Children of Paradise (22 page)

Nonetheless, at nineteen, Bashiriyeh started attending Hosseiniyeh Ershad with his friends. Like them, he was looking for illumination; but unlike many of them, he felt that Shariati purveyed an ominous new obscurity instead. One night Bashiriyeh saw Shariati hold forth for six hours, exhausting everybody but himself. He took up very modern ideas, including existentialism, but he used them, Bashiriyeh understood, to call for a return to tradition. That was a call lost on Bashiriyeh, who was looking for release from religion, not its return. A new bigotry, he suspected, was being born.

Bashiriyeh was uninterested in the mundane political affairs of the country, and he would remain so, by his telling, all his life. The politics he loved, which would win him an epoch-making influence he never desired, was a theoretical affair, a matter of philosophy, whose roots and sympathies lay within the secular left. As a university student, Bashiriyeh studied states and political systems from a comparative perspective and a sociological perspective. Not only was he not an activist, but despite his leftist sympathies, Bashiriyeh believed that the monarchy’s attempt to secularize and modernize Iran was basically a sound project.

In the late 1970s, as the temperature in Iran slowly rose, Bashiriyeh
went to Britain, where he earned his master’s in political behavior at the University of Essex and his PhD in political theory at the University of Liverpool. He read Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Marx and Hegel, and a great deal of British political theory. His great intellectual affinity, however, was for Hobbes. The seventeenth-century British philosopher was the opposite of a utopian thinker. He concerned himself not with producing justice or a vision of an ideal state so much as with observing the state as it existed in order to explain what it did and why it was necessary. In Hobbes’s view, submission to a sovereign power was all that stood between humankind and a grim “state of nature” in which human life—“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”—would be a war of “all against all.” Hobbes’s state was a Leviathan, unbounded by civil liberties, divided government, or an independent judiciary, all of which Hobbes suspected of undermining the central authority’s unifying and pacifying power. Rather, the sovereign protected men from one another, and for that mercy, men paid with their liberty. Nations flourished according not to their prosperity but to the obedience of their subjects. “
And though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences,” Hobbes wrote, “yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.”

Hobbes’s view was surely authoritarian. (He even made a brief for censorship on the grounds that it would prevent “discord and civil war.”) But the fundamental question he posed—why was the state necessary?—implied that, far from being ordained by God, the state was a contract among men, who willingly made certain sacrifices for the greater good of peace. To that extent, Hobbes was an early exponent of social contract theory, the adumbration of a liberalism later realized by Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

To Bashiriyeh, Hobbes’s pessimistic understanding of human nature, of sinister interests and the function of the state, rang true. Bashiriyeh translated secondary work on Hobbes and, years later,
Leviathan
itself into Persian. It would find an audience that was not only receptive but fascinated. In the first place, here was a foundational work of Western political thought
that had never before been introduced to Persian speakers. But the timing was also auspicious. For as Iranians—none more, perhaps, than the disillusioned cadres of the Islamic Left—began to question religious government, they faced the same question Hobbes had raised. If the state was not the vice-regent of God, what was it? Why was it necessary, and what were its obligations? Bashiriyeh specialized in such questions, supplying tools of analytic detachment to the revolutionaries, who now cast about, in some anguish, for a new and deeper understanding of political life. Some saw in Hobbes’s
Leviathan
an apt description of the system they had wrought, with
velayat-e faqih
Iran’s Leviathan. Some, disabused of utopian hopes, appreciated the British philosopher’s cold-eyed appraisal of what was.

During his years in England, Bashiriyeh also discovered Crane Brinton. At the same time, he became enamored of a post-Marxist strain of thought he found in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas—one that viewed the state not as a crude instrument in the hands of a single capitalist class but as host to a dynamic interplay of interests and alliances, which in the end enlisted even the working classes in defending bourgeois privilege. Drawing on Brinton, Gramsci, Poulantzas, and others, Bashiriyeh wrote his dissertation on the Iranian revolution and the unrest that followed it even as the events unfolded in real time.

