So delighted that you're here with us this morning for this special partnership and event. We're very, very proud of this partnership that we have. One of the great things about working at Grand Valley is, if you want to put together a program that is a good partnership with good people, it is so easy to find those partners to work. And this morning, we're very grateful, here at the Hauenstein Center, to be able to partner with Doug [? Kinchey ?] and the Kaufman Interfaith Institute. And I noticed that Dick and Silvia Kaufman are with us. They came from Chicago and Aspen to be with us. So we're so glad you've joined this morning. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

And also, of course, the Hauenstein Center, with Ralph Hauenstein is our own benefactor has joined us this morning. Ralph, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

And we also are so glad to see Majd Al-Mallah here with us, with Middle Eastern studies. He is a partner we've done several programs with. And every time we get together with Majd to do a program in Middle East studies here at Grand Valley, something very interesting usually happens. Because Petra will ask a provocative question from the audience afterward. So we'll wait for her very interesting question.

Well my role as the director of the Hauenstein Center this morning, is simply to get us started. I would like to turn the podium over to Doug [? Kinchey, ?] who's going to introduce our very special guest this morning. Somebody who's been to Grand Rapids before. And we welcome him back. Doug, would you please do the introductions for us?

Thanks [? Gleeves ?]. I want to just add an introduction. Sylvia stepped out for a few minutes when she was introduced. But Sylvia Kaufman, 20 years ago, started the Jewish-Christian Dialogue in Muskegon. and that had led to what we now have in terms of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute.

Sylvia had the insight, and the energy, and the commitment, to make this program really work. And yesterday the Kaufman Interfaith Institute, along with the West Michigan Academic Consortium, which is eight colleges, universities, and seminaries in the area sponsored an all day interface workshops with our speaker, Dr. Omid Safi.

We had a pack out crowd, over 280 in the morning. And we had to bring in extra chairs in the evening. Another 150 involved. So over 400 people were involved in yesterday's event. This is just an example of kind of insight that Sylvia had 20 years ago that has now turned into something really wonderful. So Sylvia, I want to thank you for what you've done, and Dick, her husband, who has been very, very supportive in creating the Kaufman Institute.

Our keynote speaker yesterday was Dr. Omid Safi. And he has consented to stay over an extra day. One of the rules that we have at the Kaufman Institute, and our Interfaith Institute, is that we talk about religion, we don't talk about politics. Well, we're going talk about politics today. This is no longer of the auspices of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute. This is the Hauenstein Center. Said I hear, it's been rumored, that the Hauenstein Center sometimes gets into politics. And so today we're going to have a little politics. And we're happy that Dr. Safi, who has some wonderful experiences. and some very clear ideas about how the world is, and how it could be, will be speaking to us today.

Dr. Safi was born in the United States. His father was a medical doctor who was doing his residency training in Florida when Omid Safi was born. And after, he became a chief resident of his medical studies in Florida. And after he graduated from that specialty training, the family went back to Iran where Omid Safi was raised.

While he was in Iran, there was a revolution. And Omid has told me his father said, a revolution it not a reason to leave your homeland. And there was the major war between Iran and Iraq. And his father said, a war is no reason to leave your homeland. And then Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons on Iran. And Omid's father said that's no reason to leave your homeland.

But when they were running out of college-aged students to be in the army, and they started reaching into the high school students, and Omid was 15. His father says there's reason to leave your homeland. And so the family moved back to the United States. And Omid who had lived in Iran for most of his growing up years, still has hundreds of family in Iran, stays well connected with them. So he has a particularly interesting insight that he's going to share with us.

Let me tell you a little bit more about his academic background. Omid Safi did his undergraduate and graduate work at Duke University, where he has a Ph.D. in Islamic studies. He taught at Colgate University for seven years, where he was nominated as outstanding teacher every one of those years. He is now a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina. He is a noted speaker, writer. He has written three books. One is does on progressive Islam, on justice, gender, and pluralism. One is on politics of knowledge on pre-modern Islam. And then his latest book-- which I was going to bring up here and wave it-- his Memories of Muhammad, the prophet we never knew.

And he was, as I said yesterday, our speaker. And he did a very wonderful job. And I know that you'll be pleased to hear him speak today, as he talks about-- and what happened to it-- did I bump it?

