cleansing Iran
[Elsewhere, Iran’s leading defender on the Western left, Yoshie F,
has claimed that Ahmadinejad does not plan to do what he says he’d
like to do, unless AFP is just making this up.]
Ahmadinejad vows to rid schools of liberal influence Hiedeh Farmani AFP September 5, 2006
TEHRAN — Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday
vowed to cleanse schools and universities of liberal influences,
continuing a drive to restore revolutionary values to the Islamic
republic.
“Our educational system has been influenced by secular thoughts for
150 years in a way that self-belief and identity have been ignored,”
the student news agency ISNA quoted him as telling a gathering of
elite students. “There has been an effort to promote a secular system
and thoughts in society. To change it is difficult. We have to do it
together, but things have started.”
The fiercely ideological Ahmadinejad, currently at loggerheads with
the West over Iran’s nuclear program, has repeatedly vowed to restore
to Iran the ideological purity of the days after the Islamic
revolution in 1979.
“A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the liberal
economy. A student must ask why a secular teacher gives low marks to
a student that does not have the same ideas as him,” he said.
“I tell young people that changing the secular teaching regime that
has dominated for 150 years is a difficult thing,” he said, in
apparent reference to the establishment of Iran’s first Western-style
institution of higher education in 1851.
“We need to do it together. Measures have been taken before, but it
is not sufficient,” he added.
In June some 40 professors at Tehran University were forced into
early retirement. The government said that the time had come for the
long-serving academics to leave their posts.
The retirements led to several days of protests by students who took
the loss of so many professors as a politically motivated purge of
universities.
Ahmadinejad has already acted on his election promise to restore
revolutionary values to Iran, in December ordering Iran’s radio and
television network not to play Western music and instead use
revolutionary-era tunes.
Iran has also launched a fresh crackdown against “decadent” satellite
television, raiding rooftops in Tehran and other major cities to
seize hundreds of dishes.
However pre-election fears that the president, in power for more than
a year, would launch a radical clampdown on social liberties have not
been realized.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, universities have been the scene
of political upheaval.
Under the general banner of the “Cultural Revolution,” the leaders of
the revolution sought to impose hardline Islamist values on the
universities and rid them of what they deemed secular and Western
influences.
The universities were closed for nearly two years while the
administration and curricula were changed, and many professors were
dismissed, some accused of being loyal to the toppled Shah.
When the universities reopened, Islamic officials were employed to
police the behavior and appearance of both lecturers and students.
Ahmadinejad also warned students Tuesday about the perils of
attending seminars abroad, which he said could be “tricks” to steal
the best of the Islamic republic’s 2.3 million students.
“About foreign seminars, I believe they have to be attended but some
of these conferences are tricks to exploit young people and steal
them. In these conferences they are seeking to spot elite brains and
attract them.”
According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures, at least
150,000 educated people leave Iran every year to start new lives.
But the president declared that Iran’s youth was in a good state of
health.
“Some people complain that a headscarf has slipped back or trousers
have been shortened, but I say young people today are creative and
determined,” he said.