Iran, 25 years on: Bring back the ‘necktie wearers’
2/13/2004
The Daily Star
Twenty-five years ago Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini triumphantly returned to Iran after 16 years in exile. Proclaiming “the spring of freedom,” the cleric who dared to defy the king was met in Tehran by a jubilant crowd of nearly 2 million people. Two weeks earlier, the shah of Iran, the self-titled “King of Kings,” departed ignominiously, a jar of Persian soil in his hand, tears in his eyes and revolutionary mobs calling for his death.
In the following year, the revolutionary coalition that toppled the shah radical leftists, nationalist democrats, communists, Islamic Marxists, pro- and anti-Khomeini Islamists fought among themselves and took blind revenge on former opponents. One revolutionary cleric, Ayatollah Khalkhali, a grotesque, almost farcically evil figure, once turned to a visiting Indian journalist while surveying a group of prisoners, and said: “Pick anyone. I’ll execute him for you!” Revolutionary committees executed former government officials on such charges as “corrupting the earth.” Meanwhile, rival revolutionary factions engaged in guerilla war, former anti-shah revolutionaries were branded “enemies of the (new) state,” and US diplomats were taken hostage.
The Khomeinists emerged triumphant from the post-revolutionary chaos. An Islamic Republic was proclaimed with a new constitution that gave decisive power to the clergy, granting only limited democratic space to the people. Though Iranians supported the revolution for greater political freedoms and economic dignity, they were handed an authoritarian theocracy with a state-dominated economy certain to impede growth. What’s more, a radical experiment in governance was inaugurated: Iran, with its 2,500-year history of monarchy, would be ruled by men of religion. The democratic winds of the revolution had been overwhelmed by Persia’s traditional authoritarianism. The king would wear a turban.
A quarter century afterward, last summer, I stood near a major Tehran intersection watching a cleric attempting to hail a taxi. None would stop for him. Residents of Tehran are familiar with this scene as anti-clericalism rises in the face of the Islamic Republic’s political and economic failures. But while stranded clerics offer a revealing anecdote of Iranian frustration, something deeper is going on among Iranians a wide-ranging repudiation of the mingling of religion and politics and a growing movement for secular democracy.
In bookstores, pro-democracy tracts fly off the shelves, while books advocating the principles of the Islamic Republic gather dust. In villages and cities, I have heard people say: “Let the necktie-wearers come back,” a reference to secular technocrats whose record of economic management in the shah’s era far surpassed that of the past 25 years. On campuses, democratic ideas dominate political thinking, and students demonstrate a level of sophistication and moderation not found in the radical generation of the 1970s, which myopically embraced the economic and political narrative of leftist revolution, even as it was imploding in the USSR, China and elsewhere. Thankfully, today’s Iranian students shun the immature utopian leftism of their parents’ generation in favor of a pragmatic, nonviolent discourse of political and economic dignity based on Western secular democracy.
Today, the country’s Islamic student unions, once a bastion of pro-Khomeini zealotry, serve as leading voices for democracy, with some embracing the vision of “Islamic democracy” as advocated by reformist President Mohammad Khatami; a growing number of people are calling outright for secular democracy the total separation of religion and state.
But it’s not just the students. In seminaries, a rising number of clerics publicly advocate the separation of religion and state, arguing that Khomeini’s vision of clerical rule upended more than 1,000 years of classical Shiite tradition that prohibited the clergy from ruling the state. It’s time to go back to the fundamentals of private religious guidance and instruction, they argue. Alas, Khomeini was not a fundamentalist, but a radical interpreter of his faith.
Anyone who travels to Iran will immediately sense an undercurrent of melancholy and frustration with the order of things. During this month, when the 25th anniversary is being celebrated amid a controversy over a conservative attempt to rig forthcoming parliamentary elections (or do so more than usual), Iranians look back on the recent past and see a revolution gone astray, one that betrayed the dreams of millions who took to the streets in search of a better life, only to be brought down to earth with a massive economic and political thud.
What went wrong? Let’s start with the economy. Today, Iranians earn a quarter of what they did before the revolution and must contend with high unemployment and widespread underemployment engineers driving taxis, professors becoming traders. Every year, some 200,000 of the best and brightest leave the country, one of the highest rates of “brain drain” in the world.
Iran’s economic failures serve as the most potent symbol of the Islamic Republic’s failures. All across Iran, people speak with nostalgia of the pre-revolution economy, with its low prices, adequate wages and more plentiful jobs. As one laborer complained: “I favored the revolution because I thought it would give me more opportunities. Instead, I work twice as hard for half the money.”
