by Hooman Majd
In the Ayatollahs’ democracy, where religious freedom for four faiths is supported and guaranteed by the constitution (and there is freedom for other faiths, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, as long as they are not practiced by Iranian converts), a mere vote, ballot initiative, or referendum will not be enough to guarantee Baha’is complete freedom to practice their religion in a country with a deeply religious Shia population. Democracy might demand equal protection under the law, but sometimes democracy can also lead to mob rule. Some clerics (such as Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, while he was alive) do not support the oppression of Baha’is, and millions of ordinary Iranians don’t either, but as promising as an ideal Islamic democracy might be to many Iranians, unless it affords Baha’is (and any other religious group, including avowed atheists) at least the same protection and marginal equality as other minorities, something the Green Movement has taken no stand on, it risks never quite measuring up to democracy at all.
NOTHING IS TRUE; EVERYTHING IS FORBIDDEN
Time with whose passage certain pains abate
But sharpens those of Persia’s unjust fate.
—WILLIAM MORGAN SHUSTER, The Strangling of Persia, 1912
“A mullah is waiting by the side of the road, his arm raised,” the storyteller says, “and taxis fly by without stopping for him. At long last a taxi stops, and the mullah gets in. ‘Thank God!’ he exclaims, ‘finally, a driver who’ll stop for me!’ The taxi driver says nothing and drives for about two minutes along the straight road before stopping again. He turns around and snarls, ‘Get out!’ The mullah is shocked. ‘But why?’ he asks. ‘You stopped for me, and now you’re kicking me out? Why, pray tell?’ The driver shrugs his shoulders. ‘Because,’ he says, ‘you were in the shade there, and here you’ll be in the hot sun.’” The storyteller was a mullah himself, and he laughed heartily along with his audience, all pious men.
That was in 2007, twenty-eight years after the mullahs, both liberals and hard-liners, took over the affairs of state. Iranians have long had to confront “nothing—or everything—is true [the state], and everything is forbidden [to the people],” a rewording of Hassan’e Sabah’s alleged deathbed pronouncement. However, since the creation of an Islamic state, the force of the edict has taken on added religious authority, one that is not so easily dismissed or mocked—even at times of great unrest. It is not that the clerics, the mullahs and Ayatollahs, don’t know how unpopular they can be among ordinary people, and taxi drivers in Iran are often the stand-in for ordinary people—working class, struggling to make ends meet—it is that the clerics know it doesn’t matter much. It hasn’t mattered because the relationship between a Shia people and their clergy is a complicated one, and difficult for outsiders to understand. This is one reason why the Shah, who was educated mostly abroad and then lived inside a bubble when he was back in Iran, underestimated the power and draw of the mosque, as did his father, who viewed the clergy with such disdain that he publicly upbraided mullahs at every opportunity, even forcing them to remove their turbans and excluding them from political life. No tears were shed on his downfall, even though the always-despised British engineered his abdication and exile.
Iranians may make fun of their mullahs, men who are quick to tell them what is true and what is forbidden, but they have also always revered them, or at least some of them, and anyone who underestimates the reverence many Iranians have for their Ayatollahs—“signs of God,” as some literally believe—will soon come to regret it. It is true that Ahmadinejad’s early appeal was partly due to his being a layman in a clerical political culture; some clerics, he constantly reminded audiences, were corrupt and interested only in personal gain, not in leading their flock. These same corrupt clerics, he claimed in his campaign for re-election, orchestrated the challenge to his presidency, and their leader was Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who is reviled by many ordinary Iranians more for his reputed Forbes-list wealth than for anything he might tell them isn’t permitted under Islam. And yet, in the wake of the 2009 election, and more particularly in the wake of the extremely violent suppression of public demonstrations and protests, the heroes of the opposition and the hope of many Iranians for a better future were again as they were in 1979, the clerics.
