The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  “Mongoloid,” said one leading member of the old guard, himself the son of an Ayatollah and a noted reformist, for every name I mentioned in the Ahmadinejad clique. “Mongoloids, all of them.” Sitting there in his home in North Tehran, sumptuously decorated with Persian antiques, he wasn’t aware of the offensiveness of that term in the West. It isn’t true of course—he meant that they were grossly unqualified for their jobs—for although the clique has no tolerance for the niceties of etiquette or even of democracy, most members are far from unintelligent. That their likes were shut out of power during the Shah’s time because of their humble roots, and again shut out of real power after the revolution by a new privileged class, makes them hungry for revenge, but it does not make them stupid.

  In mid-2009, before the election, I particularly wanted to visit one younger member who seemed quietly destined for greater things, Dr. Mohammad Hosseini, then the deputy minister of science and president of Payam’e Noor University, the open university of Iran offering degrees by correspondence as well as on campuses across the country. I had asked a friend of his for an introduction, and after being assured that Dr. Hosseini was expecting my call, I called him at his office one day.

  “Baleh?”

  “May I speak to Dr. Hosseini?” I said, after introducing myself.

  “Give me a land line number,” came the brusque reply. I frantically searched for the phone number for my friend’s home, from where I was calling on my cell phone, now a victim of the technology that made memorization of phone numbers quaintly old-fashioned. I found the number on my computer and read it into the receiver.

  “Hang up and I’ll call you back.”

  I did as I was told, my eyebrows raised as I pressed the “end” button on my phone. Why on earth, I wondered, did the office of the president of one of the largest universities in the world concern itself with whether conversations emanating from that office might occur on a cell phone? The house phone rang.

  “Baleh?” it was my turn to say.

  “How can I help you?” asked the man on the other end of the line.

  “I wanted to make an appointment to see Dr. Hosseini,” I said. “I believe Dr. Hosseini is expecting me.”

  “Hold on.”

  The line went silent for a few minutes, and then Hosseini himself spoke.

  “How about eight a.m. tomorrow, when I’ll be at the ministry?” he asked, without the usual Persian banter of politesse, ta’arouf, and formalities. He then proceeded to give me the address and very basic directions.

  “I’ll find it,” I replied, “and thank you very much.” I hung up, still wondering if I was about to meet a deputy minister or an intelligence officer. He was probably both, I concluded. The next morning, I left plenty of time to get to the ministry building, one of the few that had been located in the northern extremes of the city and where many of its employees had to be bussed in from points south. I arrived early and watched the employees file into the building; getting out of cars, shared taxis, and government buses, many of them were women who kissed their young children goodbye before they continued on their way to their schools.

  The ministry itself was a bustling place, with dozens of visitors waiting in the lobby to see this or that official, and I sat down and waited to be called to the minister’s floor. A few minutes later I was on a jammed elevator, uncomfortably so because I was pressed into the body of a chador-clad but shapely young woman standing next to me, and headed for Dr. Hosseini’s office. The assistant who greeted me in his outer office was gracious and exhibited none of the gruffness of the man who had answered his phone the previous day. I wondered if it was the same person, who face-to-face might exhibit, as almost all Iranians do, a different personality than when anonymous. But I didn’t ask, and he didn’t offer an introduction as he led me to the good doctor’s office and an enormous sofa facing an equally enormous desk. The morning papers were laid out on the coffee table, and within seconds, the office tea man brought a tray of tea and biscuits. I perused the papers, all of them conservative, until Hosseini walked into the room, apologizing for his tardiness. We exchanged pleasantries, and then talked about the state of U.S.-Iran relations before I quizzed him on his specialty, science and education.

  “My big question,” I said, “is, why is there still no high-speed Internet access in Iran, at least not for the general public?” Under President Ahmadinejad, the government had restricted the speed of the late-to-arrive DSL connections, already burdened by ancient telephone wires, to a measly 128 kilobytes per second. “I mean,” I continued, “doesn’t that inhibit scientific progress?” Hosseini nodded and then launched into a statistical review of higher education in the Islamic Republic.