It's good. We'll fix it.

You'll fix it? OK. As he speaks to us on not the axis of evil, but how reform might develop in his home country of Iran. So Dr. Omid Safi.

Well good morning.

Good morning.

Can all of you hear me, especially those of you sitting in the back? Is that all right? Good. So thank you for that very kind introduction. Thank you for your gracious hospitality. And it's wonderful to get to see this area in the fall time. Last time I was here I thought that it all looked like the part of upstate New York that I used to live in. And it was grey, and frozen, and cold to my bones. But this is just absolutely lovely.

And some of you yesterday had a chance to here me talk. And you might have heard that I begin every talk exactly the same way. It's by thanking people for the gift of their time. Time is limited. Time is finite. And my hope is that the time that we get to spend together is spent well, and spent beautifully.

I don't need probably to tell you too much about how important the current developments in Iran are, apart from saying two things to set to talk up. One of them is that that part of the world that we know as the Middle East is undergoing a profound transformation. The rising powers in the region are not who you think they are. And we are not witnessing a situation where the two ascending powers in the reason are not Arab countries, but are Iran and Turkey.

Culturally, religiously, and economically, these are going to be two countries that we, in the United States, will have to deal with, be knowledgeable about, and here's the good news, actually be excited about developments that are taking place in these two countries. If we can somehow get past a point of looking at the developments in these ascending powers through the lens of fear and misunderstanding, I actually am convinced that there's a profound reason for optimism about the type of Muslim majority societies that are emerging in these two countries.

The research that I'm going to present to you today is one that I've been undertaking for about the past five years. I was very fortunate to benefit from the generosity of the Carnegie Foundation. And they set aside a year of my life to read everything that the current political and religious leaders in Iran are producing. And the book that's coming out of this is going to be published by Harvard University Press in another couple of years or so hopefully. So you're just getting the sneak peek of the whole thing.

So let's begin with our provincial, intellectually challenged president.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm tempted to make a joke. But I was told I could be political today, right? So we've had similar presidents to that in our own country here. And the Iranian example is no exception. One of the interesting developments that you tend to notice in the Middle East is this. When the United States begins to gear up to have a tension-filled decade against the specific country, there are two things that take place. One, the entire country becomes collapsed into one person. Two, that same person is demonized into the rebirth of Hitler.

Now I am not a fan of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I think he's an idiot. I think he's an anti-semite He's an embarrassment from the level of an Iranian political speaker. What else can I say about him? He's not Hitler. Those of you who are friends of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show might remember that one of the homemade signs that he has for his rally that's coming up at the end of this month in DC is, I may disagree with you, but I'm fairly certain that you're not Hitler.

Fortunately, Alhamdulillah as we say, thank god there was one Nazi episode, one Hitler. There are people who are anti-semites, who are provincial leaders, who have dangerous ideas, but we don't need to see them as the rise of Hitler again. Yet we saw this pattern. We saw that pattern in Iraq. Before the war, the current war-- you have to specify which war-- the current war with Iraq, there was a way in which Saddam came to symbolize for us, all Iraqis, and he came to be the new Hitler. Right down to the fact that if you take a look at the cover of Time magazine, Saddam, whom I'm also not a fan of, ended up being depicted on Time magazine literally in the same way that Hitler had been depicted in 1938.

If you demonize a person, and you think that he represents all of a nation, and you want to get rid of that person, it becomes much easier to justify sanctions and military actions against one country.

The same thing is taking place to Iran now. When you ask most Americans to name an Iranian, Ahmadinejad is the only one that they can name. It's the only one that we see. And this guy loves the spotlight. He knows exactly what to say to get under your skin. Don't fall for it. What is he going to say to get him on the front page of in New York Times? That there was no such thing as the Holocaust, check. That 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government, check. That we were going to be a nuclear nation, check. Front page, front page, front page. He probably Googles himself every day to see how many hits he has.

So let's get some things out on the front. When he sponsors a conference the World Without Zionism, which might as well be a science fiction exercise, he knows what he's doing. When he says that the Holocaust was an [? axonin. ?] Which in Persian, means a myth or a legend. He is tapping into a genuine and real frustration that is shared, not just by Arabs and Muslims, but perhaps by the majority of people around the world about the current fiasco disaster that is Palestine, Israel.

