Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  The regime originally approved the project, then abruptly closed it nine days later, on March 1.

  With a resilience that is often surprising in a police state like Syria, Bunni decided to fight back—peacefully. He drafted a new constitution. He spent months studying Arab and Western constitutions as well as earlier Syrian laws. He paid particular attention to Iraq’s experience in writing a new constitution in 2005.

  Syria’s 1973 constitution actually stipulates, “Freedom is a sacred right.” But laws subsequently passed by parliament have taken freedoms away or left the opposition and minorities vulnerable to bad practices.

  Bunni’s twenty-one-page constitution, widely available on the Internet in Arabic, French, and English, imposes two-term limits on the leadership, bans political monopolies, and provides guarantees of equality for all Syrians in a multiethnic, multireligious, and multiracial state. Arabic is the first language, but Kurdish is the second language, and other minorities can fully exercise their languages and cultures. It guarantees the right of defense in court, while arrests and searches are barred without legal warrants.

  Bunni’s proposal also safeguards the right to form political parties but stipulates that they must be based on democratic principles. It separates the branches of government and specifically limits the executive’s ability to meddle beyond its duties. Even the Supreme Court would be elected by parliament based on a list of candidates put forward half by the president and half by a parliamentary committee. The top justices also would have a fifteen-year term limit.

  Bunni’s constitution is laden with layers of guarantees—and a provision that they can not be changed without ninety percent of a popular vote. The media may also not be shut down, censored, or confiscated.

  “I wrote it for two reasons: The constitution must be the background of all politics and a place for people to meet and to act,” Bunni told me. “When they made their new constitution, the Iraqi political parties had discussions, but each tried to get a larger space than the other for its interests. No one thought about those not represented by political parties. A constitution should be the foundation and protection for all people, whether represented by political parties or not.

  “The second point,” Bunni added,” is that all activities in Syria come from a background in nondemocracy—communist or religious or Nasserist or nationalist. All of them now ask for democracy because they’re in the opposition.

  “I tried to draft a constitution,” he said, with a smile, “to put them all to the test.”

  Two weeks after I left Damascus, Bunni was disbarred. A week later, he issued a statement condemning the arrest of Michel Kilo, another client. A few hours later, Bunni was leaving his house for an English class when he was stopped by two security officers. They asked him to get into their car, according to his brother. Bunni demanded to see an arrest warrant. When they refused, he struggled to get away and began shouting for help.37

  The two men then shoved Bunni into the car and drove away, according to his brother. He, too, was hauled off to prison.

  I ended my trip to Damascus the same way I had prepared for it—with Riad al Turk. We met for coffee on a cold, rainy spring day. He was dressed in a light gray suit, with a yellow shirt and a navy sweater underneath. He clung to a small umbrella.

  Although he underwent major heart surgery after completing his fourth prison stint, Turk had resumed his political activities. He was still active on the central committee of the Syrian Communist Party. At age seventy-six, he remained noisy and defiant.

  “I will never, ever make a truce with this government,” he told me.

  The looming question in Syria and other Arab autocracies, however, is not the government’s power. In 2007, Syria held a presidential “referendum.” Voters went to the polls to vote yea or nay for a second seven-year term for Bashar al Assad. There were no other candidates and no choices. Not surprisingly, he won ninety-seven percent of the vote. So change will depend on the opposition’s muscle and endurance. Specifically, how effective can the dedicated but outlawed dissidents be in prodding autocrats to either change or share power? And how does the balance of power finally shift?

  Dissatisfaction with the status quo in Syria is clearly growing, spurred by a confluence of demographics, economic realities, international pressure, access to information, and particularly what has transpired in neighboring states. The 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein’s own version of the Baath Party in Iraq and the forced withdrawal of Syrian forces in 2005 from Lebanon were the biggest blows to Damascus since the loss of the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967. The timing made them a double whammy that provoked strong nationalist feeling, but also a lot of soul-searching, among Syrians.

  Bashar al Assad also has neither the intimidating aura nor the political leverage of his father. He has pushed aside most of his father’s closest lackeys in favor of his own. But, at least for now, he still relies heavily on the Assad name, the family, the tribe, the minority Alawites, and the security police.

  For the opposition, the Damascus Declaration was arguably the most important moment in more than thirty-five years. It moved beyond reform to regime change. It brought together the full range of dissidents—secular and religious, leftists and liberals, urban and rural—to enunciate a common and peaceful agenda of change.

  “The opposition’s position improved significantly after the Damascus Declaration. People started to look at the opposition more seriously,” Turk told me.

  “This declaration contained—in addition to all political parties—new faces and new democratic national figures,” he said. “And it linked the parties that emigrated outside Syria, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, with those of us inside.”