  “We have over a million students,” he said, “and they are among the best in their field, worldwide. The opportunities have never been better for anyone in Iran, and despite the sanctions imposed on us by America and the West, we are as advanced as any nation.”

  “But sir,” I said, “surely if Internet access were faster and more readily available, our students could learn more, do more research more efficiently, and benefit from communication with the outside world.”

  “We Iranians,” said Dr. Hosseini, “we have a different culture.” He paused and smiled at me, like a patient professor about to explain the obvious to a dim-witted student. “We are a culture that likes human contact, not anonymous and disembodied communication.”

  “But…”

  “You see,” he interrupted, “we like to pay visits to each other, to drop in and chat with our friends and family, to see one another’s faces. It’s always been like that in Iran.”

  “Yes,” I replied, “that’s true.” I was reminded of my father’s village (which now has a university but lacked even a high school in my father’s time), where neighbors and friends still drop by at any time of day, whether it is convenient for the host or not. With only dial-up Internet access at best, they tend not to e-mail ahead. This lack of privacy is perhaps one of the reasons why, way before the Internet was developed and even before home phones were common, people like my father, and I suspect Hosseini’s family too, escaped to the big city. “But that doesn’t explain why there are over forty million cell phones in Iran,” I said, “and why texting is as popular here as it is in London or New York.” Hosseini stared at me for a few moments, perhaps pondering the incessant ringing of his own cell phone, which he had to continually silence. “Iranians invented the postal system over two thousand years ago,” I continued, “a rather impersonal communication system, but besides, the Internet isn’t all about communication; it is also a valuable research and information tool.”

  “Of course,” he said, nodding again. “And our students have full use of it.” He was correct, in that university campuses tend to have fast connections, but when students go home, they are still plagued by glacial and intermittent dial-up access. “Neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night” may have been Herodotus’s description of what could not stop the Persian post from fulfilling its duties over two millennia ago, but he didn’t reckon on the Ayatollahs of the twenty-first century, who can do so with a flick of the switch.

  “I’m still not sure what the issue is,” I told him, “given that you can block un-Islamic sites anyway, and that one measure of a country’s progress these days is Internet penetration. We want to be an advanced country, don’t we?”

  “Of course,” said Hosseini, “but we also must be mindful of our culture.” It was perhaps serendipitous for him, anyway, that after the election of 2009 he would be appointed minister of culture and Islamic guidance, the head of a powerful ministry charged with precisely that—being mindful and protective of Iran’s culture, guided by Islam. I wondered, when his appointment was announced, whether his views on culture, Iranian Shia culture, would influence ministry decisions on the arts. Would cinema be necessary at all, given that tradition in Iran dictated that stories be told orally? And face-to-face? Or would a press, let alone a free one,
be necessary when Iranian villagers who at one time preferred to get their news from their neighbors, also face-to-face, might want that culture preserved?

  MOHAMMAD HOSSEINI is not a mongoloid, as my reformist friend might insensitively insist, far from it, for he not only scored at the very top in his concours examination to enter university, but also struck me as a remarkably intelligent person in every way except for his somewhat inane explanation, one I can’t imagine he himself believes, for the paucity of high-speed Internet access in his beloved country. Hosseini also displayed little of the oghdeh, the complexes, both superior and inferior, that Iranians seem to possess simultaneously and which defines much of their behavior. Oghdeh can be the hallmark of men like him and is a much used word in Iran, for although the envy Iranians once had for the privileged class manifested itself as an inferiority complex in the growing middle class during the Shah’s time, oghdeh took on the characteristics of a distinct superiority complex among the new ruling class after the revolution. The matter of the Internet, though, is purely one of control, not culture, something Hosseini was loathe to admit. But in the cultural explanation he gave, he was not, as some urbanized Iranians with a heavy dose of the inferiority complex do, showing disdain either for the village mentality that was long the basis of Iranian social intercourse, or for the urban elite who might, like his students at Payam’e Noor, benefit from a more modern approach to communication. The Islamic Revolution was supposed to do away with class oghdeh, village versus big-city psychologies, and to a large degree it had succeeded. The Shah’s version, one of fostering a large middle class, had also succeeded, but with their inferiority oghdeh intact, the once villagers who then made up much of the middle class sneered at their humble roots, whereas a new generation of once villagers, like Ahmadinejad and his cohorts, openly celebrated them.

