Children of Paradise (18 page)

Writing in 1963, Arendt argued that the French Revolution, and the subsequent revolutions it inspired, had failed because they unleashed the force of class rage, allowing the demand for social justice to supersede the demand for freedom. The revolutionaries, fueled by the urgent needs of the poor, and the poor, inflamed by the exposed corruption of the ancien régime, resorted to terror. The American Revolution, by contrast, never proposed to settle the “social question” or to mobilize an underclass, and its protagonists did not lose sight of the liberties of man. In the end, the American Revolution, so often discounted in the study of revolutions, was the one that produced a new form of government, under a constitution that endured. Arendt wrote that “
the whole record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror, and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom”; and yet, to mobilize the poor against the rich was always more urgent and effective than to stir the politically oppressed against their oppressors.

If Ganji absorbed this argument as a Revolutionary Guardsman in the early 1980s, it did not yet drive him into open dissent from the course that Iran’s revolution, and its Islamic Republican Party, had taken during the years of terror, populism, and single-party rule. But he did pick political
fights, mainly with the Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Mohsen Rezaie. By his later explanation, Ganji and his allies differed with Rezaie over the war policy after the Iranian victory at Khorramshahr, and they held that the Revolutionary Guard should remain aloof from politics, which it was increasingly entering. They likely worried that Rezaie was using his clout to bolster conservative forces against the Islamic Left. When they petitioned Khomeini for Rezaie’s ouster, they earned a sharp rebuke from the Leader instead.

After that, Ganji traded his military career for an intellectual one. It was a better fit. Writing for Mostafa’s
Kayhan-e Farhangi
, Ganji assailed Iranian Heideggerians for embracing a view indistinguishable from European fascism. Iranian philosophers did not really know Heidegger, Ganji was convinced; what they’d learned from him was simply how to hate the West.

From
Kayhan
, Ganji knew Mohammad Khatami, who became the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance first in 1982 and then again in 1989. Khatami’s ministry, usually called by the shorthand Ershad, or “guidance,” was a curious institution. To the extent that it oversaw media and culture in a repressive state, it was an organ of censorship, surveillance, and control. But by the same token, Ershad was also the ministry that held open what narrow window existed for free expression. If anyone within the Iranian government understood and defended the legitimate functions of journalists and poets, filmmakers and playwrights, it was Ershad, the ministry assigned to encircle and contain them. Particularly under Khatami, Ershad’s officials were cultural figures themselves.

Khatami hired Ganji to work in Ershad’s international press department. Although Ganji belonged to the ruling establishment, he always imagined himself somehow free within it, a sprite in the revolution’s psyche, both loyal and provoking. He was eventually assigned to the Iranian cultural center in Ankara, Turkey. There he promoted his own vision of Iran’s revolutionary culture. It was not far removed from the official one in those days of militancy and factionalism, but Ganji invited Abdolkarim Soroush to Ankara twice and had Soroush’s work translated into Turkish.

When Khomeini stripped Montazeri of the succession, Ganji made no
secret of his disapproval, on the grounds that it cast a shadow on the doctrine of
velayat-e faqih
. Ganji would later recall that he had his doubts about the doctrine before that, too. But in 1988 he made his objections public, and Iranian intelligence agents in Turkey made the symbolic literal: they reported to Tehran headquarters that Ganji had torn up a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini. Ershad recalled Ganji to Tehran, where he was investigated and forbidden to return to Ankara in 1989.

By then, the atmosphere at Ershad had grown more restrictive. The new Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was insecure in his power and placed proxies, usually clerics, throughout the bureaucracy: men whose loyalty was beyond question and who would serve as his eyes and ears. These representatives were linked to one another and to the Office of the Supreme Leader in ways that allowed them to accrue power disproportionate to the positions they legally occupied. Even in Ershad, Ganji felt that he and his colleagues were under watch. He grew less invested in his governmental work and more invested in an intellectual quest that had assumed new urgency for a growing group of seekers.

