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<\/p>\nWhile the dogs of war bark, the Ancient \u2013 and New \u2013 Silk Road goes on forever and a civilization with a long and proud history gets on with life<\/p>\n
The minute you set foot in the streets of Mashhad, the air smelling of saffron, a fine breeze oozing from the mountains, it hits you; you\u2019re in the heart of the Ancient Silk Road and the New Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).<\/p>\n
To the east, the Afghan border is only three hours away on an excellent highway. To the north, the Turkmenistan border is less than four hours away. To the northwest is the Caspian Sea. To the south is the Indian Ocean and the port of Chabahar, the entry point for the Indian version of the Silk Roads. The Tehran-Mashhad railway is being built by the Chinese.<\/p>\n
A group of us \u2013 including American friends, whose visas were approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government \u2013 have gathered in Mashhad for the New Horizon Conference of independent thinkers. Right after a storm, I\u2019m in a van on the way to the spectacular Imam Reza shrine with Alexander Dugin, which the usual suspects love to describe as \u201cthe world\u2019s most dangerous philosopher,\u201d or Putin\u2019s Rasputin.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re deep in debate not over geopolitics but \u2026 bossa nova. Exit Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, enter Tom Jobim and Joao Gilberto.<\/p>\n
Persia traditionally has been a land of serious intellectual discussion. At the conference, after a lunch break, a few of us decide to start our own geopolitical debate, no cameras rolling, no microphones on. Dugin expands on what multipolarity could be; no universality; pluriversal; a realm of pluralistic anthropology; all poles sovereign. We discuss the pitfalls of Eurasian identity, Islamic identity, sub-poles, India, Europe and Africa.<\/p>\n
A few minutes later Iranian scholar Blake Archer Williams \u2013 his nom de plume \u2013 is delving into \u201cThe sacred community of Shi\u2019ite Islam and its covenantal dispensation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Karaj is a bustling three million-strong city one hour away from Tehran by freeway. Early one morning I enter a room in a hawza \u2013 an Islamic seminary. In my previous travels I have visited hawzas in Qom, but never a female-only school. This one harbors 2,275 active students from all over Alborz province up to PhD level. They study philosophy, psychology, economics and politics. After graduation, some will go abroad, to teach in Islamic and non-Islamic nations.<\/p>\n
Our Q&A is exhilarating. Many of my interlocutors are already teachers, and most will become scholars. Their questions are sharp; some are extremely well informed. There\u2019s so much eagerness to know detail after detail about life in the West.<\/p>\n
The next day I visit the Islamic Azad University; more than four million alumni, 1.4 million current students, 29,000 faculty members, 472 campuses and research centers and 617 affiliated high schools. The Karaj campus is the second in importance in Iran.<\/p>\n
This is an extraordinary experience. The hillside campus may not be a UCLA, but puts to shame many prestigious universities across Europe. Not to mention the annual tuition fees; only US$1,000 on average. Sanctions? What sanctions? Most of the equipment may yield from the 1980s, but they have everything they need. As attested by jovial master architect Ali Kazemi, who spent 16 years in Paris after graduating from Nanterre, the academic standards are very high.<\/p>\n
Rector Mohammad Hasan Borhanifar \u2013 formerly at the University of Kyrgyzstan in Bishkek \u2013 opens all the doors at the campus. I\u2019m shepherded by Mohammad Hashamdar, from the Faculty of Languages. I talk to the deans of all faculties and have a Q&A with students, mostly in international relations.<\/p>\n
Even before the proclamation of the \u201cstrongest sanctions in history,\u201d everyone wants details on the US Treasury\u2019s new form of financial war, even more deadly than a hot war. In slightly more than two months, the purchase of US dollars, steel, coal and precious metals will be banned; there will be no more Iranian imports to the US and aviation and the car industry will be under sanctions.<\/p>\n
