The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post have dubbed it a “Twitter Revolution,” speculating about whether new technology will enable Iranian protesters to overcome government forces. The role of technology in the current unrest is well-covered elsewhere. What is lacking in much of the coverage, however, is a sense of context.

Technology has been essential both to empire formation and preservation, and to state degradation in the Middle East. The late historian Marshall G.S. Hodgson described the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires as “gunpowder empires.” Their sultans and shahs consolidated control over expansive territories by controlling weaponry which potential aspirants to power along the periphery did not have. Once the central government lost monopoly over guns and cannons, however, the empires fractured—devolving into fiefdoms or dissolving completely.

In Iran, technology played a particularly important role in state preservation Looking at 18th and early 19th century atlases, borders are all over the place. Discrepancies of dozens if not hundreds of miles mark frontiers on maps published by different gazetteers. Whereas today imperialism is presented in almost cartoonish terms as a free-for-all, in reality there were huge debates during the 19th century whether or not to expand imperial control over various territories. Imperial rule was an expensive prospect, and so many imperial powers preferred to advance informal control.

Britain did this in Iran by supporting various regional officials—for example, briefly recognizing the autonomy of Makran (Baluchistan) in the mid-19th century and flirting with Sheikh Khazal in Khuzistan at the beginning of the 20th century. While rulers could claim as much territory as they liked, the real litmus test was whether they were able to extract taxes. Sometimes governors or sub-district governors along a country’s periphery, many of whom paid for their offices, calculated they could keep all the revenue for themselves and not remit anything to the center. Often, foreign powers encouraged such defiance (e.g. in Georgia, Kuwait, Herat, and Khorramshahr).

This would create a quandary for the Shah. If he ignored the governor’s defiance, he would effectively lose that province. Mobilizing the military and launching a punitive expedition, however, was extremely expensive. As Iran flirted with bankruptcy throughout the 19th century, the Shah had very few resources at his disposal, and the periphery knew it.

Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), however, embraced the telegraph. He could threaten and cajole opponents, and keep on top of the latest intelligence. What were the Russians doing in Azerbaijan? What were Kurdish tribes doing across the Ottoman frontier? Could he afford to dispatch the army and still maintain his security? In many ways, it was the telegraph which allowed the Shah to play foreign powers and domestic competitors off each other and preserve Iranian independence, even in the regime’s weakened state.

What was a blessing for the government and for the consolidation of the state, however, turned into a liability. Over time, the Shah’s government lost control over the communications network. While the popular belief in the 1860s and 1870s was that the telegraph ended at the Shah’s throne, myriad Iranian groups discovered that they could communicate directly with each other and against the central government. This became quite clear in the early 1890s when, desperate to raise revenue, the Nasir al-Din Shah granted the unpopular Tobacco Regie which gave the British a monopoly over all phases of one of Iran’s most important industries, from agriculture to sale. Liberals, nationalists, and clerics joined forces to force the Shah to retract. Clerics in Najaf used the telegraph to issue a fatwa, obeyed even by members of the Shah’s household, prohibiting the use of tobacco until the Shah recanted. The telegraph network enabled the formation of the mass movement.

This point was driven home in the first decade of the 20th century during Iran’s constitutional revolution. Britain backed constitutional forces, and the Russian government supported the autocrat shah. The conflict was bloody and, just as in Iran today, it made headlines. When reactionary forces laid siege to Tabriz, then Iran’s second largest city, British papers reported news of the deprivation and starvation received by telegraph. What once would have occurred without notice in Europe, sparked outrage.

As the Shah cracked down, a broad array of constitutionalists, nationalists, liberals, clerics, and Bakhtiari tribesmen coordinated their actions by wire. The Shah’s forces sought to cut the wires, but the network was too vast, and not entirely under the government’s control. Importantly, the telegraph extended across the frontier into what now is Iraq. Senior clerics cabled instructions from Najaf and Karbala.

Technology created a template upon which the opposition could act. Oppression was a constant during the Qajar period and, indeed, before. It was technology, however, that enabled the mass movement; it simply could not occur before the technology template was laid.

