Children of Paradise (23 page)

The role that Popper and Anglo-American analytic philosophy played in
Kiyan
had a parallel in the field of political sociology at the Center for Strategic Research. Like so many of his colleagues on the Islamic Left, Saeed Hajjarian had fallen under Shariati’s spell before the revolution. But the business of actually governing had raised questions that Shariati’s wild poetry could not answer—precise, pragmatic questions about politics and the function of the state. Even Marx, who had been particularly important to Hajjarian’s cohort, seemed to offer only the bluntest of instruments for the resolution of complex problems. Hajjarian, who had been studying mechanical engineering at the time of the revolution, returned to the University of Tehran for a political science PhD even while he ran his division of the new think tank. At the university, he fell under the sway of the urbane young political sociologist Hossein Bashiriyeh.

Saeed Hajjarian, two officials from Khatami’s Ershad, a future deputy interior minister, and a future deputy foreign minister were just a few of the emerging politicians who flocked to Bashiriyeh’s classes to slake a thirst. They were religious men, many of them more conservative in their religious outlook and more committed to the Islamic state than the circle surrounding Soroush; but they forgave Bashiriyeh his secular background because, unlike Soroush, he was friendly to the Marxism that made up the other half of their political outlook. They knew that the Marxism that had animated them as revolutionaries required revision. It lacked subtlety. From Bashiriyeh they gleaned a line of thought that was influenced by Marx without being exactly Marxist, that was analytical rather than ideological, and that homed in on the diversity of social forces, classes, interests, and ideologies that made the state a site of struggle and conflict. Their revolution achieved,
they could see that the state was not a finished affair. To better understand its continuing dynamism, Bashiriyeh brought them Poulantzas and Gramsci as well as the concept of a civil society that was both a part of the state and a valve for constructive opposition. Those, like Hajjarian and his colleagues at the Center for Strategic Research, who were not inclined to take on board Popper’s wholesale rejection of Marx turned to the tradition of political sociology Bashiriyeh imported, interpreted, and implicitly applied to the Iranian context.

Within the first three decades of the Islamic Republic, Bashiriyeh authored sixteen books and translated seven others. Among his own works was a treatise on theories of revolution, applying them to a number of actual revolutions, including the French and the Chinese. The book he regarded as his major work, which went to fifteen printings, was called
Political Sociology
, and it examined the role of social forces in political life. He wrote
Lessons on Democracy for Everyone
for a general readership; also, a book on the sociology of modernity, under the influence of Foucault. He translated Barrington Moore’s
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
into Persian, along with works on Hobbes, Habermas, and Foucault. One of his most controversial works was an essay on tolerance, in which he argued that forcing religious beliefs and practices on people ultimately undermined faith by making it an obligation. In another essay—much discussed at the Center for Strategic Research—Bashiriyeh defended the need for a healthy opposition.

The Islamic Leftists, soon to be reborn as the reformists, claimed Bashiriyeh as their mentor. But Bashiriyeh, somewhat like Fardid before him, all but disowned them. To his cool sociologist’s eye, these men were players in the factional struggle within the state, elites who had been marginalized and sought to reassert themselves within the power structure. To that end—to enhance, as he would later put it, their own objectives and strengthen their own positions—they used theories of democracy as a political tool. “And perhaps everywhere,” Bashiriyeh mused in later years, “democracy as an abstract idea has come into real existence as the result of a real material, political need, to be utilized.” The reformists, he suggested,
“found themselves in a position that from among the various interpretations of Islamic government, or from among the various ideologies, it was a theory of competition that would suit them best. So they understood democracy in terms of competition. Participation and competition, both of which are tools, not the ends of democracy.”

Still, when Hajjarian invited him to deliver a series of lectures at the Center for Strategic Research, Bashiriyeh accepted, using the opportunity to analyze aloud the course the revolution had taken. Bashiriyeh was even then advising Hajjarian’s dissertation on messianism in Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. He did not know that Hajjarian had just then emerged from the intelligence ministry, and he did not look on these lectures as political interventions so much as classes delivered outside the university confines. To the attendees, they were something more, a scaffolding from which to erect a new façade for the Islamic Republic.

The idea of democracy, once a term of abuse among the ideologues of the Islamic Republican Party, became nearly faddish in the early 1990s. Combined with Soroush’s argument that religion could be understood in multiple ways—that it changed with history and was susceptible to no single authentic interpretation—it suggested that the regime, even the
faqih
himself, held no monopoly on truth, nor any legitimate monopoly on power.

• • •

T
HE THINKERS AND POLITICIANS
who would become known as the reformists emanated from three institutions:
Kiyan
, the Center for Strategic Research, and Ershad under Khatami’s leadership. But the circles were concentric: the men all knew one another, and when
Kiyan
hosted dinners, all three groups came. They came to debate the most urgent question of their time and place, which was the role of religion in the administration of the state. To be a reformist was to seek to strengthen the republican dimensions of the state against the clerical ones. It was to argue for a dynamic understanding of religion, one responsive to the needs and realities of modern people in a modern state. It was to question, however obliquely, the authoritarian paternalism of
velayat-e faqih
. But, true to the name they
chose for their project, the reformists saw themselves not in frank opposition to the Islamic Republic but as a faction within its inner circle. They would preserve the revolutionary state through reform, and reform would be achieved through dialogue and negotiation among the reasonable people in charge.

