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RIGHTS: Scholar’s Long Detention Dents Iran’s Image

Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Jun 19 2006 (IPS) - Seven weeks on, the initial shock caused by the detention of Iranian political theorist Ramin Jehanbegloo in Tehran is giving way to serious concern, consternation and protest among the intelligentsia – and not just in Iran.

Jehanbegloo, an academic of international standing and wide-ranging interests, was arrested and taken to northern Tehran’s notorious Evin prison at the end of April. Although no formal charges have been framed against him, the police suspect him of espionage. Few in Iran’s academic community or civil society organisations believe this. Nor has the government made out a half-way credible case for detaining the scholar for so long.

A campaign for Jehanbegloo’s early release is gathering momentum across continents, with a strong focus on countries in Iran’s neighbourhood, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and especially India, with which country the scholar has been closely associated..

The political theorist-philosopher was arrested in Tehran barely 10 days after he returned from India, where he held a visiting professorship for four months at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in the national capital.

His wife Azin told IPS over telephone on June 19, after visiting him five times in prison, that “he is in pretty poor shape and has lost a lot of weight. Even more painful for me and our 10 month-old child is the uncertainty over how long he will be away. We just live in desperate hope day after day. The authorities say they haven’t yet completed their ‘investigations’. Until that happens, he can’t even see a lawyer”.

Jehanbegloo’s detention is widely seen in Iran’s academic circles and the broader intelligentsia as an extremely menacing development. Says a social scientist at the University of Tehran, who insisted on anonymity for fear of persecution: “It amounts to harassment of an academic, who has never been, nor been seen, as an activist or a controversial public personality who has embarrassed the government.”

Adds the professor: “I cannot tell you how gloomy the mood is among our faculty and in civil society. The message from Jehanbegloo’s harassment seems to be: the regime will arbitrarily target anybody, whether he or she is an activist or not. This is profoundly demoralising and disempowering.”

Two social activists this writer contacted over telephone are concerned at the damage this episode is doing to their government’s image at a time when Iran is “keen to reconnect to the world and be accepted as a normal and responsible state.”

One of them is particularly alarmed that “the international community has not intervened actively so far in the Jehanbegloo case, and more generally, on human rights in Iran,” but is deepening its engagement with Iran on the nuclear issue: “It would be sad if the world privileges Iran’s right to develop (or not develop) nuclear power for peaceful purposes at the expense of the human rights of Iranian citizens,” he says.

As if to counter the negative image, the Iranian government recently opened the doors of the Evin prison to journalists to show off “spruced-up women’s cells and a well-equipped clinic.” The visit to the 2,500-inmate jail, reported the Reuters news agency on Jun 13, “focused on women’s quarters where inmates were in class learning to read, working as paid seamstresses or looking after their infants in the nursery.”

However, reported the agency: “Some inmates grumbled about jail conditions but others said their main complaint was about what they said was an unfair judicial system.”

The journalists were not allowed to visit the building where Jehanbegloo is held. Iran’s Justice Minister confirmed that Jehanbegloo would not be allowed to see a lawyer until his questioning is complete because his is a “security case.”

However, intellectuals in different countries are now mobilising themselves in Jehanbegloo’s defence. The CSDS faculty has registered serious concern at their colleague’s detention. In early May, a delegation from the Centre met an official of the Iranian embassy in India to appeal to Iran “to review and reconsider” Jehanbegloo’s case.

On May 16, CSDS director Suresh Sharma wrote to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on behalf of the Centre’s faculty to “review with sympathy and an open mind the case of our colleague and restore to [him] the freedom to think, write and live as a philosopher-intellectual in Iran.”

The letter recalled that Jehanbegloo was invited by CSDS, a constituent of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, as part of its project “to formulate and reflect alternative imageries concerning politics, political-social theory and democracy,” in particular, democracy “as a universal human questà and not as something that simply could not belong to the world beyond Europe-America.”

The letter says that Jehanbegloo “immensely enhanced our sensitivity and knowledge of Iranian society and civilisation. Our engagement and concern for Iran goes beyond and deeper than the exigencies of current politics. The presence and participation of Ramin Jehanbegloo in intellectual life in India has brought to bear a civilisational vantage of rare quality. It has helped create the basis of a conversation between civilisations upon some of the most difficult and grave questions of our time.”

It describes Jehanbegloo as “a philosopher-intellectual committed to non-violence, peace and truth; and as a human being of exceptional decency. As a philosopher, (he) may have said things that some may find unacceptable, unreasonable or plainly foolish. However that be, his activities are all in the public domain. There is nothing even remotely secretive or scheming about (him). Philosophers and votaries of non-violence are unfit for espionage”.

The letter concludes with an appeal to Ahmadinejad “not to allow a philosopher to be punished for his writingsà in the land of Sadi and Hafiz,” Iran’s great medieval philosopher-poets.

Jehanbegloo has more than 20 books to his credit, which have explored personalities such as Gandhi, Isaiah Berlin, Rabindranath Tagore and Edward Said.

When IPS interviewed him in Tehran on Apr. 19, barely a fortnight before his arrest, he spoke in a relaxed manner and reflected on a range of global, regional and national issues. He emphasised the influence on his own thinking of Agnes Heller, Adam Michnik and Richard Rorty, besides Gandhi.

He spoke excitedly about the need for an intellectual dialogue across countries and continents and of his efforts to promote it through symposiums and seminars the world over. Nor less important, he said, were the articles he wrote for a host of Iranian papers like “Sharq”, and European publications like “Die Welt”, “El Pais”, “Il Manifesto” and “La Stampa”. He said he was looking forward to a global seminar planned for October in Delhi.