Don't jump to conclusions

The drama in Tehran, in the wake of the June 12 presidential election, the tenth to be held in the country, continues to play out as tens of thousands of Iranians, both opponents and supporters of the incumbent, take to the streets to express their sentiments about the outcome.

Events are not quite out of control (yet) but they are, as Alice in Wonderland would have put it, getting curiouser and curiouser.

The United States' and the European Union's stake in the Iranian crisis is no less significant than that of the Arab world. Do the election results genuinely reflect the will of the Iranian people or do they reflect massive fraud and manipulation? The American administration's response to the crisis has been muted, with President Barack Obama asserting that he does not want to be seen to be "meddling" in Iranian politics, though he did say that "violence directed at peaceful protesters is not how governments should interact with their people". No one has a problem with that observation.

American media commentators and editorialists, however, have adopted a less restrained posture, saying the election was "stolen", as if to resurrect the term used by Democrats to describe George W. Bush's presidential victory over Al Gore in 2000. The Washington Post editorialised that the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was "neither free nor fair". And there was plenty of other like-minded, combative commentary. European leaders made even tougher statements, with calls from Britain, Germany and France for a full investigation of the vote tallies.

These folks are jumping the gun, evincing less respect for these election results than they warrant.

In a polling survey, sponsored by the Center for Public Opinion and the American Strategy Program at the New American Foundation, which consisted of 1,001 interviews across Iran's 30 provinces on May 11-20, three weeks before the election, pollsters found that Ahmadinejad was leading by a margin of more than two to one. This is almost exactly what the election count showed - 66 per cent in favour of the incumbent and 33 per cent in favour of his opponent, Mir Hussain Mousavi.

The field work, conducted in Farsi and by phone, was carried out by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has reportedly received an Emmy award. Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, respectively the president and deputy director of these two highly respected non-profit institutes, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on last Monday, with the telling title, 'The Iranian People Speak', in which they stated bluntly: "Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the re-election of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted".

My problem here is not with the authenticity of the election results (like Ballen and Doherty, I'm satisfied that Iranian voters have "spoken" their minds at polling booths), but with the antiquated political system in Iran, where the president does not control foreign policy, and where candidates for electoral office have to be vetted by the Guardian Council (a 12-member body that includes six clerics) who are not elected by the people, but selected by the country's Supreme Leader. My other problem is with how the government has cracked down on protesters (as of mid-week, eight have been killed), placed restrictions on foreign journalists, who are not allowed to cover "unauthorised gatherings" or move around freely, and imposed a puritanism on free expression by Iranians that limits, or nags at, social progress, originality and innovation in the body politic.

Of course, Arabs too, more so than Americans, more so than Europeans, have a major stake in the future of Iran. As a people, Iranians have been our neighbours, our brothers and sisters, our fellow Muslims (the Sunni-Muslim divide is, or surely should be, a nebulous issue) since time immemorial. And Iran, as a country, has been, more particularly at the peak of the ascendancy of the Islamic commonwealth of nations, a partner, an integral part of Islamic culture and that culture's vital contribution to human civilisation at large.

Modern Iran, some Arab commentators would have us believe, is a "threat" to the Arab world, and they argue we should make common cause with the brutish Israeli entity against it. Nonsense. The mind dizzies at the amount of confusion it must have taken to make a decent commentator write that.

I'm convinced that in the disorder that afflicts Iran today - a disorder made worse by a seeming lack of understanding of the dynamic behind its electoral crisis - new modes of political statement, new poetics of insight, will soon become visible there. Iranians are adept enough at resolving their own internal disputes, at scrutinising their own election results, without outsiders bellowing flat and shoddy accusations at them of fraud at the polls.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.