He's smart in the way up appealing to the lowest common denominator. When the Danish cartoon controversy breaks out, which was a deliberate attempt to provoke Muslims, the same Danish journal three years prior to the cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, had refused to run offensive cartoons about Jesus Christ. Why? They said, and I quote, because we have a lot of Christian readers. And they would find it offensive that their religious head be depicted in such a way.

But it wasn't deemed offensive to portray Muhammad, because Muslims have to choose. Do you want religion? Or do you want freedom of speech? Prove to us that you are worthy citizens of Europe. Ahmadinejad said, OK. You want to play that game? I can play that game. So what does he sponsor in Iran? A Holocaust cartoon competition, an international Holocaust cartoon competition. And he invited submissions from all over the world.

His response basically was, not to appeal to the highest level of that which all of us are capable of, but to that lowest level. It is the crime in many parts of Europe to deny the Holocaust. His response was, you have your sacred issues, we have ours. You violated our sacred issue, we're going to violate yours. How do you like it now? That's the level at which Ahmadinejad operates. He's not an intellectual. He's not particularly a profound thinker. His thinking is filled with conspiracy theories. He loves the spotlight.

What's the other issue that has dominated our media's coverage of Iran? The nuclear issue. We are obsessed with Iran's desire to become a nuclear power. Are they going to just have it for energy purposes? Are they going to try to build nuclear weapons? If they do, will they have the means of delivering it to other countries? When you read the Op-Ed pages of the Iranian newspapers, they're actually extremely clear about their position. When you read the UN resolutions on chemical, biological, nuclear weapons, they say that the entire region of the Middle East should be free of these weapons, the entire region.

Today, there are three countries in the broader Middle East, and South Asia region, that are not trying to develop nuclear energy, but as a matter of fact, already possess nuclear weaponry. And those three countries are, who knows? Pakistan, India, and Israel. Pakistan and India twice within the last decade, have gone virtually to war. And Israel-- how to say this politely-- has a less than peaceful current status. Internally towards some of its own population, and with some of its neighbors.

What justification has given for the fact that these three countries have nuclear weapons in spite of the UN resolutions? That these are U.S. friendly countries. So their running position is, why do the countries that are friendly to the U.S. get to have the nuclear weaponry, when the United Nations resolutions that you're using against us, say that the entire region should be free of nuclear weaponry?

Those are the two issues. Ahmadinejad and nuclear weapons have dominated our coverage about Iran. That's not what I really want to talk about today. I want to talk about the very exciting reform movements, and developments in religious and political thought, that are going on in Iran. The short, I was going to say Cliff Notes version. My students tell me that nobody reads the Cliff Notes anymore. They don't have know what the Cliff Notes are. So that Wikipedia version of my talk it simply this. Iran is home today to the most exciting, dynamic, and sophisticated movement-- not an elite intellectual bunch of professors sitting around a table pontificating-- but a mass movement to reimagine Islam to be a modern, pluralistic, democratic, gender-equal practice anywhere in the world.

It's going to succeed if we, in this country, don't mess it up. That's all it needs is for us to not mess up their reform process. The tide of history and the tide of demographics are clearly on the side of reformers. Seventy percent of all Iranians are under 30 years old. It's a young country. Seventy percent of Iranians are born after the 1978 Iranian revolution. They don't remember the shah's time. They're not to wed to the memory of Ayatollah Khomeini. They want a solid economy, a free society, and a vote.

What's the one thing that will unite them to keep Ahmadinejad in power for the next Ahmadinejad, is if the United States keeps increasing sanctions on Iran, or Israel keeps talking about bombing Iran. Iranians are fiercely nationalistic people. They're also an incredibly proud people. They're very proud of the fact that they have a 5,000-year-old recorded history. They see themselves as right up there with the Greeks and Romans and the Chinese as among the great peoples of human history.

The Greeks came and conquered them. Iranians took their heritage and made it their own. Arabs came, conquered them. Iranians took Islam and made it their own. The Mongols came, conquered them. In a generation, the Iranians converted the Mongols.

They see themselves at people that have a long view of history with an incredible sense of pride of their sophistication, the richness of the culture, their heritage, the poetry, their philosophy. They don't take well to conquerors. Don't go there. Not only will it fail, it will also subvert this amazing, reform movement that I'm going to talk about.

