Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (43 page)

He also published a series of op-ed pieces in American newspapers condemning the clerics. “The official ideology of the ruling clerical regime considers all humans to be less than adult and says that without the supervision of the clergy, they will act like children, if not madmen,” he wrote in
The Washington Post.
“According to this clerical theory, the people are most virtuous when they are most docile.”

“We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation,” he wrote, with almost reckless abandon.
¹⁰

When we spoke, I asked Ganji if he wanted to return to Tehran—or dared to return. Soroush was under such pressure that he had left in 2000 to teach at a string of American universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and then in Berlin. He went back to Tehran only occasionally. Soroush was writing, from outside Iran, about issues of justice and Islam. Again stirring huge controversy, he proffered that justice is the standard of what is Islamic—not the other way around.

When I saw Ganji, the two men had just had an emotional reunion, their first in seven years, in Germany.

The regime effectively encouraged its dissidents to leave—or face jail. Ganji’s previous arrest in 2000 had come shortly after a trip to Europe for a conference. He had been warned that he would be arrested if he returned.

“I went back, was arrested, and I don’t regret it,” he told me.

“I told them from the beginning that it’s a two-sided cost,” he added. “They imprison me, and I pay the cost. But when I talk about them, they also pay a cost. And when they imprisoned me for six years, the cost was higher to them.”

The Reactionaries

I
slam’s priests will wield enormous political influence during the Middle East’s turbulent transitions. Many already do. They fill a void created by the imprisonment, exile, or execution of secular democrats and other opponents. Religion’s utopian ideals define goals; its institutions offer instruments of action when other avenues are barred.

The phenomenon is not unique to Islam or the region. In their own different ways, popes, dalai lamas, reverends, and rabbis have played pivotal roles in earlier political changes elsewhere—some peaceful, some not.

Yet within Islam, the ayatollahs, imams, sheikhs, and sayyeds speak with many voices. The spectrum is as disparate among clerics as it is among the region’s politicians, and in their own ways they are also competing—among themselves—for the future just as fiercely.

Nowhere is the disparity more conspicuous than in Iran. Among the clerical corps, rivalries have spawned opposing parties and led to political subterfuge, physical sabotage, house arrest or imprisonment, and even conflicting fatwas.

From his home in Tehran’s foothills of the snow-capped Elburz Mountains, Ayatollah Khomeini regularly reprimanded the theocracy’s squabbling clerics. “Stop biting one another like scorpions,” he rebuked them in 1981.
¹

When the clerics’ political party imploded from internal divisions in 1987, Khomeini again scolded them. “Sowing discord,” he said, “is one of the worst sins.”
²

The Islamic Republic’s raucous politics function much like Tehran’s irreverent free-for-all traffic. Both are irreverent.

In a city with a sea of cars fueled on gasoline at twelve cents per gallon, the unwritten rules of the road are riotously counterintuitive: To turn left on one of the capital’s leafy boulevards at busy rush hour, get in the far right lane—and vice versa. A red light means gun it. A green light means slow down and wait until the light turns red—and then gun it. Speed is limited only by what your car can do. See an ambulance or fire truck? Race it. If you pass your exit on a packed freeway, back up fast into oncoming cars. If you need to make a U-turn, wait until oncoming traffic is roaring toward you, and then veer wildly out in front of it. A two-lane road is actually three and possibly four—and, by all means, also feel free to move into a lane of oncoming cars.
The Lonely Planet
travel guide describes Tehran’s roads as “lawlessly aggressive,” even “homicidal.”

In 2004, Tehran unleashed a new breed of traffic cops and meter men to restore order. Dressed in white broad-brimmed military hats and forest-green uniforms with gold epaulets, the traffic police acted like a brigade of generals let loose on street corners. Daringly deployed on busy streets and freeway entry ramps, they did not hesitate to order drivers to pull over for violating the dictate on new billboards, in Farsi and English: F
ASTENING THE SEAT BELT IS MANDATORY.

But at nine
P.M.
, as the traffic generals retreated for the night, the chaos would resume.

It is much the same in politics. The theocracy has a plethora of forces charged with policing ideas in government, mosques, universities, the military, the press, and the professions. Yet after-hours, Iran bursts with a noisy, honking, chaotic cacophony of political notions.

