Is Iran’s Theocracy Imploding?

Is Iran’s theocracy imploding? Jamsheed Choksy — Professor of Iranian Studies and former Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Indiana University, and a member of the US National Council on the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities — makes the case that it is in this MUST READ on RealClearWorld. Here’s a small part of the beginning:

Swept up by revolutionary fervor in the late 1970s, many Iranians assumed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a pragmatist. However, Khomeini had assimilated theocratic ideas unsuccessfully expounded by Ayatollah Fazlollah Nuri during the Constitutional Revolution seven decades earlier. Khomeini went on to augment Nuri’s belief-that clergymen must rule because secular governance fails to follow divine will-with Maslaha or fundamentalist Muslim interests.

Khomeini then used his personal popularity and revolutionary authority to install an absolutism centered on velayat-e faqih or guardianship of Islamic jurists headed by an autocratic supreme leader. The current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei follows the tenets of his late teacher, regarding himself as God’s singular representative on Earth.

To a growing number of Iranians, however, religious fundamentalism is a luxury they can no longer afford. Half of them are under the age of 40 with no ideological connection to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Their difficulties and desires of life take precedence over doctrine and dogma. At least 12 percent of adults are unemployed. An inflation rate of about 20 percent saps their meager purchasing power. They face a housing shortage. They are frustrated as well by 30 years of sociopolitical repression impinging on all aspects of daily life in the name of religion. As a result, orthopraxy is equated with fundamentalism by them-and both are rejected.

He provides an analysis and then predicts at the end:

Historical and current circumstances suggest Iranians eventually will succeed in separating faith from state. They will not reject Shiism, but return it to its appropriate place in society. Iranians know well too that they are not under the spell of interfering foreigners. So circumstances suggest that leaders and peoples of other nations should assist vigorously those Iranians striving for liberty from ever-present religion.

There’s a lot more so read it in its entirety.