll up in the sun. From
within, loudspeakers squawk sermons and bursts of martial music.

This week happens also to be the 25th anniversary of the liberation
of Khorramshahr, a bloody Iranian victory during the eight-year
“imposed war” against Iraq. All week footage of the fighting has been
broadcast on television, even filling the half-time gap in the European
football cup final between AC Milan and
Liverpool (which soccer-mad Iranians watched avidly). The Iran-Iraq war
cost Iran hundreds of thousands of lives, helping to consolidate the
very revolution Saddam Hussein had foolishly attacked. Posters of the
martyrs still adorn the streets of Tehran.

   

 

Inside
the hangar tens of thousands of men (the women are screened out of
sight) sit in rows on prayer rugs. At the front under a podium is much
of the country’s turbaned political leadership. Also present is General
Yahya Rahim Safavi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, which
wrested control of the war from what had been left of the shah’s army
and has exercised growing influence in Iran ever since. Under the
podium a green banner proclaims: “So long as America sticks to its
present policy Iran will not have negotiations with it.” Now, before
the main sermon, comes the warm-up. A speaker denounces Islam’s foes.
“Shame on you Israel, down with Israel,” the seated throng bellows in
response, fists pumping in unison. “Death to America.”

The prayer leader takes his place behind a lectern. In one hand he
holds a gun, to represent the sword of Islam. He then recites in a
tremulous voice the lamentation for the Shias’ first-century martyr,
Imam Ali. At this the assembled worshippers cradle their heads and sob,
shoulders heaving with sudden grief. The preacher then takes a sip of
water, signalling that this morning’s main political message—which will
be preached at similar meetings in all of Iran’s cities—is about to be
delivered.

Today’s theme is a forthcoming meeting in Baghdad between Iranian
and American diplomats, the first formal direct contact after decades
during which neither country has been willing to talk to the other. The
preacher is at pains to explain that Iran is not showing weakness.
“That carnivorous wolf is not of the type to enter negotiations,” he
says of America. “America is only after securing its own hegemony.”
Isn’t America the axis of evil? Wasn’t refusing to talk to America a
principle of the blessed Ayatollah Khomeini? There will be no departing
from principle, he says. All that has happened is that Iraq’s
government has asked for help. And all Iran will do is insist that as
Iraq’s occupiers the Americans are responsible for the mayhem there.
“We can with most certainty announce today that the United States has
become the obvious manifestation of the axis of evil in the region,” he
declaims. The seated throng roars its assent.

The audience in America

Tehran’s Friday prayers are broadcast all over Iran and around the
world. The fiery slogans of the worshippers reinforce the scary
fanaticism outsiders have come to associate with the Islamic Republic
since Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution more than a quarter of a century
ago. And nowhere in the world do Tehran’s morning prayers have a more
attentive audience than in the capital of the United States.

For all its problems in Iraq, America is also fixated on Iran. In
2005 George Bush promised that he would stop “the world’s most
dangerous men from getting their hands on the world’s most dangerous
weapons”. That same year a brash former mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, won a surprise victory in Iran’s presidential elections.
Since then he has done his level best to look like one of the world’s
most dangerous men.

President Ahmadinejad took over from a middle-aged cleric, Muhammad
Khatami. As president, the mild, bespectacled Mr Khatami had pushed for
liberal reforms at home and talked reassuringly to the outside world
about Iran’s desire for a “dialogue of civilisations”. The new
president, a former Revolutionary Guard and a Holocaust-denying
demagogue, does not do reassurance. Since his election Iran has defied
the UN Security Council’s orders to stop
enriching uranium, threatened repeatedly to make Israel disappear and
declared war on Iran’s internal reformists.

Switch to a typical week in Washington, DC,
just before those Friday prayers. The Washington Institute for Near
East Policy is holding a symposium on Iran’s “unacceptable bomb”.
Robert Kimmit, the deputy treasury secretary, tells delegates how
America is tightening sanctions on Iran. From Jerusalem by video Shimon
Peres, Israel’s elder statesman (and now president), says that if Iran
develops nuclear weapons, they may fall into the hands of terrorists. A
British diplomat argues that Iran’s nuclear programme threatens
“irreparable damage” to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Also in this typical week another think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), unveils a database listing foreign investments in Iran. Journalists are given a CD on which they can look up who is thought to be investing what in Iran. Why? Because, says Danielle Pletka, an AEI vice-president,
people need to understand that between (a) doing nothing about Iran and
(c) dropping a bomb on it is a third possibility, (b), of inflicting
economic pain until the mullahs change their ways. This week too Dick
Cheney pipes up from the deck of USS John Stennis, one of the
additional aircraft carriers America has sent to the Persian Gulf. The
vice-president says America will “stand with our friends” to stop Iran
getting nuclear weapons and “dominating this region”.

Some say that Mr Cheney is the last hawk standing in the Bush
administration. But anxiety about Iran’s nuclear intentions stretches
right across American politics. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of
state, claims that America faces “no greater challenge from a single
country than from Iran”. And most of the presidential candidates for
2008 are talking equally tough.

Hillary Clinton favours opening a “diplomatic track” with Iran. John
Edwards supports a “non-aggression pact”. Barack Obama says it would be
a “profound mistake” to start a war. But neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr
Edwards nor Mr Obama rules out force if Iran persists with its nuclear
plans.

For Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front-runner, a military strike
would be “very dangerous”, but nuclear arms in the control of “an
irrational person” like President Ahmadinejad would be more dangerous
still. Would he consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran?
“You can’t rule out anything.” John McCain recently broke into song,
intoning “bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran” to the tune of a Beach Boys
song.

Alongside the work of the think-tanks and the warnings and ditties
of the politicians comes a drumbeat of alarming newspaper articles. In
the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, a hero of the
neoconservatives, concludes in an op-ed piece: “The plain and brutal
truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear
arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military
force—any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to
be stopped in 1938.”

The audience in Iran

Is that really where things stand with Iran—a new Hitler and a new
1938? Look again at Tehran’s Friday prayers. One thing a visitor
notices at once is how little connection this stage-managed event has
with the everyday life of the bustling metropolis around it. Even the
audience, squatting in serried ranks beyond the dignitaries, looks
untypical.

Iran is a young country (see chart): two out of three people are
below the age of 30. On the streets of affluent north Tehran, young
people dress in the latest fashions—even if the jeans-clad women are
obliged by law to wear the Islamic headscarf (the hijab). The
audience at prayers, however, is older: shabbily dressed men well into
their 40s, regime stalwarts who have trekked uphill from the poor
southern suburbs.

Which is the true Iran—the consumer-oriented young, bored by the
slogans of a long-ago revolution and impatient to move on? Or the
regime faithful chorusing the familiar slogans at Friday prayers?

It is tantalisingly hard to know. With 71m people and a multitude of
languages and ethnicities, Iran is a difficult place to read. Although
it has elements of democracy, including an elected president and
parliament, the state is not ultimately controlled by elected
institutions. And even the elected bit of the system is a backstage
game of personalities and factions, not a transparent process rooted in
political parties. Press freedom is limited, almost no serious
independent opinion polling is allowed, and many official economic
statistics appear simply to be made up. All this makes the regime’s
inner workings elusive. Outsiders can only follow the trend and make a
guess.

       
             

Men of principle

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Iran’s neoconservatives and their “white coup”

LAST time The Economist visited Iran for a special report,
in 2003, the so-called “Tehran spring”—a period of cautious political
liberalisation under the presidency of the soft-spoken Mr Khatami—was
drawing to a close. He had won a landslide election in 1997 and a
renewed though smaller mandate in 2001. These victories had signalled
that the people of Iran wanted change: freedom of thought and speech,
political diversity, a more open economy, tolerance, the rule of law
and a friendlier stance towards the outside world. But as president, Mr
Khatami had limited powers to deliver what they wanted.

That was because the constitution drawn up under Ayatollah Khomeini adopted a doctrine known as velayat-e faqih,
in which an Islamic jurist sits as “supreme leader” at the apex of
politics. And over the course of the Khatami presidency the unelected
part of the structure, directed by the present supreme leader, former
president Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, systematically throttled most of the
changes Mr Khatami and his fellow reformers proposed.

Dozens of newspapers opened during the Khatami period, only for many
to be shut down on one pretext or another by the judiciary. Clerics who
took advantage of the new atmosphere to question the doctrine of velayat-e faqih were
imprisoned or otherwise cowed. Even as political debate blossomed,
Iran’s security services cracked down on religious and ethnic
minorities. A number of the regime’s critics fell victim to murders
traced later to the interior ministry. In 1999 police reacted to a
peaceful demonstration for freer speech by invading Tehran University,
beating and arresting hundreds of students and killing at least one. In
the majlis (parliament) much of the president’s reforming
legislation was vetoed by the Council of Guardians, a committee of
clerics appointed by the supreme leader to ensure that laws conform
with Islamic precepts. 

By 2004 Mr Khatami’s failure either to stand up to these assaults on
his programme or to deliver economic progress had led to widespread
disillusion. That year, hardliners won a big victory in parliamentary
elections. And in 2005 presidential elections produced an unexpected
victory for Mr Ahmadinejad, then a little-known former mayor of Tehran.

The Tehran spring of ten years ago has now given way to a bleak
political winter. The new government continues to close down
newspapers, silence dissenting voices and ban or censor books and
websites. The peaceful demonstrations and protests of the Khatami era
are no longer tolerated: in January security forces attacked striking
bus drivers in Tehran and arrested hundreds of them. In March police
beat hundreds of men and women who had assembled to commemorate
International Women’s Day.

The consequences of dissent

According to Human Rights Watch, an international lobbying group,
detainees are routinely tortured in clandestine prisons operated by the
judiciary, the information ministry and the Revolutionary Guards. The
rate of executions appears to have speeded up, too. Iran now executes
more people than any other country except China—often without giving
defendants a fair trial. Homosexuality is one of the crimes punishable
by death.

In recent months the slide back into authoritarianism has accelerated. Tehran’s annual campaign against “bad hijab”,
when police harass or arrest women who show too much hair under their
obligatory headscarves or make themselves up to look sexy, has been
unusually severe. A series of high-profile arrests seems calculated to
intimidate dissenters. Some of those arrested have been visiting
American citizens with dual citizenship. (One, Haleh Esfandiari, from
the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, is the wife of Shaul Bakhash,
a noted scholar and former writer for The Economist. She was
detained and imprisoned while visiting her mother in Tehran.) More
shocking inside the country was the arrest in April of Hossein
Mousavian, a former Iranian ambassador to Germany and former nuclear
negotiator, on suspicion of espionage. The arrest of a regime insider
on such an outlandish charge sent a shudder through Iran’s political
establishment. Mr Mousavian is close to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a
former president and Mr Ahmadinejad’s defeated rival in the 2005
election.

If you are determined to give Iran the benefit of the doubt, one way
to interpret these developments is to see them as the swing of a
political pendulum—the sort of wobble you might expect in any country
making a fitful transition to democracy. By 2005 Mr Khatami’s reforming
presidency had after all run out of steam. Mr Ahmadinejad won a popular
election. The people seemed once again to want change, but change of a
different kind: economic “justice” and redistribution rather than a
political and cultural opening.

Mr Ahmadinejad, the austere son of a blacksmith, ran as an economic populist, adroitly harnessing the conviction of the mostazafin—Iran’s
“downtrodden”—that their basic needs had been neglected by the
political reformers. A big part of his appeal was his promise to tackle
the corruption many voters associated with the older brand of
conservative, such as Mr Rafsanjani, whom many Iranians believe to be a
billionaire as well as a cleric.

Nonetheless, says the pendulum theory, Iranian politics is still an
affair of checks and balances. The new president is not invincible. His
erratic economic policies—especially when combined with the impact of
sanctions—will prevent him from satisfying the expectations he has
aroused. By the time of the next majlis elections in 2008, or the presidential ones in 2009, the reformists will have regrouped and the pendulum may swing back.

