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In Iran, Daring to Dream of Democracy

Washington Post - By Afshin Molavi
Mar 7, 2004

This past summer at a major intersection in Tehran, I stood under a massive mural of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, watching a gray-bearded cleric trying to hail a cab. None would stop for him. By my count, eight empty taxis passed by without picking him up.

Residents of the Iranian capital have become familiar with this scene. Several clerics have told me that they literally de-frock and put on civilian clothes when they want to catch a cab. One young seminary student told me: "I don't even bother with taxis, but buses aren't much better. When I get on, people whisper behind my back. When I'm in a store, people smile and wish me well, but I see in their eyes that they don't like me." My Tehran barber, Hossein, a 38-year-old man who grew up in a religious home, puts it this way: "When I was growing up and we saw a cleric walking down the street, my father would insist that I go out of my way to say hello to him. Today, I steer my own children away from them."

Given these anti-clerical attitudes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it's small wonder that the 25th anniversary of Khomeini's return from exile passed with little note there. But it is still remarkable nonetheless. On Feb. 1, 1979, the unbending cleric who dared to defy the shah was met in Tehran by a jubilant, expectant crowd of nearly 2 million. He proclaimed "the spring of freedom" for the Iranian people, promised economic deliverance for the poor, and lambasted America and the West with a sound and fury that stunned many in Western capitals.

Today, the radical experiment in religious governance that he launched is viewed with widespread disillusion. Khomeini and his allies created a system that gave only limited democratic spaces to the people and granted decisive power to the new inheritors of the Iranian realm -- the clergy. The traditional authoritarianism of Persia held. This time, however, the king wore a turban.

It is often noted that Iranians are frustrated with their isolation and deteriorating economy. But something deeper is going on in Iran -- a wide-ranging repudiation of the mingling of religion and politics, and a growing movement for secular democracy. As a Farsi speaker (I left Iran as a child), I've been able to speak to Iranians directly. In villages and cities I visited last summer, I often heard people say, "Let the necktie-wearers come back," a direct reference to secular technocrats whose record of economic management in the Shah's era far exceeded the past 25 years.

Even in seminaries, a rising number of clerics publicly advocate the separation of mosque and state, arguing (accurately) that Khomeini's vision of Islamic rule upended more than a thousand years of classical Shiite tradition, which prohibited clergy from ruling the state. It's time to get back to the fundamentals of private religious guidance and instruction, they argue -- a critical point since Khomeini is often referred to in the West as a fundamentalist. In reality, he was a Shiite aberration.

Although much of Iran's population -- weary of social and political restrictions and the failed promises of the revolution -- has embraced the idea of democratic change, it still isn't sure how to get there. The reform movement that captivated the population with the 1997 and 2001 presidential election victories of Mohammad Khatami is largely spent, outmuscled by its hard-line foes. February's conservative "victory" in a parliamentary election in which the vast majority of reformist candidates were barred from running is another nail in the reformist coffin. Pro-democracy student groups have publicly renounced their support for Khatami and the country's reformists. The rest of Iran's population has given up on them, too. As one Iranian businessman told me, "Enough of the timid reformers in turbans. We need to move on."

Move on to what? Though no major figure has emerged as a leader, the idea of secular democracy is filling the vacuum, particularly among Iranians under the age of 30, who comprise nearly two-thirds of the population. One need look only at the country's Islamic student unions, once a bastion of pro-Khomeini zealotry, to witness this change. Today, they serve as leading voices for secular democracy. One student group, the Daftar-e-Tahkim-e-Vahdat (formed upon Khomeini's orders in the early days of the revolution to counter campus leftists), has repudiated Khomeini's vision of Islamic government and has dismissed Khatami's "Islamic democracy" as irrelevant. As one Daftar leader, Akbar Atri, put it, "We want democracy without a prefix or suffix. That means no Islamic democracy."

What's more, some of the most vigorous student democracy advocates hail from families of former revolutionaries, the religious middle classes and clerics. This is not an elitist movement of Westernized, secular liberals, but a homegrown one composed of many of the same classes that supported Khomeini. We recall that Khomeini once dismissed democracy as alien to Iranian culture. Before him, the shah said Iranians need kings, not parliaments. Today's Iranians see democracy as the natural next step in their evolution.

How long that will take, though, with the conservative clerics still in control, is anyone's guess.

Admittedly, not all Iranians have embraced the principles of secular democracy. For many, it's just the next system worth trying after the Islamic Republic's economic failures.

If the great Ronald Reagan debating line -- "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" -- were put to Iranians with a different timeline -- "Are you better off today than you were 25 years ago?" -- the answer would be "no." Iranians are today poorer, less free in the social realm and only marginally more free politically than before the revolution. In inflation-adjusted terms, Iranians today earn roughly one-fourth of what they did before the revolution. Educational opportunities have expanded, but job opportunities have not. Unemployment hovers at 20 percent and underemployment is widespread: engineers drive taxis, professors work as traders. The secular, technocratic middle class has been decimated.

