Thursday, July 28, 2005

مطبوعات در دوره خاتمی

مفاهيمی نظير ملت، قانون، حاکميت ملی و استقلال، فرديت و حقوق شهروندی، عدالت و آزادی دست کم از زمان تاسيس دارالفنون در سال 1228 خورشيدی به اين سو، به مهم ترين دغدغه فکری روشنفکران و فعالان سياسی و البته حکومت های وقت بدل شده اند.
روزنامه ها و جمهوری اسلامی
سالی 'بدتر' از سالهای قبل برای مطبوعات ايران و مقايسه ای با ديگر کشورهای 'خطرناک'
ميثاقی که ضمانت اجرا ندارد، چه دردی را دوا می کند؟
روزنامه های تعطيل، روزنامه نگاران زندانی
آنچه در سال ۸۳ بر مطبوعات گذشت
روزنامه نگاران و روزنامه ها در آغاز ششمين سا ل حبس گنجی
مطبوعات ايران، روی ميدان مين
تداوم نقض آزادی بيان در ايران
گرينويچ 20/05/2003 ايران
قاضی مرتضوی تحت فشار
گرينويچ 20/07/2003 ايران
موسسه معتبر ايندکس که از فعال ترين نهادهای بين المللی در مبارزه برای آزادی بيان است، جايزه آزادی بيان سال 2003 را به هاشم آغاجری، محقق و استاد دانشگاه از ايران، و سه روزنامه نگار از کشورهای برمه، چين و تونس اهدا کرد.
اعضای پارلمان اروپا درقطعنامه ای گفته اند وضعيت حقوق بشر در ايران بخصوص در زمينه آزاديهای سياسی و بيان بدتر شده است. آنها در صورت ادامه اين روند خواستار طرح مساله در شورای امنيت سازمان ملل شدند.
آمبئی ليگابو، گزارشگر ويژه سازمان ملل متحد در امر آزادی عقيده و بيان در گزارشی که هفته آينده رسما در کميسيون حقوق بشر سازمان ملل متحد مطرح خواهد شد، از 'سرکوب سازمان يافته و ايجاد فضای رعب و حشت' در ايران خبر داده است.
يک سرويس دهنده آمريکايی که ارائه خدمات به خبرگزاری دانشجويان ايران، ايسنا را قطع کرده است، ارتباط اين اقدام با تحريم‌های بازرگانی دولت آمريکا را تاييد نمی کند اما نهادهای مدافع آزادی بيان در داخل و خارج از ايران، اين تصميم را دارای انگيزه‌های سياسی می دانند.

نتيجه جستجو برای بيان : 1672
BBC Persian
Gooya
نگاهی به رويدادها و وضعيت سينمای ايران در دوران رياست جمهوری محمد خاتمی
هشت سال نمايش
نگاهی به تئاتر ايران در دوران رياست جمهوری محمد خاتمی
هشت سال موسيقی ايرانی
نگاهی به تحولات موسيقی در دوران رياست جمهوری محمد خاتمی
پس از هشت سال
طنز در دوران قبل و بعد از خاتمی، از نگاه ابراهيم نبوی
هشت سال با خاتمی
مجموعه ای از گزارشها از عملکرد محمد خاتمی در دو دوره رياست جمهوری
جایگاه رسانه در دیدگاه اصلاح طلبان، عیسی سحرخیز
توسعه مطبوعاتی با تمام فراز و نشیب های آن یکی از دست اوردهای اصلی دولت خاتمی بوده است و افزایش کمی و کیفی مطبوعات غیرسیاسی و روزنامه نگاری حرفه ای به ویژه در زمینه های مختلف تخصصی در هیچ دوره ای از تاریخ ایران چنین پربار و شکوفا نبوده است. و در این میان تک ستاره هایی چون اکبر گنجی همواره انگشت شمارند ... [ادامه مطلب]

sex-change capital of the world!






This is a picture of the production guys from Spine Films who produced this very well-done documentary for TLC. It featured Elizabeth's FFS experience, as well as a small bit from yours truly. by duzdonna

A fatwa for freedom A fatwa for freedom

Maryam Molkara was a woman trapped in a man's body. She was also living under Islamic law in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet, as Robert Tait reports, her determination to confront the hallowed leader has made Tehran the unlikely sex-change capital of the world
Robert Tait
Wednesday July 27, 2005
Guardian
It could take something extraordinary to move the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa. The novelist Salman Rushdie did it by challenging the sanctity of the Prophet Mohammed in the Satanic Verses, provoking Iran's austere revolutionary leader into pronouncing the death sentence. For Maryam Khatoon Molkara it required the equally dramatic step of confronting Khomeini in person and proving, in graphic terms, that she was a woman trapped inside a man's body. Article continues

