Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  War

  In September 1980 Saddam Hossein’s forces invaded Iran, beginning an eight-year war and intensifying pressure on the Iranian regime. Opinion differs over the origins of the Iran/Iraq war: whether Saddam opportunistically attacked Iran at a moment of perceived Iranian weakness, in the hope of snatching some quick gains in the Shatt-al Arab and elsewhere (attempting to put right a border dispute that had been resolved unfavourably for Iraq in the previous decade); or whether Iranian religious/revolutionary propaganda in 1979/1980, apparently directed at starting a revolution among Iraqi Shi‘as and destroying his regime, left him little choice. But Saddam was the aggressor, invading and occupying Iranian territory, and Iranian talk of exporting religious revolution (of which one of the few concrete results was the Iranian contribution to the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early ’80s) had faded by the end of that immensely destructive war. As many as one million Iranians were killed or injured, and a whole generation was stamped anew with the symbolism of Shi‘a martyrdom. In addition to the regular army and the Pasdaran, large numbers of Basij volunteers (including boys as young as 12) were recruited. The regime constantly harped on Ashura, Hosein and Karbala to maintain support for the war and to motivate the troops. The huge casualties on the Iranian side resulted partly from the human wave tactics they employed against the Iraqis, who were normally better-equipped. The technological imbalance was the result of the policy of western nations who, despite their declared neutrality, sent a variety of up-to-date weapons to the Iraqis while keeping the Iranians starved of spare parts for the weapons the Shah had bought in the previous decade. The arsenal supplied to Iraq included chemical weapon technology that was used against Iranian soldiers as well as Kurdish civilians in the north of Iraq, whom Saddam treated as rebels. The war also had the effect of physically dividing Iranian Shi‘as from the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala and Samarra.

  Iraqi gains at the outset of the war (which caused huge damage in Khuzestan and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees) were wiped out by an Iranian counteroffensive in the spring of 1982, which recaptured Khorramshahr and forced Saddam to withdraw to the border. But the Iranians then amplified their war aims, demanding the removal of Saddam and huge war reparations. Thereafter it was the turn of the Iraqis to go onto the defensive, but the Iranians were able only to make minor territorial gains (the most notable being the capture of the Fao peninsula in February 1986). The hope of a Shi‘a rising to support the Iranian attacks in southern Iraq proved an illusion, like Saddam’s hope of an Arab rising in Khuzestan in 1980, and the land war became a stalemate.

  From 1984 Saddam attacked Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf, trying to damage Iran’s oil exports. The Iranians responded in kind, resulting in what became known as the Tanker War. The US and other non-combatant nations moved ships into the Persian Gulf to protect shipping in international waters, but in July 1988 a US warship (USS Vincennes) under a disastrously gung-ho commander, sailed into Iranian territorial waters in pursuit of some Iranian gunboats and after a series of bungles shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with a pair of surface-to-air missiles, killing 290 people. The Reagan administration gave explanations that contained more misleading inaccuracies and self-justifications than contrition, and later awarded the commander of Vincennes a campaign medal (many Iranians still believe that the destruction of the airliner was not an accident but a deliberate act). Another less than glorious episode in the US/Iran relationship took place earlier, in 1986, when US officials brought a pallet of spare parts for Iran’s Hawk ground-to-air missiles from Israel to Tehran (plus a chocolate birthday cake from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv and other presents) in what later became known as the Iran/Contra affair. The exposure and failure of the venture stood as another warning of the perils of making contact between the two countries, and of the divide of misunderstanding between them11.

