Hidden Iran

by Ray Takeyh

  But by the late 1980s, Soroush appeared a changed man, his training in philosophy and science seemingly having reasserted itself, eclipsing his once militant tendencies. In the pages of his publication Kian, in lectures around the country, and through his university teaching, he popularized the notion that for religion to inspire devotion it had to embrace rationality, the power of scientific judgment, and the philosophical spirit of reason: “An ideal religious society cannot have anything but a democratic argument.”22 Religious canon and Islamic jurisprudence had to be seen, he argued, as the means of ensuring individual sovereignty and governmental accountability. Through such a liberal reinterpretation of Islam, Soroush argued that it was possible to envision a political order in which religious doctrine and pluralism were reconciled.23 The once obscure professor suddenly emerged as the backbone of an emboldened movement seeking progressive change.

  In his writings Soroush propounded the notion of collective rationality, which can only be ascertained through the democratic process as the best guide for the national government, and he came to differentiate between a “religious state” and a “religious jurisprudence state.” The latter was a regime that was governed by the clerical class with its reliance on scriptural sources and indifference to popular mandates. However, a more ideal “religious state” would merely “obligate itself to create an atmosphere that defends believers’ free and conscious faith and religious experience.”24 In essence, Soroush argued that a tolerant regime would foster conditions whereby people would wish for religion to have a continuing and important role in society and even in the administration of the state. This stands in stark contrast to Khomeini’s perception that the best manner of ensuring the survival of a religious order was to create institutional arrangements designed to thwart, or even subvert, the popular will. Soroush proved a more judicious observer than Khomeini, as he appreciated that once religion became the instrument of an oppressive state it would only provoke contempt for the clerical estate and widespread secularization. Soroush’s writings and speeches were an unmistakable challenge to the ruling establishment, securing him the acclaim of the students and other enterprising reformers.

  It was not only university professors and political activists who were shaping the reform movement. In one of the paradoxes of the Islamic Republic, the system was being challenged by many within the clerical community. One of Iran’s most intellectually imaginative clerics, Hojjat-ol-Islam Mohsen Kadivar, now came forth with his own rebuke of the ruling mullahs.25 In his critique of the Islamic Republic, Kadivar naturally relied on Shiite theology, demonstrating the extent to which Khomeini’s vision had departed from religious norms. Given that in Shiite Islam the occultation of the twelfth Imam in 976 had invalidated all temporal authority until his return, the notion of clerical government seemed peculiar. Kadivar insisted, “There is no blueprint for the management of the society during the time of occultation. No one has a special mission or authority to guide the society.” Given that no particular class has a divine right to monopolize political power, the government had to be an expression of the majority opinion. For Kadivar, a democratic government was the only one that can claim religious approbation.

  Kadivar’s interpretation of Shiite political doctrine soon attracted the attention of Iran’s most esteemed and senior clerics. Ayatollah Montazeri joined the fray on Kadivar’s side, saying, “I believe that Islam and democracy can coexist because Islam supports freedom. What the conservative leaders are practicing today is not Islam and I oppose it.”26 Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, who resigned in July 2002 as Isfahan’s Friday prayer leader, accused the clerical oligarchs of “Genghis-like behavior, acting against the people and the law, isolating thinkers, paralyzing government, and throwing the country in the wind which will lead to an inauspicious end.”27 Given the unpopularity and corruption of the religious state, many influential segments of the clergy were searching for ways to reform and revitalize the stagnant theocratic order.28

  It is important to note that along with the other factions in the Islamic Republic, the reformers were loyal to the regime and its defining institution, the velayat-e faqih. However, the difference between the reformers and the hard-liners was their interpretation of the prerogatives of the office and the extent to which it must accommodate popular imperatives. For the hard-liners the powers of the Supreme Leader were immune from electoral scrutiny, and Ayatollah Khamenei was essentially invested with dictatorial determinations. For the reformers the absolutism of the office contravened the democratic spirit of the constitution. As the main reformist clerical organization, the Association of Militant Clergy, noted, “All pillars of the regime, including the Leader, must draw their legitimacy from republicanism.”29 In this context, the Supreme Leader may exercise a general supervisory role, but his powers must be circumscribed by the constitution and he must defer to the elected branches of the government.

  In the end, for the reformers the elected institutions of the Islamic Republic were more important sources of authority than its appointed offices with their mandates from heaven. As the former speaker of the parliament, and a recent presidential candidate, Mehdi Karrubi, stipulated, “Without the vote of the people, the regime does not have legitimacy.”30 The essential argument of the reformers was that a religious order can only retain its authority through persuasion and popular acceptance. A compulsory imposition of religious strictures and a disdain for the collective will would inexorably erode the foundations of the state. Unlike the hard-liners, the reformers exhibited ample confidence in the ability of the populace to sustain a state that was religious in character and yet democratic in its practices. Tensions and contradictions that such an order inevitably provoked would be resolved through compromises that democracies are particularly capable of forging. Such a progressive interpretation of the Islamic Republic would prove fundamentally at odds with the despotic aspirations of the hard-liners.

