Expert discusses politics,
religious tensions
in Iran
Sarah Szczepanski
Assistant
Features Editor
The key to understanding what is happening in Afghanistan
can be found in Iran's republic, said Elaine Sciolino, senior writer
in the New York Times' Washington Bureau, who spoke Monday night in
Fowler Hall as part of a lecture series sponsored by the history department.
Sciolino is an expert on Iran, having published
a book about Iran titled "Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran."
"Iran is a society of contradictions," Sciolino
said. "It’s a society still trying to wrestle with where it fits
in the 21st century."
Sciolino said she is amused when she hears scholars
in Washington say that Iranian political leaders are like brilliant
chess players plotting their moves 10 steps ahead.
Sciolino looks at Iran as a place of improvising
politics; the Iranians players in a jazz band changing the rhythm and
tempo as they go along.
Sciolino said there is a guerilla war within Iran
raging for the soul of the nation, and she named battlefields —
the media, taking on the regime in new ways, and the streets, where
people test the limits of the government and the courts, finding ways
around the system. The most dangerous places, however, for the ruling
clerics, Sciolino said, are the mosques, where opposition politics take
place, using words and interpretations of the Koran.
"This tension," Sciolino said, "this use of Islam,
the question of who has the right to speak in the name of Islam, is
at the heart of the struggles that we are seeing in that part of the
world today, post-Sept. 11."
Sciolino said the attacks are coming from so many
sides that the conservatives who are trying to maintain the strict,
repressive version of Islam that has prevailed in Iran for the last
two decades cannot fight all of them simultaneously.
She said it is similar to a time when her children
caught grasshoppers and one of their friends let the grasshoppers loose
in her kitchen. "No matter how hard you tried, you can't get all of
them, there will always be a few. That’s the way I look at some
of the reformers that are fighting on these battlefields. Some of them
you can stick in jail, but you can't put all of them in jail."
Estella Chu, a West Lafayette resident, said she
liked how Sciolino talked about the political limitations, the reasons
that people behaved the way they did and how the younger generation
of Iran was the future of the country.
Steve Brewer, also a West Lafayette resident, said
his favorite part of Sciolino's speech was when she mentioned that a
"higher up" in Washington once asked her how the United States somehow
left the Gulf War without the support of both Iraq and Iran.
He thought Sciolino's visit was timely, saying,
"It's wonderful to have her here when this type of insight is so important
to us."
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