WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

ARTICLE: Volume XIX, No1, Spring 2002	Print
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Iran’s Simmering Discontent
Whit Mason *

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There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker. It is impossible to convey a just idea of the agony which this disease can inflict.... The reason for this incomprehension is that mankind has not yet discovered a cure for this disease. Relief from it is to be found only in the oblivion brought about by wine and in the artificial sleep induced by opium and similar narcotics. Alas, the effects of such medicines are only temporary. After a certain point, instead of alleviating the pain, they only intensify it. — Sadeq Hedayat

With these lines begins The Blind Owl, considered by many to be the greatest Iranian novel of the twentieth century. Though published in 1937, they perfectly capture the bleak après-ski scene I came upon early this past December at a resort in the Alborz Mountains north of Tehran. The rough cabin where I was warming my frozen toes sat in the shadow of an enormous chalet that my hosts thought must belong to the son of one of the powerful clerics who dominate the country. I was making small talk with three 40-something Tehranis when one of them said abruptly, "Could you move to a chair please—I need this bench." He dragged the bench into the kitchen, shoved it up next to the stove, and lay down. Then he placed a large piece of smoldering coal on top of a modified soft-drink can and stuck a tube running from the can into his mouth. "Opium," he sighed. "Here in the village it’s easier to come by than bread and butter. We’ve been smoking since morning."

That explained their glassy, vacant eyes. But why would these privileged Iranians in the prime of life want to spend the entire day in a drug-induced fog? They were as forthright about the pain they were trying to numb as they were about the "medicine" they were taking. Two of them, brother and sister, were the children of a broken man who had been a big shot under the Shah. Both were unmarried and lived at home; both were on psychiatric medication. The third, their cousin, also unmarried, chastised them for having given up. The cousin, on the other hand, retained an appetite for life: in his late thirties he had made himself into a tennis pro and now amused himself by having affairs with married women. In drug-thickened syllables, they explained how the financial ruination and depression visited on their families by the Iranian Revolution, combined with the social repression and material privation that followed, had robbed them of all hope and motivation. With no connections to the new ruling class, they had no professional opportunities. So they devoted themselves to killing the pain that ached where their lives should have been.

These Iranians embody the malaise of the country: 23 years after the declaration of the Islamic Republic, Iran has a painful disease for which no one knows the cure, a disease from which increasing numbers seek solace in narcotics. ¹ Though many Iranians nowadays criticize the regime—and even take drugs—in front of strangers, without apparent fear of the authorities, theirs is the courage of people who feel they have little to lose and less reason to hope. Despite a series of overwhelming electoral victories for President Mohammad Khatami and reformist members of Parliament, all of the physical power—the army, the courts, the Revolutionary Guards—remains in the hands of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini, and other scholars of Shiite Islamic law, the mullahs. Though some restrictions have been relaxed—women are now allowed to push their headscarves farther back on their heads so a bit of hair shows—the mullahs block the elected reformists at every turn, even vetoing such ideologically neutral legislation as a convention on shipping with Slovenia.

Iran faces two almost equally hard-to-imagine futures. The reformists may somehow find the nerve and credibility to force a referendum on theocratic rule, which would certainly result in a vote to end the clerics’ monopoly on power. Or Iranians’ frustration will continue to be stifled until it explodes in uncoordinated street violence, with ultimately unpredictable political results. As President Khatami himself put it in a recent speech at Tehran University: "If the differences are suppressed, if the avenues for expression of opposition are blocked, little by little this situation will lead to despair and to resorting to extremist radical methods."

