Uprising in Iran

Elections in Iran on Friday returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as president. Supporters of challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a conservative reformer, have taken to the streets in protest. Violence has broken out, and people have been shot to death by police. Remarkably, the Islamic republic’s leading cleric, Ali Khamenei, has called for an investigation of the election results. So have other members of the Iranian ruling class.

Regardless of the outcome, the United States needs to stay out of this. Mousavi’s supporters and Iran experts are clear about this. Given the history of U.S. intervention in Iranian affairs since World War II, and the anti-Americanism that was a theme of the 1979 revolution, any effort by our government to promote the opposition is guaranteed to backfire and to help unify and expand Ahmadinejad’s support. This is why Mitt Romney’s remarks this weekend have been self-serving and irresponsible. Obama’s balancing act — expressing doubt about the election’s fairness without taking sides — is the right move for this moment in the chess game.

The Web and Twitter have offered ringside seats to the events in Tehran in particular, although protests seem to be occurring throughout the land. By far the most active tweeter has been Raymond Jahan @StopAhmadi. His summary of events in Tehran today (which I’ve embellished with other news):

• Large crowds throughout Iran — millions, according to protesters — took to the streets on Sunday and today. Presumably the largest crowd was at Tehran’s Azadi Square (surrounding the Freedom Tower), the site of historic demonstrations that brought down the Shah’s regime in 1979.
• People claimed to see snipers around Azadi Square, and some people were killed or injured by gunfire. Photos of bloodied corpses were sent out by cell phone or Internet, despite sluggish bandwidth. Britain’s Channel 4 captured a police shooter on video. In general, foreign journalists have been prevented from broadcasting, and some at least have been asked to leave the country.
• In Tehran and Rasht, authorities called individuals to intimidate them, saying their phones were bugged. Jahan seems to doubt that the government has done much bugging. Activists have been using pay-as-you-go calling cards to evade any surveillance.
• A rumor was circulating Sunday that some of the police who rode motorcycles into crowds of protesters were actually Hezbollah Arabs imported from Lebanon to take stern measures against Iranians. The rumor, which seems to be false, stoked antagonism between police and the crowd, and encouraged violence. Using motorcycles to break up dense crowds did nothing to help the situation. A video shot this weekend by an Italian journalist shows some protesters protecting a battered policeman from the crowd that had pulled him from his motorcycle and set it on fire. Fleets of motorcycle cops can be seen in much of the video footage from Tehran.
• The headquarters of the Basij paramilitary force was burned today after a protester was killed outside.
• The rallying cry of the protesters is Allah o akbar, the Persian form of the Islamic motto “God is most great.” Abbas Barzegar, an Iranian Ph.D. candidate at Emory University, has warned Western observers (in the Guardian) against forgetting that Iran remains a very religious country. But he seems to assume that Ahmadinejad’s supporters have a monopoly on piety, and this seems far from the truth.
• Ahmadinejad was dismissive of the massive protests, comparing them to the reactions of fans whose team lost a soccer match. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose authority is independent of the executive branch, issued a bland statement congratulating Iranians for their large turnout and commitment to democracy. Later, as I mentioned, he announced that the election must be investigated — an apparent victory for protesters.
• There has been uncertainty about scheduled mass rallies. Rumors circulated by Twitter and email that one rally set for today was actually a government trap. Protesters suspect that those rumors, plus a round of news that tomorrow’s rally had been canceled, originated with government agents.
• Video has shown police or security officers entering homes and beating people severely, in one case leaving a man motionless on the ground. Dormitories at the university in Tehran were invaded Sunday night.
• Iranians are suspicious of the ill-timed maintenance shutdown this evening by Twitter. Shutdowns are notoriously frequent on Twitter, but under these conditions, people in Tehran suspect the worst. Tweeters are objecting with the hashtags #TwitterStayUp and #NoMaintenance.

Resources for keeping up with the news:

• Live blogging at huffpost.com has been going on since Saturday.
• Informed Comment, Juan Cole’s authoritative Mideast blog, criticizes the plausibility of election returns and makes a case for fraud by the government. He deals with (and rejects) the theory that Western journalists spent too much time in affluent North Tehran, overlooking broad-based rural and working-class support for Ahmadinejad.
• Wikipedia article on the protests is a site for hammering out a neutral account of what’s happening. Also see the discussion page.

The piano in the corner

I have not found myself able to write either about my academic work, local affairs, or the wide world — even as I anxiously watch events unfolding in Iran. What I can offer is a discovery in online music.

Magnatune.com has a certain downloadable album of classical piano music — an album that perhaps could not have been made before music went online, and that some will sneer at. Robert F. Tucios introduces From the Lobby of the Cooper Arms this way:

The piano, a bruised Brambach baby grand, lies at rest in a quiet corner of the still majestic grand lobby of the Cooper Arms, one of a handful of resort high-rise beach apartments and hotels to pop up on the shoreline of Long Beach in the 1920’s. This cool ornate interior serves as a communal living room, echoing with activity and sheltering the building’s residents and visitors from the noise of the world outside.

I descend the elevator, say my hellos and walk to the corner of the lobby, music in hand.

I sit down and play for a while.

You can listen to the results here (or here for low bandwidth).

If nothing else, this recording is a historical document, preserving the imperfections of the typical 20th-century piano that never saw the inside of a concert hall or recording studio. The imperfect tuning, mysterious clicks and pops, and uncooperative acoustics are typical of the vast majority of impromptu piano concerts in homes, halls, and lobbies. I’m delighted that someone took the trouble to capture all this in a recording — and that the recording is this listenable.

Robert F. Turcios is a graphic designer and talented amateur pianist. On Cooper Arms he records a judicious selection of both standard and interesting short piano pieces. (“Claire de lune” is here, but not “Für Elise” or, thank God, “The Entertainer.”) Classical mavens will already have “definitive” recordings of all of them, but they won’t have anything like this.

You may find it worth looking into a Magnatune membership. Magnatune only sells on the Web and splits proceeds 50-50 with musicians. For a flat monthly fee, you can either stream or download unlimited amounts of music from the company’s catalog. It’s a little heavy on electronica and New Age for my taste, and the company is a bit dense about classical and pre-classical titles. Still, there is plenty of good music to discover here.

Saturday baroque (on Monday)

I’m in awe of this concert by Jordi Savall in Italy. The music is French, including something by Marin Marais by English composer Tobias Hume. And I’ll shut up now.

UPDATE: There are three pieces by Hume.

1. I don’t know the title of the first one.
2. “Deth” (2:54).
3. “A Soldier”s Resolution” (4:55), with several section headings that the performer is supposed to read aloud, as Savall does here. The sections evoke marching, the sound of trumpets, the charge, and the “march away.”