Iran's sex-change operations By Frances Harrison The BBC's Tehran correspondent

In a country that has outlawed homosexuality, Frances Harrison meets one Iranian cleric who says the right to a sex change is a human right.
He's surprised to learn in Britain a transsexual who's had a sex change operation cannot change his or her gender on their birth certificate.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4115535.stm Published: 2005/01/05 17:07:32 GMT
August 2, 2004 By NAZILA FATHI TEHRAN
Aug. 1 - Everything about Amir appears masculine: his broad chest, muscled arms, the dark full beard and deep voice. But, in fact, Amir was a woman until four years ago, when, at the age of 25, he underwent the first of a series of operations that would change his life. Since then he has had 20 surgical procedures and expects another 4. And Amir, who as a woman was married twice to men - his second husband helped with the transition and remains a good friend - is now engaged to marry a woman. "I love my life and I'm happy, as long as no one knows about my past identity," said Amir, who asked that his full name not be published. "No one has been more helpful than the judge, who was a cleric and issued the permit for my operation." After decades of repression, the Islamic government is recognizing that some people want to change their sex, and allowing them to have operations and obtain new birth certificates. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there was no particular policy regarding transsexuals. Iranians with the inclination, means and connections could obtain the necessary medical treatment and new identity documents. The new religious government, however, classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing under Iran's penal code. But these days, Iran's Muslim clerics, who dominate the judiciary, are considerably better informed about transsexuality. Some clerics now even recommend sex-change operations to those who are troubled about their gender. The issue was discussed at a conference in Tehran in June that drew officials from other Persian Gulf countries. One cleric, Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, is writing his thesis on transsexuality at the religious seminary of Qum. "All the clerics and researchers at the seminary encouraged me to work on the subject," he said in an interview. "They said that my research can help change the social stigma attached to these people and clarify religious decrees on the matter." One early campaigner for transsexual rights is Maryam Hatoon Molkara, who was formerly a man known as Fereydoon. Before the revolution, under the shah, he had longed to become a woman but could not afford surgery. Furthermore, he wanted religious guidance. In 1978, he wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution but was still in exile, explaining his situation. The ayatollah replied that his case was different from that of a homosexual and therefore he had his blessing. However, the revolution intervened and men like himself or those who had already changed their sex were harassed, even jailed and tortured. "They made me stop wearing women's clothes, which I had worn for many years and was used to," Ms. Molkara recalled. "It was like torture for me. They even made me take hormones to look like a man.'' It took him eight years after the revolution, in 1986, to get government permission to proceed with surgery. But he could not afford the surgery and did not have it until 1997, when he underwent a sex-change operation in Bangkok. The Iranian government covered the expenses. Four years ago, Ms. Molkara established an organization to help those with gender-identity problems. Co-founders include Ali Razini, head of the Special Court of Clergy, a branch of the judiciary that only deals with clerics, and Zahra Shojai, Iran's vice president for women's affairs. An Islamic philanthropic group known as the Imam Khomeini Charity Foundation has agreed to provide loans equivalent to about $1,200 to help pay for sex-change surgery. To obtain legal permission for sex-change operations and new birth certificates, applicants must provide medical proof of gender-identity disorder. The process can take years. It also involves considerable expense. In Tehran, the initial male-to-female surgery runs about $4,000. So far, Amir has spent $12,000 on medical procedures. The people who pursue this route come from many different backgrounds. Dr. Bahram Mir-djalali, one of Tehran's few sex-reassignment surgeons, said one of his patients had been a member of the Revolutionary Guards who served five years in the war with Iraq. His operation was paid for by a Muslim cleric he had worked for as a secretary. After the surgery, the man-turned-woman divorced, and then married the cleric. "When she came to see me years later, she was wearing a chador," the doctor recalled, referring to the black head-to-toe garb worn by religious women. "She took off the chador, and there was no sign of the bearded man I had operated on." But many who cannot deal with the legal and financial obstacles to a surgical solution have to deal with humiliation in their daily lives. One 27-year-old man said he ran away from home at the age of 14 because he did not dare tell his family of his urge to become a woman. He wants to be known as Susan and wears women's clothes at home but only emerges dressed that way at night. He says the constant need for secrecy has left him severely depressed, and he has attempted suicide several times. "I have suffered all my life,'' he said, constantly adjusting his long curly hair to cover his sideburns. "People treat me as though I have come from Mars. Women pull my hair and laugh at me on the street. Most men I am attracted to reject me." In a society where men enjoy a higher status than women, the stigma against any man who wants to be a woman is especially strong. "They compliment a girl who behaves and dresses like a man as a strong person, but they look down at us and despise us," said Assal, who was disowned by her father for having surgery to become a woman. Dr. Mir-djalali said he had to fight on many fronts to help more than 200 patients who had consulted him in the 12 years he had performed sex-change operations. Even if Iran's Muslim clerics are more understanding now of transsexuals' needs, others lag behind. "We have a problem even deciding at which hospital to do the surgery because society considers these people deviant," he said. "Hospital officials have reacted negatively because they say other patients do not like the looks of my patients." He said one patient's father pulled a knife on him in his office, and threatened to kill him if he touched his son. "What we really need to help these people,'' Dr. Mir-djalali said, "is a serious cultural campaign."
Some useful links:
تغيير جنسيت در ايران روحانيون ايران انتخاب جنسيت را حق بشر می دانند
از ديگر رسانه ها افزايش عمل های جراحی تغيير جنسيت در ايران؛ گزارشی از نيويورک تايمز

