Summary: This post looks at four views of modern Iran. Spengler paints a picture of despair and hopelessness. The second indicates a profound rot in Iranian society. The next two give evidence for optimism.
Contents
- “Sex, drugs and Islam“, Spengler, Asia Times, 24 February 2009
- World Drug Report 2008“, UN office of Drugs and Crime
- “Education and the World’s Most Rapid Fertility Decline in Iran“, Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, Wolfgang Lutz, Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi, and Samir K.C., International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, 18 May 2008 (20 pages)
- “Religiosity and Islamic Rule in Iran“, Gunes Murat Tezcur, Taghi Azadarmaki, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2008
- Afterword
- For more information
Also of note (no excerpt provided): “Iran and the Future of Afghanistan“, Greg Bruno and Lionel Beehner, Council on Foreign Relations, 6 February 2009.
(1) Spengler sees only reasons for pessimism about Iran
“Sex, drugs and Islam“, Spengler, Asia Times, 24 February 2009 — Excerpt:
… Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and abroad. How, then, should we explain an eruption of social pathologies in Iran such as drug addiction and prostitution, on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay.
Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran’s birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran’s population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.
But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the “decadent” West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed.
“Iran is dying for a fight,” I wrote in 2007 (see Why Iran is dying for a fight, 13 November 2007.) in the literal sense that its decline is so visible that some of its leaders think that they have nothing to lose. Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American “great Satan” have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran’s leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran’s neighbors.
Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.
First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. … There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. “A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women,” I wrote in a 2006 study of Iranian prostitution, Jihads and whores.
… A country is beaten when it sells its women, but it is damned when its women sell themselves. The popular image of the Iranian sex trade portrays tearful teenagers abused and cast out by impoverished parents. Such victims doubtless abound, but the majority of Tehran’s prostitutes are educated women seeking affluence.
Only in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism in 1990 did educated women choose prostitution on a comparable scale, but under very different circumstances. Russians went hungry during the early 1990s as the Soviet economy dissolved and the currency collapsed. Today’s Iranians suffer from shortages, but the data suggest that Tehran’s prostitutes are not so much pushed into the trade by poverty as pulled into it by wealth.
… Second … the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that Iran has as many as 1.7 million opiate addicts.” That is, 5% of Iran’s adult, non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opiates. That is an astonishing number, unseen since the peak of Chinese addiction during the 19th century. The closest American equivalent (from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health) found that 119,000 Americans reported using heroin within the prior month, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the non-elderly adult population.
Nineteenth-century China had comparable rates of opium addiction, after the British won two wars for the right to push the drug down China’s throat. Post-communist Russia had comparable rates of prostitution, when people actually went hungry. Iran’s startling rates of opium addiction and prostitution reflect popular demoralization, the implosion of an ancient culture in its encounter with the modern world. These pathologies arose not from poverty but wealth, or rather a sudden concentration of wealth in the hands of the political class. No other country in modern history has evinced this kind of demoralization.
For the majority of young Iranians, there is no way up, only a way out; 36% of Iran’s youth aged 15 to 29 years want to emigrate, according to yet another unpublicized Iranian study, this time by the country’s Education Ministry, Der Standard adds. Only 32% find the existing social norms acceptable, while 63% complain about unemployment, the social order or lack of money. As I reported in the cited essay, the potlatch for the political class is balanced by widespread shortages for ordinary Iranians. This winter, widespread natural gas shortages left tens of thousands of households without heat.
The declining morale of the Iranian population helps make sense of its galloping demographic decline. Academic demographers have tried to explain collapsing fertility as a function of rising female literacy. The problem is that the Iranian regime lies about literacy data, and has admitted as much recently. … The Iranian government’s official data claim literacy percentage levels in the high 90s for urban women and in the high 80s for rural women. That cannot be true, for Iran’s Literacy Movement Organization admitted last year (according to an Agence-France Presse report of May 8, 2008) that 9,450,000 Iranians are illiterate of a population of 71 million (or an adult population of about 52 million). This suggests far higher rates of illiteracy than in the official data.
