Iran: Winner or Loser of the “Arab Spring”?

Abstract

On February 11, 2011, the main celebrations in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution were heavily influenced by the recent upheavals that had occurred in the Arab world—its immediate neighborhood. The Tunisian ruler Ben Ali had fled the country at the beginning of the year and on the day of the celebrations in Iran, public anger forced the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, to step down. The Arab Spring had started, and hardly any state in the Middle East or North Africa was able to avoid the effects of its force. On this very day, the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran was jubilant. Addressing his “brothers in faith” in Tunisia and Egypt, Supreme Leader Khamenei declared that the events taking place in their home countries constituted a “natural continuation of the Iranian revolution of 1979” (Alfoneh 2011: 36) and had “special meaning for the Iranian nation … [It was] the same as ‘Islamic awakening,’ which [was] the result of the victory of the big revolution of the Iranian nation” (Kurzman 2012: 162). Such statements were generally not expressions of sympathy for or recognition of the courage and resolve of the protesters in Tunisia and Egypt but rather the manifestation of a firm determination to exclusively define the revolutions as an Islamic awakening and thus force them into a trajectory that began with the Iranian Revolution of 1979.