It was a project oddly suited to the detachment of his temperament. In his home country, militants rose, the monarchy fell, a power struggle ensued, thousands died, and an extreme theocratic ideology triumphed not only over rival dogmas but also over a congeries of inchoate yearnings. In London, Bashiriyeh rooted through the Persian collections of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He visited Iran in 1979 for a month and again almost a year later, each time filling two very large suitcases with newspapers, pamphlets, and books to bring back to England. Meticulously, he documented the power struggle among the radical clerics led by Khomeini and the moderate Islamic liberals of the Freedom Movement, the radical Muslims of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, and the left. His history of the consolidation of the revolution, from 1979 through 1982, would become a classic after the dissertation’s publication in 1984 as
The State and Revolution in Iran
. No account of the early postrevolutionary period would fail to cite it. In it, Bashiriyeh argued that the Islamic Revolution was a petit bourgeois, reactionary movement that rose from the resentment of the old social classes against modernism.

Writing at the start of the Mousavi era, when the government was at last consolidated in the hands of the Islamic Republican Party, Bashiriyeh believed Thermidor had already begun. But it was during that period, in 1982, that he returned to a country and a university he scarcely recognized. The Islamic Students Association had more power than the university faculty or administration. Revolutionary Guards manned the gates to campus and searched all who entered. The older professors—the ones Bashiriyeh remembered from his own student days—had retreated into unhappy isolation. Many of the newer faculty members had been hastily trained in religious institutions and dispatched to the universities to reproduce the government’s ideology. Bashiriyeh quickly realized that there could be no open discussion in the classroom, because nearly all the students were handpicked, screened for fealty to the new regime. Two of his classes—one took a Marxist approach to Islamic political theory, the other examined theories of modernization—aroused the suspicions of the censors and were canceled after less than a month. He switched to teaching Western political theory and political sociology. These subjects had been taught in the past; they did not deal directly in Iranian realities, and it would be some years before the regime came to see them as threatening.

So it was that at the start of the Rafsanjani era Bashiriyeh taught political sociology, theories of revolution, and twentieth-century political thought at the University of Tehran. When he looked out from the lectern, he did not exactly know who his students were. He knew that the university admissions had given preference to relatives of “martyrs” from the Iran-Iraq War, to veterans, and to families close to the new regime. He knew, too, that right-wing religious groups abounded on the campus. Perhaps he suspected that the better part of wisdom would be to maintain a certain distance from his students, that the less he knew, the better. He told them that it was his object to introduce them to thinkers as persuasively
as possible: when he taught Marx, the students would believe he was a Marxist, and when he taught Hobbes, they would think him Hobbesian. He did not exactly know, or choose to know, that his classes had filled up with deputy ministers and other figures of some importance from the disempowered Islamic Left.

• • •

E
VER ONE TO KEEP
his friends close and his enemies closer, Rafsanjani had orchestrated the left’s purge from government, but he also set up a reservation to house its thinkers. He called it the Center for Strategic Research. It was a think tank attached to the president’s office, although the president never consulted it. As one of its officers later explained, this was not meant to be a dynamic center of intellectual activity so much as a place to warehouse the left and keep it silent and well fed. The government went about its business, taking little notice while the thinkers at the Center for Strategic Research busied themselves debating and building on one another’s ideas.

Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha was the first director of the Center for Strategic Research. Like so many of his allies on the Islamic Left, he had a checkered history. As the country’s prosecutor general in the early 1980s, he was incontestably associated with the country’s early reign of terror. He was also the spiritual leader of the radical students who seized the American embassy in 1979. But his acolytes spoke of him as a man with a particularly open mind and unorthodox religious views. Khoeiniha insisted that the Center for Strategic Research engage with conservative ideas and thinkers as well as with the liberal technocrats of Rafsanjani’s budget office. The center’s thinkers should invite such people in and engage them in constructive dialogue, he seemed to suggest, if for nothing else for the opportunity to measure its thinkers’ ideas against those of their adversaries. Moreover, by doing this, the center would model tolerance and civility, mainstays of the democratic school of thought the center would eventually propagate. For inside the center, the Islamic Left began to remake itself as a movement
for participatory democracy within Iran’s Islamic Republic. That movement would come to be called reform, its exponents reformists.

