Gandhi, Nonviolence, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy protests: A Discussion of the power of nonviolent protest
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Ramin Jahanbegloo, a dual Canadian-Iranian citizen who has been described in the media as “the Gandhi of Iran,” was arrested in 2006 while leaving Tehran for a conference in Brussels. The University of Toronto politics professor spent the next four months in Iran’s notorious Evin House of Detention; his captors accused him of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government. “They said ‘You’ve been preparing a velvet revolution, a soft revolution.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve never written about soft revolution.’ They took it from there,” Jahanbegloo told The Hour’s George Stroumboulopoulos in 2008. At the time of his arrest, to be a Canadian in Iran was to be considered a spy, he explained.
Jahanbegloo, who espouses a philosophy of nonviolence, once ran an independent research center in Iran. He invited scholars and intellectuals from all over the world to visit, including Richard Rorty, Timothy Garton Ash, Antonio Negri, and Michael Ignatieff. During his incarceration, people such as Noam Chomsky, J.M. Coetzee, Shirin Ebadi, Umberto Eco, Jürgen Habermas, Leszek Kolakowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Howard Zinn demanded his immediate release.
“There were no names I could give,” Jahanbegloo told the New York Times in 2007. “I could give only names of philosophers. There was no way I could reveal any secrets. There were no secrets.”