Iran is everywhere this summer, and here is an excerpt of a profile of a leading Iranian feminist, published in Germany's signandsight.com. Shadi Sadr heads a campaign to end the stoning of women (!).

In the Western media's interpretation of the presidential election and its aftermath, Iran is caught up in the rivalry between political factions within the religious power elite.

But irrespective of differences of interest and opinion, none of the factions have openly questioned the Islamic dictatorship as a system. Two weeks ago, when Rafsanjani, the heavyweight political figure and super capitalist, chose to take an openly oppositional stance towards the supreme leader Khamenei in his Friday sermon in Tehran, the gist of his message was that the religious social structure was in crisis and should be saved.

Shadi Sadr articulates a third voice which, despite the barbarism of the security forces, was heard loud and clear in the demonstrations and discussions throughout the country in the weeks following the elections. Her horizon lies far above the bickering about the number of votes cast in favour of this or that candidate of this or that faction of the power elite. In her article she outlines a direction - for the opposition struggle in general and the women's movement in particular - that corresponds to the new political reality.

One of her arguments addresses the very real threat that the women's struggle will be bypassed if the new social movement succeeds. Here she is bearing in mind the bitter lessons of the history of women's struggle as well as the fate of Iranian women's rights after the 1979 revolution. In the current protests two factors have been conspicuous: the age and the sex of the participants. Women and the youth have been at the forefront of the protests on the streets. [NOTE: see TIME's cover above] Shadi Sadr regards these two social groups as the forces of the future.

I've just read a remarkable article on the Iranian Church from Mission Frontiers Magazine. It's available on pdf, but the links are a little funny, so you have to download the entire issue, but it's worth it.

As the Iranian Islamic Revolution struggles to hold on early in its fourth decade of life, many Iranians are risking trouble by exploring other religions. Meanwhile, the Armenian minority group, starting in the sixties and continuing today, has developed a missionary mindset toward the Persian majority, including taking the incredible step of beginning to hold Church services in Farsi (the Persian language).

As any minority group or immigrant group can testify, the Armenians are doing this at the risk of their particular identity; this is a tremendous sacrifice. To hold services in the language of their at-times antagonists includes doing away with all your songs; these Armenian Christians have penned hundreds of Farsi-Language hymns.

The result: Christianity is losing its Armenian-identification in the eyes of their Muslim neighbors. In the last ten years, the pseudonymous author says,

A new term has become widespread throughout Iran, which can be literally translated “Persian-Christian,” or as they would conceptually translate it “Muslim-Christian” (farsimasihi).

For centuries, it was assumed that if you were a Christian, you were Armenian. If someone saw you wearing a cross they might ask, “Are you Armenian?” or “Have you become Armenian?” But today the question has changed. This new identity is highly significant, testifying to the presence of a truly indigenous, self-reproducing movement.

And this giving-up of the self is having a very big impact, if the author's uncited surveys can be trusted.

Recent nationwide surveys reveal that over 70% of the population is watching Christian satellite programs. These same surveys indicate that at least one million have already become believers, and many millions more are on the verge.

This growth has happened so fast, the underground church can hardly keep apace. In one example, a house church that began with two people several years ago has now multiplied into over twenty groups. The leader of this network remarked,

“Starting churches in Iran is easy! Everywhere you go to evangelize, people are ready to receive the gospel, or they have already become believers through satellite broadcasts.”

Training leaders is also easy, remarks another leader. The government has left young people with nothing to do. So believers spend time with one another everyday. They are constantly gathering for prayer, Bible study and evangelism. When a group reaches 25 people, they divide in half and begin again. Within two years, a new believer is expected to become a leader of a new house-fellowship and a discipler of new leaders.

So even if these national surveys overstate conversions by as much as a factor of ten, this is a trend in Persian Christianity not seen since the 600s of the Christian era.

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Salman Rushdie affair, which though formally over, is still alive, both for the condemned man himself, and for the European intellectual culture he represents.

Thierry Chervel of signandsight.com has written a retrospective in a German newspaper, now available in English.

The main problem, says Chervel, is that

In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality.

Set aside, for a moment, the highly debatable notion that free speech and equal rights are the exclusive domain of the Left (big L, which Chervel means those of the 1968 generation). What he's saying is significant: that the West no longer stands for anything, human rights included, aside from multiculturalism.

To review, for those too young to remember 1989:

Bombay-born Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children, published a novel called The Satanic Verses, which he knew would be considered offensive against Islam.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution (the same revolution depicted in the movie Persepolis), issued a fatwa, a judgment, against Rushdie, condemning him to death.

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an - and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death.

Riots and book burnings ensued, not only in Iran, but in liberal Europe as well—largely by angered Muslim residents of those countries.

