By James Buchan

IRAN

Few countries have remained so opaque to objective scrutiny, so resistant to coherent analysis, as Iran. Recurrently characterized as the most hostile of all Middle Eastern regimes to the West, the Islamic Republic has connived at the American invasion of Iraq and occupation of Afghanistan, helping to prop up puppet regimes of the us in Baghdad and Kabul. Regularly represented as little more than a clerical dictatorship, it has—uniquely in the regional Umma—held genuinely contested elections, and maintained a parliament where debate is not a façade and votes are unpredictable; yet prison—or much worse—awaits principled dissent. Widely held to be an obscurantist theocracy, it has transformed popular literacy and given more women higher education than any regime in the neighbourhood. Famous for its poetry in the past, since 1979 the country has produced one of the richest cinemas in the world, even while millions have been driven out of it by cultural repression. Today Iran is moving towards centre stage on the international scene, as the us prepares to tighten the economic noose around it, to preserve Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region; and the regime in Tehran, more domestically isolated and divided than in the past, confronts a mass opposition enraged by electoral fraud and eager for more comprehensive accommodation to the West. The conjunction of these two crises has unleashed a torrent of clichés and homilies in the Euro- American mediasphere. In this issue, we publish the first of a series of pieces on Iran, aiming at more informed and critical coverage of the country. In a strikingly original essay, James Buchan sets the current impasse of the regime in a cultural-historical perspective going back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. Many further questions remain open. Among those consistently glossed over or ignored in standard treatments of Iranian politics are the comparative economic and political records, in practice, of the Rafsanjani/Khatami and Ahmadinejad governments; the class composition of the Green bloc of 2009; the social basis of regime loyalism; the exact roles, respectively, of the Armed Forces and the Revolutionary Guards in the power structure of the country; the intellectual, regional or other grounds of factional divisions within the clergy; not to speak, of course, of the strategies and activities of the Western regimes bent on bringing Iran to heel as one more domesticated pawn of the ‘international community’.

Hegel says in his lectures that history must repeat itself to be intelligible. [1] Yes, rejoined Marx, in his most elegant piece of journalism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), first as tragedy, and then as farce. [2] Marx saw the coup d’état of Prince Napoleon in 1851 as a comic re-enactment of Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power on the 18th Brumaire, Year viii of the French revolutionary calendar (1799), mere historical play-acting in altered circumstances. What would Hegel and Marx have made of the June days in Iran? The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the tenth election for the Iranian Presidency on 22 Khordad, or June 12, was for his supporters an instance of divine grace and for his rivals a vulgar fraud. For the student of Iranian history, June 12 falls into a pattern in which popular revolutions (1906 and 1979) are disrupted by a coup d’état and then another and then another. In place of Muhammed Ali Shah Qajar, we have Ali Khamenei, for the Cossack commander Liakhov there is Interior Minister Mahsouli, and for Reza there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Persian Bonaparte in a car coat.

For Iranians of a religious cast of mind, the history of their country is the repeated disruption of God’s will by conspirators, mercenaries, foreign capital, liberals and the bbc Persian Service. For those of a secular bent, the sure passage of the country towards enlightenment is broken up by unpredictable periods of darkness, like a train journey in mountainous country. In either case, the consequence is frustration in which the Guarded Realms of Iran are granted neither prosperity nor justice, nor the fame they deserve in the eye of God and the judgement of humanity.

Within this perplexing pattern, there is a fundamental conflict which, as you might expect in the land that gave the world Manichaeism, takes different shapes at different historical epochs. Despotism fights Constitutionalism, Monarchy Parliament, Right Left, God the Devil, hard-liner reformer. The twelfth of June opens a new chapter. The long stalemate since the death in 1989 of the revolutionary pioneer Ruhollah Khomeini, in which the reformers could not reform and the hard-liners could not hard-line, is broken. Iranian Republicanism, or jomhuriat, is wounded and the clergy at daggers drawn. We enter a period of confusion, confrontation with the Western powers and messianic enthusiasm. Somewhere in the great salt deserts of Iran, there will soon be a nuclear explosion.

