Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
But Iran’s political transformation was still not complete. Neither a new constitution nor a new government ended the discord. Internal spats escalated as revolutionary factions turned on each other. Amid crackdowns, arrests, and executions, the government’s secular technocrats and the clerics began to fall out too. Bani-Sadr took to writing a newspaper column called the
President’s Diary
to air his troubles. He criticized the clergy for creating a climate of fear. He equated their tactics with Stalinism. He called publicly for “resistance to tyranny,” while privately writing the Imam to caution that the regime was moving toward dictatorship. Once he dared to warn that the revolution was “committing suicide.”
Clashes soon erupted between supporters and opponents of the president. Two dozen died in the bloodiest one-day showdown.
The tensions finally played out on the floor of Iran’s parliament. In June 1981, seventeen months after taking office, parliament impeached Bani-Sadr. The next day, the Imam used his absolute power to remove Bani-Sadr from office and order his arrest. Dressed as a woman, the revolution’s fist president went into hiding. He eventually fled to France.
The next sixteen months were even bloodier, as Iran’s factions fought it out. Two massive bombs in June and August 1981 eliminated a second president, the prime minister, ten cabinet officials, and twenty-seven members of parliament. In a four-month period in 1981, more than 1,000 government officials—including clerics, judges, politicians, and aides to Khomeini—were killed.
5
The assassinations forced Iran to hold three presidential elections in a twenty-one-month period in 1980 and 1981, the last two within ten weeks.
In the disarray, the Imam lifted his ban on clerics running for government office. He no longer trusted many secular politicians. In the third presidential election in October 1981, clerics were the only serious candidates.
The winner was Khamenei.
His election marked the moment that the theocrats took over both halves of the state. Iran officially had its “government of God.”
Khamenei served as president until he became supreme leader after the Imam’s death in 1989. Despite his powers on paper in both jobs, however, Khamenei has never achieved the same aura as the Imam. In his weakness, he has been more thin-skinned about challenges and more vindictive in response.
In 1995, I was in Tehran during the sixteenth anniversary of the American embassy seizure, an event commemorated each year with lots of speeches and a parade to the old embassy compound. The supreme leader devoted more time berating Soroush, Iran’s leading philosopher and reformer at the time, than condemning the United States or Israel.
“It makes me very sad when I see people who seem to be one of us…understanding truths in such a distorted way and publishing them,” Khamenei railed in his comments on the anniversary.
“Interpreting religion isn’t something that can be carried out by just anyone. Jurisprudence is the main science of the clergy,” he warned. “If someone confronts the clergy, he gladdens the Zionists and the Americans more than anything else…because they’ve set their heart on the destruction of the clergy.
“Well, the Islamic system will slap these people hard in the face!”
The regime’s thugs often did just that. Soroush kept a collection of ripped and bloodied shirts from attacks on him in classrooms as well as on the streets.
As a cleric, Khamenei has issued thousands of fatwas, or edicts, ensuring strict Islamic interpretations on everything from Islamic law to betting on basketball, student loans to children in day care with non-Muslims, women on motorcycles to staying in hotels used by Buddhists.
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Unlike papal bulls, which are initiated by the Vatican, fatwas are issued as answers to questions from members of the flock. They were used by the regime to control everyday life.
Music, Khamenei ruled, can cause deviant behavior and moral corruption among the young that is not compatible with the goals of an Islamic order.
Foreign news, Khamenei ruled, is outlawed if it in any way “lessens trust in Islamic government.”
When riding bicycles or motorcycles, he ruled, women must avoid actions that lead to the wrong kind of attention.
Clapping, he advised, is not forbidden on “joyful occasions” but must be avoided if religion is involved.
Nose piercing, he ruled, is not forbidden, although as an adornment it must be covered.
On clothing, he wrote, pictures or symbols from Western countries are a problem because they “promote the cultural aggression against Muslims.” Wearing ties is forbidden as it “imitates and propagates the cultural assault” on Muslims.
But new restrictions are not what many Iranians expected out of the revolution. And three decades later, Khamenei faced the same irrepressible irreverence that makes Tehran’s streets so crazy. A lot of Iranians do exactly what they want, fatwa or not.
In 2004, I was in Tehran again during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover. During the commemoration in front of the graffiti-covered wall around the American compound, supporters of the regime handed out little cards listing companies to boycott, such as Calvin Klein, because they do business with Israel. Yet throughout the capital, billboards once reserved for revolutionary slogans and Iranians killed in their Iraq war instead now advertised Calvin Klein—as well as Cartier watches, Nokia mobile phones, and Hummer, a cologne for men named after the American military vehicle.
Victoria’s Secret had also arrived in Tehran. So had the Gap, Diesel, Benetton, and Black & Decker. They were not legal franchises. Economic sanctions forbid American companies from doing business with Iran. So Iranian entrepreneurs bought brand-name goods abroad and resold them in their own shops, often with the brand replacing the shop name on storefront signs. Victoria’s Secret was a bit more discreet. It was marked only by a trademark pink-and-white-striped Victoria’s Secret bag in the window.
Iran’s young, who comprise seventy percent of the population, are particularly defiant, sometimes desperately so. When Iran beat Bahrain to qualify for the 2005 World Cup, tens of thousands of young males and females poured onto Tehran’s streets to celebrate. More than 100 young females even defied police—and fatwas against women attending male sporting events—to get into the stadium to see the game.
The eruption of life is visible every Thursday evening, the eve of the Muslim Sabbath, on Africa Boulevard. Teenagers and twenty-somethings cruise up and down a street lined with boutiques and fast-food joints in their colorful Japanese and Korean compacts. Boys in one car, girls in another, they drive slowly back and forth for hours, their cars blaring Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin, punk, rock, rap, heavy metal, pop, jazz, electronic, or disco. Everyone seems to be talking, either shouting to passengers in other cars or on cell phones after beaming numbers to each other. Some will hook up later in alleys near the pizza parlors that have proliferated throughout Tehran.