  Dissidents have also emerged in increasingly diverse fields, among businessmen, in the new blogosphere, even among cartoonists and cinematographers. At the same time, because the vast majority of Syrians are silent or not yet politically educated, the opposition is almost as much of an elite minority as those in power. And Syrian activists remain so vulnerable to harassment, punishment, or banishment that their leverage is limited.

  Despite the vaunted position he holds among the opposition, Turk comes under fire from colleagues for being too outspoken, even inflammatory. But he, in turn, is disdainful of fellow dissidents for not taking a bigger leap in challenging the regime.

  “The opposition doesn’t yet have a compass,” Turk said, as he began sipping a small cup of espresso. “It’s really bad that some in the opposition are afraid. When they express their opinions, they do it in a way that avoids angering officials.

  “Unjust Arab regimes are living in their last stage,” he added. “But I don’t think this opposition will be able to change the system. And what the Damascus Declaration created is not an authority that can replace the regime.”

  If the current opposition is not an alternative, I asked Turk if he felt he had wasted his life in protest and in prison—and also how he could be so confident of transformation in the future.

  “The regime will eventually collapse on its own, due to isolation internally and internationally. Its own forces will dissolve. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia,” Turk explained.

  “That’s what will happen here.

  “And no, my life has been hard, but it has not been a wasted life,” he added. “Having an opposition is important, but they’re not necessarily the ones to be the ready alternative when the regime collapses. In Russia, there’s still no real alternative to the Communist Party. Vladimir Putin is a former Communist, and he still rules like one. Look what’s happened in Iraq,” Turk said. “It takes time.

  “Finding the real alternative,” he said, “only begins with the collapse of the regime.”

  SEVEN

  IRAN

  The Revolutionaries

  Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death…. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great an
d swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

  —BRITISH PHILOSOPHER BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

  —AMERICAN WRITER EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Revolutions often eat themselves up. The turmoil, blood-letting, and failure to produce the promised utopia trigger a backlash. But in the reaction can lie the seeds of longer-term political change.

  The French Revolution ended the Bourbon dynasty and introduced equality and civil liberty, but it imploded into a reign of terror. France then needed almost a century to establish a stable republican democracy. The Russian Revolution toppled the Romanov czar and introduced classless egalitarianism, but the new Soviet Union also spawned totalitarian rule for the next seventy years, until its failure opened the way for the current still-tentative experiment with democracy.

  The same process is underway in Iran, the launching pad for the Middle East’s most zealous and novel revolution.

  In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a spindly cleric with forbidding black eyebrows and a long white beard, combined an old faith with new technology to unite liberals and traditionalists, democrats and communists, conservative merchants and rowdy student activists. Using tape cassettes and faxes from afar, he inspired more than a year of street protests, strikes, and rampages against the monarchy by his followers. Together, they forced the last shah, with the empress at his side and a small jar of Iranian soil in his hand, to depart on an “open-ended vacation.” Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi’s exit ended twenty-five centuries of dynastic rule.

  Iran’s Islamic upheaval is the only original revolution among the half-dozen uprisings that have rumbled across the Middle East over the past century, because it introduced a genuinely new political ideology that altered the world’s political spectrum. It introduced a unique and aggressive form of political Islam.

  Yet it has also spawned some of the boldest ideas about democracy in the Middle East from revolutionaries who soon soured on the new system and then turned against it.

  Among them are two men I met a dozen years apart. They met each other in 1979 as ardent revolutionaries tasked with converting a kingdom ruled from the bejeweled Peacock Throne into a theocracy governed by turbaned clerics. They started out in the new Islamic republic’s inner circle. But over the course of a decade, both became deeply disillusioned.

  Together, they illustrate the physics of political change.

  Abdolkarim Soroush is a slight man with a whisper of a voice and a neat soft-brown beard. He dresses casually in the neutral tones of an academic and would disappear in any crowd. He is a philosopher. He worked to redefine the political debate in Iran during the last decade of the twentieth century. Soroush was the teacher.

  Akbar Ganji is a short and once-beefy man with soulful eyes, a winsome grin, and a perpetual six-day stubble. Ganji is a writer. He worked to expose the regime’s failures and misadventures in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ganji was the student.

  Within Iranian society, both of their names became code words for defiance.

  “They launched the most dynamic and novel debate about mosque and state, religion and politics, democracy and Islam in Iran in at least 100 years,” Hadi Semati, an American-educated political scientist at the University of Tehran, explained to me. “In fact, probably no where in the region could you find a more vibrant or original debate. And that debate,” Semati added, “is still going on.”

  I set out to find Soroush in 1994 because his name was increasingly coming up in coffee-shop conversations, classrooms, think tanks, and seminaries. Iranians talked excitedly about his new ideas of reform. I tracked him down at his Tehran University office, where his big oak desk was covered with neat stacks of books; classical music played in the background. We began a conversation that has continued ever since.

