Dr. Mansour Farhang, former Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke about his hope for democracy and human rights in Iran on Wednesday. Speaking in Gaston Hall, Farhang discussed democratic prospects for the world’s only theocracy.
Farhang suggested that achieving human rights for all should be Iran’s most important goal. Farhang cited “Islamism,” which he defined as “a culture-based challenge to human rights, as today’s major challenge to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948.
Farhang also described Islamism, or Islamic fundamentalism, as a “restorationist” and “utopian” movement. He argued that it is a product of the poverty and displacement caused by colonialism and industrialism, and Islamists are simply trying to recover a golden past that they have created in their minds. Islamists “imagine the past and remember the future” instead of the other way around, Farhang said.
Farhang divided Islamists into two groups. Some, he said, truly believed that the restoration of Islamic law held the answers to all their problems. Others, however, were “ideological, radical, revolutionary agents of change,” he said. These elements utilized the concepts of populism and Marxism, “translating the same concepts into Islamic language that resonates,” to achieve absolute power.
Ayatollah Khomeini, under whom Farhang served as U.N. ambassador, falls into the latter category, Farhang said. However, he argued that Iranians are beginning to see through the ideology that Khomeini presented. In Iran, Islamism is not seen as an alternative utopia, but as a failed ideology, he said. Iran has seen no positive results from Islamism, and the only vestige of modernization is that “opium addiction has become heroin addiction,” Farhang said.
However, over the past two decades Islamist rulers have created an “apparatus of coercion” that will be very difficult to challenge, Farhang said. He noted that the current President of Iran, Mohammed Khatami, has tried to reform the theocracy from within, but he remains “unconditionally committed to the theocracy.” Farhang argued that Khatami’s theory of “democracy for the few, dictatorship for the many” would not succeed.
Farhang noted the difficulties of any secular challenge to the Islamist regime: Citizenship and participation in political life are contingent on “unconditional acceptance of the theocratic regime.” However, he argued that this is truly the only way to achieve human rights in Iran.
A “nascent democratic sentiment exists” within Iran, Farhang said. He said that he only hopes that “detestation of the regime will not be the motivating force” in this new movement. Indeed, he said he hopes that “a culture of human rights will guide this movement.”