The secular West may have won the struggle, Chervel argues, but only in the short run. Yes, Rushdie survived. Yes, his book became a bestseller and is today widely available. And yes, the fatwa was put in the back shed after Khomeini’s death.

But, Chervel continues, today the West’s attitude toward Islam is marked by a multiculturalist spirit of taboo. That is, in the name of respect we submit to censorship—in advance of any real controversy.

“We” (left-leaning, secular cosmopolitan types) need only look at our great success in taming Christianity to realize the importance of pushing the envelope with Islam:

Playing with the symbols, discourse and constraints of Christianity has long been taken for granted in Western culture. But playing with the symbols of Islam has been out of bounds since the fatwa, ostensibly out of "respect."

What do you think?

It seems to me that Chervel has drawn a bizarre conclusion from the Rushdie affair: that blasphemy is a duty of enlightenment, and that self-restriction out of respect necessarily constitutes submission. In fact, we restrain ourselves all the time, even when we’re entirely among those who share our culture.

It is a rhetorical trick to suggest there is no alternative between, on the one hand, embracing religion-cloaked anti-female violence, and on the other, celebrating the humiliation of that same religion. It's a false choice Chervel--and others like him--present to us.

There is a muscular civility, modeled for us by Martin Luther King and his followers, that can combine unwavering and principled judgement with kindness.

Blasphemy may be a noble calling to the transatlantic cultural élites, but it is not at all clear to me that the blasphemous life is the liberated life. In fact, to develop an idea I first heard from Slavoj Žižek: as with the senseless violence of countless urban riots, in which the property of friends and neighbors is destroyed, or with the pitiful tantrums of a two-year old, intentional offence, far from creating space for freedom, can actually be an expression of impotence and fear.

In the end, it seems to me, if Khomeini has won it is because he stands for something, while neither the multiculturalists, too timid to risk, and the Enlightenment vanguard, paranoid of restraint, stand for much of anything—they fail to define a world worth living for.

But: surely we don’t have to embrace death sentences for blasphemers. What is a better way?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member sumeja]

Persepolis works hard to make the Islamic Revolution seem an exotic imposition upon secular Iran (image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

Yesterday I looked at Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous Persepolis graphic novels, which tell the story of a childhood during the Iranian revolution and beyond. The story has also been adapted to film, now out on DVD (check your local library). I've got the trailer embedded below. Don't worry: the DVD has an English-language setting.

I loved the books and the film both. The film is visually far better than the books, but preserves the books’ Spartan feel. The film, however, makes a subtle editorial decision, that significantly changes the feel of the story; that decision is described in the special features—in a question-answer session in which French co-director Vincent Paronnaud speaks.

In order to make Marjane Satrapi’s story more understandable, they worked hard to make Tehran and Iran seem more universal, and less exotic. They wanted Tehran to look like anywhere—like San Francisco, or Cincinnati—those are the two cities Paronnaud mentions—or nowhere. Tehran has no mosques, no bazaars, and no strange music. It has anyplace high-rises, anyplace traffic jams, and so on.

Vienna, on the other hand, is other-worldly and fantastic, with haunting cathedral bells, beer halls (Paronnaud inexplicably calls them “Bavarian”), bourgeois punk anarchists, and coffee-houses. Listen to the opening few seconds of the trailer, below: those are European church bells. Vienna, in other words, is made to be the abnormal place, next to which Satrapi’s Iranian childhood seems normal. The intent is to help “us” better relate to her disorientation in Austria. (See Jesus, You Know, a movie I reviewed recently, for Austrian Catholics at prayer).

All this tells us that the subject of this movie is not Marjane Satrapi, but the European viewer, for whom a city like Vienna—with its high-context urban textures, from church bells to classical music to beer halls and bourgeois anarchists—is under normal circumstances “normal”. Non-Europeans wouldn’t need the touch: Europe is already a strange place. This is reverse orientalism.

Furthermore, by sterilizing Tehran, they’ve made the Islamic revolution come off as a foreign imposition—something certainly un-Persian (hence the title Persepolis, the ancient—pre-Islamic—imperial capital). Islam and Islamic revolution are conflated, and alien to “real Iran,” which is a nominally Muslim, thoroughly modern place.

Sandra Mackey, in her book The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, argues that an important sub-plot in Iranian history is the tension between ethnicity (Farsi, or Persian—an Indo-European ethnicity and language) and religion (Islam, a religion with a universal claim, but which originates in Semitic Arabia). Iran, after all, is one of two countries in the world named after the proto-Indo-Europeans, the Aryans.

Persepolis is a story, told by a non-devout Iranian expatriate/exile. It is now a movie intended for a European audience that, noisy multi-ethnic debates aside, is still quite uncritically unaware of its particularity.