Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism by Bennoune Karima

Author:Bennoune, Karima [Bennoune, Karima]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

THE SMARTEST TOTALITARIAN STATE

As a historian, Roya Boroumand had studied totalitarian ideologies, and she thinks about the nature of Iranian state fundamentalism within that framework. “It wants to be a theocracy but it is a totalitarian ideology that has been smart enough to take the cover of religion so it couldn’t be attacked. It’s the smartest totalitarian ideology.” This is not meant as a compliment. “There is a central office for the Friday sermon,” Roya offers as an example. “What does that tell you?” In the piece translated by the Boroumand Foundation, Hannah Arendt wrote that “[t]otalitarian society is monolithic,” and “all public manifestations . . . are ‘coordinated.’ ”12

Beyond this internal coordination, Muslim fundamentalist ideologies and the movements that advance them are also connected across borders, whatever their own particularities. In their scholarly writing, Roya and Ladan Boroumand have described “Islamism” as “a self-consciously pan-Muslim phenomenon.”13 They are painfully aware of the transnational impact of the Islamic Republic. Though Iran is a predominantly Shi’a country, it has contributed to the radicalization of Sunni religious authorities as well through international institutions such as the World Congress of Friday Imams and Prayer Leaders, which tried to shape Friday sermons around the world to match the message of the Islamic Republic.

Mahnaz Afkhami stressed to me the significance of this cross-border impact. “I’m certain that had Iran not fallen to the fundamentalist theocrats, this would have been a different region. That was a tragedy for both Iran and also for the whole region.” Like U.S. ally Saudi Arabia (and now increasingly Qatar), Iran has exported fundamentalism, its own virulent strain of political Islam metastasizing not by a natural process but through its active promotion and by spending lots of its people’s money. So, transforming the Gulf region is critical to the whole problem. “I think that if Iran changes course,” Roya avers, “it would undermine people like the rulers of Iran in other countries. It would undermine their appeal, as the fascists lost their appeal when they lost the war.” Moreover, getting out the news of what kind of lives people actually lead in the Islamic Republic is critical. “When the reality comes out, the human costs of this, people will think twice. Most of them have no idea what’s happening inside Iran—people who support it.”

Roya had been working all day to convey to me the depth of the religious repression they are fighting. She is tired, but she is on a roll, asserting the right of Muslims to be just as individual as anyone else. After the revolution, “the people who took power represented a part of Iran, but they were not a majority. If they were, they wouldn’t need vigilantes in the streets.” The minute you need morality police with sticks like they have in Iran or Saudi Arabia, then you are imposing an inorganic “morality” that has to be imposed because it is not lived. “If they were representative, they didn’t need thirty years down the road to still flog people so they covered their damned heads.

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