There is a clear battle between pro- and anti-regime groups in Iran to claim the Arab uprisings as copies of what the pro- and anti-regime groups in Tehran see as the key political event, 1979 in one case and 2009 in the other.
A Foreign Ministry statement said Egypt’s uprising is “grounded in religious teachings.” It said Cairo was experiencing a “wave of Islamic awakening.”
The daily Kayhan said, “Khomeini’s Islam is the engine of these events” across the Arab world. It said the world is now witnessing “the powerful presence of Islam under Iran’s leadership.”
At Friday prayers last week, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, no relation to the former president, told the congregation: “An Islamic Middle East is being created based on Islam, religion and democracy with prevailing religious principles.”
The Green opposition had a different view. Mir-Hossain Musavi, one of the main leaders of the opposition, said Saturday, “The starting point of what is happening in the streets of Tunis, Sanaa, Cairo, Alexandria and Suez is the mass demonstrations of millions of Iranians in June of 2009 in Tehran. It is enough to compare the recent election procedures in Egypt with our own elections and the fact that the head of our own Council of Guardians says that millions of Green citizens are irrelevant.”
Analysts outside Iran, however, generally see the Arab uprisings as Arab reactions to developments in their own countries, not as copies of events in Iran or anywhere else. “There is a desire by many in Iran, regardless of ideology, to see Iran as an inspiration for others in the Muslim world, even though that stretches reality,” said one Western observer of the Middle East.
There were some hints, however, that the regime in Tehran feared Iranians would not see the Arab upheavals as inspired by Iran but rather as something for Iran to be inspired by. Reuters reported Monday that the government had blocked websites that remained untouched until now, including Reuters.com and Yahoo News. There was nothing happening in Iran that would logically prompt the regime to censor them. But the government might not want Iranians to see how little Islamic flavoring there has been in the Arab protests.
Iranian state propaganda is telling the Iranian people that all the demonstrations in the Arab countries are demanding an Islamic republic and clerical rule like that in Iran.
But the uprising in Tunisia was remarkably secular. The key objection sounded by the crowds in the streets was against the gross corruption of the family of President Zain Al-Abideen Ben Ali. Reporters said they heard calls for democracy and an end to corruption, but no mention of Sharia law or clerical rule.
The head of the main Islamist party in Tunisia, Rachid Ghanouchi, returned from exile this week. The Iranian media gave that much coverage. But the media did not report the main thing Ghanouchi said on his return, when he emphasized his moderation by saying, “I am no Khomeini.” Ghanouchi spent his exile in Britain, not in an Islamic republic.
In Cairo, there was also little heard in the streets about an Islamic republic. In fact, one of chants most frequently heard was a put-down of Islamists. Where Islamists chant, “Islam is the answer,” a common Cairene chant was “Tunisia is the answer.”
According to Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, who monitors Iranian state television, the TV news in Iran ignored the protests that broke out in Tunisia in December until Ben Ali fled in January. Then state television started talking about an Islamic revolution in Tunisia.
The original silence may have stemmed from the fact that Iran had good relations with Ben Ali. As for Egypt, there has been no need for restraint. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has refused to have diplomatic relations with Iran.
On Tuesday, three-quarters of the deputies in the Majlis signed a statement giving unequivocal backing to the revolution in Egypt and calling for the ouster of Mubarak, although when any groups backed the street protesters in Tehran, the regime denounced such efforts as an illegal interference in another country’s domestic affairs.
(The state media do not only see revolution only in the streets of Tunis and Cairo, but also in London. State television proclaimed Sunday that student protesters objecting to government budget cutbacks and university tuition hikes are now “calling for revolution.”)
There were certainly parallels between Tehran in 2009 and Cairo in 2011. Both governments waffled about how to cope with the protests, shifting from the use of force to a withdrawal of coercive methods. Both shut down the Al-Jazeera Arab television outfit for giving too much coverage to the opposition. Both cut off some or all access to the Internet and social networks.
Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, one of the most conservative figures in the Iranian government, looked at what is happening the Arab world and said, “Today, as a result of the gifts of the Islamic revolution in Iran, freedom-loving Muslims, such as the people of Tunisia, Egypt and nearby Arab countries are standing up to their oppressive governments.” He said the people in the streets were acting “based on the principles” of Iran’s 1979 revolution.