Crowns and constitutions

In 1905, Iran was an out-of-the-way place where European modernity was represented by a few horse-drawn kaleshkis, five miles of pilgrim railway which some rode in their shrouds, a bankrupt sugar factory, a polytechnic, a brigade of Cossacks and thirty million roubles in national debt to fund the Shah’s household and his water-cures in France. A protest at the bastinadoing of two sugar merchants and objections to the construction of a Russian bank were transformed into a revolt against the Qajar autocracy, famine prices and the sale of concessions to shady European capital. The progressive clergy, shopkeepers, craftsmen and a few liberals and social democrats called for a ‘house of justice’ and then a majlis (parliament), qanun (rule of law), and even mashruteh (constitution). Tormented by gout and kidney stones, Shah Muzaffaruddin Qajar agreed to grant a constitution on August 5, 1906 and the Majlis convened two months later. In a land where surnames were still a few years in the future, the deputies advertised themselves by their crafts: Messrs Bookseller, Tailor’s Foreman, Silkmercer, Wholesaler, Fletcher, Crystalseller, Grocer, Ricecooker, Middleman, Watchmaker. [3]

Muzaffaruddin died that winter and his son, Mohammed Ali, objected to any limitation on the ancient prerogatives of the monarchy. On July 24, 1908, the commander of the Cossack Brigade, Vladimir Platonovich Liakhov, turned his cannon on the Majlis building in Tehran. By then, many of the clergy had come to distrust democratic government and the wild talk of liberty and equality. Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, the most learned and influential of the Tehran clergy, concluded that, until the Lord of Time—the twelfth Imam in direct descent from the Prophet through his daughter, Fatemeh—should emerge from his incognito and usher in the age of justice and the end of the world, an absolutist government that applied Islamic law was the least of all evils. For the anti-clerical historian Ahmad Kasravi, the Constitutional Revolution was premature. ‘The mass of people’, he wrote in the 1920s,

were wholly ignorant of what a Constitution is and what it entailed and took part in the insurrection merely to follow their leaders. In that case, there should have been at the outset of the movement people to guide and educate and teach everybody about popular government and national life, and progress as it is understood in Europe. [4]

The ‘little despotism’, as it was called, lasted just a year. A force of Constitutionalist tribesmen from the Bakhtiari gathered in Isfahan, defeated the royal army and reconvened the Majlis. Sheikh Fazlollah was hanged on June 30, 1909. But Constitutionalism gradually disintegrated and much of the clergy returned to the seminary or doffed their turbans. In 1921, a Cossack officer named Reza seized power, ejected the Qajars four years later and instituted a modernizing despotism. Foreigners responded according to national type: English ladies attended Reza’s coronation in 1926 and designed the court uniforms from patterns at Kensington Palace; a German professor dug up an ancient Persian word, Pahlavi, to consecrate the parvenu dynasty; the Soviet orientalists at Novy Vostok labelled Reza a bourgeois revolutionist, anti-feudal and anti-imperial, who would create an industrial society ripe for proletarian revolution.

Reza duly introduced surnames, a uniform dress code, factories, a national bank and university, an insurance company and military conscription. He paid off the foreign debt and forced government officials to appear in public with their wives. He smashed the corporate character of Iranian society, murdered his associates or drove them to suicide, and alienated every class of men and women. Hemmed in by Soviet commercial policies, and hating British control of the oil industry in the south of the country, Reza was attracted to Weimar and then National Socialist Germany. He built a railway from north to south, paid for by a tax on his people’s only luxuries, tea and sugar, and that was his undoing.

In 1941, needing the Trans-Iranian Railway to ship American bombers and trucks to the Red Army, the British and Soviets invaded Iran and sent Reza into exile. His son Mohammed Reza took his place but, before he could find his feet, there was a brief flowering of parliamentary government. Under the wing of the Red Army in northern Iran a popular front party, the Tudeh (or ‘mass’) gained in power and influence. In 1953, after a valetudinarian nobleman named Mussadiq as-Saltaneh nationalized the British-owned oil industry amid great popular excitement, bazaar thugs and the anti-communist clergy (liberally bribed by the British and Americans) staged a third coup d’état. Restored to his throne, Mohammed Reza dismantled representative government, suppressed the secular opposition and attempted to demolish the clergy as a political force by ordering the troublesome Khomeini into exile in 1964.