But let's back up just a little bit. I'm a historian, as some of you have heard. I'm not going to 5,000 years of history. But I'll do 50 years. I have to. We're going to start in the 20th century. In the 20th century, for awhile, Iran was one of our closest allies in the Middle East. Even nowadays, I oftentimes meet folks who spent some time in Iran in the 1950s, the '60s, and the '70s, and they speaking in such loving ways about the memories that they had there, the hospitality of the Iranian people, and what have you.

So here's President Nixon receiving the former shah of Iran. And on the right-hand side, you have the 1970s Iranian celebration, which really kind of set up as a kind of Olympics to which heads of states from hundreds of countries were invited. And it was to celebrate the 2,500 year anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great. Cyrus the Great whose name, in the bible, as a messiah. The guy is a goy, and he's a messiah. Because he was really, really, really nice to Jews, freed them from captivity in babylonia, and all that.

Right, 2,500 years of history, Iran is a great friend of the United States in the '60s and '70s. Of course we, in this country, love to have our own amnesia. And here's one of the things that we forget. The shah of Iran came to power after a 1953 CIA led coup. This coup d'etat was led by the nephew of Teddy Roosevelt, a guy by the unfortunate name of Kermit, Kermit Roosevelt.

We spend a few hundred thousand dollars and got rid of this man, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, who rose to power on the basis of one crazy idea. You're never going to believe what his idea was. His idea, his platform on the basis of which he got elected to the running parliament and became Prime Minister, was Iranian oil belongs to Iranians.

Great Britain and United States decided that this was unacceptable. Because Iranian oil belonged to Aranco, BP, Anglo-Iranian, it belongs to us. It's our oil. Our policy, at that time, was if we have 90% of the profits from oil, that's acceptable. Ten percent is all that Iranians deserve. Iranians, at one point, were willing to settle for 50% of the profits to their own oil. We deemed it unacceptable. We engineered a coup. We subverted their democratic process, took out their prime minister, court-martialed him, put him under house arrest where he died. And in his place, we put in and monarch who began cracking down on that same democratic process.

When people tell you that the United States has been a friend to democracy in this part of the world, I wish. I wish. Sadly the reality of our foreign policy in this region over the last 50 years, has been that it has been based on realpolitik and the geopolitical interests, which are oftentimes best served, not by doing what is morally right, and what is politically in the interest of advocating democracy, but rather in the interest of what gets us oil, and who can set up puppet governments that will go along with U.S. regimes' policies.

It's, at this time, that you begin to see a rise of U.S. sentiments. So you have demonstrations like this in Iran in the 1960s, the 1970s. This poster is kind of a classic one. I know probably not that many people here read Persian or Arabic. But I'll transliterate it for you. The poster on the left, this one here, it reads, Yankee go home. Yankee go home became such an international slogan that it didn't even need to be translated to indigenous languages. And this is tied directly back to that. And a lot of this leads to the development in Iran in the 1970s, of course led by the very famous taking over of the U.S. Embassy in 1978, and the holding of hostages for 444 days during the time of the Carter administration.

It's at this time that the Ayatollah enters American consciousness. He's presented in the United States as someone who's just walked out of the medieval times. He looks medieval. He dresses medieval. We thought that he thinks medieval. He seemed like an anomaly. He seemed like an anachronistic figure. Twice in a year he's put on the cover of Time magazine.

It's at this time that not only Islam enters American imagination, but also the term fundamentalism. Before this time, we mainly thought of fundamentalism as Fundamentalist Christians. And fundamentalist actually had a fairly positive connotation, the bond to adhere to the fundamentals of a tradition.

After Khomeini, we begin speaking up Muslim Fundamentalists, Jewish Fundamentalists, Hindu Fundamentalists, Buddhist Fundamentalists, and what have you. And Khomeini began speaking of an Islamic state. A state where Islamic law would rule the day.

There also begins to be a rabid form of anti-Westernism in Khomeini's discourse. So here's one of the popular revolutionary posters that you would see in Iran in the mid to late-1970s. It's Khomeini as the jedi master, essentially. He's using the force, his baraka, as we would say, to push out the West. And what is the West? It's a conglomeration of the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. The Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza, the Great Britain colonies, the policies of colonialism in the Middle East for 100 years, and now the new empire, America. The fallen shah of Iran is still trying to hide under the mantle of the West. And Khomeini is the one that is single-handedly pushing them out.