  Into this charged atmosphere stepped Muhammad Khatami, who emerged as the presidential candidate of the reformers for the 1997 election. The hard-liners quickly accepted his petition; they perceived him as a suitable token candidate for their much better organized and funded conservative standard-bearer, Speaker of the Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri. To the shock and dismay of the hard-liners, Khatami’s expansive vision of a tolerant Islamic government won the hearts and minds of the Iranian public. And it gained the little-known cleric a whopping 69 percent of the vote, a stunning victory over the establishment candidate.31 Suddenly elections seemed to matter, as they provided the public with an avenue for infiltrating the corridors of power. Khatami’s resounding triumph energized the reform movement; its adherents had to make the leap from contemplation to accountability, from theory to practice.

  The moment of exhilaration, however, was marked by a degree of caution, if not trepidation. Now the reformers faced a new challenge: how to navigate the treacherous waters of Iranian politics and institutionalize their ideas.32 This would prove a difficult, if not impossible, task. As their ideas threatened to escape the confines of clerical politics and potentially sweep away the entire system, the reformers faced the challenge of sustaining their loyalty to the regime or joining the popular wave. They ultimately opted for conformity, disillusioning their once ardent supporters.

  The perennially cautious Khatami came into office with the determination to choose his battles carefully and avoid open clashes with the conservatives. This was to be the strategy of incrementalism, seeking to gradually reform the Islamic Republic from within its own institutions. Taking the dual approach—characterized by the catch-phrase “pressure from below, negotiations from the top”—he responded to the burgeoning public demands for greater freedom. To turn up the pressure from below hundreds of new publications were allowed with censorship guidelines loosened, and permits for reformist groups and gatherings were issued with ease. The reformers, however, refrained from challenging the wide discretionary powers of the Supreme Leader, which the hard-liner
s jealously guarded. Instead, the reformers focused on expanding their institutional power by establishing a critical media and participating in elections. The reformers’ electoral triumphs in the municipal elections of 1998 and in the parliamentary contest of 2000 initially gave credence to this strategy, since Iran’s democratic infrastructure was expanding.

  During the heady days of the “Tehran Spring,” the reform movement proceeded from triumph to triumph, overwhelming bastions of reaction through electoral success. The presence of the conservatives in a variety of institutions was seen as a transient stage before the final exodus of their bankrupt ideology and stagnant movement. Such euphoric expressions engendered a sense of complacency, as the reformers never developed a grassroots organizational network to sustain their momentum and did not conceive a coherent strategy for actually dislodging their well-entrenched nemeses. The reform movement remained a closed circle of intellectuals without connection to other disaffected communities. Labor unions, trade organizations, and the modern business sector, which are the backbone of change in most developing societies, were largely absent from Iran’s emerging political struggles. The debates were scintillating, and the innovative attempts to reconcile tradition with modernity were thought-provoking and imaginative. However, the movement did not undertake the organizational effort of institutionalizing its power.

  Beyond the constitutional impediments, the reformers mistook the public’s patience with approval. The reformers’ lofty rhetoric and expansion of civil society had convinced average citizens that they should be the arbiters of important national debates. Once those expectations remained unfulfilled, a more disillusioned public began to question the utility of the reformers’ strategy, and eventually the reform movement itself. The fact that Khatami and his cohort confined themselves within the redlines established by the theocratic elite and retreated when confronted by conservative intransigence further estranged them from their constituents. In the end, the reformers simply lacked the courage of their endlessly refined convictions. The reform movement won the battle of ideas, but then had no strategy for the implementation of those ideas.

  While the reformers dithered and debated, the hard-liners had a well-delineated stratagem for assuring their political hegemony. In line with the Supreme Leader’s blessing, the conservatives cynically deployed the judiciary and the security services to close down newspapers and imprison key reform figures on contrived charges, while the Guardian Council systematically voided parliamentary legislation. Even more brutally, the clerical establishment orchestrated a campaign of terror that targeted intellectuals, writers, and activists, and unleashed vigilante groups on student gatherings and peaceful demonstrations.

  At every step of the way, the conservative obstructionism enjoyed the approbation of Ayatollah Khamenei and the hard-line leadership. The Supreme Leader warned his followers soon after Khatami’s election to be vigilant, for today “the enemy is striking Islam at home.”33 Khamenei’s explicit denunciation of the reformers as enemies of religion emboldened his followers to issue similar threats. The commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Yahya Rahim Safavi, declared, “When I see conspirator cultural currents, I give myself the right to defend the revolution and my commander, the esteemed Leader, has not prevented me.”34 The conservative countermeasures were intended not simply to weaken the reform movement but to demonstrate to the populace the futility of elections in altering the demarcations of the state and the citizenry’s irrelevance in the political process. In essence, the conservatives sought to disillusion the public and provoke their retreat from public affairs. And this is where the reformers’ strategy of incrementalism faltered—it simply could not overcome the intransigence of a core group of hard-liners who had the power to preclude meaningful change to Iran’s political structure.