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Dutch film-maker





Van Gogh killer jailed for life

A Dutch court has sentenced a 27-year-old radical Islamist to life in prison for the November murder of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh.
Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, had made a courtroom confession and had vowed to do the same again if given the chance.
The murder in Amsterdam stunned the Netherlands. The court ruled that it was a terrorist act.
The judge said the murder had triggered "great fear and insecurity" in society.
"The murder of Theo van Gogh provoked a wave of revulsion and disdain in the Netherlands. Theo van Gogh was mercilessly slaughtered," said Judge Udo Willem Bentinck.
Brutal killing
Bouyeri had told the court he had acted out of religious conviction.
Clutching a copy of the Koran, he said that "the law compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet".
Van Gogh, a strong critic of radical Islam, was shot and stabbed in broad daylight as he was cycling through Amsterdam.
His throat was slashed and the killer also pinned a letter to his chest with a knife, which threatened Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She had written the script for Van Gogh's controversial film Submission, which criticised the treatment of women under Islam.
The trial in Amsterdam took place in a heavily guarded building and about 20 relatives and friends of Van Gogh were present, Radio Netherlands reporter Eric Hesen told the BBC News website.
Van Gogh's 14-year-old son wept and was embraced by his mother as the film-maker's death was described in court. Van Gogh was a distant relative of the famous 19th-Century painter Vincent.
Alleged network
The judgement said the killer had shown "a complete disregard for human life".
Mr Bouyeri said nothing, but looked "very calm and superior", according to Mr Hesen.
He was also convicted of the attempted murder of several police officers and bystanders and illegal possession of firearms.
His sentence carries no possibility of parole.
The Dutch are still struggling to understand how Bouyeri, who was born and raised in Amsterdam, turned to radical Islam, the BBC's Geraldine Coughlan reports.
After this trial, the authorities will decide if he can be prosecuted separately for membership of a terrorist organisation.
Twelve other terrorism suspects are awaiting trial in the Netherlands and prosecutors believe Mr Bouyeri is a key figure in that group, but so far they have not come up with enough evidence to charge him.
After the Van Gogh murder, mosques in several Dutch cities were the targets of vandalism and failed arson attempts.

Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2005/07/26 09:52:06 GMT
MSNBC Killer of Dutch filmmaker gets life in prison - 2 hrs ago
The Sun Film killer jailed for life - 3 hrs ago
New York Times Dutch Court Jails Van Gogh Killer for Life - 3 hrs ago
Middle East Online Bouyeri jailed for life for van Gogh murder - 5 hrs ago
ABCNEWS.com Dutch court jails Van Gogh killer for life - 5 hrs ago

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Iran's National Football team


















AFC - LONDON, English first division side Queens’ Park Rangers (QPR) blanked out Iran 3-0 in a friendly at the Loftus Stadium, west of London, on Saturday.
Paul Furlong drew first blood for Queens' Park Rangers in the 41st minute. Gareth Ainsworth and Georges Santos were the other goalscorers for the hosts.
Iran, who included only the domestic league players and not summoned veteran skipper Ali Daei, will take on Millwall and Portsmouth on July 30 and August 6 respectively. Team Melli's Croatian coach Branko Ivankovic said: “Our star players could not come because they have club commitments. As a national side, losing 0-3 is not an ideal result but we have been training since 10 days only and not fit enough for such a game.”
“It was an excellent schooling for the future for the young players”.
گزارش تصویری از بازی ایران با کويينز پارک رنجرز 2
گزارش تصویری از بازی ایران با کويينز پارک رنجرز 1
تيم ملی در بريتانيا گزارش تصویری از تماشاگران بازی ایران با کويينز پارک رنجرز
تيم ملی در بريتانيا گزارش تصویری از بازی ایران با کويينز پارک رنجرز
Iran build bridges at QPR
QPR 3 - 0 Iran
Furlong 41, Ainsworth 59, Santos 72 Mike Baker at Loftus RoadMonday July 25, 2005
Old friends greeted each other warmly, an opportunist flag-seller snared a captive market and people walked and talked amid the unmistakable noise and bustle of a football crowd filing along city streets. Such Saturday afternoon scenes are far from remarkable in London and yet these are strange times in the capital and this was an extraordinary occasion.
George Bush would have choked on his burger. True, it does seem odd to think of an English side lining up against the national team of Iran - perhaps 10 years ago it would have been unthinkable - but sport has an ability to transcend divides as well as to reinforce them and this was an example of the former.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Persian Great Poet










Khayyam was a poet as well as a mathematician. He discovered a geometrical method to solve cubic equations by intersecting a parabola with a circle.

17:31 گرينويچ - چهارشنبه 20 ژوئيه 2005
عکس از شاهرخ گلستان، خط از نصرالله افجه ای، ترجمه از کريم امامی

برگزيده هايی از شراب نيشابور

روزی است خوش و هوا نه گرم است و نه سرد
ابر از رخ گلزار همی شويد گرد
بلبل به زبان پهلوی با گل زرد
فرياد همی کند که می بايد خورد

It's a lovely day, neither too hot nor too cold
Clouds regularly refresh the flowers in the field
And the Nightingle calls out in secret Pahlavi to the Yellow Rose
Carousing time! It's crousing time

خيام اگر ز باده مستی خوش باش
با لاله رخی اگر نشستی خوش باش
چون عاقبت کار جهان نيستی است
انگار که نيستی چو هستی خوش باش

Have a good time Khayyam, if you are merry with wine
And if you are with a tulip-cheeked companion
As death and destruction are in the cards for everyone
Imagine that you are now dead; enjoy yourself while you can

