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The Ayatollahs' Democracy An Iranian Challenge Hooman Majd 9780393072594 Books

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The Ayatollahs' Democracy An Iranian Challenge Hooman Majd 9780393072594 Books

I bought this book because I was afraid of Iran and Mr. Ahmadinejad. I thought I had better learn more. Iran and the Iranian people are real live individauals to me now. There are difficulties in Iran, of couirse, but I think that you will find that the difficulties are not that different from the ones that Americans have. Somehow when a country has anti-American sentiments, I get the feeling that they must all be crazy terrorists. Mr Majd brings the Irainian people alive. They become real live individuals a lot like the individuals we encounter every day. I think that it is very important for people to try to understand and have respect for other cultures. Thank you very much Mr. Majd for bring the Iranian people to life for me.

Is there anything to worry about with regard to Iran. I would say yes. Mr. Ahmadinejad certainly does not like the west and he does not seem to have anyone's interest in mind, other than his own. He does not seem to have the best relationship with the Ayatollah. Fair elections appear to be a joke. I do not have the fear that I had before I read the book. I can see the Iranian people as real live individuals who I sincerely wish the best for, as well as the rest of us.


Tags : The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge [Hooman Majd] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <strong>A <em>New York Times</em> best-selling author offers a personal, candid tour of the political and social landscape in Iran.</strong> Hooman Majd offers a dramatic perspective on a country with global ambitions,Hooman Majd,The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge,W. W. Norton & Company,0393072592,World - General,Democracy;Iran.,Iran;Politics and government.,Islam and politics;Iran.,Democracy,Iran,Islam and politics,Islamic Government,Middle East - General,POLITICAL SCIENCE World General,Political Science,Politics Current Events,PoliticsInternational Relations,World - Middle Eastern

The Ayatollahs' Democracy An Iranian Challenge Hooman Majd 9780393072594 Books Reviews

just what I expected.
An informative read although Majd's bias towards Khatami's importance due to his relationship with the man can make the reader skeptical of some of his analysis.
Crafted with the same care as the author's The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, itself a gorgeous piece of writing, this latest book is a very valuable contribution to the level of informed debate about Iran.

The Ayatollahs' Democracy is less of a personal memoir than the earlier book, and more a piece of engaged journalistic analysis. Everywhere there are fascinating nuggets, reported encounters, insights and analysis - all from the perspective of an insider, but one who communicates with great clarity to his mostly Western audience.

I have been despondent about the likelihood of some sort of resolution to the Iran situation (itself not just one "situation", but a constellation of issues, from the nuclear beat-up to human rights to support of Hezbollah and Hamas to the future world standing of the United States and other, mid-level powers who do not align with America's interests).

Hooman Majd still has hope for the land of his birth and for the United States. He gives us reason to hold onto this hope for ourselves, and many more reasons to resist the drumbeats of war.

I hope that President Obama and his advisers read and ponder the meaning of this book. A solution is possible - a Persian solution, perhaps with much lateral thinking behind it - and it is my hope that this book will help point the way towards it.
expected a more straight forward description of the Iranian political system and less about personalities and politics. however the info about their system is there
American/Iranian Hooman Majd is a busy traveler between East and West, apparently highly treasured in both realms. He is a prolific and, admittedly, most talented author/journalist/writer (probably sort of `journalism' being only one of his many talents) who has been writing, as his home page tells us, for instance for Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post and, really, GC. The latter indicating his downright stylishness and, well, vainness.