A better explanation of Iran’s population implosion is that the country has undergone an existential crisis comparable to encounters of Amazon or Inuit tribes with modernity. Traditional society demands submission to the collective. Once the external constraints are removed, its members can shift from the most extreme forms of modesty to the other extreme of sexual license. Khomeini’s revolution attempted to retard the disintegration of Persian society, but it appears to have accelerated the process.
Modernity implies choice, and the efforts of the Iranian mullahs to prolong the strictures of traditional society appear to have backfired. The cause of Iran’s collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity.
Theocracy subjects religion to a political test; it is hard for Iranians to repudiate the regime and remain pious, for religious piety and support for political Islam are inseparable, as a recent academic study documented from survey data.
As in the decline of communism, what follows on the breakdown of a state ideology is likely to be nihilism. Iran is a dying country, and it is very difficult to have a rational dialogue with a nation all of whose available choices terminate in oblivion.
(2) The UN has some bleak data about drug usage in Iran
“World Drug Report 2008“, UN office of Drugs and Crime — Excerpt from Section 1.2.4 about consumption of opiates:
Above average rates are reported by Afghanistan (1.4%) and Iran (2.8% of the population age 15-64). A Rapid Assessment Study (RAS) conducted by Iran and UNODC in 1999 reported that there were1.2 million regular opiate users. This figure was confirmed, when the Iranian authorities conducted a RAS among arrested addicts in 2007. The range of the latter study was: 0.8-1.7 million people.
The 2006 National Assessment Report on Problem Drug Use in Pakistan reported that there were approximately 630,000 opiate users in Pakistan, equivalent to 0.7% of the population age 15-64. Of these, around 480,000 (77%) were heroin users.2 Thus, while Pakistan’s rate of opiate use (0.7%) is below the sub-regional average, it is almost twice the global average. The prevalence rate in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan, located along the main trafficking route from southern Afghanistan via Pakistan to Iran, amounts to 1.1% and is above the sub-regional average.
(3) Education, ferility, and education of women in Iran — reasons for optimism about Iran
“Education and the World’s Most Rapid Fertility Decline in Iran“, Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, Wolfgang Lutz, Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi, and Samir K.C., International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, 18 May 2008 (20 pages). Citations were removed from these excepts; color emphasis added.
Abstract
A first analysis of the Iran 2006 census results shows a sensationally low fertility level of 1.9 for the whole country and only 1.5 for the Tehran area (which has about 8 million people). The lowest total fertility rate of 1.3 was recorded for Gilan and Mazandaran provinces.
In a recent study, Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald (2006) emphasized the likely role of greatly improved female education in this trend. However, this hypothesis has not been thoroughly tested and they have not yet provided any formal analysis on this important factor. In the conclusions they express the expectation that fertility in Iran would continue to fall well below replacement level. This paper follows up on the {that} paper in two important ways:
- It presents fertility estimates based on the 2006 census which indicate a substantial further fertility decline; and
- it presents reconstructions (back to 1970) and projections (to 2030) of the population of Iran by age, sex and level of educational attainment. It decomposes quantitatively to what extent this precipitous fertility decline can be attributed to the rapidly increasing educational attainment of women, and draws more general conclusions for theories of fertility decline.
Excerpt from Section 3 — Iran’s Fertility Decline
Studies reveal that the changes in fertility in Iran during the late 1960s and early 1970s have been small. … However, Iran has experienced a phenomenal fall in fertility since the mid-1980s. The TFR declined from 7.0 in 1980 to around 5.6 in 1988. The decline of fertility was slow until the new family planning program was officially inaugurated in 1989. The TFR fell sharply as of that time, dropping from around 5.6 in 1988 to around 2.8 in 1996, and to 2.2 in 2000 (Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald 2006). Recent estimates of fertility indicate that the TFR declined to around 1.9 in 2006.
The sharp fall of fertility in Iran since the mid-1980s deserves attention. That the decline occurred in an Islamic country is remarkable, particularly considering the sociopolitical context in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution.
Excerpt from Section 6 — Discussion
A decline in the TFR of more than 5.0 in roughly two decades is a world record in fertility decline. This is even more surprising to many observers when one considers that it happened in one of the most Islamic societies. It forces the analyst to reconsider many of the usual stereotypes about religious fertility differentials.