When the revolution came, in the bitter winter of 1978–79, the old constitutional slogans of independence and the rule of law merged with the mourning ceremonies of the Shia for the martyrs of the Prophet’s family. The public listened spellbound to Khomeini on television, discoursing for five nights on the first six words of the Koran. [5] Meanwhile student radicals occupied the us Embassy and the Islamic Republican Party, whose newspaper was edited and managed by a certain Mir Hossein Mousavi, proceeded to make fools of the liberals. In the new constitution drawn up by the theoreticians of the irp, the representative government of 1906 was revived but hemmed in by appointed institutions, such as the Council of Guardians, designed to preserve clerical hegemony. The new constitution, approved by referendum on October 24, 1979, placed at the head of affairs (first of Iran, and then the world), as Regent until that joyous moment when the Lord of Time unveils himself to view, a seminary-trained jurist. This arrangement, so rich in possibilities for political and doctrinal conflict, nonetheless remained intact through thirty years of presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections. That changed on June 12, 2009.

An electoral coup

Even in Iran, where alone of the Muslim lands miracles not only occur but are on the increase, the results of the tenth presidential election are a prodigy. Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saw in the ballot evidence of ‘the special favour of the Lord of Time to the Iranian people and the System of the Islamic Republic’. [6] In contrast, Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, an old revolutionary living in retirement near Isfahan, said here were ‘results no healthy reasoning faculty could possibly accept’. [7] To have turned out 85 per cent of the electorate is one thing, but for almost all of the increased turn-out to vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another. In one province, East Azarbaijan, which also happens to be the home province of Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main challenger, Ahmadinejad increased ten-fold his vote of 2005. In two provinces, Yazd and Mazanderan, more people voted than were on the electoral register, and in four other provinces the participation rate was 95 per cent. Iranians in possession of an identity card can vote where they like and Yazd is a fine town, with an interesting Zoroastrian community, a tradition of resist-died silk-weaving etc., but it takes several days to reach. Where, for example, the Majlis election of 1943 took six months to count, this presidential election had a satisfactory result in an hour.

In politics, what matters is what people think. Millions of Iranians believe that the Interior Ministry, under Sadeq Mahsouli, and the clerical leadership have disenfranchized them. It is as if the Iranian public were no more than torpid rayots (‘livestock’) of the Middle Ages, not a nation that pioneered representative government in Asia in 1906, overturned a well-armed despotism in 1979 and advanced in bounds in literacy and college education over the last generation. This is not the society of 1906 or even 1979, but an educated population, dwelling in immense cities, and steeped in its own history. The public knows that representative government is a force in Iran. It was the Majlis that prevented Lord Curzon establishing a personal protectorate in 1919, stood up to the Soviets in 1946, ousted the stingy Scottish managers of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 and reformed the one-sided divorce law in 1967.

A rigged election in Iran is scarcely a new phenomenon. The ninth presidential election of 2005, which brought Ahmadinejad, then Mayor of Tehran, to his first term, inspired no sort of confidence in Iranian mathematics. The questions this time are why the revolutionary establishment in Iran, known in Persian as the nezam or System, found it advisable to stage this slapdash little coup d’état in this particular year 1388 of the Persian solar calendar; and what are its consequences for the life and prosperity of the Islamic Republic?

Contenders

Of the four hundred and seventy-five men and women who presented themselves as candidates for President, all but four were rejected by the Council of Guardians. Those were the incumbent, Ahmadinejad; a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards corps, Mohsen Rezai; an elderly cleric and former speaker of the Majlis, Mehdi Karrubi; and a former prime minister living in retirement, Mir Hossein Mousavi. Of the challengers, only Mousavi was given much of a chance. A cousin of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, Mousavi descends from the same branch of the Prophet’s family as Khomeini himself. He was bred up an architect and town planner. A disciple (with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard) of the Fanonist philosopher Ali Shariati, Mousavi came to power in that evil summer of 1981 when the first generation of Khomeini’s associates were wiped out in bombings and assassinations by the ultra-leftist Mujahedin. There followed a nightmare of Terror in which not only the Mujahedin but the secular Left and Kurdish separatists were wiped out or driven into exile. Evin Prison became for a while a concentration camp, and as many as three thousand young people went to the gallows.

