The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  The government or regime may have viewed the Green Movement and the citizen activism as a threat, just as governments everywhere, even in democracies, have always viewed such movements as threats, but the leaders of the opposition in Iran knew they could win more and more people to their side precisely because they were not a threat. The presence of many senior clerics on their side made it difficult for the regime to completely ignore their demands, and despite still widespread support for both the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad, particularly among the non-urban working classes, the message of democratic change, Islamic democratic change, resonated throughout the population. For according to pro-reform clerics such as Khatami, Karroubi, and even more senior Ayatollahs, Islamic democracy guarantees nothing less than power vested in the people, accountability of a government to those people, and Islam as the guide in the establishment of laws, laws that are designed, the pious believe, to protect the fundamental rights of the people. In a land of believers in Shia Islam, which through its clergy allows for wide interpretation of the faith and even its laws, Green was never going to fade away completely, no matter what.

  To understand that the Green Movement is very much an establishment movement, it is important to note that the leaders of the opposition even had messages of support for the Basij on Basij Day in late 2009—yes, support for the militia charged with cracking down on them and their supporters, but also advice to them that their post-election behavior had been anti-Iranian and, of course, un-Islamic. No opposition leader in Iran can afford to ignore the Basij, who number as many as one million regime loyalists, but they believe these loyalists can be won over to their cause of democratic change. In late May 2009, right before the election, I told former president Khatami in Tehran that I had just met a former Basij who told me he was voting for Mousavi and for more freedom. “Last time, I personally filled out four hundred blank ballots for Ahmadinejad,” he said to me, “but this time I’ll do the same for Mousavi.” Okay, maybe he didn’t quite get the real message of democracy, but it was more democracy that he wanted. Khatami laughed, hopeful that his message of reform was finally trickling down (or across) even into the ranks of the military apparatus, and unconcerned, as yet, with the irony of the Basij’s vow. Those in the opposition to the government in Iran, some of them like Khatami having called for reform for much longer than others, know that their calls for democratic change resonate among the population, not just because of its Islamic hue, but because democracy is not a new concept to Iranians—they’ve been fighting for it for over a hundred years. Their efforts have always met resistance, from the monarchy, from foreign powers intent on keeping Iran weak and dependent on them, and from some conservatives in the Islamic regime.

  Democracy was not a concept imported wholesale from the West, nor was it ever the exclusive desire of the intellectual or upper-class elites of Iran; from the constitutional revolution of 1906 onward, Iranians of all stripes and from all classes have fought for the vote, for civil liberties, for the rule of law, and for a just and representative system of government, even as religious Iranians have always insisted on Islam, beneficent as they see it, as playing a role in their form of democracy. Democracy had been the stated goal of every leading Iranian politician in recent years, even President Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith who, supporters claimed, could not have reached the highest levels of government without democratic institutions. Iran has fallen well short of democracy, of course, not just under Ahmadinejad but also under his more liberal predecessors. But the entry of Green into the political scene has ensured that whatever democratic reform occurs in the Ayatollahs’ democracy, and reform is inevitable, it will occur sooner rather than later.

  After a lull in the violence during the summer and in the mass protests that captured the world’s imagination, at the very end of 2009, on what is known as Students’ Day, Iranian youth once again took to their university campuses across the country and on neighboring streets to protest what they considered an illegitimate government and a dictatorial regime. Students’ Day in 2009 became a particularly significant holiday to those opposed to the government of Ahmadinejad, for it is a commemoration of Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran in 1953, only six months after a CIA-backed coup removed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, and during which student demonstrators protesting the Shah’s rule were shot and killed by government troops.

  The parallels with 2009 were unmistakable to many activists, but some demonstrators went further than ever before in denouncing the government, and all of its leaders, even calling Mousavi an “excuse,” something no one had dared to mention up until then. If Mousavi was an excuse to them, they offered no one else as a leader, but their calls had much greater impact than any previous student demonstration since the revolution in 1979. Leading clerics, Mousavi, and other opposition leaders (who were not really behind the Students’ Day protests), and even Ayatollah Khamenei, paid close attention, for although the students had no charismatic leader like students did in the person of Khomeini in 1979, the regime could ill afford to ignore a unified youth population, one that numbers in the millions (more than 40 million Iranians are thirty or younger, and there are over 3.5 million university students across the country). In yet another unprecedented act, some students allegedly tore up pictures of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei during the Students’ Day protests, and their actions were, again in an unprecedented move, repeatedly shown on state television. But those students were not Green, Mousavi claimed, stating that their act was a “wholly suspicious and anti-revolutionary gesture,” and many in the opposition maintained that it was the state itself that organized the “great insult” to the Imam, as the founder of the Islamic Republic is known, in order to discredit them, especially as television stations repeatedly broadcast the sacrilegious images.