In Iran, it is said, you can always dredge up plenty of evidence to
support any theory you care to believe in. So it is with the theory of
the pendulum. Mr Ahmadinejad has been in office for less than two
years, but that has been time enough to produce plenty of evidence that
his power is limited and his tenancy may be short. Despite the
endorsement of the supreme leader (Ayatollah Khamenei has called him
Iran’s best president since the revolution), Mr Ahmadinejad has faced
vehement opposition, not least from the majlis itself.

From the start, the majlis resisted many of his choices for cabinet jobs. It also rejected many of his spending plans. More than 30 majlis
members have signed a petition that would summon the president to
appear in parliament to explain his alleged policy failings. A year ago
50 prominent economists sent him an open letter attacking his economic
policies. Last month they sent another, with additional signatories.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s mounting bellicosity on the international stage—his
threats against Israel, questioning of the Holocaust and nuclear
defiance—has also run into robust internal criticism. This seemed to
reach a crescendo last December when voters handed him a serious
indirect rebuff. In municipal elections and elections for the Assembly
of Experts (the body that elects and supervises the supreme leader),
most of the candidates Mr Ahmadinejad supported were defeated.

Does this mean that the hardliners as a whole are in trouble? Not
necessarily. In Iran’s faction-based politics, the divisions between
political blocks are not clear-cut. Factions tend to coalesce before
elections and then break apart once they have got their man in. At the
same time the defeated factions seek to form coalitions in the hope of
reversing their defeat next time round. Right now the hardliners who
rallied around Mr Ahmadinejad in 2005 are less concerned to maintain
unity, whereas the main opposition groupings are feeling their way
towards an alliance.

In the majlis these consist of a rump of Khatami-style
reformists and a larger block of people who travel under the
“conservative” banner but who are pragmatic in their approach and
oppose Mr Ahmadinejad’s brand of what many outsiders have come to call
“neoconservatism”.

Could the older-style conservatives such as Mr Rafsanjani and the
reformists band together and win next time? That is what the pendulum
theorists hope. This being Iran, however, plenty of evidence can also
be found to prove that the pendulum theory is wrong.

A parallel universe

One of the theory’s defects is its underlying assumption that power
swings back and forth with election results. In Iran it doesn’t quite.
In 1997 Mr Khatami won a very handsome democratic mandate for reform,
but by winning the presidency he did not win a free hand to govern.

Iran, remember, is at best a quasi-democracy: in parallel with the
elected system exists another system that is unelected. Its elements
include the armed forces (especially the Revolutionary Guards), the
Council of Guardians, the judiciary, the senior conservative clerics
and a vast administrative machine that reports directly to the supreme
leader. By and large this unelected system is made up of strong
believers in the original ideology of the revolution, or at least
people who have a strong vested interest in it. A common
self-description of these people is that they are osoulgara, or “principle-oriented”.

The principle-oriented custodians of the revolution did not wait
until the election of Mr Ahmadinejad before taking action against Mr
Khatami’s reforms, which they interpreted as a potentially lethal
threat to its core values. With the connivance of the supreme leader,
they simply used their executive power and a compliant judiciary to
override the wishes of the legislature and the voters.

By these means President Khatami was deprived of his power long
before he was deprived of his office. Nor did the men of principle
think it safe to leave the choice of his successor to Iran’s voters.
The election took place only after legions of candidates had been
disqualified by the Council of Guardians. By way of insurance there was
also judicious fiddling on election day: reformists complain that the
Revolutionary Guards and their associated Basij militia of perhaps a
million young volunteers were drafted in to intimidate voters and stuff
ballot boxes.

Take all this into account, and what is happening in Iranian
politics begins to look more sinister than the swing of a pendulum.
Some opposition politicians prefer to describe what Iran is
experiencing as a “white” (ie, bloodless) military coup. This did not
start with President Ahmadinejad, though as a war veteran and former
Revolutionary Guard commander he is typical of the class and generation
behind it. It has been developing quietly ever since the men of
principle began to fear that their revolution would not survive the
encroachment of Western ideas, consumer habits, satellite television
and the rise of a generation that had no direct memory of either
revolution or war.

This is not the sort of coup in which the armed forces have to make
an overt grab for power, because the supreme leader is part of the
conspiracy. The fear, rather, is that with all the state institutions
now in conservative hands the unelected centres of power are coalescing
behind a single hard line and taking over all the top jobs. And in the
name of principle this group (one majlis member calls it the “power in the shadow”) has no qualms about bullying parliament or suborning the judiciary.

Mr Ahmadinejad is part of this group, but its survival does not
depend on his. Indeed, many of the conservatives who supported his
presidency are beginning to cast around for a more moderate,
cooler-headed replacement (one possibility is Mohamed Baqer Qalibaf,
the mayor of Tehran). “If necessary they will sacrifice him to protect
themselves,” says Isa Saharkhiz, the outspoken managing editor of Aftab,
a reformist monthly. So strong is the military-clerical nexus under the
supreme leader that Mr Saharkhiz dismisses the possibility of the
reformists winning re-election. He says the Council of Guardians will
simply disqualify their candidates.

A principal exhibit in the theory of the white coup is the
relentless increase in the influence of the armed forces, especially
the elite Revolutionary Guards. The Guards bared their teeth early in
the reform period. Within a year of Mr Khatami’s election as president
their commander, General Rahim Safavi, was calling the reformers
“hypocrites”. In one notorious intervention he suggested that those
reformers who (in his view) threatened the revolution should be
beheaded.

Now that one of their own is president, the influence of the Guards has broadened. A large cohort of former Guards sits in the majlis.
The Guards maintain their own intelligence agency and secret prisons.
Men with close links to the Guards control principal media outlets such
as the state broadcaster as well as the powerful Ministry for Islamic
Guidance and Culture. Three years ago the Guards showed their strength
by deciding on their own authority to close down the capital’s new Imam
Khomeini International Airport. They claimed that a decision to allow a
Turkish consortium to operate the terminal had posed a threat to
national security; but many Iranians think the real reason was that a
company close to the Guards had lost its bid for the tender.

It may therefore be no coincidence that in the past two years the
Guards’ commercial interests have prospered. Their engineering arm,
known as Ghorb, has been granted juicy slices of big state projects,
including the building of gas pipelines and a new section of the Tehran
metro.

Sayeed Laylaz, a former government official and now a private economist in Tehran, says simply that the Guards are “Iran’s nomenklatura—a
new social class formed by domination of the economy”. Within ten
months of Mr Ahmadinejad’s election, he reckons, the value of civil
contracts awarded to the Guards, many of them without going to
competitive tender, had trebled from $4 billion to $12 billion. On top
of this, the Guards are also thought to be in charge of Iran’s
nuclear-weapons programme, a political and technological responsibility
conferring huge influence and prestige within the ruling system.

A plot a day keeps opposition away

What makes Iran’s future especially hard to predict right now is its
testy relationship with the outside world, and particularly with the
United States. That is because the direction Iran takes will depend not
only on its own choices but also on what the world does to it. Many
Americans, and many Iranians living in America, believe that the regime
is so unpopular that it can indeed be reformed or even removed from
within—if only the opposition receives a bit more help. To that end the
American government has earmarked scores of millions of dollars to help
Iranian “civil society” and pro-democracy groups.

But reformers inside the country dare not touch this money. Ebrahim
Yazdi, leader of the Freedom Movement, which supported the revolution
but is now a courageous voice for democracy, says that such programmes
merely give the authorities an excuse to “intensify the repression”.
The government cites these American funds as proof that the United
States is plotting its overthrow. Fearing (or claiming to fear) that
America is fomenting a “velvet” revolution, it has used them to justify
its arrest of foreign visitors.

In recent months almost all contacts between “civil society” and the
West have fallen under real or manufactured suspicion. In May American
would-be participants in an economic conference organised by the Ravand
Institute, Tehran’s first independent economic think-tank, set up by
Iran’s former ambassador to London, were denied visas. In June Iranians
who had the temerity to attend a reception at the British embassy to
mark the queen’s birthday were harassed on their way in and out by
police and rent-a-mob demonstrators. The regime is cutting down the
number of foreign journalists based in Tehran and restricting the
movements of those who remain. The country is being put on a “war
footing”, says one.

It is a familiar pattern. Writing from exile, Akbar Ganji, one of
Iran’s best-known dissidents, says the hardliners have consistently
cited American policies towards Iran as an excuse to crack down on
internal foes. “Politicians with close ties to the military
establishment have taken control of the Iranian government and are
trying to manage the cultural and political arena in the style of a
police state,” he says in the Boston Review. “These policies
are, in turn, aggravating hostilities and allowing the Bush
administration to justify its belligerence. Thus the vicious cycle
continues.”

A similar mechanism operates in the nuclear debate. Shahram Chubin,
director of studies at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, argues in
a recent book that although Iran resumed the shah’s nuclear programme
for security reasons during the war with Iraq, its motivation now has
at least as much to do with internal politics. As the revolution
started to falter in the 1990s, he says, the nuclear option offered a
way to rally nationalist opinion and “legitimate the regime”.

So it has proved. Mr Ahmadinejad and his coterie have succeeded
brilliantly in portraying the regime’s quest for nuclear “technology”
(it is careful never to speak of nuclear weapons) as a matter of
national pride. Most Iranians do not see why a great nation such as
theirs should be denied a technology others are allowed to have. This
has wrong-footed the pragmatists, such as Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who
supports the nuclear programme but would work harder to prevent it from
antagonising the world and isolating Iran.

For Iran’s men of principle it may be that antagonising the world
and isolating Iran are very much part of the point. Hermidas Bavand, a
Tehran-based academic, says that just as revolutionaries in Russia and
China took fright when their ideas stopped resonating with the people,
those in Iran think that their survival depends on making Iranians feel
surrounded, isolated and beset by foes. A particular group, he says,
wants to make the revolution permanent “in order to retain their
control of the power structure”—and for this it is helpful if they can
point to enemies everywhere.

The more that outsiders meddle, the deeper the regime digs in.
Better to let the country find its own way towards democracy, the
reformers say. But can the world afford to leave Iran to its own
devices? If they are nuclear devices, perhaps not.

       
             

Bombs away

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

A suitable case for pre-emption?

AMERICA and many other countries are convinced that Iran is trying
to build nuclear weapons. But Iran denies this, and after the
intelligence bungles in Iraq such claims need to be examined with care.
The Iranians remind the world that their soldiers were victims of
Saddam’s poison-gas attacks during the Iran-Iraq war, and that they
never retaliated in kind. Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, has
gone so far as to issue a fatwa (religious decree) declaring the possession or use of WMD in general, and nuclear weapons in particular, to be illegal under Islamic law.

Furthermore, Iran’s leaders point out that unlike existing
nuclear-weapons states in their neighbourhood, such as Pakistan, India
and Israel, Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has therefore submitted itself to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
the treaty’s watchdog. When asked why a country overflowing with oil
and gas should want nuclear energy, Iran answers that its oil revenues
will one day diminish and that in the meantime nuclear energy at home
would free more petrol for export. Besides, say the Iranians, America
and other Western countries were happy to help the shah establish a
nuclear industry before the revolution. Why should what America deemed
to make economic sense at that time be thought absurd now?

   
 

It
should also be noted in Iran’s defence that the nuclear agency has as
yet found no conclusive evidence that Iran is running a nuclear-weapons
programme. In a report to the IAEA’s
governors last March, Mohammed ElBaradei, its director-general, said
only that until Iran gave the agency more information about its nuclear
activities—some of which it kept secret for many years—his agency would
“not be able to provide assurance regarding the exclusively peaceful
nature of all of Iran’s nuclear activities”. In short, the IAEA
has no firm evidence that Iran is trying to make a bomb, but it has
plenty of suspicions and cannot give it a clean bill of health.