As prime minister during the Terror and the eight-year war with Baathist Iraq, Mousavi is remembered for a fair system of rationing food and petrol, and for his bad relations with Khamenei, then President. Soon after the ceasefire with the Baath in 1988, Mousavi resigned. Khomeini’s death a little later robbed him of his principal support and established Khamenei as Leader or Regent. The prime minister’s post was abolished, the Islamic Republican Party dissolved and Mousavi retired into private life. When, in the course of reconstruction after the war, the scattered remnants of the Islamic left joined with a frustrated younger generation to become the ‘reformists’ (aslahtalaban), Mousavi resisted pressure to stand for the Presidency in favour of a popular clergyman of the second rank, Mohammed Khatami.

‘An insignificant child of the Revolution’, as he describes himself, Mousavi’s pious scowl and long-winded manner seemed no particular threat to the System or to its ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. He has said, for example to Time magazine the day before the election, that the use of Iranian nuclear energy for the making of weapons was ‘negotiable’. [8] Yet the Iranian project to enrich uranium is not under the control of the Iranian president. A penitent Terrorist may not be the best choice for the many young Iranians longing to end their isolation and for the exiles hoping to return. Anyway, forms of government in Iran that look antiquated tend to be long-lived. The Safavids lasted a century after they had succumbed to drink and harem politics, the Qajars long outlasted their vigour and their revenue and even the Pahlavis, hated as they were, occupied the Peacock Throne for fifty-four years. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic, with its mixture of parliamentary democracy and clerical dictatorship, has survived since 1979 with only small alterations, of which the most important was the abolition of the prime minister’s office and the return of Mousavi to his architect’s table and painter’s easel.

In the ten days of campaigning, the reform-minded Mousavi and Karrubi concentrated less on their own policies than on the conduct of Ahmadinejad. Here was a man of doubtful truthfulness, superstitious, chaotic in his administrative work, and bucolic, even clownish, in his appearances on the diplomatic stage. Ahmadinejad countered with his twinkle, his workman’s manners, his open-handedness with the state’s money, his intimacy with the Lord of Time, his fund of folksy Molla Nasreddin stories, his Jew-baiting, and his humiliation of the Royal Navy in the Shatt al-Arab. In a series of television debates—a novelty for Iran—Ahmadinejad cast aspersions on his opponents’ financial probity and insulted Zahra Rahnavard.

As the Mousavi campaign gathered strength, it adopted as its symbol the colour green. That was both wise and rash. It was wise, because green is the colour of the Prophet’s family, and also rather becoming. It was rash because the command of the Revolutionary Guards corps has come to fear a revolution from below. Mousavist green evoked Georgian rose, Ukrainian orange and Kirghiz tulip. Since those were movements to throw off the desiccated remnants of Soviet rule, they did not appear to have much connexion with Iran which, to everybody’s surprise including its own, had managed to eject the Red Army in 1946. On June 10, Yadollah Javani, the political director of the Guards, warned that a velvet revolution would not be tolerated. ‘There are many indications that some extremist groups have in mind a “colour revolution”’, he said. ‘Any attempt at a velvet revolution will be nipped in the bud.’ [9]

A Democrat president in Washington often unsettles an authoritarian regime in Iran. John F. Kennedy in 1962 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 insisted on democratic reforms that were ultimately disastrous for Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. As Tocqueville said, a bad government is never more vulnerable than at the moment when it begins to reform itself. [10] Revolutionary Iran relies for its public support on external threat, both political and doctrinal. Barack Obama, in offering his hand, slackened one of the three mainstays that keep the country in perpetual tension—the other two being the threat of attack from Israel and sectarian Sunnism, whether Saudi, Binladenite or Deobandi.