  In the election of 2009 that followed my meeting with Hosseini by a few weeks, the entire Iranian nation became embroiled in one big oghdeh-fest: the president and his followers claiming his representation of a silent majority, the non-urban working class, and his opponents claiming that an inept, even uneducated administration was resorting to fascist tactics and mob rule to remain in power at all costs. Even the Ayatollahs were split: the intellectual elite fell in with the opposition; the others, mostly the least published or venerated, with the populist president.

  WHEN I LEFT his office, Dr. Hosseini, an intellectual himself in a now altogether different elite, in all probability dismissed me as another “West-toxified” Iranian, gharbzadeh in the Persian lexicon, and as one who had been seduced by the West into believing that its culture is inherently superior to that of Iran. West-toxification was a charge leveled at many of the middle-class Iranians at the time of the revolution, and although the term is hardly used today, the attitude of many on the far right of Iranian politics toward reformists and certainly liberals remains one of suspicion that they are more enamored of the West than they are of Persian tradition. Indeed, some view democracy, and certainly liberal democracy, as a Western notion that is or should be incompatible with Iranian culture. (Ironically, in one of President Ahmadinejad’s more bizarre explanations of the 2009 election, in a speech he gave in Azerbaijan months later, he insisted that the turnout “signified the rule of full liberal democracy in Iran.”)

  But even the leading reformists are careful to distinguish between their views on democracy and Western notions, mindful of emphasizing the Islamic, in this case Shia, aspect of what Iranian democracy means. Shiism, born out of a sense of injustice perpetuated by tyrants, is central to the thought of the reformists who see power vested in the people but guided by the social system of Islam. Some might argue that the democratic achievements of the last century, all of them interrupted by either an iron fist or a foreign power, failed because they ignored Islam, which has been the state religion since the sixteenth century. In both the constitutionalist revolution of 1906 and the Mossadeq affair, Ayatollahs and other clerics fell on either side of the battle, pro-and anti-Shah, and even during the last Shah’s reign (and his father’s) there were clerics both dissident and compliant whenever the Pahlavis advanced social or democratic changes. Ayatollah Khomeini’s promise of a pure Islamic democracy eliminated any ambiguity in terms of how the culture would be affected by democratic change, and most of the clergy as well as virtually all of the democratic movements in Iran supported his vision of a quintessentially Persian form of democratic rule, one that took into account the Shia nature of the Persians and their culture.

  Naturally many argue, particularly today, that the Islamic democracy promised by the revolution never materialized, that whatever democratic institutions were created by the new constitution of 1979 are undermined by the authority of the valih-e-faqih, the Supreme Leader. But there are still many believers in the possibility of an Islamic democracy, including leaders of the opposition, backed by some of the senior Ayatollahs, such as Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei—known for his declaration that in Islam women and men have equal status—who claim that their vision in fact matches Khomeini’s original intent, far more so, in their minds, than that of the current government’s. It is a crucial point, for in Iran Khomeini is still widely revered as a savior, a latter-day Shia crusader for justice. Nothing that Mohammad Khatami and Mehdi Karroubi, and Grand Ayatollahs Hossein-Ali Montazeri and Sanei, among others, have articulated for the future of Iran is incompatible with democratic rule, even if most of the opposition clerics still cling to the concept of velayat-e-faqih and a Supreme Leader.

