Time for Iranian Democracy

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the contested re-election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, which spurred the country’s largest popular uprisings since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. While the regime gradually succeeded in violently quelling the momentum of the opposition Green Movement, the country’s deep internal rifts – both among political elites as well as between government and society – are far from being reconciled.

Among the numerous post-election casualties was the notion of Iran as an “Islamic Republic.” As the late Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri put it, the regime’s brutality toward its own people has rendered it “neither Islamic nor a republic.