The topic of his new book (The Ayatollahs' Democracy - An Iranian Challenge. W. W. Norton & Company, New York 2010) doesn't come as a surprise. Majd, a sort of advisor (and relative, as he likes to mention every now and then) of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami on his visit to the United States in 2006 and, at the same time since then, a desperate and perspiring interpreter of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's impolitic speeches at the UN, had claimed for more than a year now that he had voted for Green Movement leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi in last year's disputed presidential election. But it seems so that he had never had a problem with Ahmadinejad's `victory', which most observers believe was stolen (although one has to admit that there is still no hard evidence of such a claim). When Majd now wants to tell us that there is such a thing like the `Ayatollahs' Democracy', basically implying that the Shi'a concept of velayat-e faqih with its rahbar, or Supreme Leader (others would say, dictator) is in fact compatible with a universal concept of democracy, eyebrows are going to be raised. When he explains Iran's different governmental bodies the Assembly of Experts (86 `elected' Islamic scholars monitoring `the performance' of the Supreme Leader); the Guardian Council (twelve appointed jurists, six by the Supreme Leader and six by parliament, or majles), which supervises any election in Iran and qualifies any candidate; the Expediency Council (28 members appointed by the Supreme Leader and charged with arbitration of any dispute between the majles and the Guardian Council), one would not change his or her strong opinion about a highly complicated, opaque, prone to corruption, well, undemocratic system neither East nor West. Let him (the Ayatollah) `beg to differ' (as conceded in Majd's previous book published in the fall of 2008; see my review here), but why should we accept the claim (for democracy)?

As I have pointed out previously, Hooman's frivolous nonchalance results in highly readable treatises. But when it comes to the brutal crackdown of the protests and opposition movement in Iran, that attitude is going to be dangerous. It puts him at the same despicable level as notorious apologists such as the Leveretts, western mouthpieces of the rogue regime in Tehran. It might cost him his reputation as independent observer and valuable discussion partner of both enemy parties.

The book starts with a real doozy, an Oliver Stone movie-like screenplay of back and forth diary entries just before, during and after last year's June election. Majd describes hopes and fears for the mounting of a Green Wave, or mowj. The mowj in fact came, but Ahmadinejad `won' anyway. The mowj even grew stronger in the election's aftermath but has been silenced by the regime. It is no longer about who won and who lost. It is about human rights and - Democracy.

It is somewhat disturbing that Majd in most parts of the book hardly mentions the escalation of the situation, especially on December 27, 2009, Ashura; prisoners, their rape, torture and murdering, incarceration of journalists. Show trials, unsubstantiated longtime imprisonment sentences.

I would have liked reading the subtitle of Majd's book - An Iranian Challenge - not as it was probably meant, a challenge to the (western) world and its biased, Eurocentric, American conceptions of what democracy is, but as an emerging high risk for Iran for eventually losing its currently largely insufficient democratic structures after (admittedly what has to be proven yet) its fraudulent election last year in favor of another military dictatorship in the region. In particular after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had openly endorsed his favorite candidate and granted his `re-election' last year there is indeed little hope left for coming elections, parliamentary or presidential. A re-emerging Green or human rights movement seems currently unthinkable.

A typical example of Majd's quite dubious style may be his description of the situation of the Jewish minority in the Shi'a Islamic republic. The obviously desired overall impression, I suppose, was that the 20,000 to 25,000 Jews left in Iran, have a better, if not overall standing, but living conditions after the Islamic revolution than ever. However, already the title of the chapter "The Good, the Bad, the Unclean" hints at deeply-rooted anti-Semitism in unenlightened Shi'a societies and the clergy. I can't help but I find it cynical and, well, anti-Semitic. When Majd visited, for instance, a hospital in Tehran, he described a scene where Mrs. Hasidim, a former midwife and one of the hospital administrators, showed him around (p. 231f). Few Jews are there, either patients or employees, except the board of directors, with the new Jewish Member of Parliament, Dr. Siamak Moreh-Sedegh, being a member of the board.

"`Come,' she (Mrs. Hasidim) said, `let's take a tour and then go and have lunch.' I followed her out the door and walked with her through the hospital, along its impeccably clean and orderly corridors and through its wards. She pointedly identified the one or two Jewish patients in their beds. She also whispered, as we said hello at a nurses' station, that `that tall one is the only Jewish nurse, or really midwife, left.' We took the stairs down to the basement and to an empty cafeteria, where a long table had been set up for the board of directors, who wandered in one by one.

`The kosher kitchen, I presume?' I asked Mrs. Hasidim.

`Yes,' she said with a smile.

`Perhaps you might tell your Muslim staff today the grandson of an Ayatollah, a descendant of the prophet Mohammad no less, ate a kosher meal in your cafeteria,' I said.

`No, I won't do that,' she said rather sternly and devoid of humor. Some things, one quickly learns, are just not funny when it comes to religion. Not in Iran. Mrs. Farangiz Hasidim, a Jew who was living and working among devout Muslims, knew that better than me." (Emphasis added.)

