Iran: Land of contradiction

Speaker says much is kept behind closed doors

Friday, January 20, 2006

GALESBURG - Contemporary Iran is more than a land of contrasts, it's filled with contradictions in its politics, religion and culture, according to a speaker Thursday in Galesburg.

"Iran is full of contradictions," said Roya Behnia, who was born in Iran and grew up and went to school in the United States. But Iranians "are comfortable with the contradictions," she said after the lecture at Knox College, sponsored by the college's Center for Global Studies. "They have a talking culture, where you resolve differences through discussion."

An attorney in Chicago and lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Behnia visited family members in Iran last September. She and Knox President Roger Taylor were colleagues in the 1990s at the Chicago law firm Kirkland and Ellis.

Iran is 95 percent Muslim, but "few people are engaged with their religion," Behnia said, because they're discouraged by corruption among the religious leadership. "Nobody goes to the mosques any more."

Known as "mullahs," Iran's Islamic clergy are so powerful that they manipulated last year's election that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into power, Behnia said. At the same time, "there's a lack of reverence for the religious clerics," she said. During her visit, "I saw only about five mullahs," Behnia said. "My relatives said (the mullahs) are scared to come outside in their religious dress. ... People blame them for the decline of their culture."

Ahmadinejad is characterized by western media as a populist, but Behnia said she "didn't meet a single person who supported the regime." Turnout in the election was only 15 percent, she said.

"At the same time, (Iranians) don't want anybody else telling them what to do," Behnia said, referring to Ahmadinejad's nuclear technology program, widely criticized by the United States and European countries. Iranians see themselves as surrounded by nuclear powers, she said, including Pakistan, India, China, Russia and Israel, and by U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. "From their perspective, there's a tradition of foreign powers intervening in their affairs ... a psychology of being invaded."

Sexual segregation is common in Middle Eastern cultures, but in Iran enforcement is often superficial, Behnia said. There are separate gates for men and women university students to enter campus. But the restrictions aren't enforced on campus, she said, and "there are far more women than men at the university."

Even Iranian architecture is "very much a parallel to how people live their lives," she said, as she showed the audience pictures of a residence with a stern, featureless exterior, contrasted with an ornate interior courtyard. "You have a (conservative) public face, but inside the privacy of their homes, they do anything they want. Anything that we do here that would be considered un-Islamic (in Iran), they do there, but behind closed doors."

This story was written by Peter Bailley of the Knox College media relations department.