The conflict has become menacingly stark because, in the words of one Western diplomat, "There is no longer any wiggle room." Reformists have exhausted virtually every conceivable means of challenging the mullahs’ hegemony short of a direct assault on the undemocratic dominance they are granted by Iran’s constitution. The assault will probably take the form of calls for a national referendum—which have recently been heard in Parliament—backed by public demonstrations. Iranian and foreign observers alike agree that this scenario has two potentially fatal flaws. First, the conservative leadership still commands the support of perhaps a quarter of the population, and, second, it has demonstrated its readiness to make use of the forces at its disposal. Diplomats estimate that the armed forces reflect the thinking of the general public, i.e., over two-thirds support the reformists. Even the Intelligence Ministry has been purged of many hard-line conservatives, following a series of murders of liberal intellectuals that were blamed on "rogue elements" in the ministry. If push came to shove, the mullahs could only confidently count on the support of the Revolutionary Guards.

Even if the balance of power seems to favor the reformists, however, Iranians who lived through the revolution of 1979 dread a reprise of the bloody purges, show trials, and summary executions that claimed tens of thousands of lives across the political spectrum. The reformists also lack leadership. President Khatami has repeatedly demonstrated his readiness to back down, rather than risk a direct clash with hard-liners, and urges others to follow his example; history may yet come to view him as Iran’s Gorbachev, but never its Yeltsin. Even many of the best-known leaders of the reform movement, such as Abdul Karim Soroush, an influential religious reformer, and crusading journalist Akbar Ganji, are compromised by past associations with the regime. Others may fear the Gorbachev syndrome, of pushing reforms so hard that they lose control of the process. Individuals with the charisma to form broad alliances have felt the vindictive power of the theocrats at close hand. Two of Tehran’s biggest vote-winners, MPs Jamileh Kadivar and Ali Reza Nouri, have both seen their siblings imprisoned on political charges.

Popular Discontent
By any measure, the mounting discontent has already entered the red zone. Khatami, though still popular, has demonstrably failed to defy the conservatives who perennially undermine him. The revolutionaries, writes the Berkeley political scientist Dariush Zahedi, "promised to create an economically developed and independent Iran in which the fruits of economic growth were to be combined with equality and social justice. Civil liberties, as well as the right of citizens to petition their government through the formation of voluntary associations and political parties, were to be assured. Above all, however, both government and society were to become morally uplifted through piety and strict compliance with the dictates of Islam. In fact, precisely the reverse has occurred. The revolutionaries have reneged on all of their promises."²

To visit Iran’s cities today is to know what Barcelona must have been like when it was the hotbed of Republicanism on the eve of Spain’s civil war. The Revolution is morally bankrupt; faith in the theocratic regime has been dissipated by economic and social crises, political oppression, pervasive corruption, and hypocrisy. Disillusionment smolders even on chill mornings like the one on which I arrived on the night train from Tehran in Tabriz, the gritty one-time capital near the Azerbaijan border. "Before the Revolution at this time of year there would always be snow on the ground, but they’ve taken away even that," said my middle-aged taxi driver, referring to the mullahs. "We used to say our prayers just for God, but now people pray to improve their position." The driver was not alone in his willingness to speak out. Other Iranians told me they have felt safe criticizing the theocracy since the reformists’ overwhelming victory in the parliamentary elections of 2000. The reformers won 80 percent of seats in the first round, and nearly 70 percent in the second round, despite the disqualification of over 700 candidates, most of whom were reformists. Everywhere I went in Iran —from the green mountains above the Caspian to the sun-baked fortress of Bam on the road to Pakistan—people went out of their way tell me how much they despised the mullahs.

"The regime is isolating itself," a senior Western diplomat said to me. And, indeed, the mullahs at the top seldom mix with the common people. This aloofness offends many Iranians’ keen sense of social justice. While touring the citadel at Bam, I ran across a group of mullahs. From the solicitous attitude of their guide, I guessed they were VIPs. After I left the fortress and was about to climb into my humble Peykan, Iran’s national car, my driver pointed to these same clerics, who were strolling toward a gleaming white Land Rover pulled up to the curb. "When Imam Ali was Khalif," he said, referring to the founding father of Shiite Islam, "and his relatives would come to visit, he would refuse to use fuel to light extra lamps, so concerned was he about abusing his position. When Imam Hossein was struggling against the Umayyid usurpers, he could have had the number two position in the empire if he had simply acknowledged Yazid [his rival and killer] as Khalif. But instead he chose a heavenly kingdom. Compared to the imams, just look at these mullahs in their fancy car!"

