The Road to Democracy in Iran (Boston Review Books)

144 Pages·2008·0.56 MB·English

by  Akbar Ganji

the road to
democracy in
iran

the road to
democracy
in iran
Akbar Ganji
Foreword by Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani
A Boston Review Book
the mit press Cambridge, Mass. London, England
Copyright © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Text design by Joshua J. Friedman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ganji, Akbar.
[Essays. English. Selections]
The road to democracy in Iran / Akbar Ganji ; foreword by
Abbas Milani and Joshua Cohen ; translated by Abbas Milani.
p. cm. — (A Boston review book)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 978-0-262-07295-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Democracy—Iran. 2. Human rights—Iran. I. Milani,
Abbas. II. Title.
JQ1789.A15G367 2008
320.955—dc22 2007050401
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Masoumeh Shafi ee—
for her solidarity in our common struggle
and her sacrifi ces for our family

Contents
Foreword ix
Prologue:
Letter to the free people of the world xvii
1 Why fi ght for human rights? 3
2 Democratic evolution in Iran 25
3 Notes on gender apartheid 43
4 Islam and the West 89

Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani
Foreword
Over the course of its hundred-year
history, the Iranian democratic move-
ment has had a particularly complicated
relationship with Shiism—Iran’s state
religion. That complexity owes in part
to competing tendencies within Shiism.
One strand has sought to reconcile Islam
with modern rationalism, democracy, and
the rule of law. The second, powerfully
expressed in Ayatollah Khomeini’s idea
of a rule of the judges, has disparaged
democracy and rationalism as modernist
diseases and turned Shiism into a project