“If you live in Iran, you have to deal with politics from seven in the morning until eleven at night,” University of Tehran political scientist Hadi Semati told me. “It’s like our traffic. It can be really frustrating—and really exhausting.”

Khomeini’s heirs reflect the competing array of visions—even on the theocracy itself.

The most powerful cleric in the Middle East is arguably Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. He is only the second person to have the job; he has already held it twice as long as the revolution’s founder.

To the great confusion of Westerners, Khamenei (with an
a
) was selected after Ayatollah Khomeini (with an
o
) died abruptly in 1989. The similarity in names was misleading; they were quite different men. The revolution’s founder was popularly known as the Imam, an honorific denoting someone considered by the faithful to be capable of leading them in all aspects of life; his successor was a midlevel mullah with marginal credentials, scholarly or otherise, who had to be hastily elevated to ayatollah over the objections of many peers. It was roughly equivalent to picking a pope from among archbishops or monsignors and quickly elevating him to cardinal in the process.

Born in 1939, Ayatollah Khamenei is a tall, lean man with full white whiskers and square, oversized glasses. He wears the black turban of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. A student of the Imam’s, he was jailed six times by the Shah. His most unusual physical trait is a limp right hand and thin, atrophied fingers that dangle at his side. He suffered serious chest and arm injuries in 1981, when a tape-recorder bomb went off as he was delivering a speech. The regime dubbed him a “living martyr.”

I met Khamenei in 1987. He was the first Iranian leader to speak at the United Nations since the revolution. He was president at the time. His debut at the world body, in full clerical garb and turban, reflected the revolution’s early hubris. Speaking in the cavernous General Assembly hall, Khamenei blithely dismissed the world body as “a paper factory that issued worthless orders.”

He then portrayed Iran’s revolution as a contribution to global order because it had toppled a monarchy that had been in “the service of imperial powers, particularly the United States.” Washington, he angrily proclaimed, with no sense of the normal diplomatic politesse used at the United Nations, was the “arch Satan.”

With a handful of journalists, I was invited to a small breakfast for him the next day at the Waldorf-Astoria. Given his speech, it was a slightly bizarre scene. A collection of clean-shaven U.S. Secret Service agents—who provide security for all visiting heads of state, even for countries with which the United States has no diplomatic relations—were working with a detail of bearded Iranian Revolutionary Guards to protect the Iranian leader. They coordinated and kibitzed like fellow professionals.

At breakfast, Khamenei came across as a dour and distant man, unable to go beyond tired rhetoric and devoid of the kind of mysterious charisma that originally attracted millions of Iranians to the Imam. A Revolutionary Guard stood next to the disabled president’s chair and cut up his breakfast foods. It seemed symbolic. Widely considered a weak politician, he was dependent on others to achieve political office.

Yet Khamenei has emerged as the revolution’s most enduring constant during its first three decades. The two big turning points in his career symbolize the two pivotal debates that have dominated politics since 1979.

The first big debate was about who should lead the revolution. The answer took two and one half years to sort out. It was the revolution’s bloodiest phase.

The Imam—and many of the people who took to the streets to topple the shah—initially did not intend to create a theocracy or to see clerics rule. “Our intention is not that religious leaders should themselves administer the state,” Imam Khomeini told
Le Monde
shortly before returning to Iran from exile in Paris.
³
After a wild welcome in Tehran, he moved back to his modest home on a muddy side street in Qom. The first revolutionary government was led by secular technocrats. The Imam was consulted mainly to settle disputes.

But when Iran got down to the business of writing a new constitution—the instrument to define the new state—the process began to look like Tehran’s traffic.

In some frenzied politicking, sixty-two drafts were introduced, more than 4,000 constitutional proposals put forward. Many called for technocrats to continue; they opposed clerical rule. Others favored a strong parliament to prevent a president from becoming another autocrat. Some wanted an elected judiciary rather than appointees. Ethnic minorities wanted autonomy from Tehran.
⁴
The many versions were boiled down, with difficulty after heated disagreements, to two formal drafts. Both constitutions called for a strong president. Both outlined a secular structure for the new state. Both borrowed heavily from Europe’s Napoleonic law. Neither allocated special roles for the clergy. And neither proposed a position of supreme leader.

