by Amir Taheri
Early secularists such as Mirza Malkam Khan, Jamaleddin Assad-Abadi (also known as al-Afghani), and Hassan Taqi-Zadeh took care to present their theses in Islamic terms so as to reassure both the mullahs and the illiterate masses. Most students of Iranian history agree that they succeeded at least in part. The structures of the Iranian state in time were secularized and remain so today. This means that, with a few notable exceptions, Iran as a state operates in accordance with its own political interests and not in the interests of Islam or its Shiite version. The early secularists, however, paid virtually no attention to the secularization of the collective consciousness, what political scientists call “subjective profanation.” For years, some of the intellectuals within the Khomeinist establishment have been warning that the real threat to the system is not the secularization of structures, which may already be irreversible, but the secularization of the consciousness.
Every state has two functions, primary and secondary. Primary functions consist of upholding a system of law and order and ensuring society’s internal peace and external security. Even in states whose raison d’être is religion, like Pakistan and Israel, these primary functions are secularized in practice. The state is a cold monster; it does not care who is pious and who is not as long as all obey the law, keep the peace, and pay their taxes. The secondary functions of the state pertain to religion, art, literature, and culture in general. Some Khomeinist reformers, notably Abdul-Karim Sorush, warn that while the ruling mullahs focus on preventing the secularization of the primary functions, a cause that is already lost, Iran is experiencing secularization in the secondary functions. Sorush proposes a united front with the ruling mullahs to combat this “secondary secularization.”
One finds numerous mullahs in key government positions. But when it comes to religion, literature, art, and culture, Iran is almost entirely secularized. There are no religious philosophers, poets, writers, filmmakers, architects, or painters in Iran today—a sharp contrast with a generation ago. Even when it comes to Islamic, and specifically Shiite, theology, the only innovative work being done is by Western-educated scholars. Creators may be believers as individuals, but the work they produce is secular and Western. Sorush himself is an example. As an individual he may be a believer, but his work is entirely secular. A disciple of Karl Popper, the British philosopher, he draws heavily on Foucault, Habermas, Kuhn, Gouldner, and Russel, among others. As a philosopher he has absolutely no Islamic ancestry. Sorush warns that the very reading of Shiism is becoming increasingly secularized.
Here is the paradox, according to Sorush: the more the Iranian state becomes “Islamicized” at the level of government policy and personnel, the less Islamic it becomes at the level of existence. Under the shah, a secularist-nationalist ideology controlled the apparatus of the state, meaning its primary functions, but could not make serious inroads into the secondary functions, where religion remained strong. Since the mullahs seized power in 1979, the situation has been reversed. A series of recent surveys conducted by the government reveal the astonishing fact that fewer people go to the mosques in Iran today than they did before the Khomeinist takeover. In March 2008, President Ahmadinejad lamented the fact that no one was building new mosques in Tehran and other major cities, and announced the allocation of $17 million from government funds to build mosques in the capital. Genuine Islamic themes have all but disappeared from Persian literature and art, as well as the now immensely popular theater and cinema.
Sorush is trying to persuade the mullahs to accept a tactical retreat to avoid a strategic one. He wants the mullahs to admit that religion can no longer act as the sole organizer of all aspects of human society and its conscience. The quest for power cannot be equated with the quest for truth. This does not mean that Iranians have lost their thirst for a metaphysical explanation of existence. Their quest for transcendence continues, but in the form of a patchwork of personal convictions, beliefs, even fantasies, often in direct opposition to the state-sponsored ideology. Sorush argues that because religion cannot kill rationality it had better aim at making it humble. The result would be salutary for both: Religion would not enter a losing game, while rationality would not self-destruct through arrogance. The idea is that unless we allow the public space to become secularized we risk secularization in the private space. People will act as believers in public but as pagans in private. “Reformation is needed to anticipate and prevent secularization,” Sorush asserts. He also takes care to reassure the mullahs. “I have no quarrel with the clergy,” he says. “They have treated me kindly.”
The problem with Sorush’s position is that it assumes that the issue of power could be settled in purely theoretical terms. He thinks that the mullahs will listen to his reasoned arguments and say: Yeah, you’re right! Let’s go back to the seminaries and focus on theology! Sorush’s project is even less serious now that radicals like Ahmadinejad are publicly calling for a yet greater Islamicization of Iran. Sorush says Iran, by trying to become too Islamic, risks losing its Islamic identity. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who support him claim that Iran, after twenty-eight years of Khomeinist rule, is not Islamic enough. Sorush wants to give religion a sacred space of its own. The Khomeinist radicals oppose any space not covered exclusively by their version of the faith.
The ideological and political split within the establishment is too deep to be bridged through tactical concessions by the regime. If persuaded that the major democracies, led by the United States, will not eventually make a deal with the regime and help it out of its diplomatic, economic, and political problems, those who support the gradual secularization of the system will be all the more determined to resist the Talibanization of Iran. The emergence of an organized and vocal opposition within the Khomeinist camp itself will, in turn, strengthen the position of those who support a direct regime change.
