The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution

by Amir Taheri

  Another group on the left of the Khomeinist establishment is the Holy Warriors of the Islamic Revolution (Mujahedin e Enqelaab Eslami). This is a small but influential organization bringing together technocrats, former officials, businessmen, and university teachers, often with a leftist background. Many members came from various proto-Marxist groups that were active before the revolution and converted to Khomeinism after the mullahs seized power. The group’s leader is Behzad nabavi, a former deputy prime minister and industry minister. The group’s political “godfather” is former prime minister Mir-Hussein Mussavi Khamenehi, who has emerged as a symbolic leader for the Khomeinist left.

  Theoretically at least, the Scientific Center of Qom (Howzeh e Elmieh e Qom) should be a bastion of Khomeinism. But it is not. (The “scientific” in the name refers to theology rather than modern sciences.) The center groups together several thousand teachers of theology and their students and thus wields considerable influence within the Shiite clergy in Iran. It has had an uneasy relationship with the revolutionary establishment, benefiting from its favors, but at the same time implicitly opposing the principle of walayat e faqih, or rule by the theologian. The best-known members of this group are Ayatollahs nasser Makarem Shirazi and Muhammad Fazel Lenkorani, who died in 2007. The latter was a teacher of Khamenehi, and thus enjoyed considerable influence within the establishment.

  Another grouping of mullahs is known as the Association of Friday Prayer Leaders (Jamiat e A’emeh namaz Jamaat). This groups together an estimated eight thousand mullahs who lead Friday prayer ceremonies at mosques in all localities in Iran with a population of ten thousand or more. Most of them have been appointed by the Supreme Guide and receive monthly stipends from his office. Some, however, owe their position to local notoriety and thus speak more independently on issues. The group meets several times a year, and plays a role in launching new ideas and starting debate on issues, often with more than a hint from the office of the Supreme Guide.

  The Tehran Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Otaq e Bazargani va Sanay e Tehran) could also be regarded as a lobby group. This is the most powerful organization of businessmen and private industrialists in Iran with influence beyond the capital. It has a mass following through a range of charity organizations it has financed for decades. The powerful bazaaris who backed Khomeini against the shah have now rallied within the chamber to exert influence on the government. Their principal leaders are the former commerce ministers Habiballah Askar-Owladi and Hadi Khamoushi. In the presidential election of 1997, the chamber backed nateq-nuri, the losing candidate, against Khatami. In 2005 it supported Rafsanjani, who also lost, against Ahmadinejad. nevertheless, at least a third of the members of the Majlis (parliament) depend on the chamber for campaign finance and other forms of support.

  The Khomeinist regime won power by seizing control of the streets through violence and terror. Therefore, it is always concerned about losing the streets to its many opponents. To prevent that, the regime has created a number of groups that recruit, train, and deploy street fighters. The most important of these is the Victorious Companions of the Party of God (Ansar e Hezballah). A semi-clandestine organization, this branch of Hezballah is believed to be financed by the office of the Supreme Guide. Its members are recruited from among the professional “tough guys” of south Tehran’s rough neighborhoods and used as shock troops against opposition on the streets. Hezballah also has the task of organizing the “spontaneous” demonstrations that the establishment needs every now and then. The Iranian branch of Hezballah is the hardcore of an international movement with branches in seventeen other Muslim countries, notably Turkey, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The best-known spokesman for Hezballah is Ayatollah Ahmad Janati Kermani, a close advisor of the Supreme Guide. Hezballah’s shock brigades are led by Reza Allah-Karam, who wears a military-style uniform and calls himself “General.” In the 1997 presidential election, Allah-Karam backed nateq-nuri and announced he would never allow Khatami to serve a full term as president. Allah-Karam’s shock brigades are used for raiding the offices of newspapers regarded as “deviant” and homes of individuals critical of the regime. Estimates put the number of Hezballah’s full-timers at around 50,000, all of them on a special payroll provided by the office of the Supreme Guide. However, the group also employs over 250,000 part-time “strugglers” when larger numbers are needed to confront an opposition demonstration.

  Leaders of the various branches of Hezballah around the world gather in Tehran every February, along with representatives of other radical Islamic movements, to compare notes, pay tribute to Khomeini’s memory, and coordinate strategy in various countries.

  If Hezballah is in charge of crushing political dissent in the streets, the task of curbing social and cultural “deviations” is assigned to another organ of repression known as the Committee to Propagate the Good and Prevent the Evil (Komiteh Amr be Maarouf va nahy az Munkar). This is a strictly religious version of Hezballah and is used to impose rules regarding dress, and the ban on alcoholic beverages and other “objects of evil” such as chessboards, playing cards, Western CDs, video and audio cassettes. The enforcement arm of the organization is called the Blood of Allah (Thar Allah) and consists of men and women driving separately in special vehicles, looking for “un-Islamic” behavior. Thar Allah units often take position in shopping centers, close to cinemas and theaters, in streets near university campuses, in hotel lobbies, and other places where “un-Islamic” acts may be committed. The purely female branch is known as the Sisters of Zaynab (Khaharan Zaynab), mostly volunteers who give the organization a few hours a week. Many women, especially in Tehran, regard the ferocious-looking “sisters” with terror.