Presidential elections in the Islamic Republic take place in two rounds, a French practice that Khomeini and his advisers brought back in their hand luggage from Paris in 1979 like a box of nougat. Unless a single candidate polls 50 per cent and one vote in the first round, after a two-week interval there is a run-off between the two leaders. It does appear that the 62 per cent given Ahmadinejad with such suspicious haste on the morning of June 13 was arrived at precisely to prevent that eventuality. A second round, in which the muj-e sabz or ‘green wave’ might have turned into a tide and swept Ahmadinejad away, was best avoided. As so often, what appears to be a consequence is, in reality, a cause. Whatever the truth of the matter, Ahmadinejad is so fond of talking that we will soon all know.

The week that followed saw the revival in Iran of the crowd, a force not seen in Iranian politics since Khomeini’s funeral in 1989. At least 34 young people are known to have been killed by the security forces. Many were killed in a pre-emptive attack on the dormitory quarter of Tehran University in the small hours of June 15 and later that day, when a crowd running into millions came under fire from a base of the armed component of the militia or basij, beneath Mohammed Reza’s memorial to the monarchy at Azadi Square.

In approved Marxian fashion, the Mousavists adorned themselves with the symbols of the 1979 Revolution. As in the January days of that year, each night a howl of ‘God is great’ resounded from the rooftops and bounced off the mountains to the north. As in 1979, they cried ‘Death to the Dictator!’ (or ‘Death to Dictatorship!’) though this time the dictator was Khamenei, and the dictatorship the Leadership or Clerical Regency (velayat-e faqih). If the Mousavists’ heads were full of 1979, 1953 and 1908, the System also succumbed to nostalgia. Ahmadinejad saw the unseen hand of Downing Street and tweaked the tail of the sleepy British Lion at his white brick-and-wisteria lair on Ferdowsi Avenue. What was new was the style of repression. The old chomaqdaran or club-wielders, who used to break up leftist or women’s demonstrations at the turn of the 1980s, are now flanked by militiamen equipped with handsome motorbikes and automatic weapons. Several hundred oppositionists were arrested and on August 1, a large group was put on public trial. At the trial, Mohammed Ali Abtahi, an adviser to Karrubi, in prison pyjamas and stripped of his turban, confessed to having been mistaken in claiming that the election result was a fraud. He said that Khatami, Mousavi and the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had conspired beforehand to stage a velvet revolution. Nobody in Iran credits such prison confessions, which have been a feature of Iranian life since the Pahlavis, or responds with anything but sympathy. Abtahi’s distressing performance was merely a warning to the named gentlemen that they, too, could soon be resident in Evin.

The crowds lacked leadership. Mousavi, his wife and his friends were not willing to expose their young supporters to bloodshed. They lacked a programme, only a constitutionalist question: rai-e man ku—where is my vote? They lacked organization, except as a coalition of small parties known only to connoisseurs of Persian politics, such as the Union of Campaigning Clergy and the Participation Front of Islamic Iran. Just as the 1905–6 Revolution discovered newspapers and telegrams, so the Mousavists had new-fangled electronic communications. Distributed denial-of-service attacks on the websites of Khamenei and the Guards were all very well, but they were no substitute for the direct action of 1905–6: the closing of the bazaar, mass asylum in the British legation, and a general migration of the constitutionalist clergy to Qom. Nor was there, as after the royal coup d’état of 1908, a reserve of constitutionalist forces in the tribes as when the Bakhtiari marched on Tehran and defeated the royal army. The Pahlavis smashed the tribes, as they smashed up everything in old Iran; and what Reza started the Revolutionary Guards completed when Khosrow Khan, chief of the nomadic Qashqai, was hanged in the market square of Firuzabad in October 1982.