بنگر ز صبا دامن گل چاک شده است
بلبل ز جمال گل طربناک شده است
در سايه گل نشين که بسيار اين گل
از خاک برآمده است و در خاک شده است

Look how the morning breeze has helped the rosebud bloom
And how at the sight of the rose the nightingle swoons
Come sit in the shade of the rosebush for such a rose
Has often grown out of the soil to fall dawn again

در هر دشتی که لاله زاری بوده است
از سرخی خون شهرياری بوده است
هر شاخ بنفشه کز زمين می رويد
خالی است که بر رخ نگاری بوده است

Whereve you find flowers and tulips galore
A prince's blood has given the petals their red hue
Each violet that you see blooming in the field
Has been a mole on the cheek of a princess too

دوری که در او آمدن و رفتن ماست
او را نه نهايت نه بدايت پيداست
کس می نزند دمی در اين معنی راست
کاين آمدن از کجا و رفتن به کجاست

The cycle that encompasses our entrance and exit
Has niether a beginnig nor an end in sight
No one speaks for a moment the truth about it
As to whence is our entrance and whereto our exit
بيست و هشتم ارديبهشت به نام حکيم عمر خيام نيشابوری، شاعر، منجم و رياضی دان ايرانی نامگذاری شده است و هرسال در اين روز ياد و خاطره اين حکيم بزرگ در ايران گرامی داشته می شود.
در تاريخ و تاريخ ادبيات ايران از عمر خيام با عناوينی چون دانشمند، فيلسوف، رياضی دان، منجم، حکيم و شاعر نام برده شده است. در کتاب های قديمی هم شاعر بودن او ناديده گرفته شده است. مثلا نظامی عروضی در چهار مقاله از خيام به عنوان منجم ياد کرده و ابوالحسن بيهقی در تاريخ بيهقی و تتمه صوان الحکمة عناوين او را دستور، فيلسوف و حجة الحق ذکر کرده است.
امسال برای نخستين بار همايشی برای بزرگداشت عمر خيام در کنار مزار اين فيلسوف و حکيم ايرانی در دوران جمهوری اسلامی برگزار شده است. اين مراسم که روز ملی خيام نامگذاری شده روز دوشنبه 17 مه (28 ارديبهشت) در نيشابور برگزار شد و در آن پيام وزير فرهنگ و ارشاد اسلامی نيز قرائت شد.
دفيلم برداری ميراث بر افسانه عمر خيام در شهرهای سمرقند و بخارا ادامه دارد.
سايت هايي كه مي شه اشعار خيام و مطالبي در مورد اين بزرگمرد دين گريز خوش مشرب انديشمند شجاع يافت
Omar Khayyám
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Omar Khayyam)

Omar's life is dramatized in the 1957 film Omar Khayyam starring Cornel Wilde, Debra Page, Raymond Massey, Michael Rennie, and John Derek.
A lunar crater Omar Khayyam was named after him in 1970.
An asteroid 3095 Omarkhayyam was named after him in 1980.
Omar Khayyam Encyclopædia Britannica Article
born May 18, 1048, Neyshabur [also spelled Nishapur], Khorasan [now Iran]died December 4, 1131, Neyshabur
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
http://www.okonlife.com/

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Freedom for Akbar Ganji


freedom for Akbar Ganji

His Excellency Hojjatoleslam Sayed Mohammad Khatami
The PresidencyPalestine Avenue
Azerbaijan Intersection
Tehran,
Islamic Republic of Iran

3 June 2005

Excellency,

We, the undersigned member organisations of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), are writing to call for the permanent release from prison of journalist Akbar Ganji.
Our members welcomed the news earlier this week that Ganji had been granted a week-long leave from Evin Prison in Tehran. As you are aware, he was said to be in very poor health. Doctors had recommended that Ganji be hospitalized for back problems and asthma, which worsened because of his prison condition. His lawyer, Nobel peace laureate Shirin Edabi, voiced great concern about his health. We trust that, during his temporary release from prison, Ganji will be given required medical \treatment in order to improve his health.
Now that Ganji has been released from Evin Prison, we urge that his freedom from incarceration be made permanent and that he not be returned to prison next week. He has already served more than five years of his prison sentence, much of it in solitary confinement. His health, already weakened by the imprisonment, will only worsen and reverse any gains made during this week of freedom.
We believe that Akbar Ganji has been held in violation of his right to freedom of expression, as guaranteed by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We call for his immediate and unconditional release, by which he will not have to return to Evin Prison next week. This action by your government will underscore the humanitarian concerns for Ganji's well-being and be seen as a positive development by the international community.