  Whether the state staged the outrage against the Ayatollahs as propaganda to discredit the Greens, or whether it was provocateurs from opposition groups opposed to the theocracy who were responsible, or whether students tearing up pictures of the only two Supreme Leaders the republic had known did so spontaneously, the regime had to consider that discontent, now broadcast on national television, had perhaps finally boiled over. In the short term, the government could arrest, intimidate, and abuse the students who spoke out, but in the longer term unless the regime gave some ground, as Ayatollah Rafsanjani himself said in early December 2009 after a long period of silence, it might be faced with the question of whether an Islamic Republic was viable at all. “If the people of Iran want us,” Rafsanjani had said to a group of students in Mashhad, “we [can] stay and govern; if not we [should] go.” It was a powerful statement, for Ayatollah Khomeini had used the word “go” to great effect from the start of the Islamic Revolution with respect to the Shah. No matter what the Shah and his government did then to appease the opposition and street demonstrators, the unwavering but simple central demand of Khomeini and the Islamic revolutionaries—that the Shah must “go,” ou bayad bereh—signaled the end of the monarchy well before the Shah’s actual flight. Akbar Gangi, the dissident former revolutionary who went on a hunger strike during his imprisonment in 2005, repeated that demand of Ayatollah Khamenei, angering the establishment as he tried, with some effect, to equate the Shah’s rule with that of the Supreme Leader. Rafsanjani and other powerful clerics, and the leaders of the opposition, though, were determined in 2009 to ensure that the possibility of them “going” or being asked to “go” would never come to pass.

  Neither the Ayatollahs’ democracy nor a Green democracy, still reliant on its own Ayatollahs, fits a Western definition of a democracy. Maybe it will never reach a definition all Iranians can agree on, but that is something that almost all Iranians can agree on. The events of the summer of 2009 in Iran were, to be sure, an important, even vital step in the development of democracy in the Islamic Republic, and perhaps the best thing that could have happened to a young republic struggling to id
entify itself, not just as far as pro-democracy groups were concerned, but also as far as anyone who cares about the future of the country, and the future of its relations with the outside world. In that respect, the name of all Iranians is Green. In 2009 Islamic Iran received the jolt it needed to end its thirty-year-long beginning, and as unfortunate as the events of the summer and fall of 2009 were for those who suffered and for the families of those who died, nothing else, not even a legitimate Mousavi win at the ballot box, could have provided the impetus for significant democratic change, even if that change—which will always have a Persian and Shia hue, a particular shade of Green, that is—might still seem far away.

  DEMOCRACY, INTERRUPTED:

  It Takes a Thousand and One Villages (and a Mullah or Two)

  In the Kingdom of God, persons or groups govern on the basis of divine laws.

  —Eighth-grade social teachings textbook, Iranian public school system

  A day after President Ahmadinejad gave a speech at the United Nations Durban Review Conference on racism, held in Geneva in April 2009, a speech that included a tirade against Israel and was viewed as particularly incendiary in the West and even in some quarters inside Iran, a friend of my father’s, an aging former diplomat like him, was walking out of his apartment in Paris. When he entered the elevator, a longtime neighbor nodded and said hello. “Congratulations!” he added. Why, wondered my father’s friend, the felicitation? “Votre president!” replied the neighbor. “Iran is the only country that dares challenge America and Israel, and is the only country in the world standing up for the Palestinians!”

  A few months later, an Iranian ambassador from the current regime told me that after the post-election unrest began in Iran, a fellow ambassador from an Arab country said to him, “Congratulations!” Wondering why he was being congratulated in the middle of a brutal crackdown, while negative images of his country were broadcast on television twenty-four hours a day, the Arab ambassador replied to him, “Because what’s happening in your country could never happen in mine.” What he meant was that in his and many other Muslim countries, particularly Arab ones, a political opposition is not allowed to exist, let alone march on the streets. It is hard to imagine that anyone would be envious of Iran’s political system, but as it is with Iran, one is often surprised.

  Five months later, in October 2009, Iran appeared to have agreed in principle with a proposal by the West to resolve the nuclear crisis. Under the agreement Iran would send its stock of low-enriched uranium (a cause of concern because it could conceivably be further enriched into bomb-grade material) outside the country for conversion into fuel rods, which would be sent back to Iran and could only be used to power a reactor. Soon after Iran balked at giving a formal answer to the proposal, and while both conservatives and reformists decried Ahmadinejad’s tentative agreement, my father, a former ambassador fired by the Islamic regime thirty years prior and not predisposed to sympathize with Tehran, asked me whether I thought Iran would, or should, accept the principle of the deal. I suggested that Iran was likely worried that the West might be setting a trap to get Iran’s enriched uranium supply out of the country and then delay or refuse delivery of fuel back in until the Iranians agreed to Western terms. “They’re right to worry!” he exclaimed. “Let’s face it: Iran is doing the right thing in being careful. Why should they trust the West?”