Airbus may have to cancel multi-billion dollar orders from Iran. An IT professor tells me Iran can buy excellent Sukhoi passenger jets instead. No Peugeots? \u201cWe buy Hyundai.\u201d<\/p>\n
My interlocutors update me on investments by Total, Airbus, BASF, Siemens, Eni \u2013 its branch Saipem signed a $5 billion deal with the National Iranian Oil Company, NIOC, to develop oil and gas fields and ultimately supply energy to Europe. They confirm that if Total pulls out of the development of the 11th phase of the South Pars gas field, the Chinese CNPC will take over.<\/p>\n
Almost 70% of Iran\u2019s oil exports go to China and Asia, 20% go to Europe. Almost 90% of what the EU buys from Iran is oil, going mostly to Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands. Iran remains THE Big Prize, as Dick Cheney well knew; an astonishing $45 trillion in oil and gas reserves.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m slightly alarmed when, talking to the Friday prayer imam \u2013 who is the actual representative of Ayatollah Khamenei in Karaj \u2013 he\u2019s clueless about the New Silk Roads. Just as the Ancient Silk Road allowed Buddhism to fertilize Chinese culture, Iran, India and China are bound to cross-fertilize again; imagine a trans-Eurasia lab equipped with a wide gene pool and well-educated young armada searching for creative solutions.<\/p>\n
The LA freeway hell pales in comparison with being stuck in a monster three-hour traffic jam from Tehran to Karaj, only 25 kilometers. I duly incorporate a Persian imprecation to my vocabulary; kharab beshe, which in polite translation means \u201cgoing to nowhere.\u201d I miss my requisite geopolitical dinner with Professor Marandi of the University of Tehran; we do it later on Whatsapp \u2013 like MBS and Jared Kushner.<\/p>\n
What daily life in 17 million-strong, congested to death Tehran reveals is the standard of living essentially of a mid-level emerging nation. Everyone has a car, and smartphones and wi-fi are ubiquitous. In parallel, everywhere we feel intimations of a Persian civilization boasting at least a millennium of fabulous history even before Islam was born. And when we talk to the secularized intellectual elite, it\u2019s clear that for them, in comparison, Arabs are nothing but trouble.<\/p>\n
Everywhere I go I\u2019m back in the \u201970s; the whole infrastructure seems decades old, but everything works. Except for timing; Iran might as well be the land of magical realism 2.0, where the unexpected happens when all hope has been forsaken.<\/p>\n
In Mashhad, I\u2019m the guest in a political talk show on Khorasan TV \u2013 in a studio immaculately preserved from the \u201970s. Yes, this is the heart of the fabled Khorasan \u2013 \u201cwhere the sun arrives from\u201d \u2013 that transfixed Alexander The Great. I spend half an hour dissecting the JCPOA; my translator is an over-qualified import-export expert. Khorasan TV\u2019s blockbuster is an American-style cop show essentially covering road accidents in real time; after all, the crime rate is negligible.<\/p>\n
Real inflation is at 16% a year \u2013 so far. Foreign exchange inflation is much higher. Real youth unemployment is at a steep 30%, in a country of 80 million where the median age is 29 and 40% of the population is under 24. One of my translators in Karaj, Ali, is 24; he\u2019s unemployed, learned English by watching DVDs and cannot afford to rent his own place.<\/p>\n
Under the new rial devaluation, the median regional salary plunged to about US$250 per month. One cannot rent a 40 square meter apartment near Azad University for less than $200 per month.<\/p>\n
I stop for a late night pizza in Mashhad. The bill reads a whopping 200,000 rials; that\u2019s a little more than $3. The euro in the black market spikes to nearly 80,000 rials.<\/p>\n
Telegram has been blocked \u2013 but still, everyone uses both Telegram and WhatsApp. Some VPNs work, some don\u2019t. The block was not necessarily linked to the spread of anti-government rumors during the January street protests \u2013 which actually started in Mashhad.<\/p>\n