Khomeini speaks of this Islamic form of government which would be ruled by jurists. And of course he would be the jurist that he would have in mind to head this particular government. If you're going to make up a theory for government, it better benefit you at some point.

A quick, little, 30-second overview of 200 years of history. How do we get to the point where Muslim governments and societies begin looking to Islam as a political answer? Well, in the 19th century and early 20th century, they actually look to Western models of government, particularly constitutionalism. The problem was, that those same Western countries were actually colonizing the Middle East. Particularly Great Britain which has Egypt and the Sudan, the areas in Yemen and Oman, France, which has Algeria and Morocco, and so on. So it doesn't make sense for them to look to the West when the West is colonizing you.

The next set of options would be in the mid-20th century to look to the East. You couldn't be a Muslim intellectual in the 1960s, 1950s, and 1970s, and if not a communist, at least partially not be a socialist. That too, comes to a catastrophic failure after the disastrous 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. And even more importantly, later on, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So you can't look to the West. You can't look to the East. What's left? Islam. You get this rise of 1970s and 1980s Islamic movements in many different places, with the goal of establishing an Islamic state.

It's in this context that I want to come to what's taking place in Iran now. Remember, we have Khomeini in 1978 leading the successful Islamic Revolution in Iran. His famous slogan-- and this is the only transition I can offer of it-- Am-ri-ka-hit ala-tin-nin kad-vo-nad bo-ko-nad. Which is, America can't do jack shit. You don't need to be afraid of America. With respect to Israel, his response was, if all the Muslims of the world unite and spit on Israel, a flood will wash away Israel.

It was a defiant, angry, in your face, we are not going to be intimidated by the West anymore, kind of a message. And it worked. It appealed to people. Here's where our problem in this country is. Our image of Iran is frozen in 1978. We still Khomeini is alive and in charge. And we have not kept up with the revolutionary transformations that have taken place in Iran in the last 32 years.

So let's go back to the late 1990s when this man becomes president. Unlike Ahmadinejad, he's actually an intellectual. He's fluent in four or five languages including German. He's a scholar of Western and Islamic philosophy. He runs for president as a reformist candidate, and wins in a landslide. He is particularly beloved by young people, university students, and women. That's where the bulk of his vote comes from. And he has some far out ideas about how he wants the relationship with the United States to look.

I'll read this for the benefit of those in the back. In terms of the dialogue of civilizations, we intend to benefit from the achievements and experiences of all civilizations, Western and non-Western, and to hold dialogue with them. This is why we sense an intellectual affinity with the essence of the American civilization. It's an extended hand to the United States. The phrase that you see, dialogue of civilization phrase. And the United Nations adopted that phrase as their theme for 2001. Now sadly, we're going to remember 2001 not for the dialogue of civilizations, but for something entirely different.

When Khatami extended this open hand to the United States saying we've changed a lot. We're ready to have this open, respectful dialogue with the United States. Then President Bush responded with a carefully orchestrated speech, the axis of evil speech. It was essentially slapping the hand that Iranians had extended towards the United States.

Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or a friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. Mind you, President Bush-- and I'm just going to sidestep all the jokes about how funny it is that President Bush talks about an unelected President. You didn't laugh at that one. I thought that was pretty funny. I'm from Florida. So to me that's hilarious.

But it's as if he is not aware of the fact that the Iranian President that he's speaking to, got over 75% of the vote. The reformist candidate, who is now in office in Iran on the platform of dialogue with America has gotten over 75% of the vote. States like these, and their terrorists allies constitute an axis of evil. Arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. The axis of evil, of course, would be Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about some of the reformists that are operating in Iran. I'll give you a quick little snippet of the kinds of ideas that they have. AbdolKarim Soroush is probably the leading, and most importantly Iranian thinker today. He, in the Western press, they love to refer to him as the Martin Luther of Islam. Here's my little news flash to the Tom Friedmans and the Robin Wrights of the world, Islam is not Christianity. And it doesn't operate the same way. And there's not going to be a Martin Luther to reform us the way that you all want it to.