The lyrically elegant city of Isfahan, the former Safavid capital lying at the foot of the Zagros Mountains in the heart of the country and often referred to as the Florence of the Islamic world, is home to some of the most beautiful religious buildings in the world. Isfahan is not particularly a center of religious study. Although, as the former capital and one of the country’s major cities it has plenty of religious students, it’s not in the same league as Mashad and Qom. But the locals’ attitude toward the mullahs who live and pray in those beautiful buildings could hardly have been more irreverent. One afternoon, I was sharing a taxi with a young woman who was a graduate student in his-tory, when I mentioned that I was heading to the city’s central plaza, now called Imam Square. "Call it Shah’s Square," she commanded as she got out. Later, as I was leaving the beautiful eighteenth-century Chahar Bagh Madraseh, an Iranian tourist I had been chatting with said the gatekeeper of the seminary must be a mullah himself. I asked how he could tell. "Because," he said, "he wouldn’t get off his hairy ass to talk to me." Locals later told me that the madraseh is known colloquially as the "queer club." The popular suspicion that the insulated all-male compounds supposedly devoted to religious study are actually the scene of illicit homosexual activity is not new. In the fourteenth century, the renowned Shirazi poet Hafez—who himself had attained the distinction of memorizing the entire Koran— penned these lines:

Those preachers who in prayer-arch
     and pulpit imposingly
          parade,
When they to their chamber go—
     another kind of act perform.
A problem, sir! Please ask the
     assembly’s learned man:
Why do those who command us to
     repent so seldom themselves
          repentance make?
You might say they put no faith in
     the Day of Judgment
Since when they act for the "Judge,"
     they employ all this
          deceit and fraud.³

The longest road in Tehran, running some 30 kilometers from the foothills of the Alborz in the affluent north to the city limits in the south, is now named Vali Asr. Before 1979, it was called "Pahlavi Boulevard" after the reigning dynasty. After the Revolution, it was renamed "Mossadegh," in honor of the popular prime minister who nationalized the oil industry and was deposed in a coup organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. When the mullahs took control of the Revolution from the liberals of the National Front in the late autumn of 1979,⁴ they renamed the street "Kashani," after a populist mullah who was a hero among reactionaries for his long and violent opposition to liberal ideals and individuals. But even in those days of revolutionary fervor, there were enough opponents of the theocrats that the Kashani street signs were being continuously vandalized. Finally, the government gave the street the name of the Twelfth Imam, revered as the "Mahdi" or Messiah, whom Iranian Shiites believe to be in "occultation" and destined to return to the world to herald Judgment Day.⁵

One day, I toured the Green Palace, a gigantic showcase of stucco carvings, enormous crystal chandeliers, porcelain, and inlay, its chairs and settees upholstered in boudoir silks, their gold-leafed legs glinting like a slattern’s tooth. The palace was once home to Reza Khan, the late Shah’s father, who in the power vacuum in Iran after the First World War had parlayed his command of a brigade of Cossacks and the support of the British to declare himself Shah and found the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925. As I was looking at a case containing some of Reza Shah’s personal effects, an Iranian visitor pointed at a pair of reading glasses. "Revolutionaries say Reza Shah couldn’t read a single line," he said to a female guide, who had passed the Ministry of Culture’s mandatory test of Islamic correctness.

"We should beat the people who say that," she said with surprising savagery.

"Yes," agreed the visitor, "let’s see what future generations write about them."