The IAEA, however, is a cautious
organisation with a mixed record. In the 1980s it failed to detect
Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programme at a time when it was in fact making
rapid progress. In Iran, the agency’s attempts to monitor nuclear
activities have been hampered by years of deception. And Iran’s
credibility suffered a massive blow in 2002 when a dissident group,
perhaps tipped off by Western spies, revealed that the country had
built two nuclear facilities in secret without informing the IAEA.
One of these, in Arak, was a heavy-water reactor, just the thing for
making plutonium, which is one way to fuel an atomic bomb. The other,
at Natanz, was a facility for enriching uranium, which is the other way
of doing it.

It is true, as Iran says, that the centrifuges at Natanz can also
make the less enriched fuel that a nuclear reactor would need for
producing electricity. But since Iran does not yet have any such
reactors (other than the one the Russians have built for it at Bushehr,
which comes with Russian-supplied fuel), why the rush to enrich? Why
try to keep both Arak and Natanz secret? And why has Iran apparently
co-operated with both North Korea and A.Q. Khan, Pakistan’s notorious
nuclear-weapons smuggler?

Iran’s answer to these questions is that it was forced to keep these
nuclear activities secret because America was intent on blocking its
civil nuclear programme, even though having such a programme was its
“inalienable right” under the NPT. Iran
also argues that under the letter of the law it was not required to
disclose the existence of these facilities until uranium enrichment
actually began—which, it says, it intended to do.

In 2003, embarrassed by the discovery of its secret facilities, Iran agreed to implement the “additional protocol” of the IAEA,
making its facilities available for fuller inspection. After
negotiations with Britain, France and Germany it agreed to suspend
uranium enrichment. But it continued to insist on its right to resume
it, and in August 2005, the month of Mr Ahmadinejad’s inauguration, it
did so—even though the three European governments had offered it
economic and civilian-nuclear help in exchange for stopping
permanently. In June 2006 the incentives on offer for nuclear
compliance were both broadened (all five permanent members of the
Security Council, and Germany, endorsed them) and sweetened.
Condoleezza Rice said that if Iran accepted, America would drop its
long-standing refusal to negotiate directly with Iran and open talks on
a wide range of subjects.

From America’s perspective this was a big concession. And yet, for
one reason or another, Iran did not bite. And in the past year its
readiness to pay a growing price for its determination to press on with
enrichment and so master the entire nuclear-fuel cycle has inevitably
added to suspicion of its intentions. Part of that price has been
losing the diplomatic protection that Russia and China had previously
given it in the Security Council. In July 2006 the council ordered Iran
to suspend enrichment. Its refusal resulted in two further
resolutions—in December 2006 and March 2007—imposing modest sanctions,
with a third now in preparation. And yet the centrifuges spin defiantly
on. Little wonder that the working assumption in many capitals is that
Iran wants the bomb.

If that assumption is correct, how soon might it get one? Mr
Ahmadinejad keeps claiming that Iran has already passed the stage of no
return in its attempts to master enrichment, but continues to deny that
Iran wants the bomb. “We have broken through to a new stage and it is
too late to push us back,” he said in June. Most outside experts,
however, are sceptical about how much progress Iran has made.

A common estimate is that in order to produce enough fissile
material for a basic device, Iran would have to run an array of some
3,000 centrifuges at high speed for more than a year. Mr ElBaradei told
a meeting of the IAEA last month that Iran
already had between 1,700 and 2,000 centrifuges running, and predicted
that this number could rise to 3,000 by the end of July. But the amount
of uranium hexafluoride—the gas put into the machines for
enrichment—has been relatively small, suggesting to some analysts,
including the IAEA, that Iran is not yet confident of its ability to spin them at full speed.

One respected expert, David Albright, president of America’s
Institute for Science and International Security, reckons Iran would be
lucky to be able to enrich enough uranium for a bomb by 2009 and that
to complete all the other steps necessary to make a usable weapon could
take another year or more. Israel says that if Iran’s programme went
very smoothly, it could have a bomb by 2009. Mr ElBaradei, who makes no
secret of his belief that it would be “crazy” to launch a pre-emptive
attack on Iran, says an Iranian bomb, if that is what Iran wants, is
between three and eight years away.

Reasons for wanting the bomb

So what if Iran got the bomb? Wouldn’t its only purpose be to deter?
Iran does after all have a history of being bullied and invaded. In the
19th century Britain and Russia played their “great game” on its
territory. Britain and America engineered the coup that unseated an
elected prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953. After Iraq’s
invasion in 1980 the United Nations did precious little to help Iran.
And in 2002 Iran found itself listed as part of George Bush’s “axis of
evil”, at a time when America had just sent one army into neighbouring
Afghanistan and prepared to send another into neighbouring Iraq.

All this—plus loose talk in Washington, DC,
about “regime change” in Iran—may have convinced the country’s leaders
that Iran needs a bomb simply to make potential attackers think twice.
But if Iran has reason to want a bomb, others have bigger reasons to
fear it. Israel is foremost of these. Whereas Israel had good relations
with the shah, Ayatollah Khomeini regarded the creation of the Jewish
state as an unforgivable sin and said that all Muslims had a duty to
reverse it.

On Israel, Iran has indeed shown less flexibility than the
Palestinians themselves. It denounced Yasser Arafat’s espousal of a
two-state solution as a betrayal and it continues to arm and train
groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah that say they want to
destroy Israel. During the reformist period, President Khatami softened
Iran’s stand, implying that it might respect whatever solution the
Palestinians accepted, but Mr Ahmadinejad, in numerous
Holocaust-denying speeches calling for or predicting Israel’s
eradication, has returned Iran noisily to the true faith.

These pronouncements have led commentators in the West to ask
whether Iran’s president is a new Hitler with genocidal designs. But a
close look shows them to be ambiguous. It is not clear, for example,
whether he really doubts that the Holocaust occurred or merely why such
an event should have been allowed to justify Israel’s creation. In the
blogosphere translators hold lively debates about whether he really did
call for Israel to be “wiped off the map” or just “removed from the
pages of time”, a phrase which some people seem to think sounds less
fierce. In the mind of Mr Ahmadinejad, are Israel and its people to
disappear in some violent event? Or is it merely the “Zionist regime”
that is to come to an end—perhaps peacefully, after the Palestinian
refugees have returned and decided by referendum?

If Israel is to disappear, will Iran be the agent of its
destruction? It is hard to say: from time to time, Mr Ahmadinejad and
other officials have said explicitly that Iran poses no threat to
Israel. Last month the president said that it was the Lebanese and the
Palestinians who had “pressed the countdown button for the destruction
of the Zionist regime”. A week later the Speaker of the majlis,
Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, said during a visit to Kuwait that Mr
Ahmadinejad’s comments did not mean that Iran intended to attack
Israel, only that “the Zionist entity” was on a “natural course of
disintegration”.

For all the ambiguity, such talk helps to sow fear in Israel and
corresponding delight in Arab countries, where Mr Ahmadinejad may now
be more popular than he is at home. To that extent it has been a
rational instrument of foreign policy. Such talk may also stem from a
rational domestic calculation: hurling dire threats against Israel in
the Khomeini manner helps rekindle the revolutionary fire that was
allowed to cool under the reformists.

As to whether Mr Ahmadinejad is a new Hitler, one point to note is
that he is neither Iran’s dictator nor the master of its nuclear
programme, which comes under the supervision of the supreme leader.
That may not be so very reassuring. It implies that even if Mr
Ahmadinejad were to shut up, or lose his job, the nuclear danger will
remain.

Since Israel does not admit to having nuclear weapons, its detailed
thinking on nuclear matters is rarely ventilated in public. But most of
those Israeli experts willing to talk rate the chances of an Iranian
nuclear attack as low. Despite Mr Ahmadinejad, most consider Iran to be
a rational state actor susceptible to deterrence.

Knowing that Israel already possesses a very large nuclear arsenal,
Iran would have to be ready to sacrifice millions of its own people to
destroy the Jewish state, unless it was sure that in a first strike it
could destroy Israel’s ability to strike back. That would be hard,
given that Israel is reported to have put nuclear weapons at sea on
submarines, and has built sophisticated anti-missile defences expressly
to protect its second-strike power. Furthermore, if Iran did obtain
nuclear weapons, America might be willing to offer Israel (and other
allies in the region) additional reassurance by saying—for whatever
such a promise can be worth—that it would regard a nuclear attack on
its ally as an attack on itself.

The calculus of destruction

Nonetheless, Ehud Olmert, its prime minister, has said that Israel
cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran.Whatever its policymakers think,
its people have been spooked by Mr Ahmadinejad. And the sheer disparity
in size between the countries (Iran’s population is more than ten times
Israel’s, and its land area 75 times as big) leads some Israelis to
question whether stable deterrence is possible between them. Israelis
are haunted by a remark of Ayatollah Rafsanjani’s in 2001, musing that
a single nuclear weapon could obliterate Israel, whereas Israel could
“only damage” the world of Islam.

Could ordinary life in Israel continue under such a threat? Even if
Iran did not use its bomb, might not possession of it embolden it to
attack Israel by conventional means, either directly or by using its
allies in Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories? A further
danger is that once Iran went nuclear, others in the region, such as
Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, might feel compelled to follow.
Hard as it would be for Israel to establish a deterrent balance with
Iran, a cat’s cradle of Middle Eastern nuclear face-offs would be an
even darker nightmare.

Added together, these considerations might still tempt an Israeli
government to try to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities before it can
finish building a bomb. The Israelis have worked for years to obtain
the weapons for such a strike, spending billions to procure long-range
variants of the F15 and F16 fighter-bomber, for example. On the other hand, senior Israelis know that this would be fraught with danger.

Iran’s nuclear targets are much further from Israel than was Iraq’s
Osiraq reactor, which Israeli aircraft destroyed in 1981. Most are more
than 1,200km (750 miles) away, and Israel’s aircraft would have to fly
even farther to avoid Jordanian or Iraqi airspace. That, according to a
study by Ephraim Kam of Israel’s Institute for National Security
Studies, would require refuelling on both the outward and return
flights, adding to the danger of interception. Osiraq, moreover, was a
single target. Since there would be many this time, the attacking force
would have to be large. And to cause serious damage, the aircraft might
have to attack more than once.

Even a successful strike would not be the end of the story. For as the IAEA’s
Mr ElBaradei keeps saying, “you can’t bomb knowledge.” Iran would be
likely not only to retaliate with its long-range rockets but also to
begin at once to rebuild its nuclear capability, just as Iraq did with
extra urgency after Israel’s destruction of Osiraq. That might not take
long, says Mr Kam: Iran has its own nuclear raw material and already
possesses much of the relevant knowledge and technology. Having spent
only three years building Natanz from scratch, it could probably
rebuild it much faster with the experience it has gleaned.

More worrying still is the possibility that Iran has secret nuclear
sites outsiders do not know about: the existence of Arak and Natanz,
remember, was not discovered until fairly recently. That could render
an attack on the known ones pointless. And Mr Kam is surely right that
an Israeli strike might unite Iran’s people behind the regime and its
nuclear aspirations.

Another alternative for Israel might be to attack Iran in order to
start a sequence of events in which America eventually joins the fray.
The Americans, naturally, would find the military job much easier than
Israel. The Americans have a motive, too: not fear of annihilation, but
fear that a nuclear-armed Iran would knock a hole in what is left of
the non-proliferation regime and challenge American interests in the
energy-rich Middle East. After Iraq, however, no American president
could doubt that such an attack would deepen Muslim hatred of America.
And Iran is not without means of retaliation, even against the
superpower. It could strike America’s already hard-pressed forces in
Iraq, direct terrorism at America’s friends or disrupt tanker traffic
through the Persian Gulf, so causing mayhem in the energy markets.

That is why American and Israeli politicians alike, while refusing
to take the threat of military action “off the table”, are probably
being completely honest when they insist that force is a last resort
and that they would prefer to stop Iran by means of diplomacy sharpened
by economic sanctions. But can sanctions do the job, and can they do it
in time?

