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REVISTA IEEE 11

277 Pedro Luis Rubio Terés The iranian elites as perceived from their society and… succeeded in its restless endeavor to protect in moral terms an increasingly alienated society from the purportedly corrupted neo-positivist values of the West. An important cohort of this society has nonetheless retained its autonomous character regardless of the self-claimed righteousness of its leaders. This stands as a very distinctive characteristic of the Persian-Azeri people, which particularly contrasts the minor political agency of the northern Central Asian autocracies, and that has been the traditional driving force of Iran’s regional lead in all scientific and humanistic fields. It is imperative to question then, how did the most avant-garde nation of the region come under the rule of a theocracy? To discern the accomplishment of the Shiite mission we need to underscore the perfect timing displayed by Khomeini and his followers within one of the very few contexts that would enable such a full-scale revolution: a weak over-corrupted monarchy repressing Islamic collectives. This scenario has had in more recent times its replica in other countries of Muslim majority, as the assumption of power by the Muslim Brotherhood proved in Egypt. The revolutionary authorities under the command of the Ayatollah mastered the understanding of social needs, in a time when their people certainly needed some spiritual guides shedding light on the perverted heart of the nation. The clergy profited from this moment of spiritual darkness with a stunning long-lasting result and, albeit weakened by the constant outbursts of social demands, it will linger for years in the sociopolitical structure of Iran. That being said, the virtue of managing the time is by far not exclusive to religious powers. History has shown that periods of collective despair are likely to be leveraged by movements cherishing social claims, as it happened one century ago in Tsarist Russia rotten by the self-enforced calamities of the First World War. As a final point, we must concead that the theocratic regime has been forced into smooth modernization and liberalism by the unavoidable context of economic sanctions and international isolation. In fact, under Rouhani’s open-to-dialogue government, chances are that the undemocratic supremacist role of religion is likely to enter a more symbolic phase following that of European monarchies. Withal, one should not forget that tolerant as the current authorities may seem, they are nevertheless headed by a non-Sayyed clergyman, that is, a voluntary member of the institutionalized Islam. http://revista.ieee.es BIBLIOGRAPHY AFSAHARI, Reza. «Islamic cultural relativism in Human Rights discourse», in Hu-man Rights in Iran: the abuse of cultural relativism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

REVISTA IEEE 11
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