Iranians are increasingly resentful of the mullahs for overriding the decisions of the democratically elected parliament and President Khatami. The Council of Guardians, which is composed of 12 mullahs (6 appointed by the supreme leader, and 6 nominated by the judiciary and approved by Parliament) and is the Islamic Republic’s equivalent of the Soviet Politburo, reviews all laws passed by parliament to ensure that they conform to their reading of Islamic law. Among the bills passed by parliament but rejected by the council were acts raising the legal age of marriage for women from 9 to 15, facilitating the start-up of newspapers, and guaranteeing criminal defendants the right to have an attorney present during trial.⁶ Like the Council of Guardians, the entire judiciary is ultimately accountable to no one but the supreme leader—in Farsi, the Velayat Faqih, or supreme jurist—Ayatollah Khameini.

Iranians suffer under an economy whose retarded growth cannot keep up with their country’s ballooning working-age population: two-thirds of the population of 65 million is under the age of 30. Moreover, 52 percent of Iran’s 41 million voters are under 30, and 22 percent are under 20 (the voting age is 16). According to the government, some 40 percent of Iranians are living in poverty. Last fall, President Khatami admitted that there are no jobs for 42 percent of the roughly 2 million Iranians who will enter the work force this year. (Even this figure understates the employment problem, since it does not take account of extravagant featherbedding.) Of the 1.5 million high school graduates who took the university entrance exam last summer—most after demanding and expensive special tutoring— only 150,000 were admitted to a university. Over the past year, some 220,000 educated Iranians emigrated to the West.⁷

President Khatami has made the expansion of women’s rights a pillar of his program of liberalization, and since his election in 1997 women have made considerable gains. Out of 273 members of Iran’s Majlis, or parliament, 11 are female. Khatami has promoted several women to top positions in the government, and some 60 percent of places in universities go to females. But like much of the rest of his program, many of Khatami’s efforts on behalf of women have been thwarted by hard-line conservatives. While women can get away with pushing their scarves farther back on their heads and can wear makeup and maybe even hold hands with their boyfriends in upscale neighborhoods without being harassed by the morals police, a woman’s testimony in court still carries only half the weight of a man’s; the "blood money" paid to avoid the death penalty for causing the death of woman is only half that for the killing of a man; and family law accords all advantages in divorce and child custody to men. The Council of Guardians has blocked all efforts to reform the law in these instances.⁸

Given the repression in so many other areas of life, football has long been a means of letting off steam. Tehran’s most popular football team is officially called "Paroozi" (Victorious), in honor of the Revolution. But its thousands of adoring fans still call it by its pre-revolutionary—and pre-Islamic— name, "Persepolis." The former national team coach was fired, under pressure from both his players and fans, for insisting that the team conform to a code of conspicuous piety, including praying before games. In October, pent-up frustration boiled over when perhaps 100,000 people poured into the streets, first to celebrate a pair of victories, then to protest a surprise defeat of the Iranian national team in a series of World Cup qualifying matches. The ensuing revelry was part street party, part spontaneous demonstration. In well-heeled parts of Tehran, unmarried couples violated prohibitions against dancing and holding hands. In other areas, young people began chanting anti-regime slogans, particularly against Supreme Leader Khameini. Police and Revolutionary Guards dispersed these more politicized crowds with baton charges, tear gas, and beatings. About 1,000 teenagers were arrested in Tehran alone.⁹

While state broadcast media maintained a news blackout on the rioting, hard-line newspapers blamed "counterrevolutionaries," led by Reza Pahlavi, the Los Angeles– based son of the late Shah, for inciting the unrest through broadcasts on satellite television. But many Iranians are convinced that the supreme leader had ordered the Iranian team to lose to Bahrain because the regime feared that the mass street celebrations and rioting that had followed previous victories were endangering stability. After canceling a trip to Isfahan due to a cold, Khameini felt compelled to appear on television to prove that he really was ill. As one Iranian journalist remarked to me, it was typical of the regime to fail to anticipate popular unrest and then focus on damage control after the fact. To diplomats and other observers in Tehran, the football shenanigans rumbled like the first minatory tremors along the fault line running under Iranian society.

