( – promoted by odum)

On Christmas Eve, I suppose “normal” people are wrapping presents or drinking eggnog with friends and family or something, but no, not me.

Since I just finished putting together some language for a legislator on death with dignity (now THERE’s a Christmas-y topic for ya), I’m now doing a diary on Iran for GMD.

So how did I get to Iran for Christmas (not that I celebrate much any more)? Two words: Reza Aslan.

I’d never heard of him, although he’s all over the media in the last two years: Daily Show, Colbert Report, Slate, the Nation, NPR, Craigblog, and more than 16 pages of Google listings. Where I found him was in an intense and sometimes self-indulgent magazine my partner gets, called The Sun.

My point, and I do have one, is that Aslan is the one person I’ve read who makes any sense IMNSH0 on what’s going on in Iraq and Iran and the U.S. More after the jump.

It likely helps that Aslan is an Iranian-born American, and that he’s got degrees in religion (Santa Clara University) and theological studies (Harvard) and attended the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is in perhaps a unique position because he gets both Christianity and Islam.

From that perspective, he says that what’s going on right now is not Islam against the West (“… a clash between Islam and the West would be a clash between a religion and and a geographical location, and that’s ridiculous”). It’s Islam against itself in a struggle he compares with the Protestant Reformation. It’s a struggle over who will control Islam: the institutions (the Ayatollahs and Imams) or the individual.

“[J]ihadist propagandists” are winning the “war on terror” “because they have the better marketing campaign.”

Their campaign works because bigoted idiots (my words, not his) in the U.S. have no understanding of Islam and insist on using language that implies or baldly states that Islam is a backward, violent religion inferior to Christianity.

For example, Reza Aslan says in The Sun interview,

the president [of the U.S,] lumped Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaeda together. These four entities have almost nothing in common. Hezbollah has issued death warrants against bin Laden. Hamas has issued fatwas condemning  him and the attacks of September 11. Both these groups want absolutely nothing to do with the global jihadist movement. The only thing they have in common, besides their use of terror as a tactic, is their Islamic identity, which the president has used to lump them together so that the American people can perceive them as a common enemy.

And, Aslan says in the part of the article you can’t get online,

The president of Iran [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] makes not a single foreign policy decision: not one. Televangelist Pat Robertson has more control over the U.S. Government than the president of Iran has over the Iranian government.

The clerics are in control, so the rhetoric that is apparently driving us toward war is primarily for domestic (Iranian) consumption, because the blacksmith’s son (Ahmadinejad) can’t keep the campaign promises he made to do away with corruption.

In The Nation article, which starts out as a paean to Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian woman lawyer who has fought for the rights of women under an oppressive regime, the spark that lit up a light bulb in my head was about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, about how it was a revolution for democracy, and the U.S. Hostages were taken because the U.S. had interfered and betrayed prior democratic experiments and revolutions. And then that revolution was hijacked by the clerics when Saddam invaded.

And, btw, Aslan is the author of the very well-reviewed No god But God, a history of Islam’s evolution with critiques and suggestions as to where it should go now.

I have waited so long for someone to look at this Iran/Iraq situation and say something that made sense and was not America-centered. Aslan has done it. I recommend checking him out.

NanuqFC