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"Commander of Iran's Basij (volunteer) force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi reiterated that Iran's Islamic Revolution serves as a role model for the regional and world nations in their fight against the tyranny of their rulers and arrogant powers. Today the great victories of the Islamic Revolution still continue unabatedly, and large communities of the world people are speedily attracted to the logic, firmness and power of the Islamic Revolution and model on us," Naqdi said, addressing people in the Northwestern city of Tabriz on Thursday. He underlined the failure of the US, Europe and their affiliates and hirelings inside Iran to defeat the Islamic Revolution, and warned that enemies are now attempting to prevent the world countries from joining the Islamic Revolution and modeling on the path of the Iranian people…………”

Iranian leaders and officials have been insisting that the Arab uprisings are an imitation of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, that either they aim at establishing Islamic states or were inspired by the Iranian example. All this against the overwhelming evidence that these uprisings were/are movements related to political and economic conditions in the countries concerned. On the other hand, some analysts, especially in the West, claim that the Arab uprisings were inspired to some extent by the Iranian opposition and its protests in 2009.
It is true that many Arabs admire the independence shown by Iran in facing Western sanctions and threats, leaving it nearly the only regional power that is not reliant on the West or fearful of it. But that is where it stops. Most Arabs have no desire to imitate the Iranian theocracy, not in the Gulf region, not in other parts of the Arab world. It is not necessarily a sectarian issue: Arabs, both Sunnis and Shi’as, mostly agree on this, despite what the sectarian Saudi and Bahraini media and Salafi propaganda claim.
Most Arabs would like to get rid of their dictators and corrupt absolute kings, but not with the goal of replacing them with a rule of the Shi’a mullahs or the Sunni/Salafi muftis and shaikhs.
Instead of near-total theocracies, as in Iran or Saudi Arabia, it looks like most of them will get quasi-theocracies, as in Egypt and Libya and possibly Syria.

The Iranians are not the only ones with such illusions and claims: they are just the most persistent. I have read articles written by toadies of Saudi and Emirati potentates, disguised as journalists and academics, who claim the same for their royal paymasters. They claim that perhaps the rising Arab masses should look up to the experience of the al-Saud or al-Nahayan.
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com