Sincerely,

AMARCCartoonists Rights Network
CJFECPJ
Freedom House
MISA
Norwegian PEN Centre
PEN American Center
PEN CanadaWPFC
Case File Number: PL05-05

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Iranian Lessons

Iranian Lessons

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, The New York Times, July 17, 2005

Young Iranian women find creative ways to adhere to hijab laws










[I]


In south Tehran there is a huge walled cemetery dedicated to the martyrs, the young men who died fighting in the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. This vast city of the dead, complete with its own subway station and shops, does not share Arlington National Cemetery's sublimely stoic aesthetic of identical tombstones, row upon row. In Tehran's war cemetery, each of the fallen is remembered individually with his own martyr's shrine, a sealed glass cabinet on a stand. The cabinets are filled with faded photos of men forever young, some in helmets or red bandannas, some carrying their weapons, others at home stroking the family cat or grinning during a meal with friends. Next to the yellowing photographs might be a Koran, or a faded copy of a Persian poem, or a set of plastic flowers, or one of the painted eggs that Iranian families exchange at their New Year. These little shrines seem to go on forever, each one a family's attempt to confer immortality on some young man who died in the trenches at a place like Khorramshahr, the pinnacle of Iranian resistance to the Iraqi invaders.

More than a million Iranians served in the war with Iraq. Three hundred thousand died and a larger number came home wounded. Although the conflict ended in stalemate and disillusion, it remains the Iranian revolution's defining moment of sacrifice. Accordingly, the regime still exploits the martyrs' sacrifices at every traffic roundabout in the country, with enormous posters of the bearded, unsmiling, very young men in uniform, heading off to battle and divine reward.

The religion of Iran, Shiite Islam, is a martyr's faith. Shiite culture has aspects of a death cult, including an obsession with blood sacrifice. For some surviving veterans, the camaraderie they experienced on the Iraqi front epitomized not only the patriotic virtues of the revolution but also the self-sacrificing virtues of their faith. Any American neoconservative betting on the Iranian regime to crumble under the impact of isolation, blockade, sanctions or foreign condemnation ought to pay a visit to the martyrs' cemetery. Revolutionary regimes anchored in faith and blood sacrifice have good reason to believe they are impervious to outside pressure.

I visited the cemetery of the martyrs late last month, during a trip to Iran to lecture on human rights, mostly to reform-minded students and intellectuals. My arrival fell between rounds of the country's presidential election. In the first round of voting, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the son of an ironworker, a former Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq and, briefly, the appointed mayor of Tehran -- had come from nowhere to win about 20 percent of the vote. The former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the supposedly reformist candidate, was struggling to hold off Ahmadinejad's challenge in the second round. Ahmadinejad is an authoritarian populist with a base of support among the poor in the shantytowns and warrens of south Tehran. Unlike Rafsanjani, he is not a mullah, and he served in the war. This gave him access to the war veterans and the Basiji, the paramilitary popular militias created during the war, and he was using them to get out the vote in the poorest neighborhoods of south Tehran. He promised the poor justice, but most of all he promised the veterans rewards for their sacrifice. Immediately labeled a hard-liner by most American commentators, Ahmadinejad sent out more populist, inclusive signals at home, leading some Iranians to worry that quick American condemnations of him as a reactionary might only provoke him into becoming one.

At the beginning of the week that I arrived, there were few Ahmadinejad posters around Tehran for the presidential runoff. Thanks to the veterans, by the eve of the final vote, banners and posters were displayed everywhere. At night, cars would grind to a halt while Ahmadinejad supporters, with his picture plastered on their foreheads, danced around the traffic circles. In the end, Ahmadinejad easily defeated Rafsanjani in the runoff election, winning with about 60 percent of the vote. It was a victory so unexpected that some were already calling it the second Iranian revolution.

[II]

Ahmadinejad had capitalized not only on his war service but also on gathering disillusion with the failure of the reformers -- nominally in power since the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 -- to address popular grievances relating to jobs, housing, transport and, above all, the growing class divide. In leafy north Tehran, reformers were talking about human rights and democracy, while in dusty south Tehran, the poor were struggling to hold onto jobs in an economy in which unemployment was officially 15 percent and probably twice that. For the reformers, the victory brought home how out of touch with ordinary Iranians many of them had become.

''That was our chief mistake,'' Amir Hossein Barmaki, a middle-class Tehrani who now works for the United Nations in the city, told me. ''The reformers -- Khatami and Rafsanjani -- came to power after the war and they did nothing for the veterans. These boys from the poor districts came home, having saved the country, and we did nothing for them. There were some who are dying of Saddam's poison gas attacks who didn't even get a pension.''

''No,'' he went on. ''There was worse. None of us actually went to the war. All the middle class went abroad or stayed in university. We sent the poor instead. We could even buy our way out of military service. It is our shame.''

On the nights after Ahmadinejad's victory, the atmosphere among many of the liberal Iranians I talked with was reminiscent of another group of intellectuals: the Russian thinkers of the 1860's, Western-educated men and women who had to discover, painfully, just how out of touch their reformist ideas were with the poor and burdened of their own society. Barmaki told me mournfully, ''We reformers have lost five years.''
The political task ahead for the liberal thinkers of Iran is to find a program that links human rights and democracy to the poor's economic grievances.

[III]

I had been invited to lecture on human rights and democracy, but Ahmadinejad's unexpected victory changed the agenda of my talks. Suddenly the question was no longer, What do democracy and human rights mean in an Islamic society? but, Can democracy and human rights make any headway at all in a society deeply divided between rich and poor, included and excluded, educated and uneducated? The reformers had promoted human rights and democracy as a panacea for Iran's poor, and what had been the result?

The slums of Tehran voted for a man who advocated stricter discipline for women, tougher theocratic rule and state control of the economy.