It's much more like Judaism, where you've got a million rabbis. And they sit, and they argue, and they talk. And the consensus shifts and changes. So there's no one person that's going to reform Islam. The reform of Islam will take place through a mass movement and large-scale debates. Don't look for just one person.

He wrote a book, a massive 681 page book, on the theory of evolution of religious knowledge. The main idea that he has is this. It's OK to say that religion is from God. But whenever we, as humans, speak about religion, we are doing it through a human lens. And as such, anything that we could say about religion is fallible and contextual. We cannot speak about religion in absolute terms. God might be absolute. But our discussion about religion is not.

His idea was, in talking about how to reform Islam, that it is insufficient to pick and choose the best rulings. So what you want to do, is you don't want to just read what every different Muslim scholar has said. His main idea was that you have to find out what the presuppositions of religious and political thought are. And until and unless you address the issue of presuppositions, and until and unless we begin with the presupposition that says every Iranian, male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, Sunni and Shiite, Jewish, and Christian, and Muslim, have exactly and identically the same set up rights, we will never be able to arrive at a just and egalitarian society.

It's not trying to tweak the rights that men have and the rights that women have, the rights that Iranian Jews have, and Iranian Baha'is have, and Iranian Christians have, an Iranian Muslims have that's going to deliver us. We have to begin at this fundamental presupposition level where we state clearly and unambiguously, that all Iranians have access to identically the same set of rights. That was his main radical idea.

He's not the only one. Here's Mohsen Kadivar that Time magazine voted as one of the 100 most important thinkers of the 21st century. You can tell that he wears a turban. What does that mean? A, he's bald. And he's covering up his bald spot. More importantly, he's a religious scholar. He's product of a seminary, of a Madrassa. I show his picture just to prove to you that contrary to what we were told, this reformed battle in Iran is not one that is between religious scholars on one side, and lefty elitists, intellectuals on the other side. There are religious clerics who are reformers. And there's intellectuals who are conservative. The lines are much more murky.

Kadivar's idea is quite simple. He's an unambiguous supporter of democracy. The choice between [? voloyatafati, ?] the rule of the jurists and democracy, is democracy. The rule of the jurist has no credible foundation in Islamic jurisprudence. It's the notion that's formed in the minds of a group of honorable jurists. I believe democracy is the least erroneous approach to the politics of the world.

He sounds Churchillian. It's the least imperfect of all imperfect forms of government. When Kadivar gives talks in Iran, 10,000 people show up at a time to hear him. We're talking about ideas that have currency in this country. This is not elitist kind of discourse.

Another one of the important Iranian intellectuals, who is again, a cleric, is Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari. His main idea is freedom and the importance of freedom in a society. He basically says, it's meaningless to speak of religious faith unless people are free to choose what faith they follow, and to practice it. Therefore, freedom is necessary for a society to be religious in a meaningful fashion. And he's talking about political freedoms and religious freedoms, not just for Muslims, but for all Iranian citizens.

Probably the Iranian reformers that most of us know, if we know somebody in Iran, is the 2003 Nobel Peace Price winner, Shirin Ebadi. She reminds me a lot of my aunt, Because she is four foot nothing tall. But she's what in Iranian contexts refer to as tiger women. They will shred you to pieces if you ever mess with them. Do not be fooled by their stature. Because these are giants.

She is this first female judge in modern Iranian history. She is a tireless advocate of women's rights, the rights of religious minorities, the rights of workers, the rights of immigrants, the rights of the physically handicapped, and so on. She has sued and won the Iranian government repeatedly in Iranian courts. If the word chutzpah had an Iranian equivalent, her picture would be it.

When she won the Nobel Peace Prize, interestingly enough, the response from the Iranian regime, and from the Bush Administration was identical. It was basically, OK we're done. Why? because when she was asked what do you think about United States war in Iraq, her response was, I support democracy. I have spent my entire life building institutions that support democracy. But if there's one thing I've learned, is that you cannot drop democracy on top of other people from an airplane that is also dropping bombs on people. Democracy has to swell up from inside the hearts of people so that it can take route in that society.