Injudicious Repression
The hottest flashpoint in Iran today is the courts. Nowhere is the gulf between the mullahs and Iran’s secular elite starker than in the judiciary, which, like the Council of Guardians, is answerable only to Khameini. Law students, lawyers, and subordinate judges are overwhelmingly progressive in their political orientation and study only the French and Belgian law that forms the basis of Iran’s legal system. The presiding judge, on the other hand, is always a cleric with expertise in the Shia version of Islamic law, or Sharia, with which the legal system has been sprinkled since the Revolution. The rulings of this judicial platypus would be comical, if they did not have such an impact on peoples’ lives.

The following judgments, rendered recently in Iran’s criminal courts, illustrate the mullahs’ perspective and competence. A boy was sentenced to three months in prison for allegedly making flirtatious faces at a girl while she was walking along the street with her father. What was remarkable about the case is that he was across the street when he committed the offense, for which the court coined a special term that translates as "teleflirting." Various sections of Iran’s statute books are color-coded, with the criminal statues colored red. In one recent judgment, the clerical magistrate found a defendant guilty based not on any particular law, but on the "red pages." In another case, a convicted man was sentenced to imprisonment "until one week before the reappearance of the Mahdi," in other words, "till Kingdom comes."

This past winter, the courts’ anti-reform campaign has become even more overtly hostile to the reformists. Early last December, an appeals court imposed a seven-month prison sentence on Mohammad Dadfar, a prominent reformist member of parliament who had made a speech criticizing the courts. That same month, a special court dealing with press offences concluded its prosecution of several leaders of Iran’s most prominent left-wing party, the Islamic Revolution Mujahedin Organization (IMRO). Its secretary general, the deputy minister for labor, was sentenced to 26 months in prison, while the party’s weekly newspaper, Asr-e Ma, joined the list of 60-odd publications that have been banned since the reformists won control of the Majlis in general elections in the spring of 2000. Another senior IMRO official and Khatami confidant, Behzad Nabavi, is under investigation for alleged misuse of funds as head of Petro Pars, a quasi-state oil company. Other Khatami allies, including his cabinet secretary, who is the former governor of Kurdestan, the head of the Petroleum Ministry, and the governor of the Central Bank have also been targeted.

The judiciary ratcheted up the pressure still further just after Christmas when the courts took the unprecedented step of imprisoning a member of parliament, Hossein Loqmanian. (Dadfar has been sentenced but not yet actually imprisoned.) Loqmanian, a pro-reform member of Parliament, was sentenced to ten months in prison for libeling and slandering the judiciary. In a speech before Parliament last year, Loqmanian expressed the commonly held belief among MPs that the courts are "decapitating freedom and attempting to threaten and intimidate Parliament." He also denounced the imprisonment of Ezatollah Sahibi, an esteemed veteran activist who has languished behind bars for months without trial, charged with a host of counterrevolutionary offenses. A third MP, Fatemah Haqiqatjou, also faces charges of defaming the courts. Tehran’s top judge, Abbas Ali Alizadeh, has said Parliament has no right to interfere in judicial affairs. "Why do you raise questions about legal proceedings for the sake of a bunch of so-called reformers and newspapers?" he asked, adding that the media had a duty not to publish articles "that might weaken or insult the judiciary."¹⁰ Loqmanian’s incarceration caused an uproar in Parliament. One MP labeled it "a mini-coup," and some called for a national referendum on the separation of powers, the most direct challenge to date by elected officials to the clerics’ political dominion. Two weeks after Loqmanian went to Tehran’s Evin prison, Khameini belatedly defused the confrontation by granting him a pardon.

Religious Nationalism
Loqmanian’s incarceration marks a high point in the increasingly sharp cycle of political clashes between conservatives and reformists. Though the situation appears to be defused, the case may yet catalyze a chain reaction that eventually leads to a direct challenge to the clerics’ political domination. Some 60 other MPs face prosecution on various charges. But the case that will probably have a more lasting effect on Iran’s political course is the one Loqmanian himself protested, involving Ezatollah Sahibi.