A third condition for regime change is that its coercive forces have become increasingly reluctant to defend it against the people. Since 2002, the regular army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the professional police have refused to crush workers’ strikes, student demonstrations, and other manifestations of protest against the regime. In many instances, the mullahs have been forced to deploy other, often unofficial, means, including the Ansar Hezballah (Supporters of the Party of God) and the Baseej Mustadafeen (Mobilization of the Dispossessed). In 2006, Ahmadinejad was forced to postpone or cancel several of his planned provincial visits because the regime’s coercive forces were deemed unwilling to ensure his protection. The five hundred or so powerful mullahs who provide the backbone of the regime have their own private armies, consisting of between a dozen and three hundred often heavily armed bodyguards. But even these do not always prove reliable. In May 2008, the armed guards preferred to stand back and watch as a group of Baluch rebels murdered a prominent mullah on the Kerman-Zahedan highway in the southeast. Some IRGC commanders are known to be unhappy with the regime’s further radicalization, which threatens their business interests. In 2005, Abdolvahad Mussavi-Lari, the interior minister and a mullah, warned in a leaked report that the regime’s coercive forces were not willing to crush protest marches in the industrial cities of Alborz and Arak during a wave of strikes. In its early days, the IRGC may have been prepared to kill unarmed opponents in the name of Khomeini. Today, however, Khomeini’s successors, who lack his charisma and prestige, might not find the IRGC so keen in massacring Iranians.
Even when it comes to fighting a foreign aggressor, it is not at all certain that the IRGC today would show the same degree of commitment that it did in the 1980s when fighting the armies of Saddam Hussein. In 2007 and 2008, several senior commanders of the IRGC, in public addresses, dropped hints that the force lacked the means to confront a major adversary, i.e. the United States. However, it was not clear whether this show of reluctance was a ploy to secure more resources from the state or indicated doubts about the wisdom of the regime’s adventurist foreign policy.
A fourth condition for regime c
hange is the emergence of alternative sources of moral authority in society. Even in religious matters, more and more Iranians look for guidance to non-official or even anti-official mullahs, including the clergy in Iraq. Admittedly, this is partly due to the fact that the present Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenehi, is a mid-ranking mullah who would never be accepted by senior Shiite clergy as a first among equals. nevertheless, even the more senior ayatollahs promoted by the regime lack the moral authority that their predecessors exercised before the revolution, when most Iranians saw the clergy as a counterweight to an authoritarian regime. Today, the clergy is perceived as the backbone of an even more oppressive government. Many of the more pious Shiites are angry at the Khomeinist regime for having politicized religion, thus exposing it to criticism if not derision.
One sign that Iranians seek religious authority outside the Khomeinist republic is the immense popularity of Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Husseini Sistani, the primus inter pares of the Shiite clergy, who has lived in najaf, Iraq, since the 1950s. Until the liberation of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition in 2003, Sistani was under house arrest and denied contact with the outside world. Saddam Hussein’s regime was especially anxious that Sistani should have no communications with Iran. Since 2003, however, Sistani has resumed contact with the clergy in Iran. In the spring of 2008 he was reported to have appointed more than four hundred special representatives in all Iranian provinces with the task of collecting donations, distributing his fatwas and ministering to the needs of the faithful. In addition, thousands of theology students from all over the world, including Iran itself, have transferred to najaf to attend Sistani’s classes, thus challenging some three decades of dominance by the Iranian “holy” city of Qom. According to the best sources on the current status of the Shiite clerics, in 2008 Sistani was top of the list of grand ayatollahs for the number of his “emulators” and the extent of charities under his supervision.
In a famous duel through fatwas in 2004, Sistani and the five government-sponsored ayatollahs of Qom, led by Ayatollah nasser Makarem-Shirazi, offered conflicting views on whether or not Islam should forbid smoking. Answering a question sent to both by a group of Tehran University students, the two ayatollahs demonstrated fundamentally different approaches. Makarem-Shirazi ruled that smoking should be banned by the government, and smokers and those who procure and sell tobacco should be punished. Sistani responded by saying that the issue was not a theological one, and that it had better be debated by scientific experts. In any case, he stated, believers who were grownup and of sound mind should take care of their own lives as best they can and in ways of their choice. In other words, Sistani was offering a Shiism of discussion, and of personal responsibility and choice, as opposed to the Khomeinist version based on dogmatism and terror. The fact that believers now have a chance to obtain an alternative fatwa from najaf makes it harder for Khomeinist mullahs to impose their despotic view. In some cases, najaf fatwas have saved the lives of women accused of adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death by Khomeinist mullahs. The Khomeinist regime no longer enjoys the religious cover it had two decades ago. Most Iranians now see it as another Third World-style despotic regime backed by security services and the military, along with hired thugs and vile apologists paid with oil money.