  TO OUTSIDERS—even to many Iranians—President Ahmadinejad and his clique may appear to be unrepresentative of Iranians in general, a fringe element, particularly since his questionable re-election. But there have always been millions of Ahmadinejads in Iran, certainly in modern times: Iranians from sometimes humble backgrounds and from disparate towns and villages who have fought for equal access to power and to have their voices heard in its corridors, which until the twentieth century were restricted to a handful of elite families in the capital. (The last Shah’s father himself came from a humble background, from a village in the north near the Caspian, and had he been successful in ridding Iran of an ineffectual dynasty, in a later age he might have chosen republicanism instead of coronation as his due.) There are differing ideologies among these Iranians, to be sure, as are there differences in social attitudes, but they have in common a particularly Shia resistance to despotism and a fierce determination to ensure that Iran never again becomes the weak and exploitable state it became after the empire. Ahmadinejad and his closest cohorts, perhaps inclined less to democratic principles than they often claim, also know that it was a nominal Iranian democracy, one that not only proclaimed independence from any greater power’s influence but also gave the people a voice, that first allowed them access to the presidential office in 2005. Iran is theirs too, and they will, like their overwhelmingly deeply religious supporters, who still number in the millions, have a say in the future of the Islamic republic they call Iran.

  IRAN IS the only country in the Middle East to have been a multiethnic nation-state, with the same name (in Farsi or Persian) and with identifiable borders, for millennia. Every other country in the region is less than a hundred years old, including Turkey, which was born out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The only part of the region not ruled by the Ottomans was, of course, Iran. It is this sense of nationhood, this sense of having always been a distinct country, a distinct culture that grew out of many tribes and ethnicities, that forms the Iranian character. Persian ambition and Persian pride, the kind of pride that leads Iranians everywhere to defend their nation’s nuclear program, have always been important. But there is a generational difference between the mullahs who rule Iran today (and who are unashamed of their backgrounds) and their sophisticated and Westernized predecessors like my father who eventually believed that they had to swallow that pride, even be subservient to greater powers, in order for Iran to be accepted into the family of modern nations. The Supreme Leader of Iran, an ethnic Turk from the Northeast provinces (whose only language other than Farsi is a Turkish dialect), is as much a Persian nationalist as he is a Grand Ayatollah, and as much a believer in the greatness of Iran as he is a believer in the truth of Shia Islam, or at least the truth as he sees it. He guides Iran’s foreign policy, as did his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, with as much a sense of Iran’s place in the world and Iranian nationalism as a devotion to the prophet and his descendents, who were, after all, Arabs from the peninsula and not Cyrus’s Persia. The roots of Islam in Iran are assuredly long and deep, but the roots of Persian nationalism are much deeper. Cyrus’s Persian Empire, a glorious and benevolent one as far as Iranians are considered, gave way to successive Persias that suffered the ignominies of invasion and occupation, and only the occasional glory of greatness. By the beginning of the modern age of the twentieth century, Iran was still an independent nation-state, but “Persia,” as it was known outside Iran, denoted a weak and backward country then, one ripe for exploitation.

  IT WAS PERSIA, specifically a small village smack in the middle of the country, a deh by the name of Ardakan, into which my father was born. It was always “Iran” to its inhabitants and “Persia” to the rest of the world, but at the time it was more Persia than Iran—not the ancient Persia of glory and superpower but a feeble Persia—even to its citizens. Persia in the sense that, long without its empire, it was now dependent on foreign, specifically British and Russian, patronage to survive. Persian Ardakan, like thousands of other villages, went without running water and a sewer system, but it did have an ancient Persian air-conditioning system that was developed when Persia was still great: the bad-geer or “wind-catcher,” using only the laws of physics mastered centuries ago, cooled the mud-brick homes located in a desert where summer temperatures easily surpassed 110 degrees. Born in the late 1920s into a landowning and religious family with clerics sprinkled among his ancestors, my father should have felt privileged, certainly as compared to the vast majority of other mostly illiterate Iranians, particularly outside of Tehran. But this was a time when Iran had embarked on a modernization program under the dictator Re
za Shah, a barely literate army officer who had put an end to the weak Qajar dynasty and who equated progress with Westernization. It was with the West in mind that he insisted Iran be called by the name Iranians had always known it as, rather than the anglicized “Persia.”