Children of Paradise (21 page)

President Rafsanjani’s task was not an easy one. Through the turbulence of the 1980s, Khomeini’s charisma, the war effort, and the mass mobilization
of the revolution itself had held Iran together in spite of everything. With none of these tools at their disposal, Rafsanjani and the new Supreme Leader, Khamenei, had now to substitute functional competence for ideology, like Thermidorian leaders everywhere.

At first the new Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, receded behind the scenes, allowing the shrewd, pragmatic president to set the course of policy. His reticence was understandable. Khomeini’s was surely a hard act to follow; President Rafsanjani had a commanding presence and a formidable political apparatus of his own; and anyway, the new administration had inherited a lot of problems. The economy was in tatters. The war had cost Iran some $200 billion and brought millions of refugees over its borders, even as the gross domestic product shrank. Advised by technocrats, Rafsanjani decided to reverse the statist economic policies of the Mousavi cabinet, which he suspected had contributed to the country’s malaise.

Rafsanjani’s course correction would look to his critics very much like the structural adjustment programs foisted on Third World countries by the International Monetary Fund: the new president proposed to substitute exports for imports and to grow a market economy, even a private sector. He’d rebuild facilities damaged in the war, privatize the agricultural sector, and expand the petrochemicals industry. To do all this, he felt certain that Iran would need allies, even foreign investment. He would start by normalizing the country’s relations with its neighbors in the Persian Gulf region. At the same time, Rafsanjani invited a loosening of Iran’s censorship regime, giving his Ershad minister, Mohammad Khatami, a green light to issue publishing licenses for newspapers and books. In Rafsanjani’s first three years in office, Ershad allowed the publication of eight thousand books, and by 1992, Khatami had more than tripled the number of newspapers and journals. It was not exactly a free press, but it was closer than Iran had come in some time.

Rafsanjani’s critics feared that this was Thermidor writ large—that Iran, like France before it, was sacrificing nearly all its revolution stood for and restoring a familiar old order in the name of stability. The conservative
right was willing to give the new president a conditional benefit of the doubt on foreign and economic policy, but it saw the cultural loosening as a sign of ideological deviation and religious impurity. The Islamic Left, meanwhile, supported the cultural relaxation but objected strenuously both to Rafsanjani’s foreign and economic policies and to its own exclusion from his inner circle.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iran’s internal tensions bubbled to the surface. As the last country Iraq had invaded, Iran could not greet this latest aggression with equanimity, Rafsanjani reasoned; nor, however, could it openly condone an American troop presence on its border. And so, Rafsanjani concluded, Iran would “
shed no blood for the United States to accomplish its goals or for Iraq to remain in Kuwait.” Iran would remain neutral. But some members of the Islamic Left in the parliament continued to believe that the Islamic Republic stood for nothing if it did not stand against America. The Americans must be expelled from the region, they insisted. Some even felt that Iran should side with Iraq against the United States. Rafsanjani refused.

If Rafsanjani hoped to steer Iran toward a less confrontational foreign policy, the Islamic Left, with its public speechifying on Palestinian suffering and American iniquity, must have seemed to him an embarrassment and an impediment. The president was a bare-knuckled, ferocious factional player when he wanted to be. In his first term, eager to silence the radicals’ keening against America and against structural adjustment, he apparently judged the common interest he shared with them on the matter of culture and censorship expendable. So were the niceties of electoral politics, such as they still existed under the Islamic Republic. To secure his short-term victory over the Islamic Left, he made a Faustian bargain: he supported an elections law making “absolute loyalty” to the Supreme Leader a condition for candidacy in Iranian elections. The Guardian Council would determine who did or did not possess this loyalty. It was a law that would effectively allow the clerics arbitrary power over the electoral process. The Guardian Council belonged—in perpetuity, for it was largely appointed by
the Supreme Leader—not to Rafsanjani’s centrist faction but to the conservative clerics to his right. In 1992 these clerics were Rafsanjani’s temporary tactical allies; in years to come, they would be his adversaries. The elections law would remain in force, having dealt a permanent blow to what little popular sovereignty existed under
velayat-e faqih
.

