A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  Another voice to take a similar line has been Ayatollah Montazeri.18 After the death of Beheshti, Montazeri had emerged in the 1980s 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 1980s he fell out with Khomeini. The details of this are not entirely clear. Montazeri certainly sent a brave letter to Khomeini protesting 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 cease-fire. Montazeri’s letter to Khomeini was published:

  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 the 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 United States and reacted badly when he found out. He also criticized 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 Khomeini 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 marginalize 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, and that Iran did not retaliate with chemical weapons against Saddam because marjas concurred that weapons of mass destruction as a whole were unacceptable. Sanei has also issued a fatwa against suicide bombings. Although Shi‘as may have been responsible for the devastating suicide attack against the U.S. 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 party 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—legitimizing 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 Khomeini.21 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—long the bedrock of support for the political ulema—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 at least forty percent since 1978.22 In the border areas 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 large number fled to Iran after the first Gulf War in 1991, when the United States 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 1990s, Iran was hosting more than 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 check. People expected something back when the war was over. Rafsanjani promised them precisely this as he was elected. In particular, he promised development and an improvement in living standards for the poorest—the mostazefin—upon whom, as usual, the heaviest burdens had fallen.

  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. But disagreements within the regime hampered the effort—in particular, privatization 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, as did exports—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 further blocked by U.S. 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

  By the midpoint of Rafsanjani’s second term (1993–1997), there was widespread disappointment with his efforts. Living standards, especially for the less well off, had not improved in the way the people had b
een led to hope. Unemployment was increasing, partly as a result of sluggish economic performance but also because the population had continued to expand dramatically over the previous twenty years. Iran’s rate of population growth was one of the highest in the world in this period—the total went from 33.7 million at the time of the 1976 census to 48.2 million in 1986 and to an estimated 68.5 million in 2007—though the rate of increase has now moderated. Tehran grew to a city of some 12 million people. Throughout the 1990s large numbers of new would-be workers were coming onto the job market each year.

  Despite the problems, the first eighteen years of the Islamic republic had achieved important beneficial results for many ordinary Iranians. A determined push to improve conditions for the rural population succeeded where the Pahlavi regime had largely failed, introducing piped water, health services, electricity, and schools even in some of the most remote districts. Life expectancy lifted sharply, along with literacy rates (now around eighty percent—eighty-six percent for men and seventy-three percent for women). Perhaps the most important improvement, reflected in the literacy rate, was in education. Primary education was, at last, effectively extended to all. Iran is a country with a strong cultural appreciation of literacy, education, and intellectual attainment, and families made the most of the new opportunities.

  The effect of the revolution on the position of women was typically mixed. They lost the better treatment at divorce that the last shah had introduced, which meant that fathers in principle got child custody—although in practice, as Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s film Divorce Iranian Style demonstrated, women often manage to find ways around this principle in the divorce courts.24 But women retained the vote. While polygamy and child marriage were made legal again, they almost never happen, except in some Sunni areas like Baluchistan. The imposition of the veil, along with encouragement from the religious hierarchy, allowed tradition-minded fathers to let their daughters attend schools, which were normally established on a single-sex basis. Girls took to this new opportunity with such energy and application that now sixty-six percent of students admitted to Iranian universities are women.25 Given the pressure on families to make ends meet, many of these women take up jobs after university and work alongside men, and continue to do so even after marriage (though many also languish in unemployment). Some observers, notably Farah Azari, have remarked upon the way that orthodox, traditional Shi‘ism has worked in the past to repress women and female sexuality in Iran, linking that to male anxiety in periods of social and economic change. There are still books to be written on the other distortions this has caused historically.26 The success of women’s education, and the greatly expanded importance of women in the workplace and in the economy, is a huge social and cultural change in Iran—one that in time, and combined with other factors, is likely to have profound consequences for Iranian society as a whole. Surveys have indicated that this is already emerging in more liberal attitudes toward education, the family, and work.27 There are parallel changes in attitude away from religion toward more secular, liberal, and nationalistic positions.28 Some clerics among the ulema are challenging the religious judgments on the status of women that were pushed through into law at the time of the revolution. These developments are not peripheral but are absolutely central to the future of the country.

  REFORM?

  Women were some of the strongest supporters of President Khatami, who was elected in May 1997 with a reformist program. Without attacking the velayat-e faqih, Khatami called for proper constitutional government and for a halt to extra-judicial violence. He said several times that he believed his reform program was the last chance for the Islamic republic—that if reform were blocked, the people would demand secular government and overturn the theocratic regime altogether. But his reforms were blocked, and the regime became increasingly unpopular, especially among young people. Levels of attendance at mosques have plummeted. Over the last decade the hard-line regime has become more and more overtly self-serving, cynically using its religious trappings, and manipulating elections to keep vested interests in power.

