What do you think of this sentence?
Ms. Ebadi is hardly afraid of jail, having spent time there, but she probably understands that what the West wants Muslim so-called moderates to say and to promote is merely a vision of a secular culture imported from the West, a vision that doesn't carry much weight with a people that is moving, albeit very slowly, to a democracy that is self-defined and that may not be recognizable to Westerners, accustomed to defining democracy as either liberal or not a democracy at all.
This is from Hooman Majd's rather good The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran.
Or how about this?
Although anonymity excuses the Persian from ta'arouf, and public speaking is the antithesis of anonymous behaviour, Ahmad Khatami and others who make such speeches are speaking on behalf of the nation (or the clerical establishment) and against another nation, and the collective 'we' makes them impersonal outbursts that some Iranian politicians today, with a sense of power that Shias haven't felt in centuries, believe appeal to the masses of their supporters who are more accustomed to being the downtrodden and oppressed majority of society than a people that can strike back against any injustice.
The book's full of sentences like this. Is it just me, or does Mr Majd expect a deep recursion stack in the brains of all his readers?
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