Into the 20th century, the Iranian government sought again to dominate technology. Early in Reza Shah’s reign (1925-1941), the Iranian government controlled radio. Under his son and successor, the state controlled television. However, it could not control audio tapes smuggled across the border from Iraq, and so in the 15 years before the Islamic Revolution, the audio cassette—easily copied and distributed—was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s only means of communication. While Khomeini’s image is iconic now, it should be remembered that until his return to Iran, many Iranians knew his voice but had not seen his image.

The Islamic Republic knows it is unpopular, and knows its vulnerability to technology. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stepped in to cancel a 2004 contract granted to Turkcell to create an independent cell phone network in Iran. Only this past year did the Iranian government bless the introduction of multimedia messaging services in the Islamic Republic. It could be a decision the Islamic Republic will not live long enough to regret.

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The Internet and Democracy project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (which graciously provides hosting services for MESH) has produced a map of the Arabic blogosphere. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge, and download the full report here. The key finding:

Most bloggers write mainly personal, diary-style observations. But when writing about politics, bloggers tend to focus on issues within their own country, and are more often than not critical of domestic political leaders. Foreign political leaders are discussed less often, but also more in negative than positive terms. Domestic news is more popular than international news among general politics and public life topics. The one political issue that clearly concerns bloggers across the Arab world is Palestine, and in particular the situation in Gaza (Israel’s December 2008/January 2009 military action occurred during the study). Other popular topics include religion (more in personal than political terms) and human rights (more common than criticism of western culture and values). Terrorism and the US are not major topics. When discussing terrorism, Arab bloggers are overwhelmingly critical of terrorists. When the US is discussed, it is nearly always critically.

Information Week publishes a story on the Internet Mapping Project:

2008 is the tenth anniversary of a project to map the Internet. Undertaken by Lumeta, the effort was undertaken as a long-range research project to study the growth of the online world…. The project gathers routing data to all backbone routers hosted by ISPs. The map shows only the shortest path to each router. Lumeta says these paths can change over time as routers are reconfigured. Maps can be constructed based on a variety of data points, including IP address blocks, geography, Top Level Domains (TLDs) and service providers.

The report is accompanied by a number of sample maps, including this internet map of the Middle East. (Click on thumbnail to enlarge.)

The Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, has just published a new study, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere. The image below is the resulting map of the Iranian blogosphere (click on the image for a larger view). From the study’s abstract:

Social network analysis reveals the Iranian blogosphere to be dominated by four major network formations, or poles, with identifiable sub-clusters of bloggers within those poles. We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks…. Given the repressive political and media environment, and high profile arrests and harassment of bloggers, one might not expect to find much political contestation in the blogosphere. However, we identified a subset of the secular/reformist pole focused intently on politics and current affairs and comprised mainly of bloggers living inside Iran, which is linked in contentious dialog with the conservative political sub-cluster. Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to blog anonymously. Blocking of blogs by the government is less pervasive than we had assumed.

Download the report here (pdf). And while we’re at it, MESH would like to take the opportunity to thank the Berkman Center for hosting the MESH website.

According to Philip Bennett, managing editor of the Washington Post, Americans lack a proper understanding of Islam. Contemporary media practice is to blame, and it is the job of the same media to fix it. His immediate proposals: hiring more Muslim journalists, better translations of Arabic words or terms and greater descriptive precision. The latter might include dropping the term “Islamist” as a characterization of certain Muslim political movements. Bennett presented these views in a talk delivered at the University of California-Irvine and it was reported in the Daily Pilot, the Newport Beach newspaper.

To be sure, Americans know relatively little about Islam. They also know relatively little about Hinduism, Buddhism and Shintoism and not a few other things besides. Just why is it the special duty of American newspapers to make Americans knowledgeable about Islam? And is it really plausible that newspapers could accomplish this task? In fact, the proposals Bennett makes to address the problem are more likely to do harm than good. But he may represent a growing consensus.