Ahmadinejad and Mousavi were two lay presidential candidates, but importantly, each had mentors in the clergy without whom they would not have reached their positions of power. When the country’s leadership effectively split into two political camps for the first time in thirty years, supporters of both sides looked to the clergy, their clergy, in the hopes that they might prevail. The disturbances of 2009 were more significant than previous bouts of unrest and government crack-downs not just because of the sheer numbers of citizens who took to the streets, but because of the support those people had from some of the top clergy in the country. It is a peculiarity of Shia Islam, similar though it can be to the Catholic Church, that there is no Pope-like figure, no ultimate religious authority above all others—although the Supreme Leader and his strongest supporters would like him to be just that—who can become the object of either adulation or scorn for the population at large. Shias can choose to follow any one of the two dozen or so Ayatollahs, or the handful of Grand Ayatollahs, whose opinions and decrees, fatwas, hold great sway over a large segment of the population, even as that same population might mock other clerics, or the institutionalized clergy in general. And as for what is forbidden, Shias, like Catholics and unlike Sunnis, conveniently have their Ayatollahs to absolve them of their sins. Iranian secularists have often looked to Ayatollahs for support too—those Ayatollahs who might give religious sanction to their political beliefs—without which they realize they have little hope of winning over the majority of the population.
ONE OF THE most vocal opponents of the Supreme Leader and of the Ahmadinejad government, the renowned filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, dedicated his 2009 Freedom to Create Prize, awarded in London in November of that year, to an Ayatollah: Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, once Khomeini’s designated successor but since 1989 the loudest clerical voice of dissent in Iran and in the aftermath of the 2009 election the highest-ranking mullah challenging Khamenei’s endorsement of the fraudulent election. Montazeri, who died of natural causes a month after Makhmalbaf’s gesture, had long been a hero to those opposed to the velayat-e-faqih as it is structured, but he had been sidelined, even kept under house arrest for a number of years at the end of the last century and into this one. He was, however, in 2009 still perhaps the most senior cleric among the Ayatollahs in Iran, and his fatwa after the election declaring the Ahmadinejad government illegitimate was a boon to the opposition, as it carried weight among his pious, even conservative, supporters far and wide. Largely forgotten in the last few years, he suddenly became relevant again after the election, his funeral an opportunity for all Iranians to protest what they believed was a government no longer of the people but of a few clerics and their supporters in the military.
Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the most prominent cleric who had supported the opposition to Ahmadinejad and had tried to see if he could reverse the election results in June 2009, knew, when he explored the possibility, that he needed much more than the still-sidelined Montazeri to mount a challenge to Khamenei. Montazeri held no official office and had long been banished from membership in the important organs of state. (Montazeri did provide at least some religious sanction for a challenge, and his position no doubt had some influence on some of the more liberal Ayatollahs that Rafsanjani intended to persuade to his side.) Rafsanjani might have initially prevailed on the Supreme Leader, before he took off on his journey to Qom to meet with his fellow Ayatollahs, to back down from his support for Ahmadinejad’s questionable re-election. And the Supreme Leader might have listened to some of his arguments, for he did order an investigation into the allegations of fraud three days after the election, charging the Guardian Council with recounting a certain number of votes before it certified the final result. However, it soon became clear to Rafsanjani that whate
ver steps were to be taken, there would be no voiding of the result and no new presidential election as the opposition had demanded, especially given that Khamenei had already called Ahmadinejad’s victory a “divine assessment.” God does not change His mind in the Islamic Republic, we were told.