The Guardian Council stacked the rolls for the conservatives in the 1992 parliamentary elections. And conservative hard-liners, to the president’s right, took the legislative body in a landslide. Once there, they doubled down on their revolutionary orthodoxy. In books, newspapers, theater, films, and women’s dress—all areas that had started to loosen up at the beginning of Thermidor, with Rafsanjani’s blessing—the hard-liners hoped to see greater conformity to revolutionary Islamic values. When it came to the economy, the hard-liners defended the prerogatives of the bazaar against the more modern, industrial priorities Rafsanjani favored. So it was that Rafsanjani, who had ensured the hard-liners’ victory in the election in order to relieve the pressure from his left, began to feel an even tighter squeeze from the other direction.

Khamenei increasingly took the side of the hardline right against the centrist president. In doing so, he permanently altered the very position of the Supreme Leader. There could be no further pretense that the
faqih
was a wise man on high, balancing power among rival factions. Khamenei was a factional player, the heaviest hand on the scale in favor of the hardline right. When the hard-liners in the parliament took up a relentless campaign against the new freedoms of expression Khatami had allowed, Khamenei spoke out on their behalf. After the Leader’s intervention, Rafsanjani had little choice but to replace Khatami with a hard-liner—which he did, in July 1992. Khatami took a quieter post as the head of the national library. The momentary cultural opening was over. The new Ershad would issue publishing permits only to those with the “appropriate” religious and nationalist qualifications, whatever that meant.

At the same time, the hard-liners and the Office of the Supreme Leader cracked down on young people on university campuses and on the streets. The student population had tripled between 1987 and 1992, making
campuses potentially troublesome hives of activism. The Supreme Leader’s office called for more representatives of its own at universities and for a mobilization against moral and religious laxity among the students. A 1992 Law of Legal Protection for the Basij allowed the youth militia to act as an arm of law enforcement, with the power even to arrest. Basijis manned checkpoints on city streets, exercising their newfound power to search cars for illegal Western music, magazines, and videotapes. The Basij could stop and question young men and women they saw together, arresting those who could not prove they were related to each other. In 1994, the parliament would pass a law allowing law enforcement, which now included the Basij, to shoot and kill demonstrators.

For all that, Iranian campuses at the time bristled with opposition less to the clerics than to President Rafsanjani. The Islamic Students Associations had been formed as organs of the Islamic Left. Now they opposed the president’s market reforms on ideological grounds, and in doing so they tapped into a reservoir of popular discontent. Iran’s economy was nothing if not volatile, reacting at once to the losses of the war period and the shocks of reform. Iran’s nouveau riche—suddenly visible after the war, now that foreign goods, from cars to clothes, were once more available for conspicuous consumption—included formerly traditional families that had come into wealth through connections to the revolutionary state. Rafsanjani’s allies, including many Iranian economists, would argue that the Thermidorean president took nothing from the poor, and that poverty in fact steadily decreased over the life of the Islamic Republic, even if the rich did get briefly richer under Rafsanjani. But the obvious presence of this new class created a climate of resentment. The pre-revolutionary elite mocked the nouveau riche for its provincial manners and crass tastes, while to less privileged Iranians, the presence of the new class suggested a culture of corruption, cronyism, and ill-gotten wealth.

The truth was that neither the liberals nor the left had succeeded in shaping Iran’s economy. Rather, in the midst of the factional tug-of-war over the country’s economic orientation, real control had fallen to a third party that silently consolidated wealth and power. By 1994, fully 40 percent of the
economy belonged to what would be called the “para-statal” sector, which consisted of a few giant, semiprivate foundations whose heads, generally clerics, were responsible only to the Supreme Leader. These massive, opaque conglomerates, called
bonyad
s, controlled funds seized from the shah’s regime and spanned the entire economy, from industry to agriculture to the service sector, sweeping what would have been hundreds of businesses under a few large umbrellas. No small business could effectively compete. Where wealth pooled, whether through the
bonyad
s or the oil business, the government was never far from view, and suspicion naturally followed. Once again, the reference to Brinton was irresistible: revolutionary states in the convalescence of Thermidor nearly always turned a blind eye to corruption. In the case of Iran, this development would become associated with the person of the president. It did not help that Rafsanjani and his family had recently made a fortune in the pistachio business.