       
             

The big squeeze

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

But sanctions are not yet painful enough to change Iran’s nuclear policy

“I PRAY to God that I will never know about economics,” President
Ahmadinejad once said when questioned about apparent contradictions in
his economic policy. The Lord appears to have answered his prayer. On
his watch, the world oil price has soared from $62 a barrel when he was
elected in June 2005 to $72 a barrel in recent weeks. Iran, which has a
young, well-educated workforce, along with the world’s second-largest
reserves of both oil and gas, should be on a roll. Instead the economy
is struggling. Is this a weakness the world can use to dissuade Iran
from its nuclear ambitions?

Since almost all official economic statistics are suspect, measuring
the performance of the economy is hard. But Afshin Molavi, an
Iran-watcher at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC,
calls slow economic decline “the untold story of the Iranian
revolution”. The economy is showing respectable growth of about 5%. But
it is recording high and rising unemployment and inflation. The
government puts unemployment at around 10% but private economists think
it is twice as high—and that many of those with jobs have to take
second ones to make ends meet. Mr Ahmadinejad’s government claims to
have reduced the rate of inflation. In fact it has almost certainly
gone up: guesstimates by foreign embassies in Tehran put it as high as
25%. Meanwhile, foreign investment is puny—and falling (see chart 2).

One reason for these economic failures is the economic punishment
America has meted out since 1979, and which it has been tightening ever
since. These sanctions prevent American companies from helping Iran to
develop its oil resources, block most Iranian exports to the United
States and restrict certain Iranian imports from there. American
financial sanctions also hamper Iranian banking (foreign visitors
cannot use credit cards and must stuff their suitcases with dollars).

The price of economic ignorance

But there are two bigger reasons for Iran’s underperformance. One is
the lopsided structure of an oil-based economy in which a
corruption-riddled public sector dwarfs private business. The other is
incompetent economic management, especially by Mr Ahmadinejad.

Oil revenues bring in some 80% of export earnings, but even with a
high world oil price the government finds it hard to pay its bills.
Tough buy-back terms have deterred foreign investment in the oilfields
and hampered production: a quarter of a century after the revolution,
Iran is pumping only two-thirds as much oil as before. Meanwhile the
government operates a vast, price-distorting system of subsidies for
food, energy, housing, bank credit and much else. According to the IMF, energy subsidies alone reached 17.5% of GDP in 2005-06, and total subsidies amounted to 25% of GDP.
A Consumer and Producer Protection Organisation keeps price controls on
cereals, sugar, baby milk, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals, paper and
agricultural machinery. This edifice of subsidies places huge demands
on public spending and would collapse if it were not for the oil
revenues (see chart 3).

Among the maddest of the subsidies is that on petrol. Even after a
recent 25% price hike it is still the cheapest in the world, at 11
American cents a litre. That has encouraged an annual 10% increase in
consumption, plus impossible traffic and choking pollution in all of
Iran’s cities.

Selling petrol so cheaply is hardly an incentive for domestic
refiners to raise production, so Iran has to import more than 40% of
its petrol and other refined products. Much of this is smuggled back
out (allegedly by the Revolutionary Guards) to be sold at a higher
price. In short, Iran spends a fortune subsidising cheap petrol not
only at home but also for consumers in neighbouring countries, wasting
money it could otherwise have spent on increasing its flagging oil
production. The government’s decision last month to introduce rationing
provoked violent disturbances. Since many Iranians use private cars to
top up meagre incomes by becoming unofficial taxi-drivers, the
consequences of this measure will be widely felt.

The IMF calls Iran’s economy
“state-dominated”. And how. Revolution and eight years of war have made
for vast government. In most sectors state-owned companies or the
opaque quasi-state foundations known as bonyads crowd out
private businesses. Agriculture, internal trade and distribution are
mostly in private hands. Even so, estimates of how much of the economy
the government controls range between 65% and 80%.

   

 

Now there is talk of large-scale privatisation to attract investment
and improve productivity. Some privatisation has even taken place,
though it often entails little more than shuffling assets from one
state sector to another. In theory, the pace of privatisation should
pick up, thanks to a new constitutional amendment that envisages moving
all but 25 state-owned companies into private ownership within eight to
ten years (though the government will keep a 20% stake). Ayatollah
Khamenei, the supreme leader, was a critic of nationalisation in the
1980s and is said to be enthusiastic about the change. The impediment
will not be an absence of political will at the top but the hesitation
of investors.

Iran’s rigid labour laws will make it hard for new owners to squeeze
any profits out of the bloated companies coming to market. Investors
may also fear that those who owned these firms before nationalisation
will want their assets back; and wonder who, in the absence of an
established pro-business political party, can protect them from future
arbitrary interventions by the state. The likely upshot is that a fair
amount of privatisation will take place, but not at prices that will
rescue the public finances, and not in a manner that will do much to
boost productivity.

The prospects for serious reform of the economy have been dented
further by Mr Ahmadinejad’s erratic management of it. In some ways
President Khatami left him a decent economic legacy. The reformist
period saw a dose of market-oriented liberalisation, a currency reform
that moved the rial to a managed float and the passage of liberal laws
governing foreign investment. By 2004 many analysts felt that the
economy was heading in the right direction, provided that something
could be done to reduce energy subsidies, shrink the size of the state
and tackle corruption. But although Mr Ahmadinejad campaigned on a
platform of economic reform, he has instead caused immense harm by an
unpredictable, populist and often dotty (“heterodox”, say his kinder
critics) approach to policymaking.

His idea of privatisation, for example, has so far appeared to
consist of giving “justice shares” to millions of citizens, without
specifying how the value of these securities is to be determined. Local
investors get discouraged when the president seems actively hostile to
the very notion of a stockmarket: during his election campaign Mr
Ahmadinejad’s denunciation of “speculators” sent share prices tumbling.
It is no surprise that many businessmen prefer to move their money
offshore. Dubai is a favourite destination: Indian estate agents there
are said to be learning Farsi, the better to sell apartments to rich
Iranians seeking a haven for their wealth.

The president’s behaviour has maddened critics and alienated former
friends. He tours far-flung provinces to announce unaffordable spending
plans, apparently on the spur of the moment. Some Iranians have
benefited from his handouts and from the cheap loans he has ordered the
banks to offer. But he has sprung expensive surprises on his country,
ranging from cancelling daylight-saving time to an abrupt increase in
the minimum wage (which had to be scaled back when it caused a leap in
unemployment).

The president has also wrought havoc inside the economically
important Management and Planning Organisation by replacing experienced
technocrats with friends from his Revolutionary Guards days. Two months
ago he astonished the central bank by ordering banks to slash interest
rates below the rate of inflation. Some Iranian economists think this
was a favour to the Revolutionary Guards, who have borrowed heavily to
expand their commercial activities since his election.

Having promised to root out corruption and “put the oil money on
everyone’s dinner table”, Mr Ahmadinejad seems destined to fail.
Indeed, his mounting economic woes at home may help to explain the
attention he has devoted to the nuclear confrontation with the West and
threats against Israel. But hard-pressed Iranian workers and consumers
have listened to nearly three decades of revolutionary slogans and are
not easily distracted from worries about jobs, rents and inflation.

Ask a passer-by in Tehran about Palestine and he will express his
sympathy for the put-upon Palestinians—before volunteering that
Palestine is a problem for the Arabs to sort out and that Iran has more
pressing troubles of its own. And so it does. Every year some 800,000
young people join the labour market, and by some accounts only half of
them can find jobs. Not surprisingly the country faces a brain drain:
an estimated 150,000 university graduates emigrate every year.

Iran, in short, has some serious economic troubles. Might a few
well-aimed kicks persuade the regime to give up its nuclear plans? In
themselves, the two sanctions resolutions passed so far by the Security
Council do not amount to much: they mainly ban trade in some nuclear
and military equipment. Their psychological impact on would-be traders
and investors is another matter. And combined with the financial
squeeze America is applying separately, the result is genuinely
painful.

America is using its heft in the world’s financial system to do some
effective bullying. In 2005 President Bush issued an order authorising
the Treasury and State Department to target “key nodes” of Iran’s WMD and
missile-proliferation networks, including their suppliers and
financiers. Since a firm or entity that is designated under this order
can be denied access to American financial and commercial systems, this
makes for a potent weapon. For example, America has accused one Iranian
bank, Bank Sepah, of providing financial services to Iran’s missile
programme and another, Bank Saderat, of providing funds for Lebanon’s
Hizbullah, which is treated as a terrorist organisation in America. The
banks deny the allegations, but have found themselves isolated.

The fate of these two banks has not gone unnoticed by financial
institutions generally. America’s Treasury Department says it is
working with more than 40 banks around the world to “discuss the risks”
of doing business with Iran and to identify customers “who could harm
their reputations and business”. Since in a country such as Iran it is
hard to know exactly who your ultimate customer is, this has banks’
compliance officers running scared.

It hurts, but not enough

The Treasury Department boasts that UBS has cut off all dealings with Iran, that Credit Suisse and HSBC have
reduced their exposure, and that other banks are refusing to issue
letters of credit. Government export-credit programmes from Germany,
France and Japan are said to have fallen sharply. Iran has responded by
moving out of dollars, and many foreign banks that have cut off
business in dollars continue to conduct transactions in other
currencies. But the Treasury Department is now gunning for them too.

So are sanctions “working”? The punishment so far, and the fear of
more to come, has scared off foreign investors and pushed up the risk,
cost and inconvenience of doing business in Iran. One notable example
was last year’s decision by a Japanese energy group, Inpex, to abandon
plans to invest $2 billion in developing the Azadegan oilfield. Raising
foreign money for big infrastructure projects is becoming harder, and
those European banks still operating in Iran admit privately that their
business is drying up. Although some big foreign firms continue to come
in, attracted not least by the prospect of a big, undeveloped market
devoid of American competitors, many others have either gone home or
left behind skeleton offices in the care of local employees.

Nonetheless, it is not clear that sanctions are even close to
imposing the sort of pain needed to alter the government’s nuclear
behaviour. They have pushed down living standards, but war and
revolution have taught Iranians how to muddle through. An economy like
Iran’s, dominated by the government budget, is better able than most to
take the travails of the private sector in its stride. And since energy
exports make up almost half the government’s revenues, high world
prices (kept high in part by the tension over Iran) have compensated
nicely for much of the damage sanctions have inflicted. Besides, many
powerful Iranians prosper through their control of a relatively closed
economy. The openness the world proffers as an “incentive” to give up
the bomb strikes at some of this group’s vested interests.

A big fall in the world oil price, or sanctions aimed directly at
Iran’s imports of petrol or exports of oil, would have a devastating
impact on its economy. Some American congressmen are talking about a
ban on importing petrol to Iran, but that would be very hard to
enforce. A fall in the world oil price looks unlikely, and if Iran’s
oil was stopped from reaching the market prices would rise higher still
(except in the improbable event of Saudi Arabia pumping enough extra to
fill the gap).

In the longer run, Iran faces a different sort of vulnerability. It
is finding it hard to acquire the foreign technology and capital it
needs in order to boost production of its fast-depleting oilfields and
realise its vast potential as an exporter of natural gas. Without this
investment, all of Iran’s big plans for a prosperous energy-fired
future would be put in jeopardy. But Iran still has a few years to sort
this out, whereas its mastery of uranium enrichment may be only a
matter of months away.

       
             

Only engage

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

The case for a “grand bargain”

IF A military attack looks too dangerous and sanctions will not
bring Iran to its knees, must the world accept that the Islamic
Republic will soon have a bomb? Maybe. Plenty of governments in the
Middle East are already working out how best to prepare for life
alongside a nuclear-armed Iran. But what if sanctions and the threat of
force were combined with more positive incentives for Iran, such as
security guarantees and normal relations with the United States? Might
not a beleaguered regime that was offered some such “grand bargain” see
it as an honourable way to give up its nuclear plans?

