Iran: Empire of the Mind (45 page)

Three days ago, a religious judge from one of the provinces, who is a trustworthy man, visited me in Qom to express concern about the way your recent orders have been carried out. He said that an intelligence officer, or a prosecutor—I don’t know which—was interrogating a prisoner to determine whether he still maintained his [old] position. Was he prepared to condemn the hypocrite organisation [the Mojahedin]? The prisoner said ‘ Yes’. Was he prepared to take part in a [television] interview? ‘ Yes’ said the prisoner. Was he prepared to go to the front to fight the Iraqis? ‘ Yes,’ he said. Was he prepared to walk into a minefield? The inmate replied that not everyone was prepared to walk over mines and, furthermore, the newly converted could not be expected to do so. The inmate was told that it was clear that he still maintained his [old] position, and he was duly dealt with. The religious judge’s insistence that a decision should be based on a unanimous, not a majority vote, fell on deaf ears. He said that intelligence officials have he largest say everywhere and in practice influence others. Your Holiness might take note of how your orders, that concern the lives of thousands of people, are carried out.
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Some believe that the real rift was over the Iran/Contra arms deal: that Montazeri was left in the dark over the discussions with the US and reacted badly when he found out. He also criticised the fatwa against Rushdie, saying that foreigners were getting the impression that Iranians were interested only in murdering people. Whatever the details, shortly before Khomeini’s death in June 1989 it was made known that Montazeri would not follow him as Supreme Leader. Instead, Khomeini’s close confidant Ali Khamenei took the role, having been promoted suddenly from
hojjatoleslam
to ayatollah, despite having had no very distinguished
reputation as a scholar previously (several senior Ayatollahs protested at Khamenei’s elevation, with the extraordinary result that he became Supreme Leader, but only a marja for Shi‘as outside Iran). Since that time Montazeri has lived mainly under house arrest, and has made several statements against the conduct of the regime, arguing for a more limited role for the
velayat-e faqih
, for properly constitutional and democratic government, and an end to human rights abuses.

Despite the efforts of the regime to marginalise him, Montazeri is still the
marja-e taqlid
for many religious Iranians, along with others who keep a certain distance from the regime. Another important example is Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, who has stated directly that the possession or use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable, that Iran did not retaliate with chemical weapons against Saddam because marjas concurred that weapons of mass destruction as a whole were unacceptable, and has issued a fatwa against suicide bombings (although Shi‘as may have been responsible for the devastating suicide attack against the Marine headquarters in Beirut in 1983, Lebanese Hezbollah later stopped using the tactic and since then to my knowledge Shi‘a Muslims have not perpetrated suicide attacks).

These are just a few illustrations of the important fact that Iranian Shi‘ism (let alone Shi‘ism outside Iran) is bigger than the current Iranian religious leadership—something observers from outside the region too often fail to register. In recent years dissent from the regime line has gathered strength among the Iranian ulema, and reform-minded thinkers like Mohsen Kadivar and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari have gained a following for their attempts to address current problems within an Islamic context in an intellectually honest and rigorous way.
²⁰
In a sense, Shi‘ism is doing something the religion has always done—legitimating an alternative pole of authority to that power wielded by the dominant regime. At the same time the moral authority of the ruling clique has withered just as the moral authority of the Bolsheviks withered.

Several commentators have remarked upon the caesura in Iranian politics created by the end of the Iran/Iraq war and the death of Khomeini
²¹
. The third event that marked this change was the election of Rafsanjani, the former Majles Speaker, as President, in August 1989
(replacing Khamenei, who became Supreme Leader in place of Khomeini in June). As he became President, Rafsanjani announced a new era, of Reconstruction. Ali Ansari has called it the mercantile bourgeois republic—the period in which the bazaari middle class—the bedrock of support for the political ulema since 1979 and long before—finally came into their kingdom.

The war had done huge damage to the Iranian economy and to the living standards of ordinary Iranians. Per capita income had fallen by forty per cent at least since 1978.
²²
In the areas at the border where the fighting had taken place some 1.6 million people had been made homeless, and refineries, factories, government buildings, roads, bridges, ports and irrigation works had all been destroyed. The country as a whole had to look after large numbers of badly injured ex-servicemen, including people suffering from the after-effects of chemical weapons (many of whom still suffer today). In addition there were refugees from Iraq (a larger number fled to Iran after the first Gulf War in 1991, when the US and the UK encouraged a Shi‘a revolt, and then stood aside while Saddam massacred the rebels)—and from Afghanistan, where fighting had been raging since the Soviet invasion of 1979. By the end of the 90s Iran was hosting over two million refugees. Unlike Iraq, Iran had come out of the war without a serious debt burden, but the need for reconstruction was great, and Iran’s continuing international isolation was a handicap.

The war had an important unifying effect in the country, and the sacrifices made by ordinary people enhanced their sense of citizenship and commitment to the Islamic republic. The war was the first major conflict involving large numbers of ordinary Iranians since the early nineteenth century; perhaps since Nader Shah. But the commitment and sacrifices were not a blank cheque: people expected something back when the war was over. Rafsanjani promised them precisely this as he was elected—in particular, he promised development and an improvement in living standards to the poorest, upon whom (as usual) the heaviest burdens had fallen—the mostazefin, whose name had been on so many politicians’ lips at the time of the revolution and since.
But there was disagreement about the policy means to achieve these goals, and results were mixed. Since the revolution, for the necessity of the prosecution of the war but also to serve the declared aim of greater social equality, the regime had followed broadly statist economic policies. Now Rafsanjani, true to his bazaari origins and sympathies, tried to build the economy by pursuing greater market freedom (in a way comparable to that in which the Soviets followed the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, to stimulate recovery after the Civil War). But disagreements within the regime hampered the effort—in particular, privatisation measures went ahead and then were halted, amid accusations of mismanagement and corruption. Some progress and some expansion of the economy were achieved, but less than had been hoped. Industrial and agricultural production increased, and exports too, especially agricultural exports (and notably, pistachio exports, in which Rafsanjani’s own family had a significant stake). But the economy remained heavily dependent on oil, the oil industry remained inefficient for lack of international help to secure the most up-to-date technology, and that help was blocked by US economic sanctions, which sharpened through the 1990s as part of the policy of dual containment applied to both Iran and Iraq. Much investment in the economy went into a construction boom, which benefited the investors, but less so the mostazefin, if at all.
²³

