The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  Tamam (Na)shud—(Not) The End

  PROLOGUE

  The sitcom that was the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, entertaining as it was for four years—with halos surrounding his head when he first addressed the United Nations, repeated Holocaust denials and international conferences in Tehran dedicated to the topic, anti-Semitic cartoon festivals sponsored by his government, the removal of countries’ names from world maps, ministers not without portfolio but without the university degrees they claimed, the uniqueness of a pure Persian society with a complete absence of homosexuals, and, of course, a president who claimed the Mahdi would appear before the end of his first term—was finally voted off the air, according to many Iranians, in June 2009. It could be said that it jumped the shark after its cancellation, taking the Supreme Leader with it, but Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (who is actually known in Farsi as the “Shark” for many obvious reasons, including his genetic inability to grow a beard) did everything in his power to prevent the republic itself from doing the same.

  At one point in the summer of 2009, when what was transpiring in Iran appeared to some to be a new revolution and to others an affirmation of the iron grip of the Revolutionary Guards on an irredeemable system, it was Jon Stewart, the American comedian, who put what was happening best when he asked, “Does anyone know what’s going on in Iran?” Hardly anyone—no, let’s say no one—had predicted the outcome of the election (and certainly no one had predicted the possibility of widespread fraud or an outright manufacturing of results). Fewer still had predicted there would be such large demonstrations every day, bringing new news that made yesterday’s analysis seem hopelessly wrong. And the machinations of Ayatollahs like Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Seyed Ali Khamenei, never transparent in the past, were more opaque than ever.

  Years ago, President Seyed Mohammad Khatami had told me that elections in Iran were generally fair—fair, that is, if the winner of any election won by more than three or four hundred thousand votes, since fraud or ballot stuffing on that level was not only possible, but even likely. In the aftermath of the election that no one predicted, the Supreme Leader upped that figure—to one million in a defense of Ahmadinejad’s eleven million margin of victory—a new revelation about this particular Ayatollah’s democracy. The Guardian Council, however, discovered in its investigation of fraud days later that as many as three million votes were suspicious—not, however, including the ballots it showed on television, which were neatly rolled up as opposed to folded (as I had to do to mine to slip it into the ballot slot) and with suspiciously similar handwriting spelling out Ahmadinejad’s name—revealing a new level of brazenness thought impossible until now. The focus of the Western media, indeed even Iran’s media, was on Mir Hossein Mousavi’s loss to Ahmadinejad, but while it would have been impossible to prove that Mousavi was more popular than the president, it was also a virtual impossibility that Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of Parliament and liberal cleric, could have received only one-twentieth the votes he did four years ago, and less votes than there were card-carrying members of his own political party. Did Iran’s propagandists engineer a “big lie,” which I thought was the only explanation of the vote tally, or was there a silent majority in Iran disinclined to the kind of giddiness for change that I had witnessed on the streets of Tehran and other towns during the campaign season? Giddiness, we later discovered, is not an option in the Islamic Republic.

  BEGINNINGS CAN be long. The Islamic Republic’s beginnings turned thirty years old in 2009. It was a new beginning after an end, a long end, to twenty-five hundred years of monarchy. The end of the monarchy lasted almost a hundred years and, without foreign interference, might have been much shorter. Without the existential election crisis of 2009, the beginning of the revolution might have dragged on, with Iran still searching for its soul, its definition of democracy, and its place in the world. But the crisis brought the first chapter of the republic’s history to a very Persian ending. It doesn’t matter who is president of Iran in 2013 (or even earlier), whether the velayat-e-faqih is embodied in one person or in a committee, or whether the Revolutionary Guards are really in complete control of Iran or not. Democracy, or at least Islamic democracy, became more clearly defined in 2009, not just by Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, or former president Mohammad Khatami, but by the people, conservative, liberal, and everyone in between. A democracy, they cry, that does not remove religion from the public sphere, but that still must allow the people to choose their government. And the Green Movement, as the challenge and opposition to the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became known, led by the reformists but also a spontaneous creation of its own—a sort of immaculate conception of the political kind—was Iran’s first real civil rights movement, one not so unlike the civil rights movement in the United States a short half-century ago. While there have been democracy movements in Iran in the past one hundred years, nothing has had this kind of momentum or showed such resilience, despite government pressure on protesters perhaps equally as intense as that exhibited in the American South in the 1960s or at the anti-war protest at Kent State in 1970. And just as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, two very different civil rights leaders in the United States, had extensive FBI files and were under suspicion of having communist sympathies and were thought to be a threat to American national security (as were leaders of the American anti-war movement), so too did the Iranian regime treat its Green Movement leaders as if they were a threat to the national security of the nation.