Police try to break up the car cavorting, but they, too, get stuck in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Dress codes are openly ignored by the imaginative young. One of my favorite images was a young woman whose version of Islamic dress was a black skirt and a baggy black sweatshirt emblazoned P
LANET
H
OLLYWOOD
L
AS
V
EGAS
. Pale pink has increasingly replaced black as the female fashion favorite, even among the devout. Many of the young dare to wear tight jeans under bust-stretching shirts or jackets. Colorful headscarves are perched precariously at the crown of the head to expose as much of a beautifully coifed hairdo as possible without falling off. Open-toed shoes expose toenails lacquered in red, purple, pink, or black. Faces are heavily made up. Among the young, plastic surgery—especially nose jobs—is common.
Many of Khamenei’s other fatwas are also ignored. Satellite dishes beam in CNN and BBC, which are viewed even in government offices. Women ride on the back of motorcycles, their chadors flapping dangerously in the wind. And the double bill at a local movie house the same weekend as the commemoration of the American embassy takeover in 2004 featured
Kill Bill
and
Fahrenheit 9/11.
They played to sold-out audiences. Despite its theme of religious irreverence,
Bruce Almighty
drew big audiences a few months later.
Khamenei’s powers are at the heart of the second big debate in Iran. It pits the clergy against itself—even within Khamenei’s own family. And it has still not been resolved three decades after the revolution.
Since 1989, the symbol of dissent among Iran’s clergy has been Ayatollah Ali Montazeri. The Imam, who once called him “the fruit of my life,” appointed Montazeri as his successor. They had been lifelong colleagues.
But ten years into the revolution, the two men had a final and politically fatal falling-out when Montazeri dared to criticize the Islamic republic and its rulers. The theocracy, he said publicly, had failed to fulfill much of its early promise. He called on the government to “correct past mistakes.”
“One does not fight a doctrine by killing, because no problem can be settled this way. One fights back with a fair doctrine,” he wrote the warden of Tehran’s Evin Prison after word circulated about several secret executions of dissidents.
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In an open letter to the Imam, he then plaintively appealed, “For what valid reasons…has our judiciary approved these executions, which can result in nothing but damaging the face of our revolution and the system?”
8
If the government continued to ignore the voices of dissent, Montazeri warned seminary students, then “dissenting words will turn into bullets.”
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Montazeri, who was born in 1922 to a peasant family, also challenged the Imam’s fatwa condemning author Salman Rushdie to death for satirical treatment of the Prophet Mohammed in his book
The Satanic Verses.
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“People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people,” Montazeri warned his mentor.
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The Imam abruptly fired his protégé.
Three months later, Khomeini suddenly died, leaving no designated successor.
For his criticism and candor, Montazeri’s popularity only increased. Iranians have been attracted to strong, charismatic leadership since the days of Cyrus the Great and Darius in the sixth century
B.C
.; less dynamic leaders have fared poorly in Iran. Khamenei’s subsequent selection, for many in Iran, failed to inspire. He lacked adequate stature and credibility.
And the simmering dispute over the supreme leader’s infallibility suddenly intensified into an existential challenge for the state. In the wake of Khomeini’s death, the clerics increasingly took sides.
Mohsen Kadivar was one of the early rebels. I called on Kadivar at his modest, book-packed office in 2004. Born in 1959, he has a short salt-and-pepper beard, a small gap between his front teeth, and the easy smile of a Shirazi. People from Shiraz—a former Iranian capital in the south famed for its roses, poets, sunshine, and, before the revolution, its wine—are noted for their lively charm and sense of humor.
Kadivar was clearly comfortable with his candid irreverence. “Iranians are so dissatisfied with the supreme leader,” he told me with a chuckle, “that if they see him on TV, they change the channel.”
In a series of essays and lectures since the mid-1990s, Kadivar has challenged the very concept of a
velayat-e faqih,
or supreme leader. His argument is based on both Islam and Iran’s constitution.
“Every member of society and every member of government is subject to the law. No one can be above it. Everyone has the same rights,” he explained. “Yet the root of the
faqih
is inequality. He assumes he is above it.
“It is time,” he told me, “for the supreme leader to be subject to the constitution too. After all, the supreme leader doesn’t come from God!”
The position’s absolute power, he once daringly said, made the
faqih
as unjust and illegitimate as the shah. That went too far. In 1999, Iran’s Special Court for the Clergy charged and tried Kadivar for “disseminating lies about Iran’s sacred system,” defaming Islam, and “helping the enemies of the revolution.” He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, virtually all of it in solitary. He quickly became a hero to young Iranians.
Kadivar was unrepentant when he was released. The time had come, he pronounced, for the clerics to pull out of government.
“Our job as religious people is not politics,” he told me, sitting across a small conference table and sipping tea. “They are taking Iran backward, not toward the future.
“Most Iranians believe what I say but are afraid to say it,” he added. The supreme leader may have increased his powers over the years, but his authority was actually in greater question. “Authority you can see in the street from the people. But power you get from soldiers and security forces. When you’re on a bus, in a taxi, in the street, in shops, you hear everywhere the criticism of the people. They are not satisfied with him.”
Kadivar was not a lone voice.
In 2006, dozens of Iranians were arrested for forming a human shield around the home of another rebel cleric, Ayatollah Hosein Kazemaini Boroujerdi. Many of his supporters had been there for more than ten weeks to offer protection. Buses rotated them in and out. Imprisoned for several months in 1995 and 2001, Boroujerdi had again been summoned by the special clerical court—the usual indication of new trouble and a potential new arrest.