As chairman of the Assembly of Experts (the body that can impeach the Supreme Leader), though, Rafsanjani could at least see if he might have the support of the majority of the clerics in the assembly to persuade the Leader to change his mind, maybe only about whether God’s message was jumbled in its delivery to him. Perhaps the threat of a special assembly meeting might have been enough to force him to back down, too. We will never know the details of any meetings Rafsanjani had, for he is the most secretive and taciturn politician in Iran, but what we do know is that he was unsuccessful in persuading the assembly to take a stand (although Rafsanjani maintained his opposition to the status quo for a considerable amount of time). Perhaps the clerics who were dismayed by the Leader’s actions didn’t want to rock the boat any further; perhaps the Leader had his own proxies working against Rafsanjani in the assembly at the same time. In any event, the assembly had never, in its brief history, taken any steps against the Supreme Leader. In fact, it hardly ever met. In June 2009, when its function was most needed (a time, one might say, akin to the U.S. Supreme Court’s role during the disputed U.S. election of 2000), the “stability” and “good of the nation” trumped all other considerations, but the assembly remained quiet until months later, when it met and validated the Supreme Leader’s qualifications as valih-e-faqih. It was a majority vote, taken with the notable absence of the chairman, Ayatollah Rafsanjani. And it put to end any notions that Rafsanjani might have the ability to alter the course set by the Supreme Leader, regardless of religious sanction provided by Shia luminaries such as Montazeri or Grand Ayatollah Sanei. Despite that, Iran had not yet become a Stalinist dictatorship. There still existed some room for dissent at the very top of the leadership, and the leadership, even Ahmadinejad with his questionable election, enjoyed a considerable amount of support from the people.
WHILE RAFSANJANI was busy rallying, or trying to rally, fellow clerics to his side, Mousavi, Karroubi, and Rezai, the three losing candidates challenging Ahmadinejad and all a part of the leadership, along with Khatami, the elder statesman of the reformists, were vocally denouncing the election and calling for their supporters to protest and demonstrate. The two clerics and two lay politicians, all of them staunch revolutionaries and politicians, simply didn’t believe that “nothing was permitted” in their republic. Their supporters didn’t believe it either, for on Monday, June 15, some three million or more came out onto the streets of Tehran (according to Mohammad Qalibaf, the conservative mayor of Tehran and onetime Revolutionary Guard commander) in relatively peaceful protest, bringing the capital to a complete halt. Two days of protests and demonstrations, not just in Tehran but throughout the nation, had already focused the Western media’s attention on Iran. The country’s immediate suspicion of the media also drew attention, especially as the government began to harass and intimidate journalists as soon as it realized that little of the coverage would be favorable to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the governing administration. Nothing is true.
The Supreme Leader, apparently unmoved by either the protests or Rafsanjani’s machinations—of which he was undoubtedly aware—scheduled himself to address the nation on Friday, June 19, as permanent Friday Prayer Leader of Tehran, a title that the valih-e-faqih holds by definition. Ayatollah Khamenei rarely leads the Friday prayers, preferring to appoint a substitute leader from a rotating group of mullahs, almost all fiercely loyal to him and almost all, with the exception of Rafsanjani, hard-line conservatives. Friday prayers and the political sermon, its talking points faxed to the speaker by the Rahbari, the Supreme Leader’s office, are when the nation and the world at large hear Iran’s policies, opinions, and intentions. When the Supreme Leader himself speaks, they are hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth. And he wanted the nation to hear it directly from him, now more than ever. To hear what was true, and what was permitted.
It is impossible to know what was going on in the mind of the highest-ranking official in the Islamic Republic in the days leading up to his sermon, for few people have access to him, and fewer still would venture any opinion on him or his motivations. Some in Iran and outside the country believe he lives his life so isolated that he is unaware of what is going on in, or even outside, the country. If that is true (and if he relies only on the Iranian state media for information), then he is as ignorant of popular opinion as the Shah once was. Importantly, however, while the Shah had only yes-men surrounding him, the Ayatollah still hears from dissenters and those in opposition to either his or his allies’ policies.
