Wednesday March 1, 2000

CNN's Christiane Amanpour has recently tried to depict Iran's current political and social situation in her hour long documentary "Revolutionary Journey" which was aired by CNN on Sunday.

"Revolutionary Journey", however, portrayed Iran's present-day reformism as a movement geared merely toward meeting the youth’s passing whims and providing them with the kind of carnal pleasures they seek. Such portrayal is mainly due to the fact that Amanpour, born to an Iranian father and raised in Iran until the 1979 revolution, has failed to soundly grasp the depth and breadth of the Iranian society and its cherished ideals.

Amanpour’s "Revolutionary Journey" in essence flagrantly insulted Iran’s reformist movement. She unknowingly pictured Iran’s reformist campaigns and struggles as a movement aspiring to reach such base and mundane goals as allowing the Iranians to hold parties in which boys and girls could mingle and dance and enabling the women to bare their heads and show their tresses. And this is a blatant insult on Iran’s history, civilization, and culture.

Even though Amanpour’s documentary chronicles a part of the reality permeating Iran today, it mistakenly takes this slice of the reality to represent the entirety of Iran’s reformist movement.

This is while the reformists have been the standard bearers of a relentless struggle against the conservatives to enshrine sublime ideals such as setting up a civil society, providing citizenry rights, fostering freedom of expression and thought, and promoting reason, realism, and divine reading and interpretation of religion.

Amanpour’s documentary in essence insulted combatant men such as Abdullah Nouri and Mohsen Kadivar who landed in jail just because they opposed the conservatives for the sake of the same lofty ideals briefly outlined above.

Does Amanpour think that Nouri, Kadivar, and other vanguards of the reformist movement braved the conservatives only for the purpose of enabling the Iranians to drink alcoholic beverages, have illicit affairs, and launch night clubs and discotheques?

Over the past two years, the Iranian reformist movement has paid a heavy price for its sublime ideals: tens of reformist papers were closed down; an interior minister was impeached; students were brutally beaten at the dorms. But "Revolutionary Journey" showed a different picture: The reformist struggles of the past two years were presented as culminating in night parties held by a segment of the Iranian youth.

A word with Amanpour: If "Revolutionary Journey" was meant, as a good will gesture, to offer a "modern" picture of Iran under President Khatami to James Rubin and his colleagues to improve Tehran-Washington ties, it would be more apt to delineate the reality dominating Iran, not a make-over version of the reality.

Rest assured that President Khatami is also making effort to present the world public opinion with a true picture of Iran, its values, principles, and ideals. The most propitious way for Iran and the US to reach an understanding is, therefore, for the White House to recognize the essence and reality of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, a naked reality which the Iranian officials can surely defend.

The Iranian youth’s excessive eagerness for romantic pleasures and excitements is an undeniable reality, a situation that has become more aggravated and malignant as the youth were deprived of legitimate ways of asserting themselves over the last two decades.

But to introduce Iran’s reformist movement as a mechanism to offer sensual gratification to the youth is totally erroneous, just as it is a blunder for the West to take the reformists’ recent parliamentary poll victory as the end of the Islamic Revolution!, a blunder springing from the West’s historical aversion toward religious rule due to the experiences of the scholastic age and the medieval rule of the Church and due to its unawareness of Iran’s developments.

The West makes wishful analysis of Iranian developments. This is precisely the reason why the West has failed to grasp the reality of the deep-seated religious sentiments among the Iranians, sentiments that enable any development in the country to gain meaning within the context of religious thought.

But the West simplistically attempts to draw a parallel between the reformists’ victory in Iran and Chamorro’s victory over Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista rule during the Nicaraguan socialist movement of the 1980s!