Iran: The 1st Chapter of the 21st Century?

I just read Professor Hamid Dabashi’s most recent Iran-piece on Al-Ahram Weekly. There was so much to quote from that I had a difficult time choosing which one. I’m going with the last paragraph, which is itself a quote he took from an Iranian blogger. I usually get a little sick to my stomach when I hear Iranians inflating their sense of self-importance but I rather enjoyed this excerpt: In the history books of the 21st century, the first chapter will be about us. In the introduction, they might write that important events have happened before us, events like 9/11 and war on Iraq and Afghanistan, but those were the remnants of the previous century, with an outdated language and with 20th century tools: airplanes, bombs and bullets. And then they will write that the first chapter is dedicated to us because we have been the true children of our time … They will write that we were the first social movement of which all of us were its leader and all of us were its organiser … They may make a subsection to describe how a movement without a command centre was acting so well- orchestrated. How its ideas, desires and slogans were suggested, criticised, and completed so well, and then one day they were expressed in such a harmony as if all these millions had practiced them together for years … In the same chapter they will write that we lived the last days of guns and bullets and we showed that where awareness, information and channels of communication for human connection exist, bullets are pointless. They may put a picture of a single bullet somewhere in our Freedom Museum and write for its caption “the last bullet that was ever pulled out of a magazine.