election and polarized society

I spent 8 years of my life in the near East what is usually called the Middle-East by the media. I had the good fortune to visit Iran a few years back while working in Damascus, Syria. I say the good fortune because, Iran always fascinated me, it is an old and rich culture and it has beautiful hand woven wool carpets, which I love. The only thing I knew about the country was some of its most recent history in the last 100 years and bits of its influence on the Arabs next door throughout the centuries and how Iran is connected to India and other Central Asian countries and their history. A complex and rich history, one that is not always well understood or known by people living in the western world.
I remember flying on Syrian airways, the airline allows you to bring on board your suitcases, why check luggage when you can carry it with you. Forget the fact that it will block the central allay of the plane and inconvenience other passengers. Anyway we flew from Damascus to Tehran arriving at the same old airport terminal that was once use by the Shah when in 1979 he went on a vacation never to return. I remember the scene at the airport of passengers trying to get their luggage out of the luggage carousel and how luggage was flying all over the place, great confusion and commotion, I also remember the rather good looking lady customs agent who very discreetly and quietly with a smile asked me if I had any alcohol in my luggage. The one thing which impressed me most was the mountains behind the city. Tehran is actually built on the foothills of the snow capped Al-Borz mountains, very impressive and beautiful. It was Spring when I visited but still cold at night. I expected people to be hostile to me a western foreigner or to view me with suspicion. Tehran does not have many tourists and foreigners are rare, so I stood out on the street.

Iranians are indo-europeans and not Arabs, it struck me that their way of thinking was very similar to ours and very different from the Arabs next door. Much of the Arab world was conquered by the Persians in the 12 century and as a result the numbering system found in the Arab world is Persian, so is part of the architecture and litterary tradition of poetry. I also realized that if I had a choice between living in Tehran or Damascus, Tehran was by far more pleasant, cleaner and better organized than Damascus, Iranian thinking I could understand more easily. Though a Shia Muslim country run by Clerics I never heard a call to prayer from a Mosque, as is all too often the custom in all Arab countries 5 times a day. I enquired about this at the Office and our Iranian staff answered me this way; Do you think we are like those Arabs, if you want to pray, look on the front page of any newspaper to see the set times.

My hotel was equipped with satellite television and I could watch FOX channel, no wonder the Iranians have a skewed image, FOX News is what they see of the USA. The people on the street and in restaurants and shops were gracious and very polite. Happy to see someone from the outside visiting Tehran. Everyone was very nice to me, including the guards on the street. I remember coming out of one of the Palaces of the Shah in North Tehran and a severe looking guard very nicely asked me if I needed help or if I wanted him to call me a taxi to go where ever I needed to go. The apprehension was on my part, no one was hostile.

We visited with a female colleague an Iranian carpet shop and I bought 10 carpets in one visit, they were so beautiful and so affordable, I simply could not believe how inexpensive they were. The shop owner and his 2 brothers were very nice to us and more than willing to show us whatever I wanted to see and explain the motifs and where the carpets came from and this was before I even bought one. The funny part came when we existed the store, it was snowing, heavy wet snow. The car was across the street, not allowed to make a U-turn. So my lady friend from the office asked the police officer if he would allow a U-turn to help us load up the carpets into the car, she pointed out that I could not drive being a foreigner. The Police officer looked at me and said to her laughing, typical foreign men can't do a thing, go ahead lady just bring the car here.

What I also saw and this without anyone explaining anything to me was how divided the civil society is in Iran. We just saw this in the current elections where to everyone's surprise the current President Mahmud Ahmedinajad was re-elected. Iran is 2 worlds, on the one hand you have the educated class and the middle-class affluent who travel and move the economy of the country and who are supporters of reforms within Iran and better relations with other countries. Then you have the urban poor and the rural areas who are very backward and uneducated who support the clerics and the mullahs, who dominate them and fill their heads with religious nonsense, they voted for Ahmedinajad. The poor see themselves as victims of the rich and educated, the clerics present themselves as their protectors. It is this struggle for power that we see constantly on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in the country. Wealthy Iranians have voted with their feet, many leaving for Dubai or for Australia and Canada and still leaving, left behind are the poor. Iran like any modern society has numerous problems, drug addiction is rampant, prostitution also, family violence and child abuse, the level of mental illness due to psychological stress and other factors is also prevalent.

How will Iran resolve all these conflicts within its society? That is the entire question of the puzzle. If the current government is foolish enough to defy the world and go ahead with building atomic weapons the reaction from other countries may be terrible. The Arab fear Iran and its influence, they do not want to be dominated by Iran as in centuries past. Israel is also worried and so is the rest of the western world. It really feels like a TV soap and we can only watch for the next episode.