In 1961, Sahibi, a professor of geology, became a founding member of a group of religiously minded activists opposed to the Shah, known as the Freedom Movement. Among the other founders were Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani, a popular and progressive cleric who was imprisoned for political offenses numerous times between 1939 and 1978, and Mehdi Bazargan, an engineer and respected lay theologian. All had been close to Mohammed Mossadegh, the popular prime minister whose CIA-orchestrated over-throw in 1953 had paved the way for the Shah’s return from exile in Italy and his assumption of absolute power, and all were committed to demonstrating that Islam was compatible with modernity. Though they urged the mullahs to be politically engaged, they believed it would be disastrous for the clerics to be directly involved in daily governance. Instead, they envisaged the Islamic Republic as a parliamentary democracy "run not by Shi’i ulama but by experts who are committed Shiites."¹¹ As such, they appealed mostly to bazaar traders and religiously inclined members of the middle class, academics, and students. Taleqani was the leftists’ favorite mullah, while Bazargan was the mullahs’ favorite technocrat.

Members of the Freedom Movement established the Islamic republic’s first government, and Khomeini appointed Bazargan prime minister, before the clerics shoved aside liberals and concentrated power in their own hands.¹² "Islam was not to be denigrated by the adjective ‘democracy,’" declared Khomeini. "Anyone wishing Iran to be just a republic, or a democratic republic, or a democratic Islamic republic, was the enemy of Islam and God."¹³ Massoumeh Ebtekar, spokesperson for the students who took over the U.S. embassy in 1979, and held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days, says of the prime minister: "Bazargan was a sincere religious reformist at heart, not a revolutionary.... A cautious man by nature, Bazargan lacked revolutionary insight and vigor—precisely the two qualities that were needed at that moment. He had endeavored to solve the nation’s problems by step-by-step, conservative measures."¹⁴

Despite having been regarded as dull plodders when they were in government, over a year ago about 30 members of the group (many of whom are now past retirement age) were rounded up in several raids and thrown into prison, allegedly for being counterrevolutionaries. In addition to Sahibi, those being prosecuted include Bazargan’s son, Abolfazi, former Tehran mayor Mohammad Tavasoli, and former interior minister Hashem Sabaghian. The trial of the first group of 14 began last November, and the trial of a second group of 15 began the following month. In contravention of the Iranian Constitution, the trials have been held in secret. Apart from nine who were released on bail, most of the prisoners have been kept in small solitary cells in a prison belonging to the Revolutionary Guards that is not within the regular penal system. Even representatives of President Khatami have not been allowed to see the prisoners. Again in violation of the constitution, a single person is acting as prosecutor and judge. When defense attorneys refused to agree to the trials being held in secret, they proceeded without defense counsel. During the more than a year that Sahibi has spent in prison, his health has reportedly deteriorated precipitously. Those close to him and other leaders of the movement say the mullahs have succeeded in breaking them—and thus, Iran’s best hope of gradual liberalization.

For years, the Freedom Movement had been banned but tolerated. So why did the conservative judiciary finally feel compelled to try these men? One reason is that the movement was more successful than other reformist groupings in forging broad alliances. In Iran’s spiritual center of Qom, religious nationalists had contacts with Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, who since 1989 has been under house arrest for publicly criticizing the regime’s excesses. Saeed Hajjarian, a former intelligence-minister-turned- reformist ideologue, had begun publicly espousing their mix of liberalism and clerical restraint. Perhaps most worryingly, the religious nationalists’ ideas were becoming popular among Iran’s students. One official close to the supreme leader indirectly confirmed to me that religious nationalists were doomed because their ideas had been taken up by the "so-called reformers."

What makes the religious nationalists so threatening to the mullahs, though, is not their new-found alliances but their ideas. Though it is impossible to say precisely what sort of political system Iranians yearned for when they toppled the Shah in 1979, available evidence suggests that a majority of the middle class now want just the sort of liberal political system that the religious nationalists espouse, one that combines pragmatic nationalism, a religiously flavored cultural outlook, and an a democratically elected government influenced only indirectly, if at all, by the mullahs.