I was invited not by the mullah-dominated universities but by the Cultural Research Bureau, an independent center in Tehran that publishes books and runs its own gift shop, gallery and lecture hall. My Iranian host, Ramin Jahanbegloo, works in a tiny shared office at the bureau, inviting foreign guests and building up a small circle of free-minded students whom he lectures on European thought. He and I had never met, but he has published a book of conversations he had as a student with Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher of liberalism, and I have written a biography of Berlin. We are Berliners.

Berlin himself visited Tehran in the late 1970's, during the dying years of the shah's regime. He gave a lecture -- ''On the Rise of Cultural Pluralism'' -- in front of the empress, who, as Berlin later recounted, fidgeted irritably and then made a sign to a courtier to get Berlin to cut it short. In midlecture, Berlin sat down, he told a friend, ''as if stung by several wasps.'' All in all it was not a happy visit. The shah's Iran, he decided, was the last czarist regime on earth. Propped up by the Americans and kept in power by a hated secret police, the shah launched a White Revolution in the 1960's, a grandiose modernization program that alienated mullahs, merchants and students alike. Eventually, street demonstrations forced him to abdicate, and he fled into exile in 1979. After that came the Shiite revolution, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have gone into exile, and the liberal intelligentsia that remains is both cut off from the mass of the Iranian population and isolated from the Western universities from which it draws its inspiration.

Jahanbegloo says he thinks of himself as a bridge between Iran and those universities. He invites a steady stream of philosophers like Richard Rorty from Stanford and Agnes Heller from the New School in New York to give talks to students. He sees some signs that their ideas are finding a toehold in Tehran. Three decades ago, the intellectuels du jour were Michel Foucault and fellow radical theorists. They arrived in Tehran proclaiming their solidarity with a revolution that actively despised them while persecuting its own freethinkers. Now the pendulum in Tehran has swung toward pragmatic liberals like Berlin.

Upon arrival, I was immediately plunged into the kinds of discussions about democracy and freedom that took place in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest in the 1980's. On my first day, young journalists at a reform-minded newspaper called Shargh quizzed me about the difference between ''maximal'' and ''minimal'' democracy. Maximal democracy means elections plus rule of law, bills of rights and checks and balances. That is decades away in Iran. Minimal democracy is what they already have: guided rule by the mullahs that may deliver the country straight to tyranny under Ahmadinejad.

It became apparent that what I should have been teaching during my visit was the history of the Protestant Reformation. It's not just that Islam badly needs a Reformation. It's also that Iranians need to know how the Reformation and the bloody religious wars that followed it taught the West to put God in his place. Democracy arises, I told the students, not just to enthrone the people but also to separate religion and politics, establishing rules of tolerance that allow all religions to enjoy freedom and creating a political system in which religious and secular arguments compete on equal ground.

Many young Iranians I talked to were so hostile to clerical rule that I found myself cautioning them against going too far in the other direction. Many seemed in favor of a secular republicanism in which religion was excluded from politics altogether, as it was in Turkey during the rule of that country's modernizing dictator, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. As Isaiah Berlin warned, however, if you bend the twig too far, it will snap back in your face. In Turkey, the reaction against the extremes of Ataturk's secularism has brought an Islamic government, though admittedly a moderate one, to power. Secularism, I argued, doesn't mean crushing religion, it just means creating a neutral space in which arguments between religious and secular people are settled by evidence, not dogma.
''Like in the United States?'' a bright female student asked me with a coy smile. In the United States, I said, God is never out of the public sphere. The furor over the end of Terri Schiavo's life and the Bush administration's restrictions on federal financing for stem cell research, among other things, make that obvious. From their vantage point inside a theocracy, young Iranians long for ''a wall of separation'' between religion and government, as Thomas Jefferson called it, and they told me they found it puzzling, even disappointing, that religion and politics are not actually separate in the United States. I tried to explain that keeping God in his place in a democracy is work that never ends.

Democracy in Iran also means working free of what one student called ''the culture of dictatorship,'' a floating web of patriarchal controls over private life. All of the young people I talked to were under 30, invariably were living at home till marriage and were chafing under restrictions on their personal lives. For young women, living free means the right to choose whom you marry and how much hair to display around your hijab; it means leaving to get an M.B.A. in Australia and then coming back and running a business. For one young man, struggling to find how he might buy his way out of compulsory military service, it means the freedom, he confessed in a whisper, to be gay. Homosexuality is a crime in Iran, and seemingly the only time when conversations do become furtive, with anxious looks over shoulders, is when homosexuality is the topic.

The hostility toward homosexuality is not just a reflex of a deeply traditional family culture. The Shiite regime has waged a 26-year war on pleasures both homosexual and heterosexual. In Persian culture, however, the taste for pleasure runs deep. Just think of the music-making, dancing and the costumed beauty of the men and women in classical Persian miniatures. During the revolution, many of these Persian treasures were hacked off the walls of mosques and palaces by Shiite zealots.