A highly embarrassing situation, and no ta'arouf. At least Majd noticed it, but why did he write about it?

Maybe the chapter on Jewish life and oppression of Jews in Iran is the most revealing in Majd's book; at least it is the most interesting. It cannot be tolerated that numerical minorities are living in a constant state of uncertainty devoid of basic civil rights. Majd summarizes his documented dialogues with people he met (p. 249f)

"My experiences with the Jewish community in Iran were not different from other experiences the paradoxical nature of the government, the people, the culture, and the society at large is as confusing as ever, and peculiarly Persian in character. Synagogues, hospitals, committees, kosher restaurants, and Hebrew schools operate freely in a Muslim theocratic state, but the government celebrates `The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.' The president denies the Holocaust as `fake' and a `hoax,' but the Jewish member of the Parliament openly and fearlessly criticizes him .... Jews are completely free, but not free to support Israel. Jews are equal citizens, except when they're not. Iranian Jews must not travel to Israel, except when they do. Iranian-Israelis are not welcome back in Iran, except when they are. Iranian government censors block the New York Post on the Internet, but not the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. It is almost a necessity to be Iranian to understand, and to be Iranian in order to be comfortable with Iranian life and all of its paradoxes. And Iranian Jews are nothing if not Iranian."

No, it's not. Dictatorship, by definition, allows for `relative freedom' and has always produced opportunists frankly taking advantage of the system. Living a `content' life, as well-established Director of the Tehran Jewish Committee Dr. Rahmatollah Raffi concludes (p. 250). Does Majd really wants to tell us that that is typically `Persian'? A society `paradox', an Ayatollah's `democracy'?

Majd mentions faintly the fate of the 250,000 Baha'is who "cannot attend Universities" or "hold government jobs" but rather are severely persecuted in Iran. And who are Iranians as well, their new faith having been founded there only in the 19th century.

Majd ends his account with putting even the role, past and present (future?), of the Revolutionary Guards, or pasdaran, into perspective. No word about their heavy influence in the country's down-spiraling economy or the nuclear program.

From the very beginning (and, by definition) Shi'ites are always victims. Is that the whiny resume? Is there any hope for the Iranians? Maybe.

"The millions of Iranians, and the leaders who have braved the stern and unforgiving dictates of a regime they helped to create, are looking to finally break free from what has defined their political lives, and when they are successful - and they will be, in an Ayatollah's democracy or not - there will be, finally, no more victims."
The chronology in the book bounces around a lot, sometimes in ways that don't seem to make sense. However, the author's arguments are well taken and should be read by all who are thinking of ways of dealing with Iran. Conservatives who demand the US confront Iran over its nuclear program often fault President Obama for not backing the Green movement. As Majd makes clear, the leaders of the Green movement are just as committed to the nuclear program as the current regime and have no interest in western intervention on their behalf. The author has no love for the mullahs' regime, but he does make the case that Iran is kind of a democracy, if not one that the west would easily recognize. He also has a chapter of Judaism in Iran, which is quite enlightening. For all the rabid anti-Semitism of Iran's President, there is a thriving Jewish community in Iran, which practices its religion within the same confines as other non-Islamic religions in Iran.
I bought this book because I was afraid of Iran and Mr. Ahmadinejad. I thought I had better learn more. Iran and the Iranian people are real live individauals to me now. There are difficulties in Iran, of couirse, but I think that you will find that the difficulties are not that different from the ones that Americans have. Somehow when a country has anti-American sentiments, I get the feeling that they must all be crazy terrorists. Mr Majd brings the Irainian people alive. They become real live individuals a lot like the individuals we encounter every day. I think that it is very important for people to try to understand and have respect for other cultures. Thank you very much Mr. Majd for bring the Iranian people to life for me.

Is there anything to worry about with regard to Iran. I would say yes. Mr. Ahmadinejad certainly does not like the west and he does not seem to have anyone's interest in mind, other than his own. He does not seem to have the best relationship with the Ayatollah. Fair elections appear to be a joke. I do not have the fear that I had before I read the book. I can see the Iranian people as real live individuals who I sincerely wish the best for, as well as the rest of us.