The Imam accepted the second draft, but several parties balked at both. Controversy raged. Rivalries deepened. To end the political gridlock, Iran’s Revolutionary Council called for election of an Assembly of Experts to write a final draft. The vote, however, only deepened the divide. When twenty political groups boycotted the poll, the unlikely coalition that had ousted the shah—including communists and clerics, radical students and conservative businessmen, nationalists and ethnic movements—formally collapsed.

The election, held six months after the Imam’s return, marked the day the revolution was hijacked by the clergy.

With most secular parties staying away, clerics won two thirds of the Assembly of Experts seats. They then crafted a constitution steeped in Islam. Article Four stipulates, “All laws and regulations, including civil, criminal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political or otherwise, shall be based on Islamic principles.”

The new constitution created a unique political system—with two parallel governments. The first layer is secular, based on Western models. It includes separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, with elections by universal suffrage from the age of sixteen.

The parallel layer is religious. Every branch of government is mirrored by an Islamic institution led by clerics, most of whom are appointed. One body is elected, but the candidates emerge from a clergy whose members basically promote each other to religious positions behind closed doors, with lifetime standing and virtually no accountability.

The religious bodies were designed to be watchdogs. But in every case they have ended up more powerful.

At the top, the Islamic Republic’s president is elected every four years and is limited to two terms. His powers are checked by parliament and the judiciary.

But the president is mirrored by the supreme leader, or
velayat-e faqih.
The concept emerged from the Imam’s fascination with Plato’s
Republic
and the idea of a philosopher-king, adapted to the Islamic world.

The supreme leader is charged with the oversight of all branches of government. He is infallible in all affairs of faith and state, with ultimate veto power over every issue in a country with the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves and the region’s second-most-powerful military. He also appoints the chiefs of the judiciary and military. And he controls the internal security and intelligence services. There is no appeal from any of his decisions.

The supreme leader runs the most powerful political papacy in the world.

The role is a radical departure in Shiite doctrine. For fourteen centuries, Shiites had been suspicious of political power. The state was viewed as imperfect, corruptible, and a source of persecution and injustice. Shiites had never before accepted temporal rule. It was anathema. So the Imam’s decision to put clerics in charge of a modern government was a revolution within Shiism as well as in Iranian politics. It also went against the will of the majority of Shiite clergy, both in and outside Iran.

Other branches of government also have mirror images.

Iran’s unicameral parliament has 290 members elected every four years. It is mirrored by the twelve-member Council of Guardians appointed on an open-ended basis. The guardians can reject both candidates and legislation for not being Islamic enough. And they often do.

In the judiciary, Iran’s civil and criminal courts are headed by secular judges usually with legal training. Most proceedings are open. They are mirrored by Islamic courts headed by clerics. The clerics can charge people, vaguely or vindictively, with un-Islamic activity. And they often do. Many proceedings are held in secret.

Iran’s military has the conventional branches of army, navy, and air force, with a total of more than 400,000 troops. They are mirrored by the elite Revolutionary Guards of some 125,000 troops, plus the young paramilitary volunteers called the Basij, or Mobilization of the Oppressed. They were formed in the revolution’s early days to protect the clerics, specifically to prevent the conventional military from trying to launch a coup. During Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, however, the Revolutionary Guards and Basij emerged as far more powerful. They were also put in charge of Iran’s secret military procurement programs, including missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Yet Iran’s new constitution did not create a theocracy. Even after it passed, Iran’s government was still distinctly split. Secular technocrats ran the traditional arms of government, while clerics dominated the religious institutions. The Imam even decreed that clerics could not run in the first presidential election, which took place a year after the revolution, in January 1980.

The winner was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, a French-educated economist who had been twice imprisoned by the Shah. A tall man with black, wavy hair, he had a mustache that turned up at the ends, but he was otherwise notably clean-shaven—at a time when beards and stubble were in vogue, even de rigueur, politically. He was close to the Imam during exile in France. Before the revolution, he wrote extensively on how Islamic economics could replace either capitalism or communism.