Above all, the Mousavists failed to win over the traditional economy or bazaar. Though the bazaar is frustrated at Iran’s economic mediocrity, and by Ahmadinejad’s inflationist practices, it stayed open through June. There was none of that creeping industrial paralysis that was a feature not only of 1906 but of the autumn of 1978, when the Pahlavi regime could not collect its customs receipts or supply its mechanized brigades with motor spirit. Even an economy as chaotic and mismanaged as Iran’s generates a revenue which, distributed to the Revolutionary Guards, regular forces, police, militia, nationalized industries, veterans of the Iraq war, servants of state, a large clerical establishment of mortmain endowments and seminaries, and subsidized food and gasoline, creates an army of Iranians with a material stake in things as they are. The excess of spending over revenue is financed by inflation, always the simplest way to tax working people, for it is a tax they cannot avoid paying. Standards of living, when expressed in per capita income, have not risen since the days of Mohammed Reza, but inequalities of wealth are much less in the eye than under the Pahlavis and there are powerful sumptuary codes. As long as the regime keeps out foreign competition, and enforces modest dress and conduct for men and women (hijab), it can count on the bazaar. The rank and file of the Guards, which may be no firmer than the Shah’s army, was not tested on the boulevards.

The Twittering of the exiles became, by the third week of June, just the squeaking of little birds on a wire. At Friday prayers at Tehran University on June 19, Khamenei spoke ex cathedra, evoked the trials of the Shia patriarch, Imam Ali, and said that a fraud of one million votes was possible but not one of eleven million votes. He declared the matter closed and threatened punishment if protest continued. On June 29, the Council of Guardians ruled the election valid. On August 5, Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president.

After-effects

So what are the consequences? Mohammed Reza used to say that those who did not like his Great Civilization could go away. Since 1979, the chief remedy of the Islamic Republic for dealing with unruly subjects has been not so much repression as banishment. Each tremor in the regime has produced its wave of emigration. The monarchists, military families, savakis, Jews and Baha’is left in 1979. The liberals and left quit after the Terror of 1981. In the 1990s, when oil could be had for $10 a barrel, the economy stagnated and the currency collapsed, hundreds of thousands of young men drifted abroad as once to the oilfields of Baku and the coal mines of Krivoy Rog. The Mousavists will no doubt make a fourth wave of emigration.

Such a purification through exile has two hygienic effects. The first preserves an image of unity (vahdat) which is the pretension of Muslim politics as it is the principle of Muslim theology: the people are as indivisible as the Godhead. The second is to restrict the ambitions of the Iranian middle class, and preserve its small-bourgeois, religious and traditional character. A side effect has been to create an army of a million or more Iranian exiles in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany and Sweden, all but a few of them prospering, and all but a few homesick to death. It is as if in Bel Air and South Kensington, they have lost the metaphysical privilege of Iranianness. Their numbers at home have been made up by refugees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet what happened happened. The System’s unexpected loss of nerve in the June days has undermined its prestige. Despite the array of unelected bodies surrounding the Majlis and the Presidency, the regime still could not secure its wishes without giving a strong impression of fraud and shooting several young women. An order which once dreamed of imposing Islamic government on Iraq (or at least on the Najaf seminary that Khomeini had so hated in his Iraqi exile in the 1960s and 70s) finds itself shaken to its core by a drab architect and unarmed crowds. A Revolution that promised to give law to the world and return Jerusalem to the Muslims has reverted to a pessimistic Shiism-in-one-country, barricaded behind walls of belief and social conduct which are constantly being breached.

In the case of Ayatollah Mohammed-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a philosopher and mystic in Qom to whom both Ahmadinejad and his political circle, the Abadgaran, are much attached, this pessimism shades into defeatism. For Mesbah-Yazdi, Iran is under perpetual assault and not only in the military arena. ‘In the economic sphere,’ he once said,

this war takes the form of international conspiracies to prevent economic and scientific progress in the Muslim world. In politics, it is revealed in the actions of local mercenaries and traitors to sow political chaos and dissension between Muslims. But the most important theatre of war is culture where for years the colonialists and bullies have played multifarious tricks on the Muslims. Alas, we see signs of their victory in our country and even in our households.