  As stalemate prevailed in the land war, the Iranians and Iraqis bombarded each other’s capitals and other towns indiscriminately with long-range missiles, and with bombs dropped from aircraft, killing many civilians (the War of the Cities). Toward the end, Iraq had the upper hand in these exchanges, and in the land war was able to retake Iraqi territory at Fao and elsewhere, bringing the front line back almost exactly to where it had been in September 1980. Finally, with the terrible cost of the war mounting and no sign of the dream of a March to Karbala being realised, Khomeini was persuaded by Majles Speaker Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani to accept what Khomeini called the chalice of poison. Rafsanjani, perhaps right for the wrong reason, had used the Vincennes incident to insist that the US would never allow Iran to succeed in the war. Khomeini allowed President Khamenei (elected in 1981 and reelected in 1985) to announce, in July 1988, that Iran would accept UN resolution 598, which called for a ceasefire.

  Death and Reconstruction

  Khomeini died on 3 June 1989, and his funeral at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery drew crowds and scenes of mass emotion comparable only with those that had greeted his return from exile ten years before. At one point the coffin had to be rescued by helicopter from distraught mourners seeking pieces of his shroud as relics. Khomeini’s last months had been overshadowed by the hard decision to end the war with Iraq, and this may have affected his health, but he was also suffering from cancer and heart disease. One significant event in these last months was what is conventionally called the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 (some have suggested it would be more accurately be described as a hokm – a religious judgement). It seems that Khomeini had been made aware of Rushdie’s book some months earlier, but had dismissed it as unimportant (he had not even banned it from being imported). Reconsidering the question later (after demonstrations by Muslims in Britain and riots in Kashmir and Pakistan) he then delivered the fatwa as a deliberate act, to reassert his claim (and Iran’s claim) to the leadership of Islam.12 It was another classic Khomeini move, which trumpeted Iran’s Islamic and revolutionary uniqueness, and made more difficulties for those who might have wanted to bring Iran back out of isolation into some kind of normality.

  Another event occurred in these last months, which illustrates again the degree to which Khomeini had been and remained an enigma even among the ulema. Early in January 1989 Khomeini sent a letter to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, observing accurately that communism now belonged in the museum of history; and that before he fell into the snare of materialistic capitalism, Gorbachev should study Islam as a way of life. At first impression this seems an odd suggestion, but perhaps Khomeini sensed an affinity with Gorbachev—as an unconventional thinker hedged in by unsympathetic and less imaginative minds. The form of Islam that Khomeini recommended upset many of his ulema colleagues—he commended to Gorbachev not the Qor’an nor any of the conventional works but instead the writings of Ibn Arabi, Avicenna and Sohravardi. With the letter he sent three of his closest companions and pupils, versed in Islamic mysticism. Gorbachev thanked them and expressed his pride at having received a personal letter from the Emam. But the letter attracted criticism from clergy in Qom, some of whom upbraided Khomeini in an open letter for having recommended mystics and philosophers. Khomeini responded with a ‘letter to the clergy’ that vented the frustrations of a long life spent enduring the criticism of more traditionally-minded mullahs:

  This old father of yours has suffered more from stupid reactionary mullahs than anyone else. When theology meant no interference in politics, stupidity became a virtue. If a clergyman was able, and aware of what was going on [in the world around him], they searched for a plot behind it. You were considered more pious if you walked in a clumsy way. Learning foreign languages was blasphemy, philosophy and mysticism were considered to be sin and infidelity… Had this trend continued, I have no doubt the clergy and seminaries would have trodden the same path as the Christian Church did in the Middle Ages.13

  Ascent through the ranks of the mojtaheds had before the revolution been an informal process, but through the 1980s it became much mo
re structured; policed and controlled by Khomeini and his followers.14 As the hierarchy of Iranian Shi‘ism came under control, so did doctrine, attempting to create out of the previous plurality a conformism to a single idea of Shi‘ism. In the ’90s this development went further, with examinations set up for aspiring mojtaheds, and political loyalty (and adherence to the velayat-e faqih) more important than piety, depth of religious understanding, intellectual strength and the approval of a loose group of senior clerics, as had previously been the case. A new group of political ayatollahs, selected in this new way, proliferated;15 while others, more deserving in traditional terms, remained mere mojtaheds.