Thankfully, Persian pleasure remains stubbornly alive. When I flew south from Tehran to Isfahan, the astounding capital of the Safavid shahs of the 17th century, I spent one night wandering along the exquisitely lighted vaulted bridges, watching men, not necessarily gay, stroll hand in hand, singing to each other and dancing beneath the arches, while families picnicked on the grass by the banks of the river and men and women passed a water pipe around. Though it cannot be much comfort to those who have to live, here and now, under public and private tyrannies, I came away from a night in Isfahan believing that Persian pleasure, in the long run, would outlast Shiite puritanism.
[IV]

Like all revolutionary regimes, the Iranian state seems to have reproduced the ugliness of the regime it overthrew. The shah had a secret police -- Savak -- and the mullahs have one, too. One day in Tehran, on a street corner, I passed a small student demonstration linked to the elections and watched as a sweaty secret-police officer, with a gun in his waistband, tried to muscle a demonstrator away into a car. Other demonstrators started punching the officer, and he had to call for reinforcements. While he did so, the seized student wriggled free and disappeared into the crowd.

In a more genuinely fearful police state, he would have gone quietly. On the other hand, when this regime wants to crush the opposition, it does so with unflinching ruthlessness. Some religious minorities -- like the Armenian Christians -- are not persecuted, but others, like the Bahais -- a schismatic sect of Islam -- have been barred from the universities, and their leaders have been arrested, tortured and, in some cases, killed. Iranian human rights lawyers told me that they defend as many political prisoners as they can, but there are hundreds more held incommunicado. Some go into the prisons and never emerge alive. In June 2003, Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian holding a Canadian passport, was taking photographs outside the notorious Evin prison in Tehran when she was arrested and dragged inside. Three weeks later, the authorities announced that she had died under interrogation, and soon after that, evidence came out indicating that she had been tortured and raped. The Canadian government is demanding that those responsible be punished or dismissed, but a case in an Iranian court seems to be going nowhere.

Shirin Ebadi, the lawyer handling the Kazemi case and the regime's most visible opponent, is a heroic figure, a physically tiny dynamo, bursting with scorn for the regime and quick to shed her hijab in private houses as a sign of her independence. She walks a careful line, distancing herself from the Bush administration's criticism of the presidential elections, but remaining equally dismissive of the regime's claims that its guided democracy remains a democracy nonetheless. Having done time for political offenses herself, she knows the insides of the prisons where her clients now languish. The outgoing president, the supposed reformer Khatami, notably failed to lend Ebadi political cover and support when she came back from Oslo with the Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever Nobel given to an Iranian. When I asked her whether the prize and the recognition it brought protect her, she replied with a quizzical arch of an eyebrow: ''No, the Nobel does not protect me at all.''
[V]

At Shahid Beheshti University, I gave a seminar on human rights to a class composed mostly of young women in full-length black robes and head coverings. When I went up to shake their hands before the session started, they pulled their hands away. Such contact between the sexes is frowned upon. But in class, they were anything but docile. In often fluent English, they asked what I thought about Islamic Shariah law and its punishments, which can include stoning women to death for adultery. The challenge, I argued, is not understanding why these are wrong but prevailing politically against the religious authorities who believe that their own power depends on enforcing these penalties. The students replied that they needed help from Western intellectuals like me to get rid of Islamic punishments. I replied that while outside pressure can help, Western human rights advocacy can often have counterproductive results. In Nigeria, for example, an international letter-writing campaign organized by human rights advocates did not persuade an Islamic governor in northern Nigeria to halt the flogging of a teenage girl for having sex (she says she was raped) -- and the campaign might even have persuaded him to proceed, if reports are to be believed. On the other hand, a group of female Islamic lawyers worked within the Shariah system to defend another Nigerian woman who had been sentenced to stoning for adultery, securing her acquittal on a technicality (which drew criticism from some Western human rights advocates).


The women in the class were not happy with my suggestion that they should reform Shariah from within. ''There should be one law for everybody, not two systems, one of Islamic law and the other of secular law,'' one student argued. I agree, I said, but it's not obvious how you are going to get there in Iran. The students found this too defeatist. ''We are very glad that you come to our class, professor,'' one said to me, ''but you are too nice to the Shariah law. It must be abolished. It cannot be changed.''

One professor observing these exchanges was a middle-aged man in the light brown robes and white turban that designate a religious scholar. Having listened carefully, with his long legs stretched out beneath the desk, he asked me -- in fluent English -- why I thought human rights were universal. I gave the answer I use in my class at Harvard -- that if I were to go up to him, right now, and smack him across the face, anywhere in the world the act would count as an injustice and an insult. Human rights law codifies our agreement about stopping these intuitively obvious injustices.

But why, he pressed further, would an injustice against him also be perceived by me as an injustice? Because, I replied, human beings are not closed compartments. We can imagine what it would be like to be at the receiving end of the very blows we strike.

''You are an intuitionist,'' he said with a smile. I countered that the human capacity to understand the pain of others is a fact, not an intuition. ''But you need something stronger than this,'' he said. We continued for a while, agreeably disagreeing, but as he gathered up his papers to depart, he was smiling like someone who thought he had just won an argument. As far as he was concerned, beneath his belief in human rights lies the bedrock of the Koran, while beneath mine lies nothing but hopeful instincts.
[VI]

One day, I paid a call on Saeed Semnanian, the chancellor of one of Tehran's most conservative universities. We sat in his spartan office, while female engineering students walked to and fro in the gardens outside his window. I began with compliments about the achievements of the revolution. Female literacy has risen to 70 percent (though male literacy is still higher, at 84 percent), while income per head has doubled since the end of the war with Iraq. But, I went on, everyone I talked to in Tehran told me the revolution has congealed into a corrupt, repressive system of privileges that exploits Islamic orthodoxy to remain in power.
''Whom do you talk to?'' he asked me with a level stare.

