How could we understand the choice of Tehran for the next UNESCO Philosophy Day on November 21-23? The very idea to organize a philosophy congress in a country where a theocratic and intolerant regime is continuously violating the freedom of thought and expression and banning humanities from universities is a challenge to any philosophical thinking and free philosophical debate. In a country where students of philosophy like Neda Agha Soltan are shot dead and philosophy professor are accused of preparing velvet revolutions, it would be difficult to take seriously an invitation to Tehran for a free philosophical discussion. As a matter of making sure that the UNESCO Philosophy Day in Tehran will be a pure product of the Iranian establishment,the Iranian President  Mahmood Ahmadinejad replaced Gholamreza Aavani – head of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy and director of the Iranian Philosophical Association – as the head of the organizing committee, with Gholam Ali Haddad Adel,  the former chairman of the Iranian parliament and the father in-law of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
The UNESCO Philosophy Day in Tehran will happen in a new context of cultural warfare represented by the rising concept of “soft war” as it is formulated by the Supreme Leader and other officials of the Iranian regime. On August 30, 2009 Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addressed a gathering of professors and university administrators with a stern warning. He blamed the humanities as a field of study that “promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs.” As a result, he called on faithful professors to “identify the enemy” and to revise the Western philosophy that create “lack of faith,” among Iranian students. Following the criticisms by the Supreme Leader, the Iranian Science Minister, Kamran Daneshjou, added few months later that only academics who had “practical commitment” to the principle of “velayat-e faqih, or the rule of the Islamic jurist, could teach at universities. In an interview, Morteza Nabavi, editor of the hardline daily Resaalat and a member of the Expediency Council, attacked the universities and claimed that they are at the heart of the Green Movement. He said that the faculty has become more radical than the students, and that “God has died in the campuses.” He lamented the fact that “our children who have grown up in the Islamic Republic have turned against it.”   However, this new battle between Iran and the Western mind underscores just how badly Iranian regime’s moral and political legitimacy was shaken by the protests inside and outside Iran in the past one year. At moments like this, it should not be forgotten that each time democracy is intimated, silenced and postponed for another day by a show of force in a country like Iran, it is a loss of credibility for those in charge and a crisis of legitimacy for the entire political system. Should political repression in Iran escalate, it also spells the possibility of an escalation of violence in the Middle East. But we should not forget that for the first time in its political history, the Iranian regime finds itself thrown into an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. This is a turning point in Iran’s domestic and foreign policies that the world cannot ignore. As odd as it might sound, the idea that one can examine life by  asking  questions,  timeless  and  universal  questions, is  still as  revolutionary  today  in Iran as  it was  in Socrates’ day. Reading philosophy in Tehran can not only be spiritually comforting, but also politically empowering for the dissidents in Iran. One needs to understand why philosophizing in Iran is vital when it is not for and with the theocratic regime, as the UNECO Philosophy Day is making us believe, but as a manner of resisting all forms of dogmatic and anti-democratic thinking that bans all quest for truth.

Published on September 22nd 2010 by Frankfurter Rundschau