Photo by Dan Addison

Abdulaziz Sachedina lectures in the Rotunda Dome Room

September 8, 2005

By Ashley Edmonds

The people of Iran flexed their political muscle in the recent presidential elections, rejecting the candidate favored by the religious clerics and choosing instead Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man with a common touch.

“Ahmadinejad drives the cheapest car sold in Iran and holds cabinet meetings on the floor,” said Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ball Professor of Islamic Studies at U.Va. and a visiting fellow at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. The country remains “a long way from liberal democracy but steps being taken in Iran are in the right direction,” he said.

Sachedina discussed the meaning of the recent Iranian elections in the context of religion and democracy in Iran on Thursday, Sept. 1, at a lecture attended by more than 75 people in the Dome Room of the Rotunda.

Marginalized in the past by a privileged class of religious clerics, common Iranians for the first time voted into office a candidate other than the one supported by the country’s religious leadership. Religious clerics had supported former Iranian president Akbar Rafsanjani in his bid for a third term as president of the country.

Following criticism by U.S. President George W. Bush that the elections in Iran were nondemocratic, Iranians in Tehran turned out in droves to vote, Sachedina said.

“What happens in Tehran [determines] the nation’s direction,” he said. “Tehran is the political pulse in Iran.”

Sachedina said he found the increase in discussions of human rights and free speech “refreshing.”

He also noted the implications of the elections on the relationship between Islam and democracy throughout the Muslim world. Advances made by Iranian women in education, health care and philanthropy, among other sectors, illustrate the changes now under way in that country, he said. More educated Iranian women than ever before are running civil associations and charities for environmental causes and health care. More women than men are now enrolled in universities and medical schools in Iran, signaling a coming shift in the demographics of the workplace.

“In the past 25 years, we [have seen] democracy take roots, but in a different way than we in the West may think of it,” Sachedina said.

Where religion is concerned, change is afoot as well. Students and the common people “are searching for a different kind of religiosity,” Sachedina said. Iranians are deeply spiritual, he noted, and many are reading Western works of mysticism. A growing number of conversions to Christianity by young Iranians are troubling the country’s Islamic leaders.

The Iranian Constitution refers frequently to Islam, but what is “new in younger people’s religiosity is that they believe that … one should not just blindly accept religious law,” he said.

Sachedina reserved judgment about the new Iranian president — he worried that Ahmadinejad might not be immune to the plague of corruption that afflicted previous Iranian leaders. “Only time will tell,” Sachedina said, “…Sachedina but polls have shown clearly that democracy and rule of law are the dream of Iranians.”