Iranscope is a think tank focused on Iran’s journey through the 21^st Century facilitating work on a broad range of projects encompassing Futuristic Thinking, Human Rights, Secularism, Progress, Globalization, Social Justice, Peace, Democracy, and Freedom in Iran. The studies may emphasize Culture, Issues of Women and Various Social, Religious and Ethnic Groups, Economics, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Art, Technology, Politics, Civil Disobedience, Sociology, History, or other aspects of life. 

Since development in today’s Iran is inseparable from the turbulence of world movement of Islamism, the central theme of our research is about the ways to deal with Islamism and the alternatives that are available not only for Iran and Iranians but for the world in the current juncture of history.

Islamism is not limited to Iran. This retrogressive movement is even causing pessimism among the youth in the West. The youth is at times dropping optimism in the future when feeling helpless in face of the onslaught of fundamentalism, and specifically the Islamic fundamentalism, which has made its impact felt, especially since Sept 11^th, 2001, in the very own backyards of the West.

The Western civilization is now an old civilization burdened with the weight of its own complexity as some new thinkers have noted for some time. This means the Western civilization is spending a lot of its resources and energy just to sustain itself. A fundamentalist panacea offers simplicity by unloading the burden of the maintenance of this complex system, for those believing in the pseudo-promises of the return to an old golden order of the world, offering easy answers for all hardships of the today’s world.

Not only in backward countries, fundamentalism even offers itself as an alternative in the U.S., where the government has a hard time to fulfill the commitments it has made to its citizens, with staggering national debt in the U.S., lack of health care for over 47 million people, and the uncertainty of social security benefits for the future generation.

It seems like a huge number of think tanks in the U.S. have been working on the same issue of Islamism, nevertheless, they hardly offer any good recommendations or ideas as to what to do with it.

My own book Futurist Iran, had the subtitle of “Futurism versus Terrorism” where I had tried to show why promoting futurism as an alternative to Islamism, is the way to go in the Middle East and specifically in Iran.

Nonetheless, my book is far from providing specific recommendations about how to deal with Islamism, defining concrete solutions, a task which is expected from a think tank. If one looks at AEI and other famous think tanks that have been working on this topic for a long time, they are not even in a better position as they show even an absence of the broad vision one can find in the Futurist Iran book. 

All other think tanks have done about Islamism were modeled after an old understanding of Communism and to a lesser degree Fascism, thus they ended up offering ad hoc advice which mostly fails to relate to the current reality because they are based on an outdated vision which is hardly descriptive of Islamism. 

They propose human rights strategies to debunk the Islamists, whereas Islamist rulers in contrast to Communist rulers share their ideology with the majority of people they rule and anything short of secularism fails to address this reality.

On the other hand, with the fall of Soviet Union, the fall of Communist utopia collapsed as well, and thus those who are looking for a utopia as a cure for the problems of the world, gave up on secular utopias of the last 150 years. This reality has also damaged secularism itself making many idealistic versions of it unappealing.

Therefore in search for ready-made answers to the dilemma of our times, many have picked up religious utopias as their way of dealing with the predicament of a world order and its related social structures which they resent, a perspective that has shaped a revival of Crusades as if we are having new fights for Jerusalem.

The above analysis does not explain what to expect from Islamism's future growth or how to deal with it, but it shows the background to the revival of Islamic Fundamentalism in the 21^st Century and with that perspective one can try to respond to the concrete issues that were noted.

We know the first Crusades did not stop and were followed by new ones. The question is whether the new Crusades will subside or will be followed by stronger or weaker crusades. What have witnessed in Afghanistan was the defeat of Soviet Utopia by the Taliban's Fundamentalism and it seems like the Western Democracy is also being seriously challenged by the Taliban in Afghanistan, as we see the Taliban coming back to power, this time through not only through war but even by peace negotiations with Afghan government, as well as fighting and peace negotiations with Pakistan's government.

In the West, not only the introduction of Shari'a courts in Canada has been problematic but successes of Islamists in the UK in the judicial branch to the point of Bishop of Canterbury asking for the recognition of Shari'a law are questioning secularism in a society with such a long history of secular tradition and show the impact of Islamism in the world cannot be viewed as limited to developing countries of the Middle East including Iran.

Working on economic issues of social freedom is critical to our endeavors to answer the dynamics of the successes of Islamists.  Such a study is the way to come up with alternative solutions to the panaceas offered by the Islamists, as it is more and more clear that their focus is on social inequalities in the world to repartition the world.  This is not only the approach of Islamic Republic of Iran with its international maneuvers in Iraq and Palestine but this is also true about Al-Qaeda's global strategy.

Sam Ghandchi, Publisher/Editor

Why I Created Iranscope?
http://www.ghandchi.com/298-iranscopeEng.htm

A Member of Lifeboat Futurists Board