That is the thinking of those who say the mistake of the Bush
administration has been to confront Iran instead of engaging it. Four
years ago Iran gave tantalising signs of wanting to end the long
confrontation. The superpower’s rapid disposal of the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan after September 11th 2001 and its preparations to invade
Iraq had made it look like a formidable enemy. In 2003 Iran is reported
quietly to have offered to open broad negotiations with America on all
outstanding issues, including nuclear weapons and Israel. But for
various reasons—mainly, say some, the hubris of America’s own
neoconservatives—this opportunity was missed. And by the time America
had run into serious trouble inside Iraq two years later, Iran’s mood
had changed.

Since President Ahmadinejad’s election, Iran has come to be less
scared of America. The superpower’s overstretched armies in Afghanistan
and Iraq now look more like hostages than menacing invaders. Although
the Bush administration already blames Iran for many of its woes in
Iraq, it knows the Iranians would and could inflict even more damage on
American forces there if America were to bomb Iran. Other American
reverses elsewhere in the region have no doubt added to Iran’s
self-confidence. The regime portrays Israel’s war against Hizbullah in
Lebanon last summer—and Hamas’s success last month in wresting the Gaza
Strip from Fatah—as a victory for its own proxies and a defeat for
America’s.

   
 

Here, though, is a puzzle. If an Iran brimming with self-confidence
is no longer afraid of America, why did it decide to take part at the
end of May in the first formal high-level talks it has held with the
United States since the American embassy hostages left Tehran in
January 1981? To judge from the defensiveness on display at Tehran’s
Friday prayers before the meeting, this about-turn was a highly
sensitive one, controversial with the regime’s hardliners and difficult
to explain to its supporters after all the years spitting defiance at
the Great Satan.

The explanation favoured by Western diplomats is that the Iranians
feel more vulnerable than they admit. Though buoyed up after last
summer’s Lebanon war, the regime’s fortunes have since declined. There
was that blow to President Ahmadinejad’s supporters in last December’s
municipal elections. President Bush, contrary to expectations,
reinforced American forces in Iraq and the Persian Gulf instead of
reducing them. American forces in Iraq have arrested five Revolutionary
Guards there (the Iranians say they were diplomats). Russia and China
surprised Iran by withdrawing their protection in the Security Council
and agreeing to sanctions.

In short, say Western diplomats, the pressure is working. Yet it may
be working in both directions: the Bush administration, after all, has
simultaneously performed a U-turn of its
own by talking to Iran after a long period of refusing contact. At
present both sides are saving face by stressing that Iraq is the only
subject on the table. America’s official line is that there will be no
widening of the discussion unless Iran suspends uranium enrichment and
complies with the Security Council’s other demands. However, many loud
voices in Washington, DC, and a few softer
ones in Tehran, see this as an opportunity to move to a broader
negotiation that could culminate in an historic reconciliation between
the old enemies.

Could it happen? America and Iran have some common interests. Both
claim to want a stable and united Iraq and both support its present
government. Neither wants the Taliban back in charge of Afghanistan
(though Iran is reported to be arming some Taliban fighters). As Shias,
the Iranians are as hostile as America is to al-Qaeda, whose jihadists
in Iraq have murdered thousands of Shias and bombed their holiest
shrines. But on the other side of the ledger are areas where the
interests of the two countries collide.

A quarter-century of bad blood

America and Iran support opposite sides in the stand-off in Lebanon.
Iran says it wants to destroy Israel, or at least see it disappear.
America accuses Iran of seeking an atomic bomb which Mr Bush says he
cannot accept. And on top of all this there has been a quarter of a
century of bad blood. To Americans, Iranians are the fanatical
revolutionaries who kept America’s embassy in Tehran hostage for 444
days. To Iranians, Americans are the scheming imperialists who deposed
their elected prime minister in 1953 and re-installed a repressive shah.

Reaching a grand bargain in these circumstances is difficult but not
impossible. Oddly, America’s misadventure in Iraq could turn out to be
the catalyst. In the 1970s America reached out to China partly to cover
its withdrawal from an unsuccessful war in Vietnam. What, though, if a
grand bargain remains elusive? Then the two countries may opt for a
partial agreement, or let their confrontation continue at the same
level, or see it deteriorate and become even more dangerous.

There are two other outcomes, both of them devoutly wished for by
some Americans, that seem unlikely to transpire. One is that the right
mixture of external political and economic pressures will force Iran’s
regime simply to capitulate and agree to the world’s demands, at least
on the nuclear front. The other is that the regime’s internal economic
failures and declining popularity will cause it to be overthrown in a
popular uprising.

What makes a simple capitulation unlikely is not Iran’s external
strength but its domestic weakness. The last risk a prickly and
unpopular revolutionary regime is willing to run is a public
humiliation. To make Iran abandon its nuclear aspirations will
therefore require not only pressure but also a means of helping the
leadership save face and point to some sort of success. That is
especially true if Mr Chubin at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy
is right that the regime’s main motivation for its nuclear programme is
to shore up its internal legitimacy.

The Bush administration seems at last to have understood this. That
is why it signed up to the incentives offered to Iran in June last year
by the other members of the Security Council, plus Germany, in return
for its nuclear compliance. These included the prospect of trade
agreements with the European Union; Iran’s acceptance into the World
Trade Organisation; the easing of American sanctions; the sale to Iran
of a light-water reactor and guarantees of nuclear fuel; EU help to modernise Iran’s oil and gas industries; support for a WMD-free
zone in the Middle East; and the possibility of Iran being allowed to
enrich uranium after all if it could show that this was for exclusively
peaceful purposes. Iran turned this offer down. But it remains on the
table and could be improved.

If a straight capitulation is unlikely, so is an uprising against
the regime. Iran, it is true, has a proven capacity to surprise. The
shah was toppled only months after the then President Jimmy Carter
described Iran as “an island of stability” in a volatile region. But
although Iranians grumble endlessly about their government and its
failures, there is precious little evidence of a popular
counter-revolution in the making. Most of the regime’s internal critics
seem to pin their hopes on gradual change emerging as it did in the
Soviet Union, from inside the system. The Soviet system, however, was
based on a secular ideology. When such doctrines fail, they can be
junked relatively easily. But how does a system that claims to be
rooted in the eternal verities of revealed religion modernise itself
from within?

The verdict of Qom

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Theory and practice

THEY call Qom “the Shia Vatican”. President Ahmadinejad is reported
to have said that when Islam ruled the world Qom would be its capital.
Rome need not worry: Qom will never compete for its tourists. At first
glance, despite the imposing golden cupola of the Sayyeda Fatima
shrine, this desert city some 100km (60 miles) from Tehran is a
backwater, devoid of grace and greenery. Its seminaries, however, are
home to perhaps 60,000 clerical students. And the broad highway that
slices from Tehran to Qom through a moonscape of scrubby desert and
salt lakes is a clue to the city’s importance. It was from Qom that
Ayatollah Khomeini began to denounce the shah, and it was in Qom that
he set up his revolutionary government after returning from exile in
France. This seems the right place to see whether the system he created
can be changed from within.

Why suppose that Qom of all places might become an agent of change?
Conventional wisdom from afar saw the success of Khomeini’s revolution
as Qom’s victory too. Didn’t the revolution stop modernisation in its
tracks and jerk Iran back to the Middle Ages, delivering political
power to turbaned clerics in thrall to an unfathomable theology? And
does it not follow that the turbaned clerics of Qom have a strong
belief, buttressed by a strong vested interest, in preserving the
theocratic principles of that revolution?

As a matter of fact, no. Khomeini’s central idea, the doctrine of velayat-e faqih,
gives the Islamic Republic its theological underpinning. This holds
that until the appearance of the Shias’ “hidden imam” (of which more
below) society should be governed by a supreme leader, the clerical
judge best qualified to interpret God’s will and the meaning of Islamic
law. It is this doctrine that makes Ayatollah Khamenei supreme leader
and all others subordinate to him. But Qom itself has never felt
completely at ease either with Ayatollah Khomeini’s idea or Ayatollah
Khamenei’s succession. Indeed, many of the most revered clerical minds
in Qom see this doctrine, and especially the way it has been
implemented since Khomeini’s death, as negating their tradition.

Politics and the hidden imam

To understand why requires a digression into theology. The quarrel
between Sunnis and Shias is about succession. Shias believe that the
last rightful imam to follow Muhammad was his son-in-law Ali, but that
he and his ten successors were murdered by Sunni caliphs. The twelfth
imam therefore went into hiding, promising not to return until the end
of time. Most Shia clerics have long held that during this period of
“occultation” there can be no lawful political authority. Until the
emergence of the hidden imam, politics must be inherently invalid and
men of religion should be careful not to implicate themselves in it.

Velayat-e faqih seems to turn this long-standing assumption upside down, especially when it is interpreted as implying that the faqih derives
his authority from God and is not answerable to the people. Many of
Qom’s clerics flatly repudiate this idea. They say that there exists no
blueprint for government during the time of occultation, and that
nobody has special authority to guide society during this period.

It is not clear exactly how the theological arguments of Qom travel
from the seminary into Iran’s politics, but they do. President
Khatami’s reform movement drew heavily on the views of clerics, some of
whom were astonishingly outspoken. One, Hojatoleslam Mohsen Kadivar,
began to argue in the 1990s that Iran could not have clerical rule and
claim to be a democracy at the same time. He was jailed for saying that
the freedom Iranians had sought through their revolution was being
replaced by a new clerical despotism. From house arrest, Grand
Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a revered cleric who was Khomeini’s
designated successor before complaining too much about the mass
execution of political prisoners after the war with Iraq, supported
Hojatoleslam Kadivar. “What the conservative leaders are practising
today is not Islam, and I oppose it,” he said.

Such criticisms are especially damaging to the present supreme
leader. Ayatollah Khomeini was not just the father of the revolution
but also a charismatic scholar of immense learning. In the eyes of Qom,
Ayatollah Khamenei is by contrast a clerical lightweight (but effective
politician) whom Khomeini prematurely fast-tracked to ayatollahdom when
he was looking for a successor. What was acceptable in the charismatic
is not necessarily acceptable in the apparatchik.

Although the government has tried to stifle dissent, Qom remains an
argumentative place, continuing to exert a potentially disruptive
influence on politics. Even during the present crackdown, the visitor
to its seminaries quickly encounters a spectrum of clerical opinions on
everything from velayat-e faqih to the wearing of the hijab
to relations with Israel and America. “Qom’s seminary is like an ocean
in which you can find anything you desire,” Hojatoleslam Kadivar told a
recent interviewer from Asharq Al-Awsat, a pan-Arab daily.

To sample the range of opinion, meet two clerics from opposite ends
of this spectrum. Hojatoleslam Fazel Maybodi teaches at Qom’s Mofid
University, a traditionally liberal seminary. A jolly, grey-bearded
cleric proud of his smattering of English phrases, he explains at once
that although Qom is not a place for political decision-making—that is
the job of the government—“theoretical” debate about Islam’s
relationship with politics takes place freely. On velayat-e faqih he
says that the views of the most senior ayatollahs are not uniform. For
example, Ayatollah Sistani, a revered cleric based in Iraq but also
widely admired in Iran, has approved Iraq’s post-Saddam constitution.
This gives ultimate authority to elected politicians rather than
clerics. “I don’t believe that all political ideas should come from
within Islam,” says Hojatoleslam Maybodi. “Politics is an experimental,
man-made activity and Islam should respect it.”

In Qom, unlike many parts of Iran, all the women wear full black chadors;
around the town billboards with anti-Semitic motifs still advertise the
recent exhibition of cartoons poking fun at the Holocaust. But liberal
clerics like Hojatoleslam Maybodi are happy to dissent from the party
line. He says it was “not correct at all” for Iran to have raised this
issue: the genocide of the Jews was an ugly phenomenon and the number
murdered was for historians to determine. As to whether Iran could ever
accept the right of Israel to exist, Hojatoleslam Maybodi says the two
countries could well make peace provided the Israelis and Palestinians
reached an agreement. Both sides have their extremists, he admits, but
“what’s the problem with Muslims living next to Jews?”

