The kicker from Graeme Wood's dispatch on the Iranian holy city of Qom:
Despite their conservatism, Qom’s pilgrims seemed motivated not by passion for Ahmadinejad—I never heard anyone say his name, though the “Leader” Ali Khamenei was mentioned repeatedly over outdoor loudspeakers—but by a total denial of politics, and a preference for something much simpler. In Tehran the previous week, I’d heard many rumors about protests, violence, provocation. Here I saw no sign of disloyalty to the government (save one: on a campaign bumper sticker with a picture of Ahmadinejad next to the slogan Man of the People, someone had scraped out his eyes and cheeks). Instead, I felt the opposite of the idealistic flurries of this summer’s protests—the happy docility of a one-party state.
Or rather, surely, the indifference to politics that true faith evokes. There is such a faith in Islam, and it is obviously as different from Islamism as true Christianity is from Christianism. Because it is based on a transcendent experience of God that makes the desire to control others, rather than to love them, seem absurd.
The Dish 