Slouching Toward Medina 253chemical and biological materials by the Centers for Disease Control
and the Virginia-based company the American Type Culture Collec-
tion, launched an attack on Iranian soil. As happens in times of war, all
dissenting voices were silenced in the interest of national security, and
the dream that had given rise to revolution a year earlier gave way to
the reality of a totalitarian state plagued by the gross ineptitude of a
ruling clerical régime wielding unconditional religious and political
authority.
The intention of the United States government in supporting
Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of
Iran’s revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its
evolution. It was not until the end of the war in 1988 and the death of
Khomeini a year later that the democratic ideals embedded in Iran’s
constitution were gradually unearthed by a new generation of Iranians
too young to remember the tyranny of the Shah but old enough to
realize that the present system was not what their parents had fought
for. It was their discontent that fueled the activities of a handful of
reformist academics, politicians, philosophers, and theologians who
embarked on a new revolution in Iran, not to secularize the country
but to refocus it on genuine Islamic values like pluralism, freedom,
justice, human rights, and above all, democracy. As Abdolkarim
Soroush, the foremost Muslim political philosopher in Iran, has defi-
antly remarked, “We no longer claim that a genuinely religious gov-
ernment can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.”
In the half century since the end of colonialism and the founding
of the Islamic state, Islam has been invoked to legitimize and to over-
turn governments, to promote republicanism and defend authoritari-
anism, to justify monarchies, autocracies, oligarchies, and theocracies,
and to promote terrorism, factionalism, and hostility. The question
remains: Can Islam now be used to establish a genuinely liberal
democracy in the Middle East? Can a modern Islamic state reconcile
reason and Revelation to create a democratic society based on the eth-
ical ideals established by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina nearly
fifteen centuries ago?
Not only can it do so, it must. Indeed, it is already doing so in Iran
and in other parts of the Muslim world. But it is a process that can be