  Born in an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue, the Khomeinist movement, like fascist movements elsewhere, always depended on a number of clandestine organizations to shield it against the outside world. Even today, almost thirty years in power, the Khomeinist movement relies on secret societies to recruit supporters, collect information, and isolate the “outsiders.” The most important of these secret organizations is the Society of the Pledge (Jamiyat e Hojatieh), a religious group that made its first appearance in the 1950s with a massive and at times violent campaign against the Baha’i community. In 1950, the Hojatieh persuaded Shamseddin Jazayeri, minister of education in the cabinet of Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara, to purge Baha’is and other “deviants,” such as followers of the secularist intellectual Ahmad Kasravi, from government schools. Within months, over four thousand teachers were purged. The society then allied itself with conservative monarchists against the centrist government of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq and its Communist supporters. After Mossadeq’s dismissal by the shah in 1953, Hojatieh reaped the rewards of its cooperation with monarchists in the form of a green light from the government for another nationwide campaign against the Baha’is. The principal Baha’i religious center, known as Hazirat al-Quds (the Holy Precinct) in Tehran, was razed to the ground while thousands of Baha’is were thrown out of the civil service. From the mid-1950s until his death in 1997, Hojatieh’s best-known figure and possibly leader was Ayatollah Mahmoud Halabi, a cleric of Syrian origin who had studied in the Iranian “holy” city of Qom and acquired Iranian nationality. The main theme of his message was that the Hidden Imam was preparing his return and that Shiites should also prepare to receive him by purging unbelievers and deviants from their midst.

  There is evidence that Hojatieh had some ties with the SAVAK, the secret police under the monarchy; but who used whom remains unclear. It is possible that Hojatieh used SAVAK to secure a free hand for its own activities and to benefit from secret funds funneled by the government. During the 1978-79 revolutionary turmoil, Hojatieh played a marginal part, mostly to counter Communists and other atheists within the anti-shah coalition. It is certain that Halabi opposed Khomeini’s doctrine of walayat e faqih, or rule by a theologian. According to Halabi, all rule belonged to the Hidden Imam and, in his absence, to the Shiite community as a
whole. While Khomeini sought a fusion of the mosque and the state, Halabi believed in their strict separation.

  In the 1983, Khomeini formally disbanded the Hojatieh, seeing it as a threat to his ideological hold over the regime. The Hojatieh, which had never officially announced its existence, took the unusual step of publicly announcing its own dissolution. nevertheless, many key figures of the establishment are known to be members of the Hojatieh, which operates as a series of secret societies pretty much like Russian matryushka dolls. Under its different appellations, including the Society of Mahdaviat, Hojatieh continues to wield financial influence through the countless business concerns it wholly owns or controls. In the duel between the state and the revolution, Hojatieh has generally supported the state because it believes that the clergy should not become directly involved in government. In 2002 and 2003, the government ordered a crackdown against Hojatieh, after accusing it of trying to seize power through infiltration and permeation of key organs of the state. The minister of the interior, Abdolvahed Mussavi-Lari, even claimed that Hojatieh represented “a clear and present danger for national security.” In the end, however, no action was taken, largely because it was never clear who the Hojatieh members were.

  The Hojatieh sponsor some parliamentary candidates, control scores of mosques throughout the country, and maintain close ties with rural areas through a network of religious front organizations supposedly designed to celebrate the birthday of the Hidden Imam and other religious occasions. Ahmadinejad and his religious mentor Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi are believed to be members of the Jamkaran branch of Hojatieh, along with Ayatollah Janati, the powerful secretary general of the Council of the Guardians of the Constitution. Another key figure rumored to be a member is Ghulam-Reza Aqazadeh, the man who heads Iran’s controversial nuclear program. The most reliable studies of Hojatieh and offshoots put the number of members and sympathizers at several hundred thousand.

  Far from being a monolithic system, the Islamic Republic allows an unusual measure of freedom of debate within the perimeters of its fascist ideology. Lacking a single overall political organization, such as the party in the former Communist states, the Islamic Republic has developed a system of decision-making unique in the so-called developing world.

  Apart from the bodies described above, many other smaller interest groups contribute to the debate, and thus to decision-making, at least on specific issues. These include the associations representing such large immigrant groups as the Iraqi refugees (estimated to number about a million), and Lebanese Shiite militants (believed to number around 25,000) who have settled in Iran, often marrying Iranians and securing positions at the middle levels of the revolutionary establishment. Many influential mullahs recruit their personal bodyguards from among Iraqi and Lebanese Shiite militants who are believed to be more dedicated to Khomeini’s universal Islamic revolution.

  A number of press organizations, notably the two giants Kayhan (“Universe”) and Ettelaat (“Information”), also play important roles in guiding the debate and thus affecting the process of decision-making within the establishment. Because no single organ is capable of imposing a blanket censorship of the press, some newspapers have emerged as genuine voices of at least some sections of society, thus giving the established order an additional safety valve. While Kayhan is known as the standard-bearer of the hardcore Khomeinists, Ettelaat has cultivated its image as a moderate voice for the machinery of state, taking some distance from the revolution.