  Ayatollah Montazeri, whose death and funeral in Qom in December 2009 sparked renewed mass demonstrations against the government, had the respect if not direct support of millions of Iranians, and clerics such as him who no longer believe in the absolute political authority of a Supreme Leader are in agreement with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq (himself an Iranian), who prefers the clergy’s role to be of guidance and not executive leadership. Montazeri, once Khomeini’s handpicked heir, fell out with the founder of the Islamic Republic over the repression and violent suppression of dissent during the 1980s. He was under house arrest for years, and emerged a fierce critic of Ayatollah Khamenei’s rule, finally ruling that the velayat-e-faqih itself was incompatible with Islamic democracy, a ruling few other Ayatollahs could support publicly even if they agreed with it. Sistani, the jurisprudent who is the most senior Ayatollah in Iraq, may have agreed with Montazeri on a limited role for the clergy in politics, but he is the de facto supreme leader of Iraq, not enshrined in the constitution, but effectively the one man who can derail any government initiative or law passed by Parliament. It is not without reason that the prime minister of Iraq visits him in Najaf as often as he can, to receive guidance but more important, approval for his programs. Anyone who has the ability to put millions of people on the street wields enormous power and influence, even as he might deny any political aspirations. And although Sistani has never met with an American official, or a general, no one doubts his enormous power. This suggests that whatever form of functioning democracy eventually takes hold in Iraq, it will be purely Islamic and probably Shia dominated.

  SHIA ISLAM may have always been a part of the political equation in Iran, as it has been in Iraq despite the oppression during the Saddam Hussein years, but the clergy, and some Ayatollahs in particular, have also regularly exercised their power not in the advancement of democracy or even justice, but in the advancement of personal or church gain. My maternal grandfather was an Ayatollah, born in a village in Iraq to an Iraqi mother and Persian father, but he was apolitical most of his life, except when he refused to leave his home in protest against Reza Shah’s banning of the turban in public life. During the reign of the last Shah, my grandfather’s son, my uncle Nassir Assar, was appointed deputy prime minister in charge of Oghaf, the Iranian Religious Endowment and Pilgrimage Organization, but my grandfather wasn’t proud; rather, he urged him to refuse the job. Oghaf was notorious among the clergy, for it was in charge of vaqf, or religious
endowments, whereby land and other property were given to them for the maintenance of shrines or mosques or schools—in a measure of the importance of the church, the organization was second in wealth only to the National Oil Company. The Shah’s intent was to exercise greater control over the administration of Oghaf’s endowments. The clergy viewed this as interference in their affairs and a diminishing of their influence and power, and to be the point man for the Shah on a matter affecting the mullahs’ pocketbooks was, in my grandfather’s view, asking for trouble. “Man een akhoundha ra meeshenasam,” my mother tells me he said to Nassir—“I know these mullahs.” He was prescient, for my uncle became a wanted man after the revolution, more because he had crossed the clergy than for his service to the Shah or even the prime minister, his friend from his Foreign Ministry days, Amir Abbas Hoveyda.

  But during his tenure and throughout the Shah’s days, neither my uncle nor his office were very successful in curtailing the power of the mullahs, either by monitoring their wealth or by any other means. The government may have controlled large sums of money set aside for charitable religious projects, but pious and wealthy Shias still gave generously and directly to their Ayatollahs or mosques in the form of zakat, or the alms that are mandated by Islam. And there have always been, throughout the villages, towns, and cities of Iran, pious and wealthy Shias. The middle class that my father represented, villagers tending pro-democratic and pro-modernization, may have abandoned tradition and the mosque, but there were always those, highly educated and not, in the villages and among immigrants to Tehran and other big cities who clung to the Persian way of doing things, ignoring the state and directly supporting the clergy. “Secularism,” former president Khatami said in Berlin in 2005, “is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.” The Shah insisted; the Ayatollahs, and then the people, fought back. The bazaaris, merchants in the traditional bazaars of Iran’s cities who have always been looked down on by the upper class and by the middle class aspiring to the upper, are perhaps the most glaring example of wealthy and pious Shias who always supported their Ayatollahs, their revolution, and the Islamic system to this day. But there are many others in the new middle class, such as Dr. Hosseini and his boss, President Ahmadinejad, and many in direct opposition to them but still a part of the Islamic system, who, like my father and those before them, also came from disparate villages in a once agrarian society to form the backbone of a regime in the industrial age. And it is these people, from the smallest villages to the biggest cities, who fall into the reform, conservative, or pragmatist camps of Iranian politics, who will decide the future of the Ayatollahs’ democracy.