Throughout the Rafsanjani years, Ganji read sociology. He read Marx, Weber, Tocqueville, Habermas, and Durkheim; through them, and through scattered readings in anthropology, he grew interested in a welter of different ideas, philosophies, cultures. Soroush’s emphasis on religious pluralism resonated with Ganji during these years. He envisioned truth as a mountain he was trying to summit: one encircled in pathways, all of which led to the top.

On the crucial question of the period—the relationship of mosque and state—Ganji cast his lot with Soroush. In a religious state, he saw, religion became vulnerable to politics. To criticize the state was to criticize Islam. If the critics of the state were right, religion itself would turn out to be flawed, even endangered; if religion could not be flawed, critics of the state must then be apostates who could not be tolerated. Iran’s Islamic Republic took the latter view, defining itself as the guardian of the one true religion. And so Ganji, as an incipient critic of that state, came to view politics as the fruit not of God but of man. If Iran’s government was an earthly thing built by human hands,
velayat-e faqih
was nonsense. The country’s leader should be
chosen by its people and dismissed by them. And the clerics should have no special political role.

• • •

U
NDER
P
RESIDENT
R
AFSANJANI
, Mostafa Rokhsefat’s new journal,
Kiyan
, flourished. Mostafa was no longer obligated to bookend Soroush’s essays with ripostes from Ahmad Fardid and Reza Davari.
Kiyan
became the late realization of that pre-revolutionary dream—the birthplace of something its writers called “religious intellectualism,” a thoroughly modern, thoroughly Iranian laboratory of ideas.

A growing circle of thinkers, nearly all of them former revolutionaries or regime loyalists, gathered at
Kiyan
’s offices each Wednesday to work toward a new vision of religious liberalism. Akbar Ganji was influential among them. The discussions centered on Popper and Soroush, and the participants, who numbered as many as thirty or forty, appealed to Soroush as the final arbiter of many questions. For each meeting, different members of the
Kiyan
Circle, as it was known, were assigned to give presentations explicating particular aspects of Soroush’s philosophy. Collectively, through the discussions that followed, the
Kiyan
Circle worked toward understanding those ideas and translating them into a more explicitly political vision of pluralism, citizenship, and the role of civil society in an Islamic Republic.

The
Kiyan
Circle was a myth in its own time, a distant object of excitement for religious young people ill at ease with the course the revolution had taken. The journal’s essays were heady, its concerns abstract, its frame of reference erudite; and yet, no one would describe it as obscure or as an object of interest only to academics. Rather,
Kiyan
was widely understood to embody the new wave of religious political thought, a corrective to the despotism and violence of the eighties and a solution to the problems of democracy and tolerance, one all the more serious because it emanated from thinkers who had themselves been close to Khomeini’s regime.

Kiyan
’s readership survey revealed that the journal’s readers were largely young men, with the average age of thirty. More than a third weren’t
college-educated, and almost half resided outside Tehran.
Close to 80 percent described themselves as believers, ranging from somewhat religious to devout. It was a profile that matched that of the radical revolutionary students of the previous decade: young men, including college students and functionaries, from the society’s traditional quarters. By some accounts, it was
Kiyan
’s appeal to the revolutionary rank and file that led the government, at length, to view it as a particular threat to its legitimacy.

• • •

S
OROUSH PUBLISHED A COLLECTION
of his essays as a book called
The Contraction and Expansion of Religious Knowledge
in 1991. Anyplace else in the world, such a treatise on epistemology and metaphysics might be left to molder in academic libraries. In Iran, the language of abstraction, whether poetic or philosophical, was a native one. Soroush’s book offered tantalizing possibilities. Through it, one could at last debate the merits of secularism without ever calling it that. One could question the power of the clergy without disappearing to the gallows. And so the book and its author became a very serious challenge to the forces of reaction in the Islamic Republic.