By the mid-point of Rafsanjani’s second term (1993-1997), there was widespread disappointment with his efforts. Living standards, especially of the less well-off, had not improved in the way the people had been led to hope. Unemployment was increasing, partly as a result of sluggish economic performance, but also because the population had continued to expand dramatically over the previous twenty years. Iran’s rate of population growth was one of highest in the world in this period—the total went from 33.7 million at the time of the 1976 census to 48.2 million in 1986—and an estimated 68.5 million in 2007, though the rate of increase has now moderated. Tehran grew to a city of 10-12 million. Throughout the ’90s large numbers of new would-be workers were coming onto the job market each year.

Despite the problems, the first eighteen years of the Islamic Republic had achieved important beneficial results for many ordinary Iranians. A determined push to improve conditions for the rural population succeeded where the Pahlavi regime had largely failed, introducing piped water, health services, electricity and schools even in some of the most remote districts. Life expectancy lifted sharply, along with literacy rates (now around 80 per cent; men 86 per cent, women 73 per cent). Perhaps the most important improvement, reflected in the literacy rate, was in education. Primary education was, at last, effectively extended to all. Iran is a country with a strong cultural appreciation of literacy, education, and intellectual attainment; and families made the most of the new opportunities.

The effect of the revolution on the position of women was typically mixed. They lost the better treatment at divorce that the last Shah had introduced, which meant that fathers in principle got child custody (although in practice, as Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s film
Divorce Iranian Style
demonstrated, women often manage to find ways round this principle in the divorce courts
²⁴
). But women retained the vote. Polygamy and child marriage were made legal again, but almost never happen (except in some Sunni areas like Baluchistan). The imposition of the veil, along with encouragement from the religious hierarchy, allowed traditional-minded fathers to let their daughters attend schools, which were normally established on a single-sex basis. Girls took to this new opportunity with such energy and application that now 66 per cent of students admitted to Iranian universities are women.
²⁵
Given the pressure on families to make ends meet, many of these women take up jobs after university and work alongside men, and continue to do so even after marriage (though many also languish in unemployment). Some observers, notably Farah Azari, have remarked upon the way that orthodox, traditional Shi‘ism has worked in the past to repress women and female sexuality in Iran, linking that to male anxiety in periods of social and economic change. There are still books to be written on the other distortions this has caused historically.
²⁶
The success of women’s education, and the greatly expanded importance of women in the workplace and in the economy is a huge social and cultural change in Iran, and one that, in time, and combined
with other factors, is likely to have profound consequences for Iranian society as a whole. Surveys have indicated that this is already emerging in changed attitudes, more liberal attitudes, to education, the family, and work
²⁷
and is paralleled by other changes in attitude, away from religion toward more secular, liberal and nationalistic positions.
²⁸
Some clerics among the ulema are challenging the religious judgements on the status of women that were pushed through into law at the time of the revolution. These developments are not peripheral, but absolutely central to the future of the country.

Reform?

Women were some of the strongest supporters of President Khatami, who was elected President in May 1997, with a reformist programme. Without attacking the
velayat-e faqih
, Khatami called for proper constitutional government and for a halt to extra-judicial violence. He said several times that he believed his reform programme was the last chance for the Islamic republic—that if reform were blocked the people would demand secular government and overturn the theocratic regime altogether. But his reforms were blocked, and the regime became increasingly unpopular, especially among young people. Levels of attendance at mosques have plummeted. Over the last decade the hardline regime has become more and more overtly self-serving, cynically using its religious trappings and manipulating elections to keep vested interests in power.

Khatami’s election was an unpleasant surprise for the hardline leadership (they had supported his opponent Nateq Nuri), and they seemed to take some time to adjust to the changed conditions of politics that followed. Khatami won 70 per cent of the vote in an election that captured the national imagination as none had done for years; which energised a new generation of young Iranians and gave them hope for the future. Unfortunately, Khatami was outmanoeuvred by the hardline leadership and those hopes were disappointed. Some have suggested that he was a stooge for the hardliners all along: it is more plausible that he was just a bit too nice for politics, and unwilling, at the crucial moment in the
summer of 2000, to risk a confrontation with the hardliners that could have turned violent.

One question in Iranian foreign policy that always lurked in the background through this period was the question of a resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and the US. On several occasions President Khatami made statements that seemed to suggest an openness to renewed contact with the US (notably in an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN, broadcast in January 1998).
²⁹
But it appeared that a block on renewed relations with the US, like Iran’s hostile attitude to Israel, had the character of immovable shibboleths for the hardline elements in the Iranian regime: an inheritance from the revolution. Some international commentators speculated that after the improvement of UK/Iran relations in the autumn of 1998, Britain would act as an honest broker between Iran and the US, but this did not happen. It was difficult too for the US government to make a serious effort at rapprochement, though President Clinton and Secretary Albright made a number of conciliatory statements in 1999 and 2000.