Iranian Student Movement

During the first two days of 2009 post-presidential election Iran was still under a despotic religious regime. The protesting groups have definitly changed this reality for ever. Two months latter the university students stood at the helm of the opposition groups. This powerful forces were little known to anybody when the protest began, and their leaders were still under indictment for state treason when they came to street revolution. You will not find another such sharp turn in Iranian student movement - especially if you remember that it involves a group of 8 million people. It is clear that the events of 2009 post-presidential election, whatever you think of them, deserve study.

The history of a social movement, like every other history, ought first of all to tell what happened and how. That, however, is little enough. From the very telling it ought to become clear why it happened thus and not otherwise. Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures, nor strung on the thread of some preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws. The discovery of these laws is the author's task.

The most indubitable feature of a social movement is the direct interference of the people in historic events. In ordinary times the state, be it despotic or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business - Ayatollahs, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the people, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a social movement is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the people into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.

The point is that our Iranian society does not changes institutions as need arises, the way a writer changes his pens. On the contrary, Iranian society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once for all. For last two decades the oppositional criticism of the Pan-Islamist reformers was nothing more than a safty valve for people dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the Islamic social structure. Such in principle, for example, was the significance acquired by the Pan-Islamist reformers criticism. Entirely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of Mousavi and Kahroubi or green parties, were necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of conservatism, and bring the people to street protest and insurrection.

The swift changes of Iranian people views and moods in post-presidential election thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of protesters' mind, but just the opposite, from their deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of change that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the clergymen mind a mere result of the "treason."

To be continued...