As for nonreligious matters, there was a time when the regime enjoyed the support of the overwhelming majority of Iran’s “creators of culture.” Today, not a single prominent Iranian poet, writer, filmmaker, composer, or artist endorses the Khomeinists; most have become dissidents whose work is either censored or banned. Opposition intellectuals, clerics, trade-union leaders, feminists, and students are emerging as new sources of moral authority. A number of individuals and social groups are also emerging as alternative sources of secular morality in Iran. Regular army officers, who had been discredited as a corps because they effectively surrendered to street mobs in 1979, have regained much of their lost moral authority. Their record of bravery in the war against Saddam Hussein and the fact that they have not become instruments of oppression for the Khomeinist regime have provided them with a capital of goodwill that their counterparts in the IRGC could not dream of.
As a group, the intellectuals are also making a comeback after more than two decades in disgrace as punishment for their collaboration with Khomeini. Despite recent purges ordered by Ahmadinejad, there are still hundreds of academics who enjoy the kind of prestige and moral authority that no Khomeinist official can claim. Most of Iran’s poets had welcomed the revolution, often without a proper understanding of what was happening. Most, however, turned against the revolutionary regime within months of its inception. The annual Tehran Book Fair is a good barometer of the cultural mood in the country. Every year, government departments participate with hundreds of books about Islam, Khomeini, hatred of Jews and Americans, and other supposedly revolutionary themes. These, however, never succeed in finding an audience. The Iranian people have moved on. What they crave are books sold under the counter and in the teeth of the official censor. noam Chomsky’s books, instantly translated and published by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture, no longer sell. Instead, the latest Gabriel Garcia Márquez, banned by the same ministry, sells tens of thousands. When the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coehlo visited Iran in 2002, he was greeted like a pop star in Tehran and Shiraz. In response to the warmth of his reception, he set up a prize to help translate Persian authors into at least one Western language. The regime made it clear to him that the scheme would not be allowed unless it included a prize for a text on Islam. The problem is that, aside from official propaganda that no one could disguise as literature or scholarship, Iranians no longer produce texts on Islam.
Avowedly antireligious Persian poets of the past—notably Omar Khayyam, Obeid Zakani, and Iraj Mirza—have found a new popularity that no one would have expected before the revolution. Even when it comes to contemporary poets and writers, those identified as opponents of the regime find the biggest audiences. A collection of poems by nader naderpour, who died in exile in California, has gone into several editions since 2000, produced and sold clandestinely. Essays by Saidi Sirjani, a scholar who died after months of torture by the regime, have become part of the must-read list of many Iranians. The same is true of books by Abdul-Hussein Zarrinkub, narrating the sufferings of the Iranian people under Arab-Islamic rule some fourteen centuries ago. Banned by the regime, they are published and widely distributed in what everyone now recognizes is an alternative Iranian space. The poems of Saeed Soltanpour, a young poet who was abducted from his wedding and put in front of a firing squad, have been set to music and, despite regime efforts, have become part of the Iranian collective memory. The poetess Simin Behbahani, who initially supported the revolution, has turned against it, thus finding a new audience. The former Tehran University chancellor Mahmoud Maleki, the Kurdish poet Jalal Qavami, and the nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi could also be regarded as part of the emerging alternative source of moral authority in Iranian society. Books and audiotapes of seminars by anti-Islam writers and scholars such as Shojaeddin Shafa, Ahmad Ahrar, Cyrus Amuzegar, Dariush Homayoun, Majid Roshangar, Elahe Boqrat, Kurosh Aryamanesh, Bahram Moshiri, Ali Mir-Fetros, Homer Abrahamian, Firuz Fouladvand, Assad Homayoun, and Esmail nuri-Ala have found growing audiences both in samizdat form and through the Internet. And it would be no exaggeration to say that the antireligion satirist Hadi Khorsandi and the antifascist modernist Esmail Khoei are currently Iran’s most popular poets.
Thanks to the Internet and satellite radio and television, Iranians have access to a wide range of views. Some exile figures have found audiences inside Iran through these new means of communication. Radio and TV talk shows by Hussein Mohri, Hussein Hejazi, Pari Abasalti, Homa Sarshar, nader Sadiqi, and Ali-Reza Maybodi now have larger audiences than some of the political programs offered by the regime’s official media. Attempts by the regime to build a wall around Iran have failed. An estimated twenty million Iranians now have access to the Internet. Most
also receive satellite radio and television. As far as the number of bloggers is concerned, Iranians are in second place in the world, after the Americans.
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Repression and Resistance
Finally, regime change becomes possible when at least the outline of a political alternative becomes visible. Like nature, society abhors a vacuum. In the case of Iran, that vacuum cannot be filled by the dozen or so groups in exile, although each could have a role in shaping a broad national alternative. What is still needed is an internal political opposition that can act as the nucleus of a future government. The ingredients of such a nucleus exist already. However, such a nucleus cannot be created so long as the fear persists that the United States and its allies might reach an accommodation with the regime and leave Iranian dissidents in the lurch. And that fear has roots in reality. In the years 1999-2000, President Khatami succeeded in splitting the opposition by boasting of the terms of his forthcoming “grand bargain” with President Clinton. His message was ingeniously twofold: the deal would help solve the nation’s economic problems and open the way for less repressive measures in social life and culture, but it would include a stipulation that America would never help opponents of the Khomeinist regime.