When she was asked what do you think about the U.S. government someday having a war with Iran, she said, I'm a pacifist. I'm opposed to all wars. I abhor violence. If the United States were ever to invade Iran, I would pick up a gun, and I would be on the frontline defending my country. Now this is you pro-women's rights, pro-human rights, pacifist, democracy advocate. And she's saying don't mess with us. We got it. They can put us in jail. And she's been thrown in jail repeatedly. When she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Iranian regime broke into her office and stole her Nobel metal. It's like as if you steal Batman's costume. I took your super power. And she's like, I don't need the medal to do what I do. I got the medal because of what I do.

When she won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was a massive reception for her. And Iranians, God help them, they're poets and lovers. They're not fighters. They showed up at the Iranian airport, each of them, with a single red rose to receive her. The Iranian regime was hoping that she was going to take her $1 million from the Nobel committee, and go by a villa somewhere by the Caspian Sea and retire. Her first act getting out of the airplane, was to ask for a bullhorn. Without coming down the steps of the airplane, she grabbed the bullhorn and begins talking out loud to the Iranian government. And says, you must free the political prisoners.

If these kinds of people-- and there's not just one, or two, or a hundred, or a thousand of them-- that are going to fundamentally transform Iranian society, and it is happening. And it has happened over the last 30 years. Which leads us to where we ended up in the 2009 elections which Ahmadinejad stole. Unambiguously, clearly, they were stole elections. They were frauds. There were candidates that ran from the Green Party, the reform party. And the elections were rigged. Ahmadinejad won a reelection. And Iranians poured into the streets in the millions.

In 1978 they poured into the streets and they shouted death to the dictator, we want freedom. The dictator that they were talking about then was the shah of Iran, the monarch. In 2009, 31 years later, the poured into the streets. And they said again, death to the dictator, we want freedom. The dictator they're talking about now is Ahmadinejad. They got it.

There are millions of Iranians who are pushing to transform their own society. What's their message? Freedom, equality, women's rights, human rights, a democratic institution. Oh, and they're Muslim. They want to be and remain a Muslim society. They don't see any conflict between Muslim pro-human rights, pro-modernity, pro-democracy.

The Green Movement, is one that's kind of like our Civil Rights Movement. Yes, there are people Malcolm X, Dr. King, and others that we come to associate with it. Mousavi got a lot of notice. But it's not tied to any one particular person. Mousavi ran for president. He was cheated. But that doesn't change the opinion and the enthusiasm of the majority of Iranians, especially the young, particularly women.

So oftentimes you see them wearing green scarves, green wrist bands, and what have you, and marching and demonstrating in the streets. In many parts of Iran, the government cracked down on these demonstrations. And so Iranians do what Iranians do. They found clever ways to get around it. If they prevent you from marching on the streets, where do you go? Think like 21st century people. On the internet. Persian today, is the fourth-most blogged language in the world. There's only 70 million Iranians. We have no business having that many bloggers. But we do. Why? because they can't block it.

It's hilarious. The Ayatollahs who are on the repressive side, they were like, we need to prevent this internet from getting to Iran. And we're going to put a giant bubble on top of the country to prevent the internet signal from getting in. They start cracking down on reformist bloggers. And the bloggers just set up mirror sites. They set up 20 mirror sites for each one of their blogs. They can't block them fast enough.

And it was a young woman who was shot in the elections last year, Neda Agha-Soltan. This was one of those things where a person is just, depending on your point of view, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or somebody who could have been anybody. And they become a symbol of an entire movement. And this beautiful young woman, who had never been a political activist in her life, had never been to a rally in her life. She was a college kid who went to a rally, was shot on camera, and it became essentially a YouTube sensation. Because of how horrific it was that is beautiful young woman is shot in the face by Iranian soldiers, and you see blood pouring out of her face, her body fall to the ground, and everybody around freak out. I'm not going to show you the video. But this was the image of her right before the blood started coming out.

And so Neda, today, has kind of become the symbol for a lot of the reform movements, the Iranian movements. And they have these very cool interesting posters that you see Iran. Remember the slogans from '78 and 2009, death to the shah, death to the dictator. The Green Movement slogan is death to nobody. That's where Iran is today.

Intellectually, culturally, artistically, the tide is with the people. There is and ultra-repressive government that controls the judiciary and controls the military to pull people down. They will fail at doing so.

If you look at Iran in 2010, you cannot compare it with Iran-- forget 1978-- even Iran in the late 1990s. The people are bold. They are fed up. They're frustrated. They want a modern, successful economy and society. And they want their Islam. Not the Islam of the repressive regime, their kind of Islam.

