Ahmadinejad’s disturbing preference for “revolutionary purity”
We have previously described Iran’s economic problems under its theocratic sharia regime, problems that are endemic to sharia governments worldwide. We have catalogued Iran’s stagnation and decline compared to the mighty rise of China, and we have seen that Iran’s problems are entirely self-imposed — by adopting a system of laws that produces a government unable to deal with the Modern World. We have also seen brave young Iranians rise up, from time to time, against the medieval regime that threatens to bleed their lives of hope, prosperity, and the good things the Modern World has to offer.
In recent years, Iran has chosen a somewhat North Korean style economy over a Chinese capitalist style economy and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Amir Taheri tells us more about the atavistic revolutionaries who wrecked Iran, and Ahmadienjad’s preference for the idea of “revolutionary purity” over the idea of accommodation to life. By choosing a sharia economy over a capitalist economy, Iran faces:
a looming economic crisis. Inflation has risen to 17 percent, its highest rate since the 1970s. A cascade of business closures has pushed unemployment, already high even by Third World standards, to its highest level in three decades. The value of the national currency (the rial) has dropped against regional and global currencies, and is still on the slide. By official estimates, including some offered by Islamic Chief Justice Ayatollah Shahroudi, capital flight has turned into a flood…
Opposing the Chinese model from the start were those who won the sobriquet of “The North Koreans of Islam.” Their chief theorist was the late Muhammad-Ali Raja’i who briefly served as president in 1981 before he was assassinated. Rajai’s catchword was khod-kafa’i or “self-sufficiency.”
A genuine Islamic society, he argued, will be impossible while the country is exposed to global commerce dominated by “infidel” powers. With the slogan: “Iranian! Buy Iranian!” he argued that the people of Iran must start with the assumption that they need nothing. Once that “zero base” was established, they should then decide what are the goods and services they can’t do without in the context of an Islamic society based on frugality, mutual help and a minimization of needs. According to Raja’i, the goods and services produced by “infidel” powers, designed to meet the desires of their own populations, don’t always meet the requirements of Islamic life.
Ahmadinejad has always cast himself as an heir to Raja’i. In public, he is often greeted with this chant: “Allah’s Praise to Muhammad! The friend of Raja’i is welcome!” And, as governor of Ardabil (northwest of Tehran), Ahmadinejad reorganized the province’s economy to reduce trade in foreign-made goods while encouraging local handicrafts and small businesses.
Later, on becoming Tehran mayor, he removed the giant billboards showing David Beckham advertising sunglasses and George Clooney selling coffee from the streets of the capital. (He replaced them with pictures of suicide-bomb “martyrs.”) Living in a nondescript three-bedroom house in a poor neighborhood in Tehran and driving a battered Iranian-made car, Ahmadinejad has used qana’at (frugality) and twazu’e (modesty) as key concepts in his doctrine of “self-sufficiency.”
He claims that China has forfeited its “revolutionary purity,” while North Korea has not.
We agree with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muhammad-Ali Raja’i that Islamic society, as they envision it, governed through a pure, literalist interpretation of sacred texts, is incompatible with the consumerist societies of the Modern World. Rajai and Ahmadinejad are correct that “the goods and services produced by ‘infidel’ powers, designed to meet the desires of their own populations, don’t always meet the requirements of Islamic life.” Ahmadinejad is further correct in stating that China has let itself be co-opted into the modern, capitalist world, while North Korea has retained its “revolutionary purity.”
However, “revolutionary purity” is a notion with deeply disturbing implications that must be taken seriously by the West. For example, if a regime is willing to reduce its own people to grinding poverty, is there any action it is not capable of? Is the apparent willingness of the regime to let Iran’s greatest economic resource, it oil industry, waste away to nothing in a few years related to the millennarian zeal of the theocracy’s leadership? Since Ahmadinejad apparently believes that Shiite Islam should rule the world, and that such a world would be a good and godly place to live, to what extent does Ahmadinejad really believe that ridding the world of Israel and the “two thousand Zionists” that stand in the way of Islamic progress will produce a Golden Age? Given his “revolutionary purity,” what weapon would Ahmadinejad not use to achieve his goals?