  This meant that the revolution had instituted a religion controlled by the state and subordinated to state interests, oddly similar, from that perspective, to the din-e dawlat the Shah had earlier attempted as part of the White Revolution—with the difference that this State was headed by a mojtahed rather than a monarch. By the mid to late ’90s some independent voices warned of the dangers of the new situation. Notable among them was the thinker and theologian Abdolkarim Soroush, who called for a secular government and predicted that otherwise, the compromises and hypocrisies of politics and government would discredit religion in Iran and alienate the young.16 This is precisely what has happened (the corollary has been an underground resurgence among intellectuals of the nationalism of the 1920s/1930s pattern, idealising pre-Islamic Iran and blaming failures of development on the Arab conquest—appearing, ironically, to celebrate the Cyrus-nostalgia most had rejected from the lips of the last Shah17).

  Another voice to take a similar line has been Ayatollah Montazeri.18 After the death of Beheshti, Montazeri had emerged in the ’80s as the figure most likely to succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader. Montazeri had been a loyal supporter of Khomeini, and an important theorist for the principle of velayat-e faqih. But toward the end of the ’80s he fell out with Khomeini. The details of this are not entirely clear. Montazeri certainly sent a brave letter to Khomeini, which was published, that protested against the massacre in prison of thousands of political prisoners, mainly former members of the MKO (the massacre followed a final, absurd, doomed offensive by MKO military units from Iraq into Iranian territory just after the July 1988 ceasefire):

  Three days ago, a religious judge from one of the provinces, who is a trustworthy man, visited me in Qom to express concern about the way your recent orders have been carried out. He said that an intelligence officer, or a prosecutor—I don’t know which—was interrogating a prisoner to determine whether he still maintained his [old] position. Was he prepared to condemn the hypocrite organisation [the Mojahedin]? The prisoner said ‘ Yes’. Was he prepared to take part in a [television] interview? ‘ Yes’ said the prisoner. Was he prepared to go to the front to fight the Iraqis? ‘ Yes,’ he said. Was he prepared to walk into a minefield? The inmate replied that not everyone was prepared to walk over mines and, furthermore, the newly converted could not be expected to do so. The inmate was told that it was clear that he still maintained his [old] position, and he was duly dealt with. The religious judge’s insistence that a decision should be based on a unanimous, not a majority vote, fell on deaf ears. He said that intelligence officials have he largest say everywhere and in practice influence others. Your Holiness might take note of how your orders, that concern the lives of thousands of people, are carried out.19

  Some believe that the real rift was over the Iran/Contra arms deal: that Montazeri was left in the dark over the discussions with the US and reacted badly when he found out. He also criticised the fatwa against Rushdie, saying that foreigners were getting the impression that Iranians were interested only in murdering people. Whatever the details, shortly before Khomeini’s death in June 1989 it was made known that Montazeri would not follow him as Supreme Leader. Instead, Khomeini’s close confidant Ali Khamenei took the role, having been promoted suddenly from hojjatoleslam to ayatollah, despite having had no very distinguished reputation as a scholar previously (several senior Ayatollahs protested at Khamenei’s elevation, with the extraordinary result that he became Supreme Leader, but only a marja for Shi‘as outside Iran). Since that time Montazeri has lived mainly under house arrest, and has made several statements against the conduct of the regime, arguing for a more limited role for the velayat-e faqih, for properly constitutional and democratic government, and an end to human rights abuses.

  Despite the efforts of the regime to marginalise him, Montazeri is still the marja-e taqlid for many religious Iranians, along with others who keep a certain distance from the regime. Another important example is Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, who has stated directly that the possession or use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable, that Iran did not retaliate with chemical weapons against Saddam because marjas concurred that weapons of mass destruction as a whole were unacceptable, and has issued a fatwa against suicide bombings (although Shi‘as may have been responsible for the devastating suicide attack against the Marine headquarters in Beirut in 1983, Lebanese Hezbollah later stopped using the tactic and since then to my knowledge Shi‘a Muslims have not perpetrated suicide attacks).