All of the mechanisms for getting to that point are there. The one thing that can prevent them from getting there is external pressure. And idiotic pressure from the United States and Israel to subvert their reform process. If you want a modern, moderate, powerful partner in the Middle East, ironically enough, it's in the axis of evil, except it's not evil.

Let me stop there and open it up for questions, and comments, and see where you would like to go.

[APPLAUSE]

Yes sir.

I wanted to take it just a bit into the religions. And I'm asking you because I'm interested in being educated.

Sure.

It's my understanding that, for example in the bible, there are some very pacifist ideas. On the other hand, there's some very aggressive terrorists in a sense, ideas. I hear, I read, that in Islam, there is the same ability to read in the Koran what you wish to fit your current views. Can you help me to understand first, if this is the case. And secondly, how that relates to the Islam that is sought currently by the Green-- potentional-- Revolution, if you will.

Sure. In this recent book that I published, Memories of Muhammad, there's an introduction which talks about how do we go about studying our own tradition, and traditions other than our own. And one the things that I said was, if we want to go fishing around to find things in each others scriptures that scare the bejeezus out of us, you're going to find it. And I gave some examples of you have a verse of the sword in the Koran. In the Old Testament Hebrew Bible, you've got all the scary things about take their babies and mash them action against rocks. And even Jesus, sweet, loving, hippie Jesus, has things of I came not bring peace, but the sword.

What do we want to do? Do we want to stop at that point and say aha, this proves it. I found in your scripture irrefutable evidence that you're just violent, and will always be violent. That's the point of the discuss that I think we're all going to lose. Because people can find that in all of our scriptures. What I'm actually interested in is not me trying to come in and tell Jews, what does your tradition say, me trying so Christians what does your religion say. I'm interested in actually practicing enough humility where I say, tell me how your tradition has come to deal with this complicated issue of violence and warfare.

Are there resources in the Koran to justify violence and war? Absolutely. Are there resources in Koran to justify having a peaceful coexistence? Absolutely. What I'm interested in, is to begin by saying within the tradition of Islamic thought, what have been the parameters that Muslims have set up? And what you find in that case is that Islam and Christianity have actually something in common. Both of them have basically developed, with a few exceptions, what we would call in the West, a just war tradition. That there has to be sufficient cause to go to war. While at war, you conduct yourself in a specific way. And there has to be a procedure to get yourself out of war.

Muslims have developed the same approach. There is the condition whereby you're allowed to enter into war. You can enter into war if somebody attacks you. You're not allowed to initiate wars, what will call offensive force. While at war, in the Islamic tradition, the legal tradition that is shared by Sunnis and Shiites would say, the Prophet Mohammad has laid down rules for how you fight.

When in battle, you cannot kill civilians. You cannot kill women. You cannot kill the elderly. You can't cut down trees or poison water wells. It goes to the level of detail of saying, in the middle of a battle, if you and I are fighting and you give up, and you throw down your weapon, turn your back, and start running away, in that instant, it becomes prohibitive for me to kill you. Because you're no longer a combatant.

By those standards of Islamic law-- I'm not talking about hippie, groovy, reformist interpretations-- I'm talking about classical, conservative Islamic law, one would see that what we tend to think of as terrorism, suicide bombing violates the letter and the spirit of Islamic law.

What these reformers are saying is actually very consistent with that. interestingly enough, even what the conservatives are saying agrees with that. The kind of justification of terrorism that we see, is such a marginal phenomena. So ironically, here's the situation that we're dealing with. The overwhelming majority of Muslims and third world people identify with the plight and the suffering of Palestinians. No question about it, it is issue number one.

But people can identify with the suffering of Palestinians while they are disagreeing with the methods that some Palestinian extremist groups might be using. And that's the message, for example, of people like Shirin Ebadi. She says, the fight between Palestinians and Israelis is not an equal fight. You're dealing with one of them, the Israeli state, which is one of the largest militaries in the world, and Palestinians who are dispossessed, homeless, and colonized. She says, I will always stand with the weak and the politically oppressed. But as a Muslim, I cannot support suicide bombing. It violates my understanding of the Koran. It violates my understanding of what the Prophet would do. I'm with you, Palestinian people. I will not support you in suicide bombing.