From the outside, particularly from the secular West, Iranians may appear to be divided between believers who support the theocratic regime and better educated, non-religious people who read the reformist newspapers that have been closed down in droves over the past year. This is a false dichotomy. Iranians’ faith, centered on a line of savior figures descended from Imam Ali, is broad and deep. But it is not the religion that outsiders would infer from looking at Iran’s laws and institutions. Quite the contrary: in many ways, Iranians’ faith is deeply hostile toward both the reigning religious authorities and the Sunni Muslim world with which the government often expresses fraternal solidarity.

Conversations with Iranians across the country reveal that the religious thinker with the widest popular appeal, at least among the middle class, is a French-educated sociologist who died under mysterious circumstances in London in 1977. Ali Shariati preached a blend of Iran’s Shiite Islam, liberation theology, and modernism that electrified Iranians in the late 1960s and 1970s. He was, moreover, closely aligned with the religious nationalists. To understand Iranians’ vision of Islam, one need only look at Shariati’s writings.

It’s no accident that Shariati, like Bazargan and Taleqani, tried to reconcile Shiite tradition with modernity. A leading exponent of Islamic humanism, Shariati emphasized the distinction between the Shiism of Imam Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Shiites consider God’s vice regent on Earth, and the Shiism of the Safavid dynasty, which in 1502 made it Iran’s state religion. As the historian Nikki Keddie wrote: "Alid Shi’ism [according to Shariati] represents original Islam and is a movement of progress and revolution with no division between intellectuals and the people—Islam in its progressive and dynamic phase. The Safavids, by making Shi’ism the state religion, degraded it into an institution, making it a means of political enslavement and turning it from its original aim—the search for justice and sacred duties.... Shariati’s Safavid Shi’ism is also [Shah] Pahlavi Shi’ism, and today’s "Safavid" ulama [mullahs] are those who play games of power."¹⁵ In "Reflections of a Concerned Muslim On the Plight of Oppressed People," Shariati writes: "Where should I go? Should I go to the Mobedans [priests of pre-Islamic Persia]? How could I return to those temples which were built to enslave me? Should I join those who claim to be examples of our national freedom but in essence are attempting to gain their inhuman privileges of the past?"

Even among the mullahs themselves there are many who argue that secular power will corrupt their religious vocation. Today in the seminaries, that argument is being fortified by the growing recognition that theocratic rule is turning Iranians against the mullahs. Just before Christmas, violence flared in Qom during the funeral of a senior dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Husseini Shirazi. Shirazi was among about a dozen senior mullahs who, like Ayatollah Montazeri, oppose theocratic rule and refuse to accept the supreme leader as an equal in terms of religious authority. Uniformed soldiers believed to be Revolutionary Guards attacked Shirazi’s funeral procession, beating his mourners and breaking his coffin. His body fell to the ground twice before being thrown in a minibus and driven off to an undisclosed location.

If the reformists’ cry were purely cerebral, the mullahs might prevail against it indefinitely. But Iranians’ demands for change are fueled by religious fervor and the conviction that the mullahs are not simply corrupt worldly despots. Iranians, believing that they cannot expect any better of this world until the cleansing reappearance of the Mahdi, have traditionally accepted authoritarian rule. But in the view of many Iranians, the mullahs’ offense is incomparably worse than the Shah’s because by hoarding power and wealth while posing as defenders of the faith they are betraying the sacred tradition of Iranians’ beloved imams. And that, most Iranians seem to agree, is an unpardonable apostasy.

No regime out of sync with its own people can stand indefinitely. It seems certain that Iran will eventually move in the direction of the Freedom Movement’s vision of a republic governed by elected officials, with no interference from foreign powers and only a minimal political role for the clergy, if any. Between here and there stand the current holders of power—the mullahs, their families, and their protégés, backed by the stalwarts of the Revolutionary Guards. Perhaps they will recognize that their internal rot is terminal and grasp the nettle of reform. More likely, they will struggle to keep a lid on the simmering discontent until it boils over. The regime may be able to carry on until the death of the supreme leader, who is 68, but the clash between Iranians’ aspirations and the mullahs will surely come to a head then, if not before.

