Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Rainy Day visitor Enda Johnson takes issue with much of what I wrote in today's earlier post, Musterknaben and other ironies. He says, "i think you've really gone off at the deep end here. too much fox and cnn i suspect." He regards my using of the term "mullahocracy" as "outrageous". Iran, in his opinion, is "a democracy, where the 'church' has an inappropraite (sic) level of influence and authority."

Now, whenever I hear arguments in which Iran is described as a "democracy", I take a deep breath and consider the kind of world we find ourselves in today. In one part of it, people like Enda Johnson and myself are free to write whatever we want about the Pope, the Queen or the price of a pint of Guinness. This right of expression is up there with fresh air and clean drinking — something we take for granted.

But those of us who love writing, reading and the unfettered exchange of ideas should never, ever forget that the "democracy" Enda Johnson writes about remains unique among modern nations for having put out a contract on a writer. On 14 April 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie because of his novel The Satanic Verses. In his edict, Khomeini informed "all the zealous Muslims of the world that the blood of the author of this book?which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an, as also of those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, is hereby declared forfeit. I call on all zealous Muslims to dispatch them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one will dare insult Islamic sanctities again. Anyone who is himself killed in this path will be deemed a martyr."

Bernhard Lewis in The Crisis of Islam, writes: "To supplement and anticipate the rewards of paradise, an Islamic charitable trust in Teheran offered a bounty to anyone who killed Salman Rushdie consisting of 20 million tumans (at the time around $3 million at the official rate, about $170,000 at the open-market rate) for an Iranian, or $1 million for a foreigner. Some years later the bounty, still unclaimed, was increased by the trust."

Putting a bounty on a writer's head and shutting down a country's free press are strange ways indeed of achieving democracy. Iran a democracy? More a "sham" democracy, I would say. But there's hope, as Fareed Zakaria writes in The Future of Freedom:

"The reasons are obvious: the regime has mismanaged the economy, is repressive politically, and faces millions of alienated young men and women. Most important, in Iran theocracy has been discredited. The Islamists have lost their trump card. Everywhere else in the Middle East and North Africa they are the alluring, mythical alternative to the wretched reality in which people live. In Iran fundamentalism is the wretched reality which they live under. The next time a mullah comes knocking on an Iranian's door he will turn his back: 'Been there, done that.' "

And as regards the term "mullahocracy" I will gladly replace it if someone out there supplies me with a definition that describes those who have turned a faith into something so puritanical and dour that it needs to be policed by religious commissars to ensure compliance.

A final point: Enda Johnson says of Iran that "it is incorrect to characterise it as some sort of police state where opposition has no voice". Is he aware that the Iranian supreme council for National Security issued an order on 22 November last year preventing any official or political activist from speaking to the Persian sections of the BBC and the VOA? And what about Sina Motallebi, the blogger and journalist arrested on 20 April and accused of threatening national security by giving interviews to Persian-language radio stations outside Iran?