the one the us just killed was actually something of an islamic humanist, which, sure, this vs the regime repression seems contradictory on the surface, but it's a different part of the world

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5878792&forum_id=2#49973965)

Btw I’ve been reading vali nasr’s “Iran grand strategy” and finding it pretty cr so far

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5878792&forum_id=2#49974026)

Khamenei vs Khomeini (typing this will never stop getting a chuckle out of me; like we have a guy named Jon Trump as the next president) wrt what I managed to gather from a variety of speeches and his book thing, the former wanted to get back in some sense to the other parts of the more general revolution that was lost under Khomeini while still not leaving Iran open to being pillaged culturally like Russia or South Korea by some of the forces within those parts of the general revolutionary movement likely would have. The insularity and mistrust of the mullahs both damned and saved Iran in different senses in the aftermath of the Shah's overthrow

A good deal of his work surveyed regarding Islam seems to be about balancing the strictures of the faith (which he truly believes will produce the best outcomes for Iranians if followed properly---like he has a bit of a "compassionate Islam" compared to maybe what they said about early Putin's "compassionate authoritarianism" thing going on in some of his writings. The guy was a true believer and not your average central Asian tinpot guy just using the faith as a cudgel) with modernizing Iran and listening to the assembly of the faithful in the process (whatever that term is, the ummah of the nation maybe) and he lays out both his thinking and his internal struggles in a way that shows a fairly nuanced picture of the guy as a thinker

This wasn't a red in the face Salafi guy screaming about everything the West has introduced being dunya and it seemed like w/r/t modernization and introducing some liberalizations that he preached caution and slowness rather than banning this or that outright. I also think that Iran's stronger state control over their religious police probably allowed for this sort of take whereas in Saudi it took the al-Saud family basically proscribing the mutaween local militias almost to reign in that element

This sort of sentiment, historically, works uncommonly and only with a bit of luck and was the death of large parts of conservative Europe when the energy of 1848 came about but in a way maybe him dying and at least some of what he said about the perfidy of the US and Israel may bolster his reputation after death and possibly keep Iran being given over to some commercial Yeltsin style puppet government

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5878792&forum_id=2#49974054)