The spirit of ijtihad—the idea that Islamic law can and
should be reinterpreted to match the circumstances of the day—is strong
in Shia Islam. Hojatoleslam Maybodi says bluntly that sharia
law discriminates against women and should therefore change. He argues
that the unequal treatment of women (such as their smaller claims on
blood money or inheritance) stems from a time before women were
economically active. As for the crackdown on “bad hijab”,
Hojatoleslam Maybodi expresses a view often voiced by Iran’s clerics.
When the state uses coercion in the name of religion, it is in danger
of turning the people away from Islam.

The views of individual clerics should not be given too much weight.
If, as Hojatoleslam Kadivar boasts, Qom is an ocean, it is difficult at
any particular moment to judge which way its tide is running. Many of
the ayatollahs are arch-conservatives in social matters. Some were
scandalised by Mr Ahmadinejad’s suggestion that women should be allowed
to watch football matches—an idea he had to withdraw.

So, at the other end of Qom’s spectrum, meet the suspicious,
unsmiling Hojatoleslam Mohsen Gharavian. He is a student of Ayatollah
Mesbah Yazdi, the extreme hardliner said to be Mr Ahmadinejad’s
spiritual adviser. Ayatollah Yazdi and those who think like him have
little regard for democracy and no compunction about employing coercion
if the people refuse to embrace piety voluntarily. “The prophets of God
did not believe in pluralism,” he once said. “They believed that only
one idea was right.”

And yet the views of Hojatoleslam Gharavian turn out to be more nuanced than his teacher’s. Although he claims that velayat-e faqih
is accepted unanimously in Iran by conservatives and liberals alike, he
concedes that there are differences of opinion about the extent of the
supreme leader’s rightful authority. He agrees that it may be time to
grant women equality in respect of blood money but wants cautiously to
“wait and see” when it comes to the law on inheritance. He is
unflinching on the compulsory wearing of the hijab: like gold, silver and jewels, he says, it is natural for society to want to keep women safe from the avarice of men.

He is implacable on Israel, too: it belongs to the Palestinians and
its government should be in the hands of the Muslims, he says. But that
does not mean that Jews cannot live there; and he concedes, when
pushed, that if the Palestinians chose to make a gift (hebeh) of part of it for a Jewish state, that would be their affair.

Open to the world

Qom—or at least the idea of Qom—sums up many of the things the
secular mind finds frightening about Iran’s revolution. From here the
clerics’ view of the righteous way is projected not only throughout
Iran by the machinery of the state but also into the world beyond by
the power of the internet. Behind one unprepossessing façade you will,
for example, find the Aalulbayt “Global Information Centre”. Affiliated
to Ayatollah Sistani, this outfit operates four global websites in some
30 languages, pumping out personal, spiritual and political teaching to
the faithful in scores of countries. Its director, Hojatoleslam
Lajarvadi, boasts that Qom hosts more websites per head of population
than anywhere else in Iran.

All this helps to explain how it is possible from Israel or America
to see Qom as the nerve centre of global fundamentalism. But Qom is not
homogenous. Besides, it imports ideas as well as exporting them. Mofid
University, for example, holds regular human-rights seminars in which
Jews and Christians from outside Iran take part. Its students read
books on Western philosophy, and many travel to America and Britain to
study. Moreover, Qom is wired: every student, says Hojatoleslam
Maybodi, has access to the internet. That may be one reason why, as
with young people the world over, the study of English has lately
become a preoccupation.

Above all, it is a mistake to associate Qom with the messianic views
of Mr Ahmadinejad and his coterie. A lot of senior clerics are appalled
by the new president’s frequent claims that the appearance of the
hidden imam is imminent and its timing somehow connected with the
political zeal of the present government. Their distaste for Mr
Ahmadinejad helps explain why, when he endorsed a slate of candidates
affiliated to Ayatollah Yazdi for election to the Assembly of Experts
last December, they were roundly defeated by candidates associated with
his centrist rival, Ayatollah Rafsanjani.

Well before the election of Mr Ahmadinejad, Qom was home to clerics
who said the revolution had taken a wrong turn, creating a new
despotism and turning people off religion by using state power to ram
it down their throats. Even in the Shia Vatican, out in the desert,
Iran’s beleaguered revolutionaries are finding it hard to keep
dangerous ideas at bay.

Khomeini’s children

Jul 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Not happy, but probably not eager to become Westernised either

AN EXOTIC country that is viewed mainly through the filter of its
foreign policy and its televised public rituals is liable to be
misunderstood. So it is with America in the eyes of Iranians and with
Iran in the eyes of Americans.

Iran took an American embassy hostage. It may have had a hand in
the bombing of the American marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 and it
stands accused now of helping to kill American soldiers in Iraq. It is
not surprising that many Americans consider Iran a bitter foe.

Nor is it surprising that Iranians return the favour. America
organised the coup against Mossadegh, supported the shah, helped Saddam
in the Iran-Iraq war, invaded two of Iran’s neighbours and imposes
sanctions on Iran. The Iranian regime considers America an implacable
foe and routinely denounces it, in political speeches and organised
rituals such as those fiery Friday prayers, as the Great Satan or “the
Global Arrogance”.

And yet, as this special report has already noted, many of the
smartly dressed young people of Tehran seem quite unmoved (some are
amused) by the official hate-mongering. They do not admire George Bush.
But to judge by dress, behaviour, viewing and consumption habits—and
even more by the regime’s terror of a creeping “Westoxification”—they
do admire at least some of America’s ways.

   

 

The young suffer disproportionately from the regime’s failures. In
2006, by the government’s own reckoning, nearly every other Iranian
between the ages of 25 and 29 was unemployed. A lack of jobs is no
doubt one reason for the prevalence of heroin addiction and other
social ills. In this nominally austere society, alcohol is consumed
widely, even though it is illegal for Muslims. Prostitution is
widespread.

Will the disaffection of the young bring down the regime? That is
what those outsiders who see the Islamic Republic as a crude despotism
lacking popular support sincerely hope. But how many Iranians see their
regime that way? It seems highly likely that if the government
continues to thwart the aspirations of young voters, they will punish
it at the next election. Yet it would be a terrible mistake to assume
that every youthful, fast-urbanising country facing economic hardship
must be eager to throw off its regime and embrace Western values.

Iran remains a strongly religious society. Though the proportion of
city-dwellers has soared, they are different from the atomised
individualists of Europe or North America: the extended family and
traditional social networks have survived even in teeming Tehran. And
though the government is not popular, most Iranians seem to accept its
right to govern. One sign that millions continue to have faith in the
country’s institutions is that more than 60% of eligible voters turned
out in the presidential elections of 2005, at a time of deep cynicism
following the blocking of President Khatami’s political reforms.

 

The difference a year makes

A year ago an American firm, Zogby International, polled Iranians on
a range of issues by phoning in from abroad. At that time 41% of those
polled said the country’s top priority should be the economy, 27%
thought developing nuclear weapons was more important and only 23% put
more freedom at the top of their list. Those who wanted Iran to become
more religious and conservative (36%) outnumbered those who wanted it
to become more secular and liberal (31%). However, in a similar poll
last month by “Terror Free Tomorrow”, an American think-tank, 88% saw
the economy as the top priority, compared with 29% who listed nuclear
weapons. And 79% said they would prefer a democratic system in which
all leaders, including the supreme leader, were elected by a direct
popular vote.

Given that Iranians are naturally wary about what they tell
strangers on the phone, these are striking results. They underline the
regime’s economic vulnerability. What they do not prove is that Iran is
ripe for counter-revolution.

President Ahmadinejad may not be much of an economist, but he is a
shrewd politician. He may not appeal to the gilded youth of north
Tehran, but he was able in 2005 to scoop up the votes of the
traditional lower and middle classes. Many of his policies, such as
cheap home loans for new couples, are aimed at consolidating the
support of this group. For millions of young Iranians in the
Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia or government service, the
revolution remains an economic provider as well as a moral compass.

For how long? Iranians gave the reformists two terms before deciding
that they could not deliver. If President Ahmadinejad fails them, he
too will eventually have to go—and his failure may inflict collateral
damage on the supreme leader and the conservative establishment that
backed him. In the longer run, Iranians may conclude that the whole
theocratic system might prove unworkable. But one thing that could help
to save it would be a military attack by the West. Young Iranians may
grumble, wear jeans, drink Pepsi and watch football. But they are
nationalists whose instinct in the face of external attack will surely
be to rally around their leaders, no matter how flawed.

       
             

Alina tercinta,

Bersama surat ini kukirimkan padamu sepotong senja–dengan angin, debur
ombak, matahari terbenam, dan cahaya keemasan. Apakah kamu menerimanya
dalam keadaan lengkap?

Seperti setiap senja di setiap pantai, tentu ada juga burung-burung,
pasir yang basah, siluet batu karang, dan barangkali juga perahu lewat
di jauhan. Maaf, aku tidak sempat menelitinya satu persatu. Mestinya
ada juga lokan, batu yang berwarna-warni, dan bias cahaya cemerlang
yang berkeretap pada buih yang bagaikan impian selalu saja membuat aku
mengangankan segala hal yang paling mungkin kulakukan bersamamu meski
aku tahu semua itu akan tetap tinggal sebagai kemungkinan yang entah
kapan menjadi kenyataan.

Kukirimkan sepotong senja ini untukmu Alina, dalam amplop yang
tertutup rapat, dari jauh, karena aku ingin memberikan sesuatu yang
lebih dari sekedar kata-kata.

Sudah terlalu banyak kata di dunia ini Alina, dan kata-kata,
ternyata, tidak mengubah apa-apa. Aku tidak akan menambah kata-kata
yang sudah tak terhitung jumlahnya dalam sejarah kebudayaan manusia
Alina.

Untuk apa? Kata-kata tidak ada gunanya dan selalu sia-sia. Lagi pula
siapakah yang masih sudi mendengarnya? Di dunia ini semua orang sibuk
berkata-kata tanpa peduli apakah ada orang lain yang mendengarnya.
Bahkan mereka juga tidak peduli dengan kata-katanya sendiri. Sebuah
dunia yang sudah kelebihan kata-kata tanpa makna. Kata-kata sudah luber
dan tidak dibutuhkan lagi. Setiap kata bisa diganti artinya. Setiap
arti bisa diubah maknanya. Itulah dunia kita Alina.

Kukirimkan sepotong senja untukmu Alina, bukan kata-kata cinta.
Kukirimkan padamu sepotong senja yang lembut dengan langit
kemerah-merahan yang nyata dan betul-betul ada dalam keadaan yang sama
seperti ketika aku mengambilnya saat matahari hampir tenggelam ke balik
cakrawala.

Alina yang manis, Alina yang sendu, Akan kuceritakan padamu bagaimana aku mendapatkan senja itu untukmu.

Sore itu aku duduk seorang diri di tepi pantai, memandang dunia yang
terdiri dari waktu. Memandang bagaimana ruang dan waktu bersekutu,
menjelmakan alam itu untuk mataku. Di tepi pantai, di tepi bumi,
semesta adalah sapuan warna keemasan dan lautan adalah cairan logam
meski buih pada debur ombak yang menghempas itu tetap saja putih
seperti kapas dan langit tetap saja ungu dan angin tetap saja lembab
dan basah, dan pasir tetap saja hangat ketika kuusapkan kakiku ke
dalamnya.

Kemudian tiba-tiba senja dan cahaya gemetar.
Keindahan berkutat melawan waktu dan aku tiba-tiba teringat padamu.
“barangkali senja ini bagus untukmu,” pikirku. Maka kupotong senja itu
sebelum terlambat, kukerat pada empat sisi lantas kumasukkan ke dalam
saku. Dengan begitu keindahan itu bisa abadi dan aku bisa memberikannya
padamu.

