Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted." He is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His Web site is http://www.hamiddabashi.com/ Hamid Dabashi says it's wrong to view the conflict in Iran as a battle of the middle class vs. the poor. (CNN) --   In a short essay that Abbas Amanat, a scholar of 19th-century Iran at Yale University, was asked to write for The New York Times on the current crisis in Iran, he asserted that what we are witnessing is "the rise of a new middle class whose demands stand in contrast to the radicalism of the incumbent President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and the core conservative values of the clerical elite, which no doubt has the backing of a religiously conservative sector of the population."
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Hamid Dabashi: Some are depicting Iran conflict as a battle of middle class vs. poor
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Dabashi: Mir Hossein Moussavi draws support from wider group than middle class
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He says it's wrong to say Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supporters are poor, rural Iranians
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Dabashi says best parallel may be to the U.S. civil rights movement of 1960s
Highly educated, pro-Western and progressive Iranians are thus placed on @placeholder's side, while backward villagers and urban poor are on Ahmadinejad's.