  The other party that must bear its own measure of blame for the failure of the reform movement is the United States. The Bush administration’s strategy of democratic transformation and its so-called moral clarity paradoxically contributed to the conservative consolidation of power. The contest between reform and reaction in Iran took a dramatic turn after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as external events suddenly intruded on Iran’s domestic struggles. The bitter lesson of the Islamic Republic remains that hard-liners have historically been the sole beneficiaries of American antagonism. Khomeini, as we have seen, provoked the hostage crisis to inflame the public and displace the moderate provisional government. More than two decades later, his disciples sensed in Washington’s bellicosity another opportunity to fend off the reformers and change the nature of the debate. The fact that the reformist government had cooperated with the United States in Afghanistan made it all the more vulnerable. Far from being rewarded for its assistance, Iran was once more castigated, threatened, and lumped with the unsavory states of Iraq and North Korea.

  As America’s war on terrorism unfolded, the proponents of pluralism were defamed by the conservatives as a “fifth column” undermining national cohesion at a time of maximum peril. Ayatollah Khamenei emphasized this point, stressing, “If they [the United States] see that disgruntled people and adventurers want to cause trouble, and if they can turn them into mercenaries, they will not hesitate do to so by giving them their support.”35 In an even more preposterous assertion, the reactionary cleric Mohiyeddine Haeri Shirazi stated, “Those who weaken the Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guards are spreading discord among the people and want to promote American influence.”36 Beyond their rhetorical fulminations, the conservatives wrapped themselves in the mantle of national unity to justify their crackdown. They were not engaged in the suppression of democratic rights, they said, but were merely instituting judicious security measures designed to safeguard Iran from foreign intervention.

  The self-defeating nature of the American strategy was quickly noted by the democratic dissidents it was designed to aid. Shirin Ebadi, the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, pointedly criticized the U.S. policy: “The fight for human rights is conducted in Iran by Iranian people, and we are against foreign intervention in Iran.”37 In a similar vein, Hamid Reza Jalaiapour, a leading reformist politician, noted, “When Bush named Iran as an axis of evil, our hard-liners became happy. They can then mobilize the part of the country that supports them.”38 The reality remains that the hard-liners required international crisis and conflict with America as a means of deflecting attention from their sagging political fortunes. Sadly, Washington’s approach played easily in the hands of the “unelected few” that President Bush and his advisers justifiably abhor.

  THE WAY AHEAD

  A glance at Iran today seems to suggest that the conservative strategy for reclaiming their power has succeeded. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidential triumph concludes a remarkable resurgence of the Right that has now captured all the relevant elected institutions. In a dramatic realignment of Iranian politics, it appears that after eight years of stalemate, internal discord, and lofty promises of reform and democratization, the Iranian populace has conceded the state to the conservatives in the hope that they can deliver on their promise of economic justice.

  Despite the conservative jubilation, their strategy may yet prove self-defeating. The Right’s monopolization of power has burdened it with responsibilities that the reformers did not have. The reformers can be absolved for some of their failures by the divided nature of the government and right-wing obstructionism. The conservative consolidation of power over all the relevant organs of the state deprives them of such a pretext. Given their intellectual poverty, corruption, and attachment to anachronistic policies, the hard-liners have no viable solutions to Iran’s manifold political and economic troubles. The moderate newspaper E’temad captured the predicament of the hard-liners, warning, “With all the capabilities, and the consolidation of the powers that they enjoy, they should be able to solve all the problems without the slightest excuse.”39 On the eve of their most impressive power grab, the conservatives may yet face a d
isgruntled public that they can neither appease nor contain.

  The alarmist headlines and the astonishing power the conservatives hold should not conceal the fact that the clerical establishment is still divided along factional lines. Indeed, a persistent problem for Western observers is their perception of Iranian politics as static. The reformist triumphs of the 1990s were seen by many as inevitably ushering in a new democratic epoch, while today the conservative assumption of power is seen as necessarily permanent and durable. In Iran, however, politics is a shifting landscape. It is not inconceivable that the reformers may stage yet another comeback and reclaim the parliament in the next election. Nor can it be ruled out that Rafsanjani or one of his pragmatic protégés will assume the office of the presidency yet again. The conservatives have a daunting mandate, namely, fixing Iran’s economic ills. Should they prove unable to discharge that burden, they may yet face another populist backlash.

  However, for the reformers or the pragmatists to take advantage of such an inevitable reaction, they would have to move beyond their inhibitions and transform themselves into a viable oppositional force. As we have seen, at the core level all attempts by both Rafsanjani and Khatami to revise the parameters of the state have faltered in the face of the absolutism of the Supreme Leader and the determination of the ideologues to employ their institutional power. In the end, no reform movement can succeed and no liberal tendency can predominate without another round of constitutional revisions circumscribing the functions of the Supreme Leader and making the office accountable to the citizenry. For the Islamic Republic to change, it has to subordinate its religious dogma to its republican pillar.