In a speech in Mashad on July 19, he said those who wanted to declare the elections void were denying the very principle of clerical guidance. [11]

The Constitution of the Islamic Republic functioned. Its representative character gave the Iranian public a sense that it had a share in government, which provided a cloak of popular legitimacy for Iran’s power politics. In retrospect, it was the refusal of the Pahlavis to tolerate representative government that left them unable to deal with dissent. Reza abused and beat parliamentarians as he did his associates, and his exile after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 was welcomed principally because it permitted a revival of parliamentary government. In time his son, Mohammed Reza, who turned from the frightened young man of the war years to a sort of Montreux edition of his father, had nowhere to turn in 1976 except a discredited and unpopular single party, the Rastakhiz (‘renaissance’). It is now impossible to imagine the elections for the eleventh presidential period generating any enthusiasm. As Khamenei looked down, during Friday prayers on June 19, at Ahmadinejad in the front row, smiling like a prize pupil, he must have wondered: How am I going to get rid of this lad in four years’ time? Elections may well degenerate into a bayat or oath of allegiance of the kind Sheikh Fazlollah had in mind.

As well as its tragic view of history, and its promise of redemption, the Shia has been since the time of the Safavids the principal means of seizing and preserving state power in the Guarded Realms. Confronted with the dilemma of all scripture, which is written down in time but must legislate for eternity, the Iranian Shia allows those men that can master the gruelling seminary curriculum great latitude in making law. It is this latitude which allowed the Shia to import so many of the mental goods of the European nineteenth century, such as constitutionalism and freemasonry; the Third Worldism of the 1960s; and now the internet. Yet never in all Muslim history was there such an innovation as Khomeini’s theories for seizing and holding power in the world. Looking back at Khomeini’s lectures in Najaf in January and February 1970, now known as Islamic Government: The Regency of the Jurist, one is struck by how the argument proceeds not by authority (as in classical Muslim thought) but by assertion. It is as if Khomeini, in his long journeys through the outer reaches of Persian theosophy in the 1920s and the 1930s, had mastered those lost gnostic secrets that allowed him to speak with the voice of God.

These fantastic Persian theories have never had much appeal outside Iran. They are unthinkable as heresy in the lands of the Sunna, and all but unknown in the strongholds of the Shia in southern Iraq, southern Lebanon and India. When Khomeini was exiled by Mohammed Reza in 1964 and made his way to the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, he found himself ostracized by the senior Shia clergy. [12] The most venerated of the Najaf divines of our times, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an Iranian from the generation after Khomeini, is himself a constitutionalist of early twentieth-century character. His singular contribution to rescuing Iraq from civil war was his ruling in 2005 that the Shia vote in the parliamentary elections.

Even in Iran, the unity of the Khomeinist clergy has broken. Divines of great authority have been silenced or driven into retirement. The heroes of Khomeini’s movement, who endured exile and Pahlavi prisons and the assassin’s bullet in their pulpits, see themselves displaced by power-seekers and mountebanks. Montazeri, whom Khomeini once called ‘the fruit of my life’, has been confined to his house in Najafabad since 1997. In 2002, Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, the leader of congregational prayers in Isfahan, withdrew from an intolerably corrupt public life, in words that breathe the true spirit of 1906: ‘When I recall the promises and pledges of the early days of the revolution, I tremble like a willow over my faith. I see the sun of my life on its last rays, my flour sifted and my sieve hung back in its place. I am drenched in the sweat of shame.’ [13] In early July, he issued a statement condemning the manipulation of the election. Thus, pious Iranians disgusted with the violence and compromises of Islamic government have ample alternative authority, or ‘source of emulation’ (marja’) as it is known.

Like the French Constitution of 1848, ‘so cleverly made inviolable’, as Marx put it, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic can ‘like Achilles, be wounded at one point. Not in the heel, but in the head.’ [14] The role of Leader or Regent, created in 1979 for the hero Khomeini, is oversized for ordinary successors. The clerical kingmaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, who in 1989 manipulated the Council of Experts to elect Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor, has long had second thoughts. At Friday prayers at Tehran University on July 17, Rafsanjani presented the events of June 12 as a betrayal of Khomeini’s legacy. ‘You are listening’, he said, ‘to a man who has lived each second of the revolution, from the very beginning of the struggle about sixty years ago until this day. I know what the Imam wanted and am thoroughly familiar with the Imam’s thinking.’ [15] Were Khamenei retired by the Council of Experts, which Hashemi leads, the entire constitutional edifice of the Islamic Republic would be rattled to pieces.