''Intellectuals, writers, journalists.''

''You are trying to take the temperature of the revolution, but all your thermometers are wrong,'' he responded.

All this complaining, he implied, is what you would expect from discontented liberals. The achievement that matters, he said, is that Iran is independent. In the presidential elections, all the candidates were pure Iranian. In the shah's time, nothing was pure Iranian. Everything was decided in the American or the British Embassy.

He seemed faintly amused by my failure to understand his country. For him, the history of Iran is the history of attempts to subvert its independence. As far as he is concerned, it might be yesterday, and not in 1953, that Kermit Roosevelt and the C.I.A. organized the coup that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalized the Iranian oil fields. The seizure of the American Embassy and the hostage drama were, as Semnanian saw it, an exquisitely drawn out revenge for the C.I.A.-inspired coup, just as the regime's current drive for nuclear weapons is a search for an ultimate guarantee of its freedom from foreign interference.

Iranian democrats contend that if Iran were a democracy, its nuclear weapons would not threaten anyone. What makes Iranian weapons dangerous, they argue, is that the regime is a theocracy with connections to Hamas and Hezbollah. A democratic Iran that broke with terrorism would be easier to live with, even if it possessed a nuclear bomb. As Shirin Ebadi told me, ''Who cares about France's force de frappe?''


American neoconservatives also tend to argue that democracy will make Iran peaceful and pro-American. This might be wishful thinking. Fear of encirclement by the United States means that the regime's drive for weapons has widespread popular support. If a genuine Iranian democracy were as nationalistic as most new democracies usually are, a democratic Iran might well remain a bellicose opponent of the United States and Israel.

In any event, America has almost no capacity to promote democracy inside Iran, and some capacity to do harm to Iranian democrats. Every Iranian I met wanted to spend time in the United States -- and wished there were more scholarships to take them to America -- but nearly every one of them laughed when I mentioned the recent Congressional appropriation of $3 million to support democratic opposition groups inside and outside the country. Iranian democrats look on American good intentions with incredulity. It would be fatal for any of them to accept American dollars. ''Do they want to get us all arrested as spies?'' one said to me.

Hence the paradox: the Middle Eastern Muslim society with the most pro-American democrats will strenuously resist any American attempt to promote democracy inside it. It is easy to understand why. ''We fought for our independence,'' Semnanian told me. ''You think when our people fought to drive out the invaders from Iraq for seven years, we were fighting only Saddam? We were fighting the U.S.A., Britain, the whole world. We saved our country. And now we are free.''
[VII]

The night before I left Tehran, I had a private conversation about Ahmadinejad's political program with one of the new president's advisers, A. Asgarkhani, a genial, long-haired professor in his 60's. When Asgarkhani, who holds a Western doctorate, first began predicting victory for his candidate a month ago, nobody believed him. Even a week before the runoff, nobody took him seriously. Now it had happened.


The good thing about Ahmadinejad's victory, Asgarkhani said, is that it will end the paralysis of the regime, the division between the reformers and the religious guardians who control the political system. All power will finally be in one set of hands. So the president can do something.
But won't that be bad for human rights? I asked.

Maybe at first, he replied, but then Ahmadinejad will bring human rights and democracy -- here he gestured with his hands -- ''from the top down.''

And how is Ahmadinejad going to change the economy? ''If he listens to me,'' Asgarkhani said, ''he is going to go with 'techno-nationalism.' ''

Techno-nationalism, import substitution, new growth theory -- all the catch phrases of Western development economics tumbled out of Asgarkhani's mouth, but they still sounded like the Islamic Marxism that has passed for economic theory in Iran since the revolution: don't depend on foreigners; keep the economy in state hands, otherwise foreign capitalists will get control of it; restrain the financial sector, because a free financial sector will cause the economy to melt down.


With oil at about $60 a barrel as I write, there is little likelihood that the regime will be forced to open up and reform the economy. But unless it does, there won't be much democracy or progress for the poor. One human rights truth, universally acknowledged, is that oil is an obstacle to democracy in every developing society. When a government can get what it needs out of oil derricks and ceases to derive its revenue from taxes, it loses any incentive to respond to the people. Theocracy in Iran is built on oil and will endure as long as the oil price holds up.

One young female Iranian economics major had told me wearily that she wondered why she bothered to study macroeconomics at all, since, in Iran, all economic decisions are made politically. The incoming president has promised the desperately poor the better life the revolution was supposed to deliver. What happens if all that the poor get are programs and policies like Asgarkhani's voodoo economics? Then all that will be left is the iron fist.


When I said this to another young Iranian woman and told her that when Ahmadinejad fails the poor, the only recourse left will be further repression, she said, determinedly: ''No, he cannot turn back the clock. He cannot send us backward.'' I hoped she was right, but I noticed that she made a small involuntary gesture. She pulled her hijab down and covered her hair entirely. For the first time, she looked uncertain and concerned.


Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer, teaches about human rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is the editor of ''American Exceptionalism and Human Rights,'' just published by Princeton University Press.