In public protests, people chant, "The mullahs live like kings, while we live in poverty!" 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. Iranians under the age of 30, "the children of the revolution," live their lives in varying degrees of revolt ranging from active political dissent to more common and more subtle acts of resistance -- quiet defiance of strict social laws or simply voting with their feet. Last year, nearly 200,000 of the best and brightest left the country legally; tens of thousands leave illegally.

Iranian college campuses, however, offer glimmers of hope. The leftist, anti-imperialist ideas of the 1970s have given way to a more pragmatic discourse about economic and political dignity based on Western models of secular democracy. Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents' generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third World anti-imperialism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism. "We just want to be normal," is typical of what hundreds of students have told me. "We're tired of radicalism." Another student told me, "We're not rich enough to be radical leftists. We have to worry about getting a job."

For inspiration, Iranian youth would do well to turn back to the era of their great-grandparents and the 1906-11 Constitutional Revolution, Iran's first attempt at democratic reform. That era produced a constitution that embraced democracy, secularism, women's rights and a strong parliament. Ultimately, the movement was snuffed out by royalist reactionaries and foreign powers (namely the British and Russians). 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 among today's "children of the Islamic revolution." That, in the end, might be the Islamic Republic's most lasting -- and ironic -- legacy.

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It could be the eternal wisdom of Persia's great poets, an unforgettable bond to Iran and an everlasting love for a ruler the world shunned in his last days in exile that have kept Farah Pahlavi anchored.

She has suffered in her 25 years since the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, piloted his family out of Iran. At 66, she remains philosophical about her losses, the dizzying highs and lows her journey has involved.

"There are days where I find myself depressed and tired . . . people write to me and they want me to give them courage," she said. "Life is a struggle, for everyone at every level, but you should not lose your dignity. To go on is the struggle of life."

"There are so many answers in Persian poetry. A blue sky, love of family and nature. All this gives me positive energy," she said. "At the end, it is in yourself that you have to find the way to go on."

The account of her life as a glamorous and stunning empress who had to give it all up in the face of historical upheaval is narrated in her memoir, "An Enduring Love: My Life With the Shah," published in English by Miramax Books. The book, which was translated from French, topped bestseller lists for weeks last fall in France.

In the book, she chronicles Iran's plunge into chaos and arbitrary executions in the early days of the revolution, and her husband's battle with cancer. She describes the humiliation of becoming a diplomatic burden in search of a haven and medical care at the height of the U.S. hostage crisis in Tehran.

She details the political maneuvering she and her husband faced as they jetted from Egypt to the United States, the Bahamas, Mexico and Panama before finally returning to reside in Egypt. It is a retelling of events based on her own diary entries as well as accounts from the shah's doctors, the former first lady of Egypt, Jehan Sadat, and others.

Pahlavi talked about her life and work Wednesday in an interview at her home in Potomac. The afternoon sun flooded her living room, decorated with kilim carpets, modern Iranian paintings and a bronze bust of the shah.

She follows every newscast and development in Iran as if still there, and she devotes time each day to answering e-mail from students in Iran who ask her to call them, parents worried about their children or disillusioned expatriates who need her moral support.

Pahlavi began writing her book three years ago, when she was overcome with grief as her youngest daughter was losing a battle with depression, eating disorders and a dependence on sleeping pills. Leila, 31, died in a hotel room in London in 2001.

"I felt so miserable, I started then," she said of beginning the memoir.

Pahlavi said that if she has one regret, it is that she did not spend more private time with her husband and children. Her happiest memories are of giving birth to a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, and of traveling around the Iranian countryside, where she said she met ordinary people. "I always wanted to travel as a nomad, or cross the Iranian desert on camel back. Apparently, it is an unbelievable experience," she said longingly.

Pahlavi was born Farah Diba, an only child. She lost her father and was brought up by her mother in her uncle's house.

In the summer of 1959 in France, while trying to obtain a scholarship to continue her architecture studies in Paris, a chance encounter with the shah developed into a romance. They married later that year.

A longtime acquaintance, Haleh Esfandiari, who served as deputy director of one of her many cultural foundations, said that "she never lost that popular touch. She was genuine. While the shah gave the impression of being distant, she allowed people to rush and embrace her while visiting the provinces." Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center here, attended the same girls school in Tehran as Pahlavi.

Pahlavi describes the forced separation from her children when they needed their parents the most, the final scene of tearful farewells with palace personnel throwing themselves at the shah's feet, and the cook who grabbed his copper pots and bags of lentils and beans to take with him on the plane.

"When we look back, we all had a part in this revolution," she said of her countrymen. "They all, in a sort of hysteria, thought religious men could bring freedom and democracy.

"Khomeini used them all," she said of the grand ayatollah who led the 1979 Islamic revolution. "Maybe we should have handled or addressed problems differently," she conceded, noting that there were shortcomings in her husband's rule. He died in 1980.

The political jockeying by some members of the royal entourage after the death of her husband still stings. "It's very hard to have seen one side of human beings, then have to see the other side, their actions and words, coming from people who were close to you," she said.

But, she added, "I have tried to put myself above it."

"If you have to cross the desert to reach your goal, go," she said, borrowing from the words of Hafiz, one of Iran's most celebrated poets, "pay no heed to the wounding thorns."

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