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Iran's endogenous civil-rights movement needs international solidarity, not political meddling. Academics, universities and non-governmental organizations can help.

In the face of this bleak news, however, Iranian academics are surprisingly optimistic. They tend to buy into the argument that, despite the current crackdown, greater democracy is inevitable in Iran, which will provide an open society that is more conducive to science and critical thinking. They point out that Iran and Turkey are the two Muslim countries with the strongest democratic and secular traditions — and that academics have played a major part in helping the society resist religious obscurantism. Iran is not the only country in the region where human rights and democracy are violated; and the West has hypocritically been relatively silent on similar abuses by several of its allies in the Middle East. But in Iran at least, the country's long traditions of democracy, education and free thinking — suppressed for decades by the regime, and in particular the current hard-line leadership — are now out in the open.