Elaheh, who did her language master in France; Bojan, who has a PhD in economics from San Diego State; or Ayoub Farkhondeh, who works on terrorism studies at the Habilian research institute, are all amused by the \u201cbizarre\u201d coverage by Western media of all things Iran.<\/p>\n
The analysis of well-educated people in both Mashhad and Tehran tends to qualify the protests as essentially IMF riots \u2013 which happen when the Washington Consensus forces governments to reduce subsidies. Real revolutions, in Iran, involve clerics, middle-class intellectuals and the bazaaris.<\/p>\n
This time the focus was the grassroots; the working class in small provincial cities. Millions in Iran, after all, depend on government salaries and subsidies. In contrast, Team Rouhani is essentially neoliberal.<\/p>\n
Of course, there\u2019s government criticism \u2013 more towards the clerics than neoliberal Team Rouhani. Businessmen told me of untold ministerial-level corruption \u2013 but it\u2019s virtually impossible to verify the numbers. The Pasdaran, as the IRGC is referred to, continue to control a great deal of the economy and to manage a welfare system and client system that distributes favors to millions of people, but also imposes rigid social control.<\/p>\n
At the same time, not looking at Iran via a windowless cubicle in Washington but actually on the ground, it\u2019s clear that NSC Adviser John Bolton\u2019s plan to revive the Mujahedin-e Khalq, known as MEK, to attempt a color revolution will fail miserably. MEK is universally despised. The whole of Iranian society won\u2019t blame either Khamenei or Rouhani for the incoming economic war.<\/p>\n
Persian politeness, hospitality and graciousness always strike a visitor as deeply touching. All that combined with an obsession with the image that the West has of Iran. Iran does not seek \u201cisolation\u201d; it\u2019s Washington politics that wants it isolated.<\/p>\n
So no wonder Europe is on the spot. The EU will activate a 1996 law which forbids European companies to comply with US sanctions, protecting them \u201cagainst the effects of the extra-territorial application of legislation adopted by a third country.\u201d Still, the question is ubiquitous; \u201cThe Europeans will side with us or the Americans?\u201d<\/p>\n
In parallel, Iranians don\u2019t want to be like the West. And the best way to understand it is by visiting the Imam Reza shrine over and over again \u2013 I went early in the morning, after an afternoon storm, and at night.<\/p>\n
The Imam Reza shrine, known as Astan Qods-e Razavi, is a marvel enveloped in golden and turquoise domes, lavish minarets and 12 courtyards spread over one million square meters. It hosts the largest Iranian NGO; a centuries-old administrative structure encompassing eight general directorates, more than 50 industrial, agricultural and service companies, over 15 cultural and research institutions and more than 12,000 students.<\/p>\n
The 12th-century library at the shrine is one of the world\u2019s oldest, along with Alexandria, the Vatican and Topkaki. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered its preservation. The public library holds four million books in more than 90 languages. There\u2019s even a lab to \u201ccure book diseases.\u201d Mashhad runs a library in India plus a documentation center with more than 18 million items, including a 1,300-year-old document linked to Imam Ali.<\/p>\n
Before leaving on a night flight to Doha, I visit the shrine one last time with two fine, steeped in history, Italian observers, ace journalist Giulietto Chiesa and writer Roberto Quaglia. It\u2019s the first day of Ramadan. We\u2019re speechless facing the crossover of aesthetic beauty, spiritual illumination and plain old fun.<\/p>\n
Whole families gather, improvise a picnic, chat, take selfies, kids roam around playing. Instead of being glued to some dodgy version of Big Brother, like most across the West, they prefer to live life in a shrine. It is indeed an organic \u201cthird day,\u201d like a government insider told me in Tehran.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a Chinese train is snaking along from Mongolia to Tehran carrying sunflower seeds. While the dogs of war bark, the Ancient \u2013 and New \u2013 Silk Road goes on forever.<\/p>\n
By Pepe Escobar, Atimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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