Setelah itu aku berjalan pulang dengan perasaan senang. Aku tahu
kamu akan menyukainya karena kamu tahu itulah senja yang selalu kamu
bayangkan untuk kita. Aku tahu kamu selalu membayangkan hari libur yang
panjang, perjalanan yang jauh, dan barangkali sepasang kursi malas pada
sepotong senja di sebuah pantai di mana kita akan bercakap-cakap
sembari memandang langit sambil berangan-angan sambil bertanya-tanya
apakah semua ini memang benar-benar telah terjadi. Kini senja itu bisa
kamu bawa ke mana-mana.

Ketika aku meninggalkan pantai itu, kulihat orang-orang datang
berbondong-bondong, ternyata mereka menjadi gempar karena senja telah
hilang. Kulihat cakrawala itu berlubang sebesar kartu pos.

Alina sayang,
Semua itu telah terjadi dan kejadiannya akan tetap seperti itu. Aku
telah sampai ke mobil ketika di antara kerumunan itu kulihat seseorang
menunjuk-nunjuk ke arahku.

“Dia yang mengambil senja itu! Saya lihat dia mengambil senja itu!”

Kulihat orang-orang itu melangkah ke arahku. Melihat gelagat itu aku segera masuk mobil dan tancap gas.

“Catat nomernya! Catat nomernya!”

Aku melejit ke jalan raya. Kukebut mobilku tanpa perasaan panik. Aku
sudah berniat memberikan senja itu untukmu dan hanya untukmu saja
Alina. Tak seorang pun boleh mengambilnya dariku. Cahaya senja yang
keemasan itu berbinar-binar di dalam saku. Aku merasa cemas karena
meskipun kaca mobilku gelap tapi cahaya senja tentu cukup terang
dilihat dari luar. Dan ternyata cahaya senja itu memang menembus
segenap cahaya dalam mobilku,sehingga mobilku itu meluncur dengan nyala
cemerlang ke aspal maupun ke angkasa.

Dari radio yang kusetel aku tahu, berita tentang hilangnya senja
telah tersebar ke mana-mana. Dari televisi dalam mobil bahkan kulihat
potretku sudah terpampang. Aduh. Baru hilang satu senja saja sudah
paniknya seperti itu. Apa tidak bisa menunggu sampai besok? Bagaimana
kalau setiap orang mengambil senja untuk pacarnya masing-masing?
Barangkali memang sudah waktunya dibuat senja tiruan yang bisa dijual
di toko-toko,dikemas dalam kantong plastik dan dijual di kaki lima.
Sudah waktunya senja diproduksi besar-besaran supaya bisa dijual
anak-anak pedagang asongan di perempatan jalan.

“Senja! Senja! Cuma seribu tiga!”

Di jalan tol mobilku melaju masuk kota.Aku harus hati-hati karena
semua orang mencariku. Sirene mobil polisi meraung-raung di mana-mana.
Cahaya kota yang tetap gemilang tanpa senja membuat cahaya keemasan
dari dalam mobilku tidak terlalu kentara. Lagi pula di kota, tidak
semua orang peduli apakah senja hilang atau tidak. Di kota kehidupan
berjalan tanpa waktu, tidak peduli pagi siang sore atau malam. Jadi
tidak pernah penting senja itu ada atau hilang. Senja cuma penting
untuk turis yang suka memotret matahari terbenam. Boleh jadi hanya demi
alasan itulah senja yang kubawa ini dicari-cari polisi.

Sirene polisi mendekat dari belakang. Dengan pengeras suara polisi itu memberi peringatan.

“Pengemudi mobil Porsche abu-abu metalik nomor SG 19658 A, harap
berhenti. Ini Polisi. Anda ditahan karena dituduh telah membawa senja.
Meskipun tak ada aturan yang melarangnya, tapi berdasarkan…”

Aku tidak sudi mendengarnya lebih lama lagi. Jadi kubilas dia sampai
terpental keluar pagar tepi jalan. Kutancap gas dan menyelip-nyelip
dengan lincah di jalanan. Dalam waktu singkat kota sudah penuh raungan
sirene polisi. Terjadi kejar-kejaran yang seru.Tapi aku lebih tahu
seluk-beluk kota, jalanan dengan cahaya yang bernmain warna, gang-gang
gelap yang tak pernah tercatat dalam buku alamat, lorong-lorong rahasia
yang hanya diperuntukkan bagi orang-orang di bawah tanah.

Satu mobil terlempar di jalan layang, satu mobil lain tersesat di
sebuah kampung, dan satu mobil lagi terguling-guling menabrak truk dan
meledak lantas terbakar.Masih ada dua polisi bersepeda motor
mengejarku. Ini soal kecil. Mereka tak pernah bisa mendahuluiku, dan
setelah kejar-kejaran beberapa lama, mereka kehabisan bensin dan
pengendaranya cuma bisa memaki-maki. Kulihat senja dalam saku bajuku.
Masih utuh. Angin berdesir. Langit semburat ungu. Debur ombak
menghempas ke pantai. Hanya padamulah senja ini kuserahkan Alina.

Tapi Alina, polisi ternyata tidak sekonyol yang kusangka. Di segenap
sudut kotak mereka telah siap siaga. Bahkan aku tak bisa membeli
makanan untuk mengisi perutku. Bahkan di langit tanpa senja, helikopter
mereka menyorotkan lampu di setiap celah gedung bertingkat. Aku
tersudut dan akhirnya nyaris tertangkap. Kalau saja tidak ada
gorong-gorong yang terbuka.

Mobilku sudah kutinggal ketika memasuki daerah kumuh itu. Aku
berlari di antara gudang, rumah tua,tiang serta temali. Terjatuh di
atas sampah, merayapi tangga-tangga reyot, sampai seorang gelandangan
menuntunku ke suatu tempat yang tak akan pernah kulupakan dalam hidupku.

“Masuklah,” katanya tenang, “disitu kamu aman.

Ia menunjuk gorong-gorong yang terbuka itu. Ada tikus keluar dari
sana. Banya bacin dan pesing. Kutengok ke bawah. Kulihat kelelawar
bergantungan. Aku ragu-ragu.Namun deru helikopter dengan lampu sorotnya
yang mencari-cari itu melenyapkan keraguanku.

“Masuklah, kamu tidak punya pilihan lain.”

Dan gelandangan itu mendorongku. Aku terjerembab jatuh. Bau busuknya
bukan main. Gorong-gorong itu segera tertutup dan kudengar gelandangan
itu merebahkan diri di atasnya. Lampu sorot helikopter menembus celah
gorong-gorong tapi tak cukup untuk melihatku. Kurabah senja dalam
kantongku, cahayanya yang merah keemas-emasan membuat aku bisa melihat
dalam kegelapan. Aku melangkah dalam gorong-gorong yang rupanya cukup
tinggi juga. Kusibukkan kelelawar bergantungan yang entah mati entah
hidup itu. Kulihat cahaya putih di ujung gorong-gorong. Air busuk
mengalir setinggi lutut, namun makin ke dalam makin surut. Di tempat
yang kering kulihat anak-anak gelandangan duduk-duduk maupun
tidur-tiduran, mereka berserakan memeluk rebana dengan mata yang tidak
memancarkan kebahagian.

Aku berjalan terus melangkahi mereka dan coba bertahan. Betapa pun ini lebih baik daripada harus menyerahkan senja Alina.

Di ujung gorong-gorong,di temapt cahaya putih itu, ada tangga
menurun ke bawah. Kuikuti tangga itu. Cahaya semakin terang dan semakin
benderang. Astaga. Kamu boleh tidak percaya Alina, tapi kamu akan terus
membacanya. Tangga itu menuju ke mulut sebuah gua, dan tahukah kamu
ketika aku keluar dari gua itu aku ada di mana? Di tempat persisi sama
dengan tempat di mana aku mengambil senja itu untukmu Alina. Sebuah
pantai dengan senja yang bagus:ombak,angin,dan kepak burung?tak lupa
cahaya keemasan dan bias ungu pada mega-mega yang berarak bagaikan
aliran mimpi. Cuma saja tidak ada lubang sebesar kartu pos. Jadi,
meskipun persis sama,tapi bukan tempat yang sama.

Aku berjalan ke tepi pantai. Tenggelam dalam guyuran alam yang
perawan. Nyiur tentu saja, matahari, dan dasat lautan yang bening
dengan lidah ombak yang berdesis-desis. Tak ada cottage , tak ada
barbeque, tak ada marina.

“semua itu memang tidak perlu. Senja yang bergetar melawan takdir
membiaskan cahaya keemasan ke tepi semesta. Aku sering malu sendiri
melihat semua itu. Alina, apakah semua itu mungkin diterjemahkan dalam
bahasa?”

Sambil duduk di tepi pantai aku berpikir-pikir, untuk apakah semua
ini kalau tidak ada yang menyaksikannya? Setelah berjalan ke sana ke
mari aku tahu kalau dunia dalam gorong-gorong ini kosong melompong. Tak
ada manusia, tak ada tikus, apalagi dinosaurus. Hanya burung yang
terkepak, tapi ia sepertinya bukan burung yang bertelur dan membuat
sarang. Ia hanya burung yang dihadirkan sebagai ilustrasi senja. Ia
hanya burung berkepak dan berkepak terus disana. Aku tak habis pikir
Alina, alam seperti ini dibuat untu apa? Untuk apa senja yang bisa
membuat seseorang ingin jatuh cinta itu jika tak ada seekor dinosaurus
pun menikmatinya? Sementara di atas sana orang-orang ribut kehilangan
senja….

Jadi, begitulah Alina, kuambil juga senja itu. Kukerat dengan pisau
Swiss yang selalu kubawa, pada empat sisinya, sehingga pada cakrawala
itu terbentuk lubang sebesar kartu pos. Dengan dua senja di saku kiri
dan kanan aku melangkah pulang. Bumi berhenti beredar di belakangku,
menjadi kegelapan yang basah dan bacin. Aku mendaki tangga kembali
menuju gorong-gorong bumiku yang terkasih.

Sampai di atas, setelah melewati kalelawar bergantungan,anak-anak
gelandangan berkaparan, dan air setinggi lutut, kulihat polisi-polisi
helikopter sudah pergi. Gelandangan yang menolongku sedang tiduran di
bawah tiang listrik sambil meniup saksofon.

Aku berjalan mencari mobilku. Masih terparkir dengan baik di
supermarket. Nampaknya bahkan baru saja dicuci. Sambil mengunyah pizza
segera kukebut mobilku menuju pantai. Dengan dua senja di saku kiri dan
kanan, lengkap dengan matahari,laut,pantai, dan cahaya keemasannya
masing-masing, mobilku bagai memancarkan cahaya Ilhai. Sepanjang jalan
layang, sepanjang jalan tol, kutancap gas dengan kecepatan penuh…

Alina kekasihku, pacarku, wanitaku.
Kamu pasti sudah tahu apa yang terjadi kemudian. Kupasang senja yang
dari gorong-gorong pada lubang sebesar kartu pos itu dan ternyata pas.
Lantas kukirimkan senja yang ?asli? ini untukmu, lewat pos.

Aku ingin mendapatkan apa yang kulihat pertama kali: senja dalam
arti yang sebenarnya?bukan semacam senja yang ada di gorong-gorong itu.

Kini gorong-gorong itu betul-betul menjadi gelap Alina. Pada masa
yang akan datang orang-orang tua akan bercerita pada cucunya tentang
kenapa gorong-gorong menjadi gelap.Meraka akan berkisah bahwa
sebenarnya ada alam lain di bawah gorong-gorong dengan matahari dan
rembulannya sendiri, namun semua itu tida lagi karena seorang telah
mengambil senja untuk menggantikan senja lain di atas bumi. Orang-orang
tua itu juga akan bercerita bahwa senja yang asli telah dipotong dan
diberikan oleh seseorang kepada pacarnya.