Around 1992, when inflation reached 50 percent, Rafsanjani tacked left. He began to propose a kind of statism of his own that would challenge the bazaar by shifting capital to the government and the banks. He emphasized industrial production, as though Iran’s government could take the economy in hand and force it down the road of modernization that would make it a player in the global economy. To soften the blow and silence his critics, he doubled the consumer subsidies on which ordinary Iranians depended. But his agenda was still deeply distasteful and threatening to the right. In January of 1993, the parliament approved only a much-watered-down version of Rafsanjani’s budget. In the year that followed, Iran weathered a major drop in oil prices and a devaluation of its currency. Because it was politically impossible to raise energy prices or cut subsidies, Iranians overconsumed oil; exports plummeted. Rafsanjani had triangulated himself into a corner. From there, little choice remained: he would have to reach out to the banished Islamic Left.

• • •

H
OSSEIN
B
ASHIRIYEH’S STORY
begins with his father, a Sufi seeker and poet. To be a Sufi in Iran was to belong to a minority sect that was
alternately suppressed and adored. No literature was more venerated in Iran than poetry, particularly the work of the Sufi lyricists Hafez and Rumi. But Sufism was a faith free of certainty, a quest and not a destiny, a sort of eccentricity in the context of a rigidifying Islam. Bashiriyeh’s father meditated, took up mysticism, sought God in all of life and in all religions. So earnest was his search for divinity that he was willing not to find it. In the end he renounced religion altogether, informing his family, “I have found no truth in any religion.”

Born in the northwestern city of Hamadan in 1953, Bashiriyeh was one of six siblings. His father was the central influence of his life, the person who taught him the alphabet long before his first school days. He also introduced Bashiriyeh, as a small child, to the classics of Persian literature, particularly the poets Hafez and Ferdowsi. Bashiriyeh was taciturn by temperament, a person of few, carefully chosen words. Although he would devote his life to ideas intimately linked to the history he witnessed, he often appeared to evince more scholarly concern than passion for the ideas, the history, and his own fortunes. This placidity was partly native to him but perhaps also partly willed—a fortress from whose safety he might observe the dangers and disappointments of a political life that mattered all too much.

From his earliest youth, Bashiriyeh studied literature, poetry, and history. He was particularly drawn to the novels of Sadegh Hedayat, a Western-educated, aristocratic modernist whose work implicitly criticized both the clergy and the shah. Bashiriyeh read all of Hedayat’s work, but the one that was most influential in Persian letters was his 1937 novella
The Blind Owl
, a dark and dizzying prose poem that shuffles and reshuffles a handful of portentous images: an antique vase, a possibly poisoned bottle of wine, a lush-haired woman with slanted eyes, a hunchbacked old man, a murder weapon, a river, the dusty earth in the ancient town of Shahr-e Rey. The narrator, fevered or mad, imprisoned or dying, wrecked by grief or merely high, has murdered or not murdered the woman, who is an angel, a whore, possibly his mother.
The Blind Owl
was a classic of literary modernism and a riveting portrait of a society at once suffocated and mesmerized by its
traditions, among them erotic repression, misogyny, and the dissociation of sin from the better self. A brooding and alienated man, Hedayat committed suicide in 1951, when he was forty-eight years old.

For Bashiriyeh, Hedayat’s appeal lay in his nationalism, his love of the pre-Islamic Persian past, and his willingness to ridicule Islam, with its corrupt clergy, its greedy religious businessmen, and the blinkered traditional culture it supposedly fostered. In just the years his slightly younger contemporaries would spend discovering political Islam, Bashiriyeh came to identify soundness of thought with opposition to religion. His father had always urged independence of mind, and in his youth Bashiriyeh understood the poets he admired—Omar Khayyám, Hafez, Saadi—to be arguing for critical thought and against the conventional interpretation of religion. To the extent any religion influenced his thinking, it was the moral outlook of Sufism, with its emphasis on tolerance, individuality, and the inner experience of religion over its external duties and obligations.