Iran’s conservatives were visibly on the defensive until President Bush came to their rescue. By naming Iran, along with North Korea and Iraq, as part of an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union speech this past January, he threw the reformists, who favor rapprochement with the United States, on the defensive. Iranians from across the political spectrum closed ranks in the face of Bush’s belligerent rhetoric. Hundreds of thousands turned out for rallies in February to celebrate the Islamic Republic’s twenty-third anniversary. President Khatami chastised U.S. leaders as immature, while marchers carried placards saying, "Bush Is Dracula," and demonstrators burned effigies of the American president and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.

More remarkable than this brief burst of national unity, however, was how quickly the reformists returned to their argument that it is in Iran’s interest to find ways to engage with the United States. Nevertheless, the movement toward directly challenging the theocrats that had been gathering steam at the end of last year has for now been overtaken by the struggle for control of foreign policy. Nominally, foreign policy is in the hands of the National Security Council, which is accountable to the president and, through him, to Parliament. In reality, the supreme leader retains the final say about Iran’s direction—until, that is, the Iranian people decide they have had enough.

The murals on the wall of the former U.S. embassy in Tehran demonizing the United States include Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement, "When America praises us, we should mourn." In the citadel at Bam, I asked four men who said they hoped relations with the United States would improve quickly, how they squared this goal with Khomeini’s warning. One of them, a tire salesman, smiled and said, "That was then, this is now." •

This article was made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

*Whit Mason is a speechwriter and op-ed writer for the head of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. He was a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs from 1998 to 2001.

Notes

1. According to official estimates, there are 1.2 million drug addicts in Iran, and another 800,000 who are regular users. Other estimates range up to 3 million, or almost 5 percent of the total population of 65 million. A gram of opium in Tehran costs about $1.50—roughly the same as a pack of Marlboros. Many middle-class Iranians complain that the ban on alcohol has led to an epidemic of alcoholism. Before the Revolution, imported liquor was expensive, and most Iranians who drank consumed modest amounts of alcohol in bars. Now that all alcohol is inexpensive moonshine, many drink heavily every evening.

2. Dariush Zahedi, The Iranian Revolution Then and Now (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 2000), p. 3.

3. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000), p. 180.

4. Khomeini returned to Tehran from exile in France on February 1, 1979, and the Islamic Republic was declared on April 1. On November 14, the liberal government of Mehdi Bazargan resigned under pressure, and in December Iranians ratified the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, which was based on the Velayat-e Faqih, or Mandate of the Jurisprudents.

5. There are other sects of Shiis who believe in different successions of imams, ending with either the Fifth ("Fivers") or the Seventh ("Seveners"), who include the Ismailis.

6. John Ward Anderson, "Islamic Democracy’s Power Politics," Washington Post, May 26, 2001.

7. The Economist, October 1, 2001.

8. Molly Moore, "Women Say Yes to Khatami," Washington Post, June 8, 2001.

9. Guy Dinsmore, "Football Movement or New Revolution," Iran Reporter, October 27, 2001.

10. John Ward Anderson, "Iran’s Conservatives Face Growing Split," Washington Post, May 25, 2001.

11. Zahedi, Iranian Revolution Then and Now, p. 126.

12. The two stages of the Iranian Revolution mirror those of the Russian Revolution: the liberals overthrew the monarchy in the February Revolution before being replaced, eight months later, by the more ruthless Bolsheviks.

13. Zahedi, Iranian Revolution Then and Now, p. 146.

14. Massoumeh Ebtekar, Takeover in Tehran (Vancouver, B.C.: Talonbooks, 2000), pp. 76–77.

15. Nikki R. Keddie, Roots of Revolution (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 217–18.

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