Iranian Revolutions from Shirin Ebadi to "Allahu Akbar"

Not her Islam: Iran's Shirin Ebady, the human rights activist who won the Nobel peace Prize in 2003, is calling on the Iranian regime to annul the election.(Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images)

Last December either Ali Khamenei's or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's thugs were sacking Shirin Ebadi's human rights office in Tehran just as she was preparing a 60th anniversary celebration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was the regime's way of paying her back for a United Nations report Ebadi's Defenders of Human Rights Center had helped draft, and which called on the Iranian government to quit torturing and executing juveniles, among other brutal routines.

Two days ago, Ebadi called for new elections in an interview on Radio Free Europe.

"I believe that a recount of the votes under the current conditions won't solve anything," Ebadi said. "A new election must be held and this time it should be under the monitoring of international organizations so that all participants would be contented that the votes that come out of the ballot boxes are the real votes of the people." Ebadi did not go so far as to question the legitimacy of the regime. But neither has Moussavi.

The Iranian regime meanwhile appears disoriented, at times hesitant, at times idiotic (as with its allegations of an Israeli plot to blow up mosques on election day) and brutal (as with reports of a massacre at Tehran University), at times inexplicable, as when Tehran television began showing footage of pro-Moussavi demonstrations. Ahmadinejad has been out of sight for more than 48 hours. Khamenei isn't speaking (though he's set to speak at Friday prayers in Tehran tomorrow). Either the military is calling the shots, which would not be good news for the protesters, or a dissolution of authority is under way.

But despite massive protests today--with reports of a million people taking part in a collective wake for victims of the crackdown in Tehran--there's been few allegations of outright violence, which again signals a change from the regime, and a calculated risk. Either the pull-back from the skull-cracking is an admission of weakness (and, one would hope, eventual defeat) or it's a way to take advantage of the fact that the majority of protesters still seem wholly within the fold of the Iranian Revolution (brandishing pictures of Moussavi as much as they do pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini), and and disarm them with concessions.

Maneuverings aside, it's been impressive, and moving, and humbling, to watch Iranians sustain a movement all their own, defying not only the Iranian regime's cracked legitimacy but, just as impressively, defying any attempt from, beyond the country's borders, not least the United States, to define the movement for them. Agree with it or not, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was remarkable for its essentially Iranian character and its systematic rejection of other ideologies (political or religious). The ongoing protests have the same character in common. They're an essentially--an exclusively--Iranian phenomenon.

Which explains the return of the 10 p.m. ritual of Iranians chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) at their windows and balconies, as they did in the early months of the revolution 30 years ago, when the chant was the people's way to voice their opposition to the shah.

As Hooman Majd writes in his absorbing The Ayatollah Begs to Differ,

In order to understand Iran and Iranians today, one needs to under stand what it meant to shout “Allah-hu-Akbar!” in 1979. The expression has become known as a sort of Muslim fundamentalist battle cry, uttered in every Hollywood movie featuring terrorists and notorious as the famous last words of the 9/11 hijackers. But the “God is Great!” that Iranians shouted in 1979 predated the concepts we have of fundamentalism—there was no Hezbollah, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad then, nor an Al Qaeda or a Taliban (and the PLO, the Middle East’s most prominent terrorists, was still famously secular, and very few in the West had even heard of the Muslim Brotherhood, let alone knew what it stood for)—and to the Shia people the words signified their fearlessness in confronting an unjust ruler.

They're fearlessly confronting a ruler again, as Iranians.

See Also:

• Next Up Against Iranian Protesters: Tanks
• Iran Shuts Down Nobel Laureate's Human Rights Organization
• Shirin Ebadi Column on Iranian Crisis
• Hooman Majd's Web Site
• Recount Rebuffed, Demonstrations Called Off
• Real Protests, Fake Inquiry, Enduring Fraud
• Fear and Loathing in Tehran
• The Meaning of Ahmadinejad's Victory
• What's a "Supreme Leader"?
• Who Rules Iran and How? A Primer