In all of this, it was never wholly clear, then or later, whether President Rafsanjani was friend or foe to the reformists. Rafsanjani’s economic liberalism met mainly with criticism among the reformists associated with the Center for Strategic Research. But with the decline of the left worldwide after 1989, these thinkers found themselves drawn more and more to social democracy or welfare-state liberalism—visions not wholly incompatible even with that of the most liberal of Rafsanjani’s technocrats. By 1996, with the eclipse of the Cold War and their own turn to a more democratic vision of the state, the former Islamic Left stepped back from its anti-Americanism as well. The reformists now seemed likelier allies for the embattled president than the hard-liners he’d helped to power in the parliament.

Nonetheless, Rafsanjani had to answer to the Leader and the right. In 1992 he was obliged to fire Khoeiniha from the Center for Strategic Research. He replaced the radical cleric with a figure from the security establishment. Hassan Rouhani was close to Rafsanjani but far friendlier to the right than to the reformists. He served as the Supreme Leader’s representative on the country’s National Security Council. Rouhani made it his mission to shut the center down as a hive of reformist thought. “
If you think we will fall for your pretty words on democracy,” one of the center’s thinkers remembers Rouhani saying, “you are wrong. We know you are seeking to topple the regime, but we will not let you, because we will not make the same mistake the Shah made.” Rouhani forbade the center’s thinkers from doing further research on poverty, injustice, political development, or opposition; Kadivar was to halt his study of Shiite theories of governance. Moreover, Rouhani banned Bashiriyeh from the premises, declaring that he should not even be paid for the work he had already done. When the new director had an informer infiltrate Kadivar’s meetings in Qom, the informer accidentally faxed his report to the office of one of
Kadivar’s allies. The think tank’s members were incensed. They demanded to know why they were being spied on. One morning they showed up at work and were refused entry at the door.

Four years had passed since Rafsanjani helped the conservatives to power in the fourth parliamentary election. In 1996, with so many of his projects stymied or even reversed, Rafsanjani knew he had to tip the next parliament in a different direction. It was time for him to reach back out to the former Islamic Left. He found its moderate wing receptive, in its new guise as the movement for reform. Called Kargozaran, or the Executives of Construction Party, the coalition between Rafsanjani’s moderate right and the nascent reform movement emphasized the rule of law, economic reconstruction, and development based on science and technology. In its 1996 parliamentary campaign, the coalition’s reformist wing pressed for political liberalism, which included freedoms of speech and association. Student groups, until recently so critical of Rafsanjani, embraced Kargozaran as a vehicle for democratic reform. The new coalition picked up eighty seats.

The intellectuals recently ousted from the Center for Strategic Research found new homes in the nongovernmental space they called civil society. One group decamped for a newspaper called
Salam
, under the editorship of Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, the former director of the Center for Strategic Research. Three former Center for Strategic Research thinkers founded a polling agency called Ayandeh, which allowed them to pursue their sociological study of postrevolutionary Iran independent of state funding or interference. Others, like Hajjarian, drew closer to politics after the parliamentary election. It was Hajjarian who came to define the goals and strategies of the reform movement, which would work within the legal structure of the constitution to enlarge the role of popular participation.

With Kargozaran, Rafsanjani had at last formed an effective alliance that had the political muscle to get things done. But he had done so just as he reached the end of the second term of his presidency. Emboldened by the parliamentary sweep, a spokesman for the president suggested amending the constitution to allow Rafsanjani a third term. The hard-liners were
loudly outraged, and Khamenei vetoed the suggestion outright. Rafsanjani could not hold on to the presidency. He determined that the right would not seize it, either. But Kargozaran lacked a galvanizing candidate.

In July of 1996, the part of the Islamic Left that had not been subsumed into Kargozaran announced Mir Hossein Mousavi as its candidate for the 1997 presidential election. Mousavi was the Islamic Left’s most distinguished figure: he was a former prime minister, a favorite of Khomeini’s who had steered the country through war and privation. But he was also a divisive figure to those who supported the current Supreme Leader, Khamenei; nor did he and Rafsanjani see eye to eye on the important matter of the economy. Moreover, it was very early in Iran’s electoral cycle for such an announcement. But the announcement forced the right to follow suit. The hard-liners put forward the speaker of the parliament, Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri, as their candidate, and they suggested that there would be no need for anyone to run against him, as he was clearly the most appropriate choice.

Three months later, in October, Mousavi announced that he would not run. Perhaps he was intimidated by his old rival who now sat in the catbird seat. Years later, rumor had it that Khamenei, who felt he had at last vanquished an old competitor when he was named Leader, forbade Mousavi from entering or even speaking of politics after Khomeini’s death. If this was true, it would certainly explain Mousavi’s curious silence. For even while his former advisers, ministers, colleagues, and friends energetically debated social contract theory, Gramsci, Popper, and Islam, Mousavi disappeared into the architecture faculty at Shahid Beheshti University, becoming a political enigma and a screen for various projections.

Rafsanjani could not support Nategh-Nouri, especially after the debacle with his own bid for a third term. He would swing his weight against the hard-liners: he would prove to them that they needed him. But there was no place for him to go. Finally, in January of 1997, an unlikely candidate emerged on the scene.

Mohammad Khatami, the smiling, approachable former head of Ershad, announced that he would run for president. Although he’d become associated with Rafsanjani’s controversial cultural policies, he was far from being
a firebrand. He was moderate by temperament, cautious, and conciliatory; and on the pressing philosophical debates of his time—Soroush or Fardid, republic or theocracy—it was not totally clear where he stood. The reformists who supported him did not expect him to win. They thought they would use the campaign to raise the profile of a new journal. But in April, Kargozaran endorsed Khatami as its candidate of choice.

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