  Khatami’s election was an unpleasant surprise for the hard-line leadership (they had supported his opponent Nateq Nuri), and they seemed to take some time to adjust to the changed conditions of politics that followed. Khatami won seventy percent of the vote in an election that captured the national imagination as none had done for years. This victory energized a new generation of young Iranians and gave them hope for the future. Unfortunately, Khatami was outmaneuvered by his opponents, and those hopes were disappointed. Some have suggested that he was a stooge for the hardliners all along, but it is more plausible that he was just a bit too nice for politics—too unwilling, at the crucial moment in the summer of 2000, to risk a confrontation with the hard-liners that could have turned violent.

  One question in Iranian foreign policy that always lurked in the background through this period was that of a resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States. On several occasions President Khatami made statements that seemed to suggest an openness to renewed contact with the United States, notably in an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN, broadcast in January 1998.29 But it appeared that a block on renewed relations with America, like Iran’s hostile attitude toward Israel, was a shibboleth the hard-line elements in the Iranian regime were unwilling to discard—a sign of keeping faith with the revolution. Some international commentators speculated that after the improvement of UK/Iran relations in the autumn of 1998, Britain would act as an honest broker between Iran and the United States, but this did not happen. It was difficult too for the U.S. government to make a serious effort at rapprochement, though President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a number of conciliatory statements in 1999 and 2000.

  The murders of writers and dissidents in November and December 1998—events that became known afterward as the serial murders—were widely seen as an attempt by operatives within the MOIS to confront and discredit President Khatami. The victims included Dariush Foruhar, his wife Parvaneh, and other veterans of the initial phase of the revolution. One version of events says that Khatami was brought a tape that recorded a telephone call in which the killers—with Parvaneh audible in the background—had asked their bosses what they should do about her, because her husband was already dead. When Khatami successfully faced down that confrontation and secured the arrest of Saeed Emami and some of the other perpetrators, following up with a purge of the MOIS, many judged that he had strengthened both his own position and the reform process. But the arrests were followed by the detention of thirteen Jews in Shiraz on espionage charges, and again it seemed that disgruntled MOIS officials had arrested innocent people in order to portray the organization as bravely resisting some kind of Zionist plot. The arrests also had the effect of further embarrassing Khatami’s efforts at international rapprochement. MOIS claimed at the time that a number of Muslims (nine, eight, three, or two according to different statements) had been arrested in connection with the same case. But details were hazy, and it seems that this was a screen to disguise the anti-Semitic aspect of the action. Eventually all the Jews were released, but some had been convicted in the interim of spying for Israel (for which the penalty can be death), and some of the releases were only on a provisional basis. That meant that the men might be rearrested should the MOIS find that convenient.

  The question of the detainees and their uncertain future attracted renewed criticism of Iran and Iran’s human rights record internationally. It also threw into harsh relief the situation of Jews in the Islamic republic. While there are still more Jews in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East apart from Israel, it has been estimated that when Israel was established in 1948, there were at least 100,000 Jews living in Iran. By 1979, there were 80,000, and today estimates vary between 25,000 and 35,000.30 This decline is mainly explained by the emigration of Iranian Jews to Israel and the United States especially. Plainly, there were both pull and push factors involve
d in that emigration, but the rate of emigration accelerated rapidly after 1979. After the revolution, in accordance with the Islamic injunction to protect the People of the Book, Khomeini held meetings with Jewish representatives and decreed that Jews should be protected. The constitution gave the Jewish community a fixed representation of one deputy in the Majles (the Armenian Christians and Zoroastrians are treated in a similar way, except that the Armenians have two deputies). Some of the stipulations in traditional shari‘a law about the inferior legal status of Jews and other non-Muslims have been changed to make their treatment more equal, but many unequal distinctions remain. These include the rule that a convert to Islam inherits everything when a relative dies, while other claimants who do not convert get nothing. Under the Islamic republic the old anti-Semitism of some has simply dressed itself in anti-Zionist clothes (notwithstanding that many ordinary Iranians feel genuine indignation at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians). Many Jews feel that the political anti-Zionism of the regime has made anti-Semitism respectable, in the newspapers and in petty acts of persecution—for example, demands that Jews donate to anti-Zionist causes. The Jewish community generally survives, as at other times in the past, by making themselves unobtrusive and avoiding trouble. Given the ancient history of the Jews in Iran, and their rich and unique Iranian Jewish culture, this is a sad situation. In the United States and Israel, many Iranian Jewish families still uphold Iranian traditions—the celebration of Noruz, for example—and still speak Persian.

  The position of the Baha’is has been worse, and many Baha’is have been imprisoned and executed since 1979 (one accusation leveled at them is that they have Zionist connections). Baha’is have been subject to intimidation and arrest, and to forced conversion. Having banned them from attending university as Baha’is, agents of the regime subsequently attacked those who had set up and participated in Baha’i study circles.