Soroush’s core insight was simple, revelatory, and part Popperian, part mystical, in its skepticism. The gleaming inner core of religion—the thing itself—did not belong to us and was unsullied by our hands. Like scientific truth, religious truth was known to us only through the mediation of our minds, our systems of knowledge. And so it was our minds and our systems of knowledge we really knew, and these were neither sacred nor infallible. That which was sacred and infallible—religion itself—was that brilliant gem at the bottom of the well, from which we spent our lives clearing away the obstructions.

Religion could not speak; humans spoke on its behalf, and what humans said was only human. Religious knowledge, like all human knowledge, was subjective, contestable, and shaped by historical context. It was an effort and not an end. Moreover, from the American logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, Soroush took the insight that all realms of
human knowledge were interconnected; he extrapolated that religious knowledge, too, altered and shifted—expanded and contracted—with the circumstances of history and the development of science and other fields of understanding, and that it was susceptible to the techniques and insights of other fields. And so religious men should not fear the advance of human endeavor, including science, so much as embrace it as part of the pulsing organism to which theology, too, belonged.

Popper had called it “critical rationalism”: the belief that human knowledge was limited and fallible, and that therefore any search for truth required the exercise of reason in an open-minded, collective effort without end. Soroush noted that to believe the opposite—that there was such a thing as certain truth known to particular men—was to render some questions unanswerable, even unaskable. Why had different schools of philosophical thought survived over the course of time? Why had theologians reached irreconcilable verdicts on matters of ethics and law? Moreover, such certainty cheapened faith, making its convictions a thing believers simply inherited, or received with frightened minds. Faith that came from open disputation and reason, Soroush believed, was far superior. Critical debate would make theology stronger and truer, while dogmatism would encourage demagoguery, opportunism, and greed.

Soroush believed that to be a critical rationalist was to be a pluralist, in matters of religion as well as philosophy. He argued that a true religion was one that pointed out the right path, but the same path was not right for every seeker; therefore, one religion might be true for one person, while a different religion was true for another. Soroush likened the prophets of the three monotheisms to trees in an orchard, each bearing its own fruit.

For those who thrilled to his theories, Soroush liberated religion from the clergy, politics from religion, faith from prejudice, rational debate and criticism from theological dogmatism. If no one could claim to speak for God, there could be no religious grounds for silencing one another. Religious thought, like everything else, should be open to discussion, criticism, debate, revision. Moreover, it could not subsume politics and all other human affairs, as Shariati had wanted it to, for religious knowledge was
merely one other human affair and not in itself divine. As Soroush would later put it, where Shariati had sought to make religion corpulent, he, Soroush, sought to make it slim. He suggested that the theological basis for
velayat-e faqih
was weak and so it should be judged by its consequences. Moreover, Westoxication, by Soroush’s lights, was dangerous nonsense that mistook blind emulation and total rejection for the only possible responses to a monolithic West. In Soroush’s pluralistic view, a self-confident culture was a dynamic and open one capable of recognizing the dazzling variety of its influences.

• • •

A
LTHOUGH
S
OROUSH’S CARDINAL WORK
of the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to owe more to Popper and Quine than to Mulla Sadra and Motahhari, he had not abandoned Islamic sources. In fact, there were some he drew on almost as extensively as he drew on Popper, and that matched his sensibility at least as closely.
These were the Mutazilites, rationalist Islamic philosophers of the eighth through twelfth centuries, defenders of free will who held reason to be prior to revelation. God, in their view, had purposefully created a rational universe so that humans might discern it by use of their independent faculties. Soroush reflected this view when he scoffed at theologians who offered “Because it is God’s will” in answer to the questions of supplicants. A rational God did not will things that couldn’t be explained on their own merits. Because Soroush understood God’s will to be rational, rather than arbitrary, he believed that theological explanations should owe more to logic than to flat assertions of divine authority.