  By the end of 2009, however, those leaders had not faced the kind of charges some of their unfortunate lieutenants and supporters had, and the government continued to walk a thin line between accusations of sedition and pleas for the leaders, children of the revolution, to come home, safe into the bosom of the velayat-e-faqih they had once helped to create. But at the end of Iran’s theocratic beginning, the Greens no longer sought such safety, and probably never would again. At a minimum the Green Movement, they knew, had ensured that there would never be a repeat of the debacle of the 2009 election in Iran, and with its continued existence, Green also ensured that the country would not readily become another Burma. But it is also unlikely that there will be a revolution along the lines of Iran’s own in 1979, or of the more subtle Eastern European type in the post-communist years. Iran will, however, continue to defy the odds and the experts, as it always has, and the future of the Ayatollahs’ democracy, their Shia Islamic democracy, will be inextricably tied to Iran’s power, influence, and its challenge to Western hegemony, not one of which will dissipate or disappear with the changes the Green Movement demands.

  Iran is complicated, like every culture, and it defies any attempts to describe it, its people, or its politics, in red, white, or Green. Journalists and writers rely on their experiences, as I do, to relate a story, and Iran has a thousand and one of them. Although as an Iranian I am emotionally invested in the politics of the country, that investment was not the motivating factor in writing this book. Nor have I wanted to allow my biases to color, excuse the pun, the truth about Iran, a truth that is as elusive to most people as it might be to American talk-show hosts. The Green Movement may have started as a symbol of opposition to a government, but in reality it is more symbolic of a desire for something better than what Iran now has, a desire to move forward and not backward, and the hope of reform politicians and clergy is that all Iranians, not just angry protesters, might one day be able to call themselves Green. My name is Green, yes, but only as long as it can be for all Iranians. It is that embrace of Iran and Iranians, of the good and the bad, of the Green and of those who fear it, that inspired me to tell my stories, from well before Green was a name.

  There are, of course, many books on Iran and on the Islamic regime, and there will be many more, some quite valuable for the insight they provide into a frustratingly mysterious place. No book, article, or essay, however, can ever completely unravel the mystery of Iran for a reader, or fully explain
either the country or its people to his or her satisfaction, especially not after the often confusing events of 2009. At times it has seemed that for every event that signals the demise of the Islamic Republic, there has been another that reinforces its longevity. For every protest that has brought demonstrators to the streets demanding an end to oppression by the state, there have been long stretches of days when Iranians woke up, went to work or school and came home, watched television, laughed and cried, and lived their lives pretty much as people do everywhere else. For every story on Iran printed in our newspapers there have been thousands ignored, and forgotten. Iran, despite what we’re told is its prominent role in our lives and in our security, continues to be woefully misunderstood, and in some cases woefully misrepresented, and while not every question on Iran can be answered or every facet of the Iranian character can be explained, my hope is that this book might illuminate some of the darker corners of Iran’s political and social topography, and perhaps even reveal just a few truths, truths about Iran, Green and every other hue, and the Ayatollahs’ democracy.

  MY NAME IS GREEN

  I have bad memories of this place, but this is my land and my country; Iran is the only reason for my existence.

  —YAS, twenty-eight-year-old Tehran rapper, in his song “Be Omid’e Iran”

  It is autumn and I am as the rain,

  It is autumn and I am as the rain

  Imprisoned by my rage.

  What a beautiful tomorrow we dreamed of, It was all in vain.

  What great times and what dreams we saw Searching for a reawakening

  Me and you!

  We were the wingless generation

  Me and you!

  We were the generation that could not fly!

  —From a speech by Hilla Sedighi, a female student in Iran, Autumn 2009

  For two weeks in 2009, from June 12 until June 25, a frenzy of Western media attention centered on the Islamic Republic of Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s staggering landslide re-election resulted in general disbelief that quickly turned to anger, and then to street protests on a scale as yet unseen in the history of the republic. The focus of international news organizations, diverted only by pop-singer Michael Jackson’s untimely death, was more intense for this new development than it had been for any of the venom that had spewed from Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying, Great Satan–baiting lips, or even for the worrisome nuclear ambitions of the mullahs who rule Iran.

  We in the West were fascinated by this nascent revolution, just as the image we had of Iran and Iranians—dark, brooding, and reflexively anti-everything—was shattered by the reality of a people, looking very much like us, pleading on our television screens that all they really wanted was what we did: a right to determine their own destiny. Thirty years before, we had been fascinated by a people demanding to be led not by a suave, Westernized, and modernizing king, but by austere men in turbans and robes who promised the kingdom of God on earth, a God some imagined never felt comfortable outside the Middle Ages. And here we are, three decades later, believing we might be witnessing the beginning of the end of rule in God’s name—b’esm’allah—that few could reconcile with rahman’o rahim, merciful and beneficent.

