Amir Taheri has the gen on what’s happening in Iranian politics at the moment. It’s apparantly all about the classification of parliamentarians into “good” Muslims and “bad” Muslims by the Council of Guardians.
He also explains the differences between “reformists” who don’t reform and “conservatives” who want to initiate world revolution.
The supposedly “reformist” bloc has controlled the presidency for the past six years and the parliament for the past four years. And yet, it has implemented absolutely no reforms of any significance. Nor has it even proposed such reform.
For its part the “conservative” faction bases its ideology not on the need to conserve anything, but on the necessity of exporting the Khomeinist revolution first to other Muslim countries, and then to the entire world.
The so-called “conservatives” have a coherent discourse that one may like or dislike. Put simply it runs like this: Islam is the only true faith, all other religions have either been abrogated by God or were man-made concoctions from the start. Today, the only country in the world that has a truly Islamic system is Iran. It is, therefore, Iran’s duty to help replace all other regimes in the Muslim world with truly Islamic ones. Once that has happened, a powerful Islamic bloc should be formed, led by the Iranian “Supreme Guide,” to convert the whole of mankind to the Khomeinist version of Islam, if necessary, by war.
I’ll leave you to draw your own parallels.
