As I write, angry demonstrations continue in Tehran and elsewhere in the Islamic Republic of Iran, over what the young demonstrators perceive as the blatant rigging of the presidential election to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power for another five years. Reports suggest at least eight protestors have been killed by police.

“The time for dancing and shouting is over”, one riot policeman told a western journalist, as the police crack down on what was an extraordinarily vibrant, boisterous and participatory election campaign.

It is a frosty ending for what had been a genuinely exciting and optimistic spring in Middle Eastern politics.

Consider: in early June, Lebanon successfully held its second ever free democratic elections. More important than the fact that Hezbollah’s coalition failed to win a parliamentary majority is the fact that Hezbollah accepted the result. A Middle Eastern government was democratically elected, without bloodshed.

This follows the provincial elections in Iraq in January, where millions of Iraqis risked their lives to assert the right to choose their government. Monthly civilian casualties in Iraq are now the lowest they have been since the start of the war.

In June, US president Barack Obama did wonders for US-Middle Eastern relations, by giving an intelligent and non-patronising speech at Cairo University, by not dividing the world into simplistic Manichean divisions of Good and Evil and, in short, by not being George W. Bush.

Obama’s insistence on the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Palestinian territories, and on the creation of a viable state for Palestinians, seems to be bearing fruit. In mid-June, Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu publicly supported the creation of a Palestinian state, something he’d never done before.

In May, the UAE arrested a businessman for the torture of a former partner. What was unusual was that the businessman is a member of the UAE royal family, and it is the first time any royal has been arrested in the Gulf.

And a little further back, in February, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah appointed the country’s first ever female minister, as part of a broad government reshuffle that weakened ultra-conservatives and promoted several reformist-minded politicians.

These are all tiny, incremental steps. But still, they are in the right direction, towards the dream of a stable, prosperous, democratic Middle East.

And then the Iranian Revolutionary Guard weighs in with its batons, while the Ayatollah Khameni, Iran’s Supreme Leader, declares insouciantly: “There was truly a divine hand behind this election.”

Khameni has since backed down from that remark, and from his initial, perhaps outspoken, support for the election result. The Guardian Council, a powerful clerical group in Iran, has also suggested a re-count of the election.

The u-turn of the clerical establishment suggests it understands the risk to its own power, if the Islamic Republic is perceived by its own citizens to have lost its moral and political legitimacy.

When the Republic came to power, during the 1979 revolution, it had enormous domestic legitimacy because it appeared to introduce a more democratic, just and Islamic form of government, after the elitism, autocracy and corruption of the Shah’s regime.

The successful alliance of democracy with Islamism sent shockwaves through the whole Middle East, providing a powerful role-model for other democratic, revolutionary, Islamist forces in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere.

Now, as in Animal Farm, the new revolutionaries have turned out to be just as bad as the old despots. The divine hand of Iran’s theocracy has been caught in the ballot box, stuffing votes. This threatens not just the legitimacy of the Iranian government, but the legitimacy of the wider Islamist movement.

The Middle East’s ayatollahs, imams and mullahs have risen to political prominence, and in some cases power, because they provided an outlet for democratic yearnings denied by many of the region’s autocratic regimes. If they are now seen to stand in the way of those yearnings, they may find that they too are swept away in time, like so many divine regimes before them.

Jules Evans, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, London

June 17, 2009