Meanwhile, leading Iranian clerics, who plied populist themes and class-based resentment in their rise to power, have settled comfortably into the villas and palaces of the shah’s elite. In public protests, people chant: “The mullahs live like kings, while we live in poverty!” Reformists who weave narratives of economic discontent into their speeches generally receive favorable applause.
Ironically, history professor Hashem Aghajari, jailed for a widely discussed speech in which he called for an Islamic reformation and urged his fellow Shiites to make their own religious decisions rather than rely on the clergy, received some of the most sustained applause with a populist line, comparing his worn, beaten car to the fancy cars driven by senior clerics.
Politically, freedoms have expanded since the revolution, yet the system is still riddled with institutions obstructing democracy, such as the office of the supreme leader, who has virtual veto power over all matters of state, and the hard-line Council of Guardians, which pre-screens candidates for elective office. The country’s reformist movement, beaten back by conservatives who still control the levers of power, may be losing the bureaucratic struggle, but their ideas of greater openness, tolerance and freedom have irrevocably entered Iranian public discourse. Some reformist leaders have shown extraordinary courage, facing jail time and the shadow of assassination at the hands of hard-liners.
Still, Iranians have grown justifiably frustrated with the pace of change and a seemingly insurmountable gap has grown between the government and governed.
What’s next? Iranian demography and history might offer hope. Two-thirds of Iranians are under the age of 30. These “children of the revolution” are searching for a life of dignity, prosperity and freedom from arbitrary power a theme running throughout 20th-century Iranian history. Never before, however, have Iranian opponents of freedom faced such a modern, urbanized, educated mass movement of young and old Iranians seeking democratic change.
As the Islamic Republic prepares to commemorate the anniversary of the revolution with the usual propaganda, Iranians ought to look back to a more relevant “revolution” in Iranian history: the 1906-11 constitutional revolution, Iran’s first attempt at democratic reform. That era produced a constitution embracing democracy, secularism, women’s rights and a strong Parliament. The movement was snuffed out by royalist reactionaries and foreign powers, but the dream of that movement of a fair society based on just laws and of an independent, democratic, secular and prosperous Iran has not died. It lives even stronger in Iran today.
That, in the end, might be the Islamic Revolution’s most lasting legacy.
Afshin Molavi is the author of Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran (WW Norton). He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/13_02_04_d.aspIran's Khamenei calls for mass voter turnout
Friday, February 13, 2004 - ©2003 IranMania.com
TEHRAN, Feb 13 (AFP) -- Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on Friday for Iranians to turn out in force to vote in next week's parliamentary election and defeat what he called the enemies of the Islamic revolution.
"The people, for their own sake, for that of the country and the (Islamic) regime, must go to vote and ensure these elections are enthusiastically backed," Khamenei told tens of thousands of faithful gathered for traditional Friday prayers at Tehran University.
"Some people in the world, who do not want the welfare of our people, were seeking for these elections not to be held or be well supported," Khamenei said about the February 20 poll in remarks carried on state radio.
Iranian reformists had called for the elections to be postponed after the conservative Guardians Council vetting body barred thousands of candidates -- mainly reformists -- from the elections.
Some reformist parties have said they will boycott the poll.
"Our enemies have done everything against the revolution and have failed. Today they are seeking to create a gulf between the people and the leaders, but these elections are a response to the enemy who will learn that the people firmly defend their country and their regime," Khamenei added.
He strongly denounced some European parliaments who have criticised the massive barring of reform candidates.
"Certain European parliaments have gone beyond the limits. If their intervention was confined to simple words, it would be unimportant ... but if these words are transformed into interferance in our internal affairs, the people will given them an unforgettable lesson," he said.
"The elections are a barrier against the enemies ... People should go and vote en masse so the elections are held majestically," said Khamenei.
Implicitly criticising some reformists, he said they had tried to "discourage the voters, playing the game of the enemies" of the Islamic Republic.
Khamenei has intervened several times in the political crisis into which Iran plunged after the Guardians Council announced the banning in January, as the republic was preparing to celebrate its 25 anniversary.
It was he who insisted that the reformist-dominated government of President Mohammad Khatami go ahead and organise the elections.
On Friday, eight reformist parties announced they had set up a "Coalition for Iran" to contest the poll, the bloc's spokesman Ali Akbar Mohtashami-Pur, said, cited by the student news agency ISNA.
Among the parties are that of President Khatami, the Association of Religious Combattants.
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