Alina yang manis, paling manis, dan akan selalu manis, Terimalah
sepotong senja itu, hanya untukmu, dari seseorang yang ingin
membahagiakanmu. Awas hati-hati dengan lautan dan matahari itu,
salah-salah cahayanya membakar langit dan kalau tumpah airnya bisa
membanjiri permukaan bumi.

Dengan ini kukirimkan pula kerinduanku padamu, dengan cium, peluk,
dan bisikan terhangat, dari sebuah tempat yang paling sunyi di dunia.

–Cerpen Pililihan Kompas 1993

By Seno Gumira Ajidarma

http://sukab.wordpress.com/

Dumber.
That is her name.
Dumber is the butterfly who dances in my tummy.
She is my butterfly. She is mine.
She married him on a high hill, Bukittinggi.
I lost her forever. My butterfly has gone eternally.
I was defeated by that Dumb male.
Since then, I let him keep the name.
I decided to change mine into Dumbest.

A trully beautiful writing by Stania, it’s honest and original. Full of love, affection and plenty of charms albeit brutally possesive. However, what catch my attention most from this story is the pain of letting go, which I’m quite certain that every of us has been in this kind of position before, deja vu!

Anyway, thank you Stania for letting me put your story on my blog, I am sure many people will enjoy reading it as much as I do.

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest
I’m Dumb.
That’s my name.
Everyone who hear it for the first time thought that I was joking. But I was not.
And they soon realize why I was inherited the name.

I am a stutterer. I can’t speak easily, especially in front of audiences.
My
hands would shake, my knees would tremble and my pant would soon get
wet. I am clumsy as well, like to procrastinate and forgetful.
It’s not something I’m proud of, but these traits seem running wildly in my blood. Do people mock at me?

Sure, and the scorns even get louder if I was caught doing mistakes.
But
it’s better to be underestimated. When you’re doing things correctly
-even if it’s a small thing- people will give you credit; but if you
are overestimated, you will carry a burden of people’s expectation that
you might not want to know in a first place.

Afterall, God is very kind to me.
I am blessed by green thumbs. Tener mano para las plantas.
I like taking care of plants and pinching off the plant’s growing tips
is my specialty. It makes the plant send out lateral shoots and make it
bushier. My bosses always satisfy because the plants juices and cells
in their garden become lodged under my fingers.

Nature is my place.
Like
Nabokov, I feel the highest enjoyment when I stand among butterflies
and their food plants. It’s an ecstasy and behind the ecstasy is
something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum
into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and
stone.

But still, I’m Dumb, the careless and sloppy person.
On one
important day, I was late to Kebun Garden, the place where I have been
working for the past three years as a gardener. It was a prestigious
centennial gardening contest my boss always wanted to participate.
Seeing my great jobs with plants and lovingness to butterfly, they
decided to join the competition. They believed my tender touch will
make us win.

I worked my butt off to prepare for that day. I was
doing extra ordinary efforts for that… but maybe because I’m Dumb, I
was late and mistakenly gave a stinky fertilizer instead a nice
fragrant one on the hallway side.

I was devastated. Do they know
that my heart was also shattered into pieces because of that? My work
owns a special room in me. I love it and watch the feeling grows
everyday. It calms me and gives me meanings.

But isn’t it very human to be wrong? Perfection only belongs to the Divine.
I
don’t regret it. If I have to regret all the bad things in my life,
then I also have to regret the good things too. And she is one of the
good things happened in my life.

Dumber.
That’s her name.
Dumber is the butterfly who dances in my tummy.
She’s my butterfly. She’s mine.
She always told me that she’s not dumber than me. In contrary, much smarter.
But I think that’s only her way to convince herself because… well, you can see it from her name, right?

I first met her when she was nervously crossing the street in front of
my garden. She was almost hit by a truck if I did not pull her fast
into the sidewalks. Fretfully, she explained her anxiety that day. She
was a microbiology student. That early morning, her lab’s autoclave
blew up when she tried to disinfect all of her glass equipments. She
has already set the right temperature, checking the pressure and turned
on the alarm clock. But my oh my, she fell asleep like a log, which a
normal alarming clock couldn’t wake her up. Birds of the same feather
flocks together and I quickly feel attached to her.

I accompanied
her into a supporting group. No, not for the alcoholic one, this was a
special class for students who have problems finishing their final
projects experiments.

First, she would go into the front of the class and said,
“Hi. My name is Dumber….., ” she looked around and continued hesitantly,
“..and I have problems finishing my thesis…” she took a deep breath.
The crowds then replied, “HI DUMBER!!!”

I accompanied her through the sessions until graduation day.

We were inseparable.
I wrote many secret poems and stories of her during my off work in the garden.
I read countless poets and literary works to copy their skills into mine.
My life was never been better than that. I even lost my startled tongue around her.

But there comes another Dumb one day. He works as a mechanical
engineer. Yes, his salary in a multinational company is twenty times
higher than my gardening pay out, but nothing special about him.

The Dumb-male is a mediocre person, in my opinion.
He always utters awful jokes and his face…is soooo… mechanic!
I
couldn’t care less why Dumber feels very attracted to him. And it’s a
shitty thing to share a same name with someone you hate. I wish he knew
manner by seeing that Dumber is mine and cautiously kept away. But he
didn’t. Dumb!
One day Dumber told me that she wanted to marry him. I was panicked.
I asked Dumber,
“Why do you have to marry him?”
“Ya iyalah, masa gue mau ngejomblo terus… nanti gue dibilang perawan tua lagi. Kata orang tua, bawa sial, tauk.”

“Please
stay with me. I will write you stories; I will bring you poems and
poetry, I will pick the most beautiful flowers in my garden to take
home everyday … Why do you even consider him to be your other half? He
doesn’t write. He didn’t even understand a single verse. He only cares
about money, business, flourishing and reproduce. I read Whitman, I
worship Rumi and I adore Coelho. Engineer is a noble profession, and
necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are
where we stay alive for. I can give you life; I can set you free…”
“Hah? Ngomong apa sih elo? Mending lo cari pacar aja, biar lo gak ngejomblo kayak sekarang. Sana gih gih gih .."

She married him on a high hill, Bukittinggi.
I lost her forever. My butterfly has gone eternally.
I was defeated by that Dumb male.
Since then, I let him keep the name.
I decided to change mine into Dumbest.

"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose". -C. Wright Mill

Hari ulang tahun kemerdekaan yang dirayakan oleh moyoritas masyarakat di Indonesia dari mulai religiously upacara bendera, pesta rakyat; mulai lomba panjat pinang, tarik tambang sampai musik dangdut -di KBRI Londonpun acaranya goyang dangdut, that’s right- mugkin rightly so, adalah ungkapan kegembiraan sebagaian besar orang Indonesia, tapi bagi minoritas? Indonesia has a long way to go.

Indonesia, post kekuasaan orde baru, to its credit, sudah melangkah cukup jauh dalam waktu yang sangat pendek, demokratisasi di segala aspek sudah bisa kita rasakan, proses pemilu yang fair, freedom of speech, dan dengan menutup mata kejadian** kecil tentang media di Indonesia, kita sudah punya free press.

It’s all good in the cover. tadi disaat kita sudah punya pemerintah yang meski jauh dari sempurna, sudah bisa dibilang masuk akal and did reasonably good jobs. What’s trouble me most is the attitude of majority of Indesians yang belum bisa menelaah kebebasan secara utuh, bebas berarti kebebasan untuk memilih, dan sejauh itu tidak melanggar hak orang lain, kebebasan itu harus dijaga dan di hormati, konsekuensinya adalah kita harus menjadi legawa kalau orang lain berbeda dengan kita.

Dalam kesempatan ini saya menyoroti tentang beberapa insiden yang ada di Indonesia akir akir ini, misalnya, bagaimana kaum Ahmadiah di discreditkan, dimusuhi and at some levels diperangi secara fisik. Terus adanya attitude yang condong ke kekerasan jika suatu kelompok tidak manut ama mayoritas, seperti intimidasi intimidasi FPI terhadap pihak Playboy atau kelompok anti RUU-APP yang tidak jarang diwarni kekerasan. It saddens me so much and I really feel for them, the minority.

The ather attitude that I really hate, though, often come across, both from general public and ironically some highly educated people that I know, is the tendency to simplify things.

Contoh: Attititude yang menganggap, Aceh, Irian, Maluku itu bagian Indonesia, therefore, mereka ga punya hak macem**, kalo masih mokong sikat aja. Another, Perang Israel itu perang antara Yahudi dan Islam, therefore Yahudi selalu salah dan Islam selalu benar, sikat habis Yahudi! mari Jihad ke Lebanon! more? Di Indonesia itu mayoritas adalah Islam Sunni, therefore, Islam yang aneh** seperti Ahmadiah and co, tidak bisa diterima, sikat habis mereka!….so much for the freedom.

Mungkin klaim klaim diatas ada elemen kebenaranya, but it becomes so wrong when they come up with a quick fix based on simpliflying not-so-simple-problem. Jadi intinya kita jangan terlalu gampangnya menjudge apa apa yang kita sendiri belum 100% faham, mungkin cara yang terbaik adalah mempelajari dan mendengar point of view dari kedua sisi dan mungkin juga rumus Stephen R. Covey dalam hal ini sangat berguna: Seek firts to understand…than to be understood

Atau mungkin juga pak Frederick Douglass saat membuat statement dibawah, sudah melihat bagaiamana keadaan Indonesia disaat ini, sehingga dia berucap:

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."

Anyway, Dirgahayu Indonesia yang ke 61!

..And for you non-Indonesians who seek to undertand democracy in Indonesia, I can assure you, freedom does exist in this country (terms and conditions apply, courtesy of the majority).

"Indonesian voices very much under-represented in the outside world simply because hardly any books, academic publication and conventional media are written in English. Indonesia, a country with more than 200 million population, has only one English newspaper,  Jakarta  Post , and none of existing Indonesian magazines are in English. And hardly any best seller Indonesian books written by prominent intellectuals are written in or translated into English"

A  very well-laid argument dari blognya A. Fatih Syuhud 

10 Reasons Why We Blog in English

1. My English writing skill is not good. I’d like to improve it by writing regularly in a medium where editorial barrier is non-existent.

2. English is undoubtedly understood –though not necessarily spoken or written–by many, if not by most, influential people in the world. Hence larger audience, more visibility and influence of some sort.

3. Most internet-literate Indonesians understand English. Using English in my blog, therefore, does not hinder Indonesian readers to appreciate what I’d intend to convey to them, my primary audience.

Indonesia

4. Indonesian voices very much under-represented in the outside world simply because hardly any books, academic publication and conventional media are written in English. Indonesia, a country with more than 200 million population– has only one English newspaper, the Jakarta Post, and none of existing Indonesian magazines are in English. And hardly any best seller Indonesian books written by prominent intellectuals are written in or translated into English.

5. Among 10 percent of Indonesian internet users, only about 0.4 percent of them are blogging which means if you blog in Bahasa Indonesia you have to be satisfied with that of 0.4 percent readers who does not necessarily read your blog. Less potential readers will lead to less blogging courages.

6. It gives non-Indonesian a chance to know you and Indonesia: the mindset, culture, faith, etc. And it gives you more chance to interact with them. Hence, more understanding of multi-polar world and broaden your vista and horizon of thinking.

7. Depending on your blogging influence, but at the least it’ll give you more self-esteem by making more friends from various cultures accross the continents.

8. There are many people outthere with good intention to make an interfaith and intercultural dialogue; every now and then they need a person from particular country, say Indonesia, to talk to. Let them know that you are the person they want.

9. If your blog content is good, the possibility of being published and then reviewed by prominent international book reviewer is not far away.

10. Blogging in English, like blogging in any other languages including Bahasa Indonesia, is basically history in the making. The difference is by blogging in English you are making history in front of many faces and backgrounds from many countries and therefore it adds more to your credibility.