While in many industrialized countries the fertility of Muslim minority populations is significantly higher than that of the women belonging to the (mostly Christian) majority populations, this may not be due to religion per se, but rather to specific social and economic characteristics of the populations compared. In Austria, for example, the Muslim fertility level is higher by a factor of two. But the Muslim women living in Austria are mostly recent immigrants or descendents of immigrants from rural Anatolia. Their educational attainment is far below that of the average Austrian woman. It would be interesting to see how the religious differentials would turn out, if controlled for at the level of education.
But the Islamic Republic of Iran not only experienced the world’s most rapid fertility transition, it was associated with a stunning increase in education and in particular female education. Young women in Iran today are almost as well educated as young men with an average of 8.4 years of schooling. This challenges another powerful stereotype, namely that Muslim societies discriminate against women for religious reasons. At least in Iran this does not seem to be the case with respect to education. And since education has been shown to be the most powerful long-term driver of emancipation, income and economic development there is reason for optimism concerning the future of Iran.
(4) Is religion a reason for optimism about Iran?
“Religiosity and Islamic Rule in Iran“, Gunes Murat Tezcur, Taghi Azadarmaki, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2008
Abstract
We investigate the relationship between religiosity and support for Islamic rule in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Are high levels of religiosity associated with an ideology characterized by clerical rule, supremacy of Islamic law, and state enforcement of Islam? The data come from a random sampling survey conducted in Tehran in August 2003. It covers a range of questions on religiosity, social, and political attitudes, and has a sample of 412 respondents. The analyses show that religiosity is closely affiliated with an ideological understanding of Islam in Tehran. Interestingly, political dissatisfaction does not negatively affect this association. Shi‘ism in Iran has evolved from a “world-shaking” force into a “world-legitimating” force.
Excerpt from the Discussion section
The revolution, and the regime it created, has transformed what Shi‘ism means to ordinary religious Iranians. Most remarkably, this ideological worldview appears to be highly resilient and survives among pious Iranians despite widespread political dissatisfaction. In this sense, Shi‘ism in Iran has evolved from a “world shaking” force into a “world legitimating” force (Billings and Scott 1994).
Meanwhile, these findings should not be taken as evidence for religious citizens being politically acquiescent and passive. As indicated above, they seem to make a critical distinction between the ideals of Islamic rule articulated by Khomeini and actual practices of the current governance. In this regard, pious Tehranis are not necessarily the ones who attend state-sponsored Friday prayers. Consequently, there are no a priori reasons to expect that religious Iranians are less likely to support reformers than less or nonreligious citizens.
In fact, the central strategy of the reform movement (jebhe-ye eslahat) led by the ex-president Mohammed Khatami, who is a cleric, was to generate a democratic and relatively liberal interpretation of the Islamic revolution and its ideals. For him and his followers, the principles of freedom of expression and political pluralism can be perfectly compatible with Islamic rule.
Khatamiwas fully aware that the majority of Iranian citizens is deeply pious and tailored his political discourse accordingly. He identified the greatest achievement of the revolution as its democratic spirit. His call for greater political freedom and openness was cast in a religious language and had strong appeal among religious Iranians. In this sense, religious Tehranis’ espousal of Islamic rule does not necessarily preclude their acceptance of democratic and even liberal values.
5. Afterword
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6. For more information
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp relevance to this topic:
(a) Background Information about Iran
- “Iran’s oil and gas wealth“, US Congress Joint Economic Committee, March 2006 (4 pages)
- “Iran, Country Analysis Brief“, US Energy Information Agency (EIA), October 2007 (17 pages)
- Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, National Intelligence Estimate, November 2007
(b) Posts about Iran on the FM site
- Is Pakistan’s Musharraf like the Shah of Iran? (if so, bad news for us) , 8 November 2007
- War with Iran , 9 November 2007 — Why Iran is not necessarily our enemy.
- Is Iran dangerous, or a paper tiger? , 13 November 2007
- The new NIE, another small step in the Decline of the State , 10 December 2007
- Iran’s getting the bomb, or so we’re told. Can they fool us twice?, 16 January 2009
