The recurrence of intense popular protests less than two years later indicates that within Iran the Islamic Republic not only has failed to foster Khomeini’s notion of a virtuous Islamic society, but indeed is facing a widespread rejection of his ideology. These demonstrations were a reprise of rallies that had broken out all over the country at the end of 2017 and carried on until August 2018. If people in Iraq and Lebanon are calling for an end to Iran’s meddling in their countries’ affairs, Iranians themselves are demanding the dissolution of the clerical regime and even chanting “Death to the dictator!”Īs of this writing in early December 2019, the brutal repression that the regime had unleashed against the demonstrations inside Iran had, according to cautious estimates, killed more than two-hundred people. Yet the massive demonstrations against the Islamic Republic and its influence that broke out in Iraq and Lebanon in October 2019 and then within Iran itself in November have shed stark light on a far less glorious reality for the Iranian regime and its totalitarian Islamist ideology. 1939), celebrated as the regime marked its fortieth birthday. The Islamic Republic’s expansionist victories in “Western Asia” were among the achievements that Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (b. It is the Islamic Republic that began the export of Islamist ideology by means of a vast propaganda network, as well as the provision of arms, training, and money (much of it siphoned from Iran’s oil exports) to a myriad of both Shia and Sunni Islamist terror groups. In February 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran celebrated its fortieth anniversary. It is in Iran that Islamism-or a certain strain of it, at least-has proven itself able to provide the basis of a long-enduring political project. She is currently writing a book on the tectonic social changes taking place within the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ladan Boroumand is a historian and the cofounder and senior fellow at the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. Even the resurgence of authoritarianism in Russia was justified by evoking fears of what violent Islamism could unleash, as underlined by the Beslan school massacre of 2004. In addition, fear of Islamism (and of immigration as its carrier) has paved the way for antiliberal nationalist movements to reemerge within Western democracies, enabling demagogues to gain influence and sometimes to win elections. 1ĭuring these fateful decades, Islamism in various forms has spread around the world, and today it directly targets liberal democracy and its values in the heart of Western democracies. For decades after Khomeini launched his Islamist revolution in Iran, the world’s liberal-democratic states failed to grasp that Islamist radicalism was a direct ideological threat, even though from its inception it had proclaimed Western democracy as its main enemy. A little over four decades ago, when a Shia Muslim cleric named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged in Iran and on the world political stage as the head of an unprecedented theologico-political project, few people in the West realized that they were witnessing the gestation of a new ideological challenge to the liberal-democratic worldview.
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