  Iran is a lively and dynamic society where change is a slow but constant factor. Despite appearances, Iranian society today is more open than two decades ago, with the balance of power shifting in favor of civil society. There are as yet few organs through which civil society can directly take part in the debate and decision-making process. But there is no doubt that it exerts some influence through many of the existing organs of the regime.

  The constitution provides for the formation of political parties and trade unions, although this provision has not been put into effect, largely because Khomeini and to some extent Khamenehi have been suspicious of what they regard as models imported from the West. nevertheless, it is possible to say that Iran is moving towards a reorganization of its political life through the creation of political parties. In a sense, major political currents are already to be found within the establishment and could in time be transformed into political parties. Once this happens, the parties would have to seek support beyond the confines of the establishment and within civil society.

  Leaving aside the “Islamic” terminology used by almost everyone within the present establishment, the undercurrents of Iranian society could be described as conservative, liberal, social-democrat, and fascist. With Ahmadinejad’s election, the fascist tendency is in the driver’s seat, supported by the Supreme Guide, and is trying to absorb the state into the revolution and lead the Islamic Republic towards conflict and war with the outside world. nevertheless, the central theme of Iranian politics concerns the role that the state ought to play in the economy and society as a whole. The revolutionary terminology and the theological shorthand in use could be described as the trees that hide the forest.

  Trying to understand Iranian politics and the process of decision-making in religious terms would be missing the point. The central issue of Iranian politics, like politics everywhere, is the acquisition of power and its use for specific purposes. The revolutionary establishment has developed its own vested interests, which defend the status quo and fear change. The machinery of the state, however, is trying to reimpose its supremacy, including in the ideological field, where it emphasizes Iranian nationalism as opposed to Khomeinist pan-Islamism. Many powerful interest groups in Iran see their interest in a re-emergence of the state as the dominant factor in Iranian politics. That would mean the state’s final absorption of the revolution, and the start of the long-promised but so far elusive Iranian Thermidor. Unless this happens, Iranian decision-making is likely to remain erratic, contradictory, and confusing in some areas.

  One man who is determined to prevent this from happening is Ahmadinejad, the first of the six Islamic Republic presidents who wishes to put the state at the service of the revolution, not the other way round.

  23

  The “Nail” of the Imam

  In April 2007, just before he announced that Iran had gate-crashed the “nuclear club,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours. He was in natanz, the nerve center of Iran’s nuclear project, where Iranian scientists are producing the enriched uranium needed for atomic warheads. The ceremony was delayed because the president was having a khalvat (tête-à-tête) with the Hidden Imam, the twelfth and last of the Imams of Shiism, who went into his Grand Occultation in the year 941. According to Shiite lore, the Imam, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World and Master of Time.

  In every generation, the Imam chooses thirty-six men (and no women, for obvious reasons) as the owtad or “nails” whose presence, hammered into mankind’s existence by the “Hidden Hand,” prevents the universe from “falling off” into eternal chaos. no one knows how the “nails” are chosen. One theory is that the Hidden Imam appears to the elect in their dreams and informs them of the awesome blessing bestowed upon them. Although the “nails” are not known to common mortals and do not know one another, at times it is possible to identify one of them by his deeds.

  It is on this basis that some of Ahamdinejad’s more passionate admirers claim that he is one of the “nails,” a claim he does not discourage. For example, he has maintained that in September 2006, as he addressed the United nations General Assembly in new York, the Hidden Imam was present in the audience and “drenched the place in a sweet light.” In 2005, it was after another khalvat with the Hidden Imam that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. And after the first round of voting, in which he had come in second, it was again the Hidden Imam who informed him that he would win in the second round. Ahmadinejad claims that t
he Imam has elevated him to the presidency of the Islamic Republic for a single task: provoking a “clash of civilizations” in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the infidels, led by the United States, and defeats them in a slow contest that, in military jargon, sounds like low-intensity asymmetrical war.

  In Ahmadinejad’s analysis, the burgeoning Islamic “superpower” has decisive advantages over the infidels. Islam has five times as many young males of fighting age as the “decadent West,” which is the realm of aging populations. Hundreds of millions of Muslim ghazis (holy raiders) are keen to become martyrs, while the infidel youth fear death and would not fight. Islam also has four-fifths of the world’s oil reserves, thus controlling the lifeblood of the infidels. To all this must be added the fact that the United States, the sole infidel power still capable of fighting, is hated by other infidel nations and even by a substantial segment of its own population. According to this analysis, echoed in Ahmadinejad’s discourse and spelled out in commentaries by his strategic guru Hassan Abbasi, President George W. Bush is an aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since John F. Kennedy, when faced with a serious setback abroad, have “run away.” From the start, therefore, Ahmadinejad’s strategy was to “wait Bush out.” And that, by “divine coincidence,” also covers the time Iran needs to develop a nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidels still enjoy.