"It is a new era," said Assad, "but it did not start now. It started with the Iranian revolution. What is new is that it is happening inside independent countries in the Arab world."
Right or wrong, most parallels drawn between Iran and the current Arab revolts have dealt with the protests that followed the 2009 Iranian presidential elections. But while the current uprisings would be the first popular revolutions in the modern Arab world, the impact that Iran's Shia'a Islamic Revolution left on the region should not be overlooked, either. With a grassroots and leaderless million-man march currently assembling in Cairo as this writing goes to post, it was not too long ago that nine million Iranians marched through the streets of nearby Tehran, marking the largest protest ever recorded in world history.1
Although the numbers and fire behind today's protests come from the Egyptian youth -- much as it did in Iran three decades earlier -- an older generation (which includes Arab leaders) surely remembers the events leading to the demise of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Hosni Mubarak's televised statements had a striking hint of the Shah's address before his fall, in this respect. And the protests -- while decentralized, leaderless, and employing innovative uses of technology -- also show similarities to those leading to the Islamic Revolution. To be clear, Cairo, 2011 is not Tehran, 1979. Still, protesters' tactics are naturally following Iranian footsteps, only into the information age. The dubbing of audio cassettes smuggled into Iran2 has been replaced with Twitter and re-tweeting, as it were. The role the BBC played in spreading news to Iranian protesters in '79 has been assumed by Al-Jazeera. And where accessible photocopy machines proved crucial to overcoming the Shah's state censors3, internet proxy addresses have played an equally critical part in overcoming internet censorship in Egypt, until the country's entire internet infrastructure was shut down by the Mubarak government.
Assad's sudden and reform-minded comments indicate that the lessons of 1979 have not been lost on all Arab leaders. His statement that "we must keep up with this change" in Egypt, and that Arab leaders "have to upgrade [with] the upgrading of the society" speaks of a general trepidation that is likely gripping every authoritative government in the region. And as Mubarak's grip of power weakens further by the day, other (and older) Middle Eastern heads of state (in Yemen, Jordan, and elsewhere) likely recall the outcome of Iran's revolution more sharply than the 45 year-old Mr. Assad, who was only thirteen at the time. Time will tell if they will take action and, motived purely out of political survival, preemptively enact reform in hopes they don't face their own uprisings.
With Egypt's government teetering on the brink, calls for protests in other countries continue to spread.
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1 Kurzman, Charles, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 122
2 Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle & Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 119
3 Ibid., 127
Although the numbers and fire behind today's protests come from the Egyptian youth -- much as it did in Iran three decades earlier -- an older generation (which includes Arab leaders) surely remembers the events leading to the demise of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Hosni Mubarak's televised statements had a striking hint of the Shah's address before his fall, in this respect. And the protests -- while decentralized, leaderless, and employing innovative uses of technology -- also show similarities to those leading to the Islamic Revolution. To be clear, Cairo, 2011 is not Tehran, 1979. Still, protesters' tactics are naturally following Iranian footsteps, only into the information age. The dubbing of audio cassettes smuggled into Iran2 has been replaced with Twitter and re-tweeting, as it were. The role the BBC played in spreading news to Iranian protesters in '79 has been assumed by Al-Jazeera. And where accessible photocopy machines proved crucial to overcoming the Shah's state censors3, internet proxy addresses have played an equally critical part in overcoming internet censorship in Egypt, until the country's entire internet infrastructure was shut down by the Mubarak government.
Assad's sudden and reform-minded comments indicate that the lessons of 1979 have not been lost on all Arab leaders. His statement that "we must keep up with this change" in Egypt, and that Arab leaders "have to upgrade [with] the upgrading of the society" speaks of a general trepidation that is likely gripping every authoritative government in the region. And as Mubarak's grip of power weakens further by the day, other (and older) Middle Eastern heads of state (in Yemen, Jordan, and elsewhere) likely recall the outcome of Iran's revolution more sharply than the 45 year-old Mr. Assad, who was only thirteen at the time. Time will tell if they will take action and, motived purely out of political survival, preemptively enact reform in hopes they don't face their own uprisings.
With Egypt's government teetering on the brink, calls for protests in other countries continue to spread.
____________________
1 Kurzman, Charles, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 122
2 Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle & Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 119
3 Ibid., 127