  These are just a few illustrations of the important fact that Iranian Shi‘ism (let alone Shi‘ism outside Iran) is bigger than the current Iranian religious leadership—something observers from outside the region too often fail to register. In recent years dissent from the regime line has gathered strength among the Iranian ulema, and reform-minded thinkers like Mohsen Kadivar and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari have gained a following for their attempts to address current problems within an Islamic context in an intellectually honest and rigorous way.20 In a sense, Shi‘ism is doing something the religion has always done—legitimating an alternative pole of authority to that power wielded by the dominant regime. At the same time the moral authority of the ruling clique has withered just as the moral authority of the Bolsheviks withered.

  Several commentators have remarked upon the caesura in Iranian politics created by the end of the Iran/Iraq war and the death of Khomeini21. The third event that marked this change was the election of Rafsanjani, the former Majles Speaker, as President, in August 1989 (replacing Khamenei, who became Supreme Leader in place of Khomeini in June). As he became President, Rafsanjani announced a new era, of Reconstruction. Ali Ansari has called it the mercantile bourgeois republic—the period in which the bazaari middle class—the bedrock of support for the political ulema since 1979 and long before—finally came into their kingdom.

  The war had done huge damage to the Iranian economy and to the living standards of ordinary Iranians. Per capita income had fallen by forty per cent at least since 1978.22 In the areas at the border where the fighting had taken place some 1.6 million people had been made homeless, and refineries, factories, government buildings, roads, bridges, ports and irrigation works had all been destroyed. The country as a whole had to look after large numbers of badly injured ex-servicemen, including people suffering from the after-effects of chemical weapons (many of whom still suffer today). In addition there were refugees from Iraq (a larger number fled to Iran after the first Gulf War in 1991, when the US and the UK encouraged a Shi‘a revolt, and then stood aside while Saddam massacred the rebels)—and from Afghanistan, where fighting had been raging since the Soviet invasion of 1979. By the end of the 90s Iran was hosting over two million refugees. Unlike Iraq, Iran had come out of the war without a serious debt burden, but the need for reconstruction was great, and Iran’s continuing international isolation was a handicap.

  The war had an important unifying effect in the country, and the sacrifices made by ordinary people enhanced their sense of citizenship and commitment to the Islamic republic. The war was the first major conflict involving large numbers of ordinary Iranians since the early nineteenth century; perhaps since Nader Shah. But the commitment and sacrifices were not a blank cheque: people expected something back when the war was over. Rafsanjani promised them precisely this as he was elected—in particular, he promised development a
nd an improvement in living standards to the poorest, upon whom (as usual) the heaviest burdens had fallen—the mostazefin, whose name had been on so many politicians’ lips at the time of the revolution and since. But there was disagreement about the policy means to achieve these goals, and results were mixed. Since the revolution, for the necessity of the prosecution of the war but also to serve the declared aim of greater social equality, the regime had followed broadly statist economic policies. Now Rafsanjani, true to his bazaari origins and sympathies, tried to build the economy by pursuing greater market freedom (in a way comparable to that in which the Soviets followed the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, to stimulate recovery after the Civil War). But disagreements within the regime hampered the effort—in particular, privatisation measures went ahead and then were halted, amid accusations of mismanagement and corruption. Some progress and some expansion of the economy were achieved, but less than had been hoped. Industrial and agricultural production increased, and exports too, especially agricultural exports (and notably, pistachio exports, in which Rafsanjani’s own family had a significant stake). But the economy remained heavily dependent on oil, the oil industry remained inefficient for lack of international help to secure the most up-to-date technology, and that help was blocked by US economic sanctions, which sharpened through the 1990s as part of the policy of dual containment applied to both Iran and Iraq. Much investment in the economy went into a construction boom, which benefited the investors, but less so the mostazefin, if at all.23