Where did the backwardness go?

When the the image they sold you of an Iran oppressed by backwards Mullahs does not fit with the Islamic Republic's records in science, you can smell something utterly wrong with everything you have ever been told about it.

When early this week Mrs. Clinton claimed Iran was moving towards a military dictatorship, I am sure she never expected her warmonger caricature to be undermined in a matter of days by her very own scientific community. To her frustration, Iran is not only declining to join the US tendency in the region of plaguing it with military dictatorships and occupations, but teaching the world lessons in science in the middle of a planet-wide economic crisis and the toughest of global blockades.

Rarely are the victories of the Islamic Revolution so clearly expressed in the Western world as a February 2010 NewScientist article which gives deep burial to a long campaign against Islamic Fundamentalism.

It might be the Chinese year of the tiger, but scientifically, 2010 is looking like Iran's year. Scientific output has grown 11 times faster in Iran than the world average, faster than any other country.

It comes as no surprise: Under the Ahmadinejad administration, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been topping the rankings of scientific output growth for the past several years. In its September edition of 2005, the magazine Science wrote,

Science in Iran is enjoying a renaissance.Whether the momentum will be maintained depends on the emerging policies of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(Although no Western media would ever dare to admit so, one could guess Ahmadinejad's policies did their job)

Who's to blame?

The result cannot be attributed to a president who is an engineering Ph.D. well into the academic world - actually the very first one to deny it in his humbleness -, and not even to the swift drive that the Supreme Leader Ayatallah Ali Khamenei has given to the development of the Islamic Republic - wisely understanding science as a means for ideological and technical independence in the 21st century -, but rather is the fruit of three decades of an aspiration. An aspiration to establish Islamic governance on earth, with everything it implies.

Dynamic messianism

Though widely demonized by Anglo-Pharisee propaganda, the uniqueness of the messianic view of Shia Islam plays a major role in this: The concept of waiting for Imam Mahdi to come and establish a perfect Islamic government on earth - defined by Justice ruling - is not a passive crossing of arms, but an urgent responsibility that must be enacted by believers towards improving the condition of the world.

One could thus say that the idea of luxurious resorts and skyscrapers in Dubai bringing us closer to a paradise on earth, regardless of how many millions of brethren in kind die at the doorstep as an associated cost of the pompous infrastructure, is as alien to Shia Muslims as the minority of minorities in Iran who question the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad's government: Not even the 30% who didn't give him their vote in the last elections, but a yet smaller percentage of them who carried on gladly backing an obvious coup attempt against their own nation. Such Burj Al-Dubai fantasies are precisely what their dissent craves for, and what their commanders promise them.

Science - or rather our modern simplification of it - is one of the great side-beneficiaries of such a world view, since empty pride in such applied academicism is not seen as an end on itself, as is the case of our secular West. Such crippled concept lacking any regards for the Divine - an inevitable dimension of human existence in the sight of any traditional wisdom - is never valued more in the core of the Islamic Revolution's Weltanschauung than the practical tool it is, with its own limited purposes. It is interesting to notice that the same is the case for money, but that is the topic for another post.

Didn't you say backwardness?

When rather turning to deep knowledge of the human being and of the created, one is most likely to find modern science serving but a decorative purpose in the schools of Qom, headquarters of the Islamic Revolution.

A superficial understanding of the status of modern science in the holy city leads to an unfaithful caricature, and is a tempting source for Westerner conscious blindness. Added comes a series of extremist movements crafted and artificially empowered courtesy of the Washington-Tel-Aviv axis which cultural propaganda machinery rushes to term "Islamism", as part of their campaign to reduce all resistance in the Middle East to subservient and so-called "moderate" tyrannies against the will of the respective nations (the Burj Al-Dubai protectorates).

Imam Ayatallah Ruhollah Khomeini once said,

We want the basis of the government to be Islamic... Islam does not need to take rules from anywhere or anyone...

And just when you thought he is spoiling it by feeding the caricature of intolerance portrayed on his movement even by the reformists of Iran, he - unlike the authors and parrots of the caricature - did continue,

... for Islam is entirely progressive.

Clouding this complement placed in the heart of the Fundamentalist movement, analogous to the demonization of the Shia messianic understanding, works charms in mocking and pointing fingers at its backwardness.

Mocking and pointing fingers is easy. But when under the toughest global blockade, and while NASA sees its missions castrated by budget cuts, the Mullah-run Islamic Republic of Iran has no problem to plan placing the first Fundamentalist in space in the coming decade, one has to wonder: Who is the joke on at this point?

True, Iran is today in no way comparable to the Western scientific and technological might. At the same time, Iran is today in no way comparable to the Western oppression of own citizens and those abroad, and its domestic and foreign debt is nowhere comparable to that of the US alone, the very pillar of our world system. Considering this latter illusion, and nothing but such smoke and mirrors, is all depriving Iran from being seen as one of the main powers of the world, it can be concluded the Islamic Revolution delivered human kind a viable alternative civilization the very day it triumphed.

Be very scared Mrs. Clinton, when the peoples your military dictatorship is oppressing in the Middle East and around the world start to take even further notes on the Iranian example, and you throw your nation down the drain for stubbornly refusing to understand what the Islamic Revolution was really about.

خِرمن
兄
弟
Germán