ATHENS -- To understand the development of the democratic experience in Iran 'we must reject Washington's spurious optimism whereby it gloats over the occasional eruption of protest in Iran as a sign of the imminent demise of the Islamic republic', wrote the Egyptian al-Ahram weekly in its latest edition, IRNA reported.

"How frequently the U.S. has criticized Arab regimes for having insufficient freedom of expression, pluralism and avenues of peaceful protest. Yet, when such phenomena do exist, as in Iran, Washington depicts them, not as manifestations of democracy but as a state of revolt, so keen it is on overturning Tehran's elected government and implanting a non-democratic puppet regime as it hopes to do in Iraq," noted the English-language paper.

The democratic experiment in Iran is perhaps the most complex and, simultaneously, dynamic of such experiences in the Arab and Islamic world.

Indeed, the importance of the Iranian experiment resides in the precedent it has set for applying Shari'a within a modern, democratic framework of government, wrote Amr Elchoubaki in the weekly.

Iran has a parliament whose representatives are popularly-elected in polls that are a far cry from the ballot-rigging culture prevalent in the Arab world, it said.

There is considerable scope for the expression of diverse and rival political trends. These can roughly be subsumed under the headings reformist and conservative, which sometimes overlap.

The vibrancy of democracy in Iran stands in stark contrast to the experiments in restricted plurality in the Arab world and to those Arab and Islamic regimes that hide their moral and political bankruptcy behind ideological slogans, as was the case with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Afghanistan of the Taliban, wrote the paper.

"The Iranian experience has succeeded in creating democratic channels for political debate and procedural mechanisms permitting for revision and reform.

"Because of these channels and mechanisms, Iran, since the beginning of President Khatami's term in office, has undergone numerous reforms leading to greater democratization and political openness," the daily points out.

"If the road to democracy is a progressive process, entailing an ongoing grass-roots struggle, the interplay between pressure groups, peaceful protests and the like, Iran possesses the necessary mechanisms to sustain the process.

"This is why it has not suffered, nor is it likely to suffer, the arterial sclerosis that has affected most Arab and Islamic societies, in which the sudden coup seems always to loom as the answer to political change or where withdrawal from political participation is the only available mode of protest," concludes al-Ahram.