Portents

Few ideologies last much beyond the generation that brought them to birth. The young people who were permitted to vote for the first time on June 12 were barely conscious of the Khatami government of 1997, let alone the death of Khomeini, the Sacred Defence against Iraq of the 1980s, the Revolution or the whisky years of Mohammed Reza. The lurid symbols of those periods evoke little response in their imaginations. The endless sermonizing about traitors and mercenaries and British conspiracies strike no echo. They never expected that freedom from foreign interference would mean isolation from the main stream of world affairs, and unemployment in a country starved of capital and brain. They do not fear a restoration of monarchy, or have a very clear idea what monarchy is. They want liberty, not in the sense of libertinism, but as what we would call privacy.

What they will get, as we all do, is diversion. In his Natural History of Religion, Hume provocatively divided religious sentiments into the fanatical and the superstitious. Khomeini, who appeared at times to be so absent from this transitory world as to be indifferent to phenomena, had no superstition about him and no tolerance of it. Those Iranians who swore blind they saw his face in the full moon of January 16, 1979 received short shrift. Ahmadinejad, a self-conscious man of the people, has a taste for Persian popular superstition; Shah Abbas himself kept the best horses in his stable saddled and bridled for the use of the Twelfth Imam. Ahmadinejad has fostered the cult of the well at Jamkaran, outside Qom, where, according to tradition, the Lord of Time appeared for an instant and where he is expected to return. In the eschatological ferment of these days, the System may well find in some greasy truck stop in Sistan or Fars that it has an old-fashioned Iranian prophet on its hands. It will have only itself to blame. If Khomeini and Reza had nothing else in common, they did have this: There will be no prophets in Iran while I am breathing.

The other diversion is a nuclear weapon. There is a fantastic belief across Iran that a nuclear bomb will entrench rule by the turban for ever. It matters not at all that the capacity to detonate a nuclear bomb did nothing to preserve apartheid South Africa or the military government in Pakistan. The enrichment of uranium towards an eventual bomb explosive proceeds. If that frightens the Europeans or provokes an attack by Israel, so much the better, for only thus will the unity of the people be guaranteed and skirt lengths stay on the ground. If the future is confrontation with the West, messianism, social conformity and a nuclear seminary, is it any wonder that so many Iranians in June marched from Enqelab to Azadi? Until then they can watch Ahmadinejad perform like Louis Napoleon in the closing paragraph of the Eighteenth Brumaire:

Driven on by the contradictory demands of his situation, he has to keep the eyes of the public fixed on himself by means of constant surprises, that is to say by performing a coup d’état in miniature every day. He thereby brings the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable in the Revolution, strips the halo from the state machine and makes the state both disgusting and ridiculous. [16]

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[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Georg Lasson, Hamburg 1968, vol. 3, p. 712.

[2] Surveys from Exile, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 146.

[3] Habl ul-matin (Calcutta), 1907, quoted in Ahmad Kasravi, Tarikh-e mashruteyeh Iran, Tehran 1384, p. 181.

[4] Kasravi, Tarikh, p. 273.

[5] Ruhollah Khomeini, Tafsir-e sureye hamd, Qom 1363.

[6] ‘Khutbeh-haye namaz-e jome’e tehran’, 29 Khordad 1388, available at khamenei.ir.

[7] ‘Payyam-e ayatollah montazeri piramun-e nataej-e entekhabat’, 26 Khordad 1388, available at www.amontazeri.com.

[8] Joe Klein and Nahid Siamdoust, ‘The Man Who Could Beat Ahmadinejad’, Time, 12 June 2009.

[9] Sobh-e sadeq, 18 Khordad 1388.

[10] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Book iii, Ch. 4.

[11] ‘Dar musir-e defa’e hameh janebeh az islam’, Ramadan 1425, available at www.mesbahyazdi.org; Mashad speech available at www.parlemannews.ir.

[12] Hamid Rouhani, Nehzat-e emam Khomeini, Tehran 1381, vol. 2, p. 219 ff.

[13] Nowruz, 18 Tir 1381, available in English from bbc Monitoring, 10 July 2002.

[14] Surveys from Exile, p. 160.

[15] bbc Monitoring, 19 July 2009.

[16] Surveys from Exile, p. 248.

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