  But as the government (or really, the Ahmadinejad regime), initially caught off guard, put its strategy into place—one that included zero tolerance for the kind of “people power” that it owed its own existence to—the massive protests became less frequent, foreign reporters either left as their non-renewable visas expired, or were arrested and jailed, and it appeared for a moment that Tehran might slowly be returning to normal just as Iran slipped from the front pages of newspapers and from nightly newscasts. The rumors of the Islamic Republic’s death, it seemed, had been greatly exaggerated. But normal? Normal, perhaps, as far as we were concerned, with the abnormal President Ahmadinejad large and still very much in charge, and Iran once again the belligerent wannabe nuclear player we all imagined it to be. That was Iran, we thought: the despotic theocracy that was incompatible with democracy, and the proof was in the pudding of blood and guts spilled on the streets of Tehran. But for the cries of Allah-hu-akbar! shouted from rooftops every night as faithfully reported in blogs, on Twitter, in Facebook, and to any mainstream media that might still pay attention, Iran’s latest revolution, it seemed, had retreated in the face of a massive crackdown on any dissent, repression redolent of military dictatorships—states and nations that Iran had been at pains to distinguish herself from since her rebirth as a republic after twenty-five hundred years of absolute monarchy.

  The chants of “God is Great!” were reminders that He, Allah, was not dead—not to the regime, we already knew, but not to the opposition either. They were also reminiscent of the slogan Iranians shouted at the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1978 and 1979; just as young Iranian soldiers, Muslim themselves and mostly conscripts, struggled emotionally with punishing those proclaiming the greatness of Allah thirty years prior, today’s protesters assumed that government forces would again find it hard to arrest or beat citizens uttering the most Islamic of phrases. In the intervening years, rooftop cries of Allah-hu-akbar could be heard only during the “Ten Day Dawn,” the yearly anniversary marking the days between the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini on Iranian soil and the fall of the Shah, and most loudly on the eve of the twenty-second of Bahman, the national holiday celebrating the culmination of the revolution. It was always a remembrance of how a people brought down a tyrant, not unlike an American Fourth of July fireworks display, but it was largely ignored by upper-class Iranians, some of them oblivious to the sound reverberating in their neighborhoods. And it was a remembrance in 2009 too, one that neither the government nor the formerly apathetic elite could ignore. Like the color green chosen by the opposition for its direct link to Islam, Allah-hu-akbar was a defiant cry of protesters signaling their devotion to the faith of the oppressed. I had wondered out loud in the past why Iranian protesters in the intervening years, between 1979 and 2009, had not resorted to the same tactic, but organized protests against the regime in the past had been limited to demonstrators from specific groups, such as students or women’s rights activists or trade unions, with little support from the general masses (and none from the media), whereas the Green Movement spanned the entire political and social spectrum. More important, it included many of the architects of the Islamic regime itself. Allah is Great, alive, and well in the Islamic Republic. Yes indeed, He has to be, for however great the discontent of the Iranian people, they are still resoundingly religious and, of course, Shia.

  Early in the summer of 2009, death of the King of Pop might have temporarily pushed Iran’s internal crisis and the images of a young girl, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was brutally murdered on the streets of Tehran, off the network news and the front pages of our newspapers, but the Iranian government and the opposition to it were still hard at work trying to figure out their next moves. Both sides recognized, perhaps too late, that this was an existential crisis. While the Western media, if only for a few days, was fixating on the tragi-comedic life and death of the man who was once the world’s biggest pop star, the Iranian political system itself had fractured, with various politicians, Ayatollahs, and clerics taking sides, but it wasn’t broken, not yet. Jackson, as popular a star in Iran as anywhere else, would have ordinarily received much attention by the youth and those older who remembered his groundbreaking work, but in 2009 Iranians were preoccupied with their own drama, more tragic than comedic.

  The government, having realized that the initial burst of citizen fury was not limited to the privileged and secular classes or students, groups they have never relied on for support and who bore little resemblance to the rest of its citizens, began a campaign to persuade those Iranians that the unrest was being guided by Iran’s enemies—namely, the West, which was one reason why Western reporters were subsequently barred from Iran. Meanwhile, the opposition, mindful that the accusation could very well stick, formulated a strategy of opposing an
y government moves through legal challenges and emphasizing the rule of law, and of Islam itself. But containing its citizens’ anger, no longer limited to dismay at the results of the presidential election, was not going to be easy for the government, and no less difficult for the opposition whose initially peaceful protests soon threatened to turn violent. Fresh bouts of street protests took place in July commemorating the tenth anniversary of the student rebellion on the eighteenth of Tir (Persian month) in 1999, despite the main opposition figures remaining silent in the face of government threats, intimidation, and the closure of many of their channels of communication. The subsequent televised mass trials of detained protesters, journalists, and reform politicians, many of whom “confessed” to the crime of working with foreign forces to overthrow the Islamic regime, did little to convince ordinary Iranians that their protests in fact disguised a revolution or insurrection. The trampling of rights and the law, haq and hoqooq, by their own Islamic government had resonated strongly among Iranians, a Shia people whose character is in part defined by a constant struggle—from the time of the Shia-Sunni split and the denial of the prophet’s grandson’s rightful place at the head of the Muslim nation—for the assertion of those rights.