In late 2008 while I was in Tehran, I heard a disturbing anecdote that could be true, but it could also be an exaggeration, as many things in Iran are. A doctor who attends to Khamenei told a friend of a recent visit to his compound for a regular checkup, and as he was waiting for the Supreme Leader to enter the room, the Leader’s aides said to him, “Now don’t say anything to the Rahbar. Even if he asks you a question, don’t answer.” The doctor was incredulous; as a friend of the Leader for many years, from before the revolution, he couldn’t very well ignore his questions. “Well, don’t answer anything non-medical-related,” one aide said. Presumably, the aides didn’t want any opinions on the state of the economy or the popularity of the Ahmadinejad administration reaching the Supreme Leader’s ears, especially not from an outsider. If true, the Leader is more isolated than anyone thinks, and he could have even been unaware, when he declared the election a “divine assessment,” that it might have been marred by less-than-divine intervention. Nonetheless, the Supreme Leader was smart enough not to make the same mistakes the Shah made when he faced angry crowds of unhappy Iranians. “I’ve heard the voice of your revolution,” the Shah had said on state television in late 1978, which as far as many Iranians are concerned was an invitation to a real revolution. The Supreme Leader, one of the revolutionaries who smelled blood thirty years ago when the Shah showed a weak hand, was not going to admit that anything resembling a revolution was going on. Quite the opposite, for on Friday, June 19, he declared that the state would crush any revolt, any protest, and any activity that was deemed to be illegal. Everything is forbidden. In other words, people would be hurt if they continued to protest, and it would be nobody’s fault but their own. “Bring it on!” the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution had said, “if you dare.”
But bring it on they did. Neither Khatami nor Mousavi nor Karroubi backed down (and Rafsanjani quietly went on with his business), for this was not about a revolution as far as they were concerned; it was about the very least a democratic republic could guarantee—the vote of its people. True to his word, the Leader unleashed his forces on demonstrators, and scores of ordinary people, men and women, were killed, beaten, or arrested and imprisoned. Nothing is true. The most famous of them, Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman whose death the very next day was captured on video and shown on televisions throughout the world, became a rallying cry for Iranians everywhere, but still the government did not back down. Every protest, every demonstration, was met with a brutal response by the Basij, specifically charged by the Supreme Leader to restore order to the republic. For many in the West, and some in Iran, the clampdown by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij became symptomatic of the Guards’ overall takeover of the country, which started years ago and accelerated during President Ahmadinejad’s first term. Although it is unclear if Ahmadinejad was ever a Revolutionary Guard himself (he was certainly a Basij), it is taken as fact that he was, and he has placed many former Guardsmen in key positions in Tehran, including in his cabinet. But to look at the post-election landscape in Iran and to call it a Revolutionary Guard takeover of the state, as some did, was to oversimplify matters.
The Revolutionary Guards, which are tasked with guarding the “revo
lution,” have always answered to and been loyal to the Supreme Leader, and in the post-election crisis, it was no different. There is no question that in the rank and file of the Guards many officers and enlisted men might have voted for a candidate other than Ahmadinejad; in fact, according to election statistics in the past, the Guards voted along remarkably similar lines as the general population, with over 70 percent voting for the liberal Khatami in his landslide election of 1997. But at the very top of the command, the officers take their direction from the Supreme Leader, and whether they preferred one candidate to another, it didn’t matter once the Supreme Leader declared Ahmadinejad the winner.
By the time the Guards entered the fray, the Iranian government had already set out a propaganda plan to counter accusations that the presidential vote results were fraudulent: Western countries, with the support of the foreign media, had instigated riots and demonstrations to begin a “velvet” or “color” revolution along the lines of those in Eastern Europe, and any disturbances or unrest were simply manifestations of their plans. The British were especially targeted as the masterminds, and since the British have a perhaps undeserved reputation for controlling everything that happens in Iran, even among Iranians who should know better, it was thought that labeling the “Little Satan”—servant to the “Great Satan”—as the nefarious hand behind the unrest might actually work. It didn’t, of course, except with the Guards and the Basij, but the Iranian propaganda machine plowed on.