  “I’m not such an important man,” he told me in our first meeting, in a little voice that forced me to lean forward to hear him. “I’m just a writer and a thinker, and I’m just toying with ideas about religion.”

  Born in 1945, Soroush came from the kind of lower-middle-class family that formed the revolution’s backbone. His mother, Batoul, was named after one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters; she refused to abandon the enveloping black chador that covers all but a woman’s face and hands, even when the shah banned it. His father, a grocer, refused to buy a radio because it meant listening to the shah’s state-controlled news. Most of the homes in old Tehran where Soroush grew up were mud brick; most had only a couple of large rooms and often no bathroom.

  Soroush came of age in the 1960s as Ayatollah Khomeini began his campaign against the monarchy’s modernization plan—for failing the poor, deserting religious values, and corrupting a civilization dating back five millennia. Soroush grew up as sleepy Tehran was transformed into a cosmopolitan capital, complete with casinos and discos, Peyton Place on television and Kentucky Fried Chicken in restaurants, miniskirts and makeup, and shopping malls and supermarkets to rival traditional commercial powers in the Middle East’s grandest old bazaar. Iran became a hub of foreign influence in the Middle East.

  “You see nothing but…self-interest, lechery, immodesty, criminality, treachery, and thousands of associated vices,” Khomeini railed in a little book called Secrets Exposed.1

  The ayatollah, already in his sixties, was a rare voice willing to risk the dangers of speaking out. In 1963, after condemning the shah as a “miserable wretch,” Khomeini was arrested and held for ten months. Soroush was only a high-school student at the time. But when the cleric was released, Soroush was among the thousands who traveled to the cleric’s mud-brick home in Qom, the dusty religious center an hour’s drive from Tehran, to celebrate his release.

  The final confrontation between king and cleric unfolded in 1964, when Khomeini attacked a new law granting immunity to thousands of U.S. military personnel—and all their dependents—for any crimes committed in Iran. To followers assembled in front of his home, the ayatollah thundered that Iran’s dignity had been destroyed. He linked the law to a $200-million loan from the United States.2 The controversial legislation, Khomeini pronounced,

  reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him…. Are we to be trampled underfoot by the boots of America simply because we are a weak nation and have no dollars?3

  On November 4, 1964, the shah expelled the fiery ayatollah.*

  Soroush kept up with the ayatollah’s wandering exile—in Turkey for seven months, in Iraq for twelve years until he was deported by Saddam Hussein, and the final four months in Paris. The first in his family to go to university and the first to go to the West, Soroush took a break from his studies in London to visit Khomeini in France in 1978, as the revolution was building up steam back home. The two men hit it off. When the ayatollah returned triumphantly to Tehran to install Islamic rule several weeks later, Soroush followed him home.

  Soroush quickly became a prominent figure in revolutionary circles. He was the youngest of seven men named to the Committee of the Cultural Revolution. Before Iran’s universities were allowed to reopen, the committee conformed curriculum to Khomeini’s version of Islam and purged hundreds of intellectuals sympathetic to the shah.

  But the turmoil of the revolution’s first decade took a toll. Daily life was harder for the average Iranian, and many were forced to take second or third jobs. Despite oil wealth, Iran’s economy was in trouble. The country was isolated diplomatically and under economic sanctions by major powers. It fought the longest war in modern Middle East history against Iraq, suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties. Corruption was worse, far worse, than during the monarchy. Squabbling among the
theocrats forced them to disband their own revolutionary party.

  By the late 1980s, Soroush was deeply disillusioned, even with Khomeini. The charismatic ayatollah, he told me, had proven to be only a function of the political transition, and not the symbol of its ultimate goal. Soroush gradually weaned himself from the inner circle and worked on his own political theories.

  In the early 1990s, Soroush tapped into a debate that had been brewing for a century in the Islamic world about the scope of individual freedom. Islam literally means “submission”—to God’s will. The concept is enshrined in Iran’s constitution. Chapter One stipulates that government is based on faith in one God and that “man should submit to His will.”

  But Soroush began to argue that Islam and democracy are not only compatible but inevitably intertwined.

  “To be religious necessitates being a democrat as well,” he told me during our first meeting. “An ideal religious society can’t have anything but a democratic government.”

  Soroush pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, as he often did when making an important point.

  “You see, in order to be a true believer, one must be free,” he continued. “True believers must embrace their faith of their own free will—not because it was imposed, or inherited, or part of the dominant local culture. To become a believer under pressure or coercion isn’t true belief.”

  Thus freedom always precedes religion—a revolutionary idea in the Islamic world.

  I thought of Soroush’s argument a few months later when I walked the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., during the cherry-blossom festival and decided to duck into the Jefferson Memorial. I was struck by the four quotations carved into the stone walls around Jefferson’s statue, and I took a picture of each. On a trip to Tehran later that year, I showed them to Soroush.

  The first inscription from Jefferson reads,