Iran is one of my fetishes, which surely began in my childhood, (in Grade 5 more precisely I think) because of a casual conversation with a classmate, in which she revealed that she had spent her early years in snow covered Tehran. For a kid, who was given to Bruce Chatwin’s “What am I Doing Here?” like geographical escapism, the actual fact this girl had actually lived elsewhere soon proved to be irresistible point of departure into fantasy. Soon afterwards I was looking up Iran in an encyclopedia in one of the 'library periods' we had, instead of reading the usual dose of Hardy Boys adventures. Finally, I have had the chance to indulge even more this Iranian (or Persian as I prefer to refer it) fetish here in America, fueled in large part by the discovery of Rumi's and Hafiz's poetry.

Given this, my eyes perked up when Sepia Mutiny featured this article on the arrest of Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, a Iranian scholar recently in the Kafkaesque Mullah-Land. As the odds go, I had actually encountered Ramin Jahanbegloo in the Indian blogsphere before that, specifically through this post at Chandrahas Choudhury's literary blog "The Middle Stage", in which Chandrahas discusses a book of conversations titled "Talking India" that Ramin had collaborated on with Ashis Nandy. I would also recommend reading this exchange of letters in which Ramin discusses the relevance of 'The American Dream' to other countries of the world, and pray that he would soon be able to escape the Islamo-Kafkaesque situation he currently is trapped in, safe and sound.

...

More coincidentally, it was only last week that I happened to pick up, for $1 in the trash racks of a second hand bookstore, Elaine Sciolino's excellent chronicle of her own Iran watching as a reporter for Newsweek and New York Times starting from the cusp of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, titled "Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran". While the book is a bit dated - it came out six years ago when it appeared that Iran was undergoing its own version of Perestroika under Khatami - it still provides thinking points to a lay observer in view of all the war of words going on between far out folks sitting there in Tehran, and here in Washington DC.

First point: yes, life in Iran can be a bitch if you are any kind of a free thinker, who is engaged in or want to engage in any kind of creative production. If you are a rock musician, you better kiss your electric guitar goodbye before your ass is transported to Evin prison (built by the American 'puppet'/ shah) for the crime of 'westoxcification'. But then didn't Alan Bloom, the godfather of many of the Washington Neocons, in his best selling polemic, "The Closing of American Mind" indicate that one reason behind the decline of thought and great souled longing for love vis-à-vis sexual promiscuity is the devil of rock music? I am sure Ayatollah Khamenei would have enjoyed parts of this book.

Second point: Even though dissent is suppressed in Iran, the conservative clerics are still far from attaining the Stalinist perfection of the Gulags. This is mainly because dissent and argumentation is inbuilt into Shia theological world that supplies many of the Iranian ruling clerics. As Sciolino details at length in her book, this has been on an ongoing low intensity jijuistu between those who think clerics should get out of the business of government and powerful clerics who would like to maintain status quo. So yes, while the Iranian regime is very well capable of sending out assassins on hit jobs to eliminate dissidents abroad, as well as prosecute horribly perceived opponents within Iran, it is still a far cry from Kim Jong-il’s supremely surreal totalitarian North Korea, another vertex of Small (everything is small except the bring-it-on swagger) B's Axis of Evil.