The first difficulty is that newspapers are simply not intended or designed to provide a general education in any subject, let alone one like Islam, which has a 1,400-year long and complicated history. Their role is to report the news. Of course, these days newspapers supplement that with feature stories, and if these are good and long—indeed, very long—they can be helpful. But for better or for worse, if Americans are to become deeply knowledgeable about Islam, they will have to invest more time and effort than is required by reading newspapers.

Nor will having more Muslim reporters necessarily help. This assumes that Muslim reporters are both necessarily deeply knowledgeable about Islam and have no intra-Muslim biases of their own. Take the division of contemporary Muslims into Sunnis and Shiites. The usual description of the character and grounds of the differences between them in news stories is inadequate, limiting itself at best to its origin in the quarrel about the succession to Muhammad. This is less adequate than it needs to be, and some fairly simple remedy could be proposed.

But is the remedy more Muslim journalists? Quite a few Sunnis and Shiites know relatively little about one another’s beliefs and history. Moreover, the antipathy between them could lead to biased reporting—anti-Sunni or anti-Shiite respectively—of a different sort. Or does Bennett propose to have both Sunnis and Shiites on staff and limit them to reporting on their respective affiliations? If so, one might wonder why this practice should not be extended to other religions to allow for intra-Catholic, intra-Protestant and intra-Jewish differences and disputes.

It is unclear whether Bennett has thought about any of this. But what is clear is that his idea resembles an all too common and regrettable view that only members of specific religious or other societal groups are fit students and interpreters of such groups. This view has its recent American origins in American universities. It has already done a great deal of damage there, where one of its chief consequences has been to render much scholarship akin to apologetics. It would be regrettable if apologetics were to replace reporting as well.

There is some hint of this in Bennett’s remarks, particularly where the report comes to the question of terms. Apparently there was some discussion of terms like “jihad,” “madrassa,” and “hijab,” and hand-wringing about their alleged mistranslation. What this meant with regard to madrassa and hijab is not stated and is, even in the case of hijab, hard to imagine except for students like myself of arcane medieval discussions of Sufism and related matters.

In the case of jihad, there was the standard belaboring of the fact that it sometimes means warfare but also may mean “struggle and valiant attempt.” Precisely because this belaboring has become so standard, it is hard to believe that “mistranslation” is today the issue or problem. The real and obvious question is how many Muslims embrace the one or the other and with what energy, and that has nothing to do with what newspapers say or do not say.

The somewhat new issue concerns the term “Islamist.” The use of this term is apparently being debated in newsrooms, with some urging it to be dropped as too vague. This perhaps reflects and derives from a similar debate in the American academy, where the issue less concerns vagueness than the possibility that non-Muslims might identify Islamism—i.e., radical Islam—with Islam itself, and so identify Islam with violence.

It would be unfortunate if this term were dropped. Indeed, it would make reporting more inaccurate rather than less, and if accuracy is genuinely the concern of newspapers it should be retained. Although the term Islamism is not free of ambiguities (neither is the word Islam itself, so should we stop speaking of it as well?), it is not simply vague. It refers to the radical ideological and political movement which arose upon the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. To be sure, this movement now embraces a variety of organizations, including Al Qaeda, which disagree and diverge from one another (often with great hostility). But they still retain enough in common to be describable with the same term, and such distinctions among them as are necessary can be appropriately made. (A case also can be made for Salafism, but its present disadvantage is that, at best, it would cover only Sunni and not Shiite groups.)

At all events, the great utility and advantage of the term Islamism is precisely that it makes a distinction between Islam as such and its contemporary radical offshoots. In fact, so far as I’m aware its first usage in English about forty years ago was by the late Pakistani theologian and scholar Fazlur Rahman. (For full disclosure, he was my teacher.) His purpose was precisely to draw this distinction and to protect Islam from being confused with radical groups. Since this seems also to be the purpose of Mr. Bennett and others, they would be well advised to continue using it. Otherwise they will contribute to that which they fear: anti-Muslim bias.

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