The Center for Strategic Research had two branches in central Tehran. The social and cultural program had offices a little to the north of the city’s center. Among its best-known thinkers were a former hostage taker who now held a secular view of politics, and a former military intelligence man from the Revolutionary Guard who had since come to admire Soroush and the disinherited Ayatollah Montazeri.

Perhaps the more famous branch of the Center for Strategic Research was the one closer to the heart of the government, in central Tehran on Marjan Street. This office included the center’s foreign policy and economic departments, and it housed the thinker whose name would be most associated not only with the Center for Strategic Research but with the reform movement itself. Saeed Hajjarian was a heavyset young radical from South Tehran who had worked for Prime Minister Mousavi. Because the revolutionaries had stormed and dismantled the despised SAVAK, the revolutionary regime found itself without a spy agency at the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Hajjarian was the man the Mousavi administration detailed to establish a new intelligence service, first within the prime minister’s office and later for the Islamic Republic. Hajjarian drafted its establishing law and went to work for the new ministry when the parliament gave it the go-ahead. By the time he left the Ministry of Intelligence and Security for the Center for Strategic Research, Hajjarian had deep knowledge of and a gnawing foreboding about the direction his revolution had taken. Exactly what he had seen inside the intelligence apparatus to occasion this foreboding was the subject of dim speculation even among his friends.

Like their colleagues at
Kiyan
, the scholars at the Center for Strategic Research suspected that the Islamic Republic required a serious rethinking—that the revolutionary Islamism of Shariati and Khomeini had led Iran to a new despotism from which both Islam and the political establishment needed to be extricated. Hajjarian and two of his colleagues made two trips to Qom. There they prevailed on an iconoclastic young cleric
named Mohsen Kadivar to come to the center as the head of a department of Islamic studies.

Kadivar had an open face and an easy laugh, a gap between his front teeth, and a voice that jumped whole registers when he was excited. He had studied philosophy and sociology at university and had been a student of Montazeri’s at a seminary in Qom. During the Iran-Iraq War, Kadivar spent one month of every year at the front in Khuzestan as a sort of chaplain to the soldiers. During those visits he had come to question the policy of continuing the war after Khorramshahr. These doubts led to other doubts. After Khomeini’s death, he set to work on a book questioning
velayat-e faqih
. Kadivar believed that the doctrine was little more than an Islamized theory of monarchy, which owed more to Plato and the follies of Persian history than to Shiism. Kadivar believed clerics should have authority in society but not power within the political structure. He favored a representative democracy with neither a king nor a supreme guide. When the censors did not allow him to publish his book, he grew depressed. But he discharged his frustration as a crucial member of the brain trust at the Center for Strategic Research.

Because Kadivar’s critique of the Islamic Republic was more legal than theological, the thinkers of the Islamic Left embraced Kadivar earlier than they embraced Soroush, who seemed to be arguing for a radical revision not only of Khomeini’s theory of the state but of the domain of Islam more generally. Hajjarian and his colleagues at the Center for Strategic Research were familiar with Soroush and even attended the occasional meeting at
Kiyan
(Hajjarian more than the others), but this was not at first their native territory. They were influenced more by Marx than Popper, and they first associated Soroush with his anti-Marxist screeds and the right wing of the Islamist movement, whereas they had originated from the left. Some members of the intellectual circle around the Center for Strategic Research were particularly concerned that Soroush’s minimal interpretation of Islam left too little to religion and ascribed too much to the worldly realm. Soroush’s view was broadly modernizing, even secularizing, they feared. But they
took Soroush seriously. It was Soroush, one of these thinkers would later note, who exposed the roots of totalitarianism in Iran and who offered religious pluralism and philosophical moderation as antidotes. Gradually, the Islamic Left would come to abandon its reservations and embrace Soroush. For his part, Soroush grew ever more radical; he led the Islamic Leftists inch by inch, over a period of years, into a terra incognita.