Once again, looking at Iran, one is struck by the impression of watching a revolution in the making. Most recently it seemed within reach when, after the death of the young Kurdish woman Jina (Mahsa) Amini in custody in September 2022, the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” filled the streets and women publicly rejected the symbol of compulsory veiling. What began as an uprising against the morality police, humiliation, and legally enforced dress codes grew within a few days into a general indictment of the order of the Islamic Republic.
Hope for a turning point was great, and it was disappointed. The regime responded with its familiar repertoire: violence, mass arrests, and systematic intimidation. Reports of torture and sexualised violence in detention accumulated, while the enforcement of compelled “morality” continued as a language of power directed against everyday life. Thus, what remained of the uprising, for the time being, was not the fall of the order but the visible erosion of its self-evidence, and a long aftershock of repression, courage, and defiance.
Such hopes are not new. The summer of 2009 offers a lesson. In the West, the confrontation over the presidential election was read as the prelude to a democratic revolution. Its real significance lay elsewhere: within a few weeks, those internal fault lines of the Islamic Republic came into the open that otherwise disappear behind religious rhetoric and the label “reformers” versus “hardliners”. Anyone who takes that episode seriously sees that political fronts run less along abstract ideologies than along networks organised around money, coercive power, institutional leverage, and control of interpretation. That is why it is worth clearing up Western misunderstandings about Iran’s political landscape.
The youth in affluent North Tehran may have been willing to believe it at the time, because they hoped for it so fervently, but Mir-Hossein Mussawi Khameneh was anything but a left-progressive democrat, and Mahmud Ahmadi-Neschâd was by no means a right-conservative representative of a theocratic state. Political pigeonholing is generally of limited use; in this case, however, the inverted perception was especially obvious. Mussawi, prime minister until 1989, when the office was abolished, was an early comrade of Khomeini and helped shape the regime of the Islamic Republic. During the war against Iraq he introduced the planned economy that still gives the regime economic power today. He argued for continuing the war; during his time in office kidnappings, torture, and murder were pursued with zeal. He belonged, however, to a different clique than Ahmadi-Neschâd. (Mussawi has been under house arrest since 2011.)
For some time now, a conflict has been smouldering in Iran between two powerful groupings, both of which see themselves as heirs of the Islamic Revolution. Iran’s economic order is best described as fascist, with three large sectors: state planning, private enterprise, and the enterprises of political foundations. As in any interventionist mixed system, some achieve great wealth, while the masses live in poverty. A group of nouveaux riches inhabits Tehran’s elite districts with their high-rises.
Sanctions and currency collapse sharpened this logic. The more legal channels were cut off, the more valuable became those routes that function only through protection, insider access, and a grey zone of trade. Thus, precisely those organisations that present themselves outwardly as a bulwark against the West became principal profiteers, and their opportunism is fuelled by economic self-interest.
The Islamic Republic has long since lost the consent of broad segments of the population. Where patronage, subsidies, and redistribution once could buy loyalty, mismanagement, currency decay, and sanctions make that model ever more expensive. This helps explain why waves of protest recur at regular intervals and why hope for a deeper rupture keeps flaring up anew.
The private economy is highly concentrated: many small entrepreneurs, mostly in trade and services, struggle to get by, while a few large conglomerates dominate the top. Former president Ali Akbar Haschemi Rafsandschani used this system to build fabled wealth († 2017). He was regarded as one of the richest men in Iran, and his family controlled a considerable share of the Iranian economy. No wonder free-market capitalism has a bad name in Iran: from the earliest days of the revolution, mullahs and bazaar merchants formed an alliance. Khomeini himself once declared: “No one should be afraid to come back and invest […]. As long as Islam exists, free enterprise will exist too.” In the years before 2009, a genuine boom took hold; in 2004 The Economist ran the headline “Iran: The Mideast’s Model Economy?”, after taxes were cut and trade liberalised.
A large part of the companies that operate in Haschemi’s orbit, and compete with it, is concentrated in the hands of paramilitary forces. To mobilise for the Iran-Iraq war, the regime once built a Goebbels-style Volkssturm that has since taken on a life of its own. These forces were fanaticised as cannon fodder. After the war they succeeded in converting military power into economic power. The organisations known as the Pasdaran (“Guardians”) and Basidsch (“Mobilisation”) now control numerous conglomerates (presumably around a third of the total economy) and thus have an independent financial base. They see themselves as the protective troop of an order from which they profit, and as morality police they spread fear and terror.
With economic success, Haschemi became ever more pragmatic. This shift characterises all “reform forces”. Originally radical Islamist and socialist in orientation, they later tended to argue for markets and liberalisation. Given the suddenness of this shift, it is unlikely to reflect purely noble motives. Ultimately, it is a struggle over control of the economy. This is a familiar pattern: those with easier access to the state sector are always more inclined to planning, while those farther away from these firms are more inclined to markets. Ahmadi-Neschâd’s economic policy was populist socialism via inflation and redistribution, which also explains why he got on so well with Hugo Chávez. It was therefore absurd to label him “right” and the “reformers” “left”.
It is also a mistake to treat Ahmadi-Neschâd as a representative of religion. In fact Iran is not a theocracy: leading clerics are under house arrest and have long since become estranged from the regime. Iran is ruled by a sophisticated oligarchy that abuses religion for worldly purposes. Grand ayatollahs, who rank higher within the clergy than the “Supreme Leader” Ali Chamenei, declared it “haram” (religiously forbidden) to recognise Ahmadi-Neschâd as president at the time. In reality the power bloc of the paramilitaries consists of rather secular forces. They connect to that side of Khomeini’s project that was praised for having moved against the “reactionary clergy” after the revolution. To understand this background of the supposed “theocratic state” better, we have to go back a little in history.
Islamisation
Iran derives from the Old Persian Aryanem Vaejah and means “Land of the Aryans”. The Aryans were a people from the north who moved south. On the Indian subcontinent they subdued the Dravidians and formed the ruling caste of the Brahmins. In the territory of today’s Iran, the Persian and Median peoples emerged from them. New Persian is an Indo-European language and is therefore closer to German than to Arabic: barâdar means, for example, brother; modar, mother; and so on. There are few greater insults to a Persian-speaking Iranian than being called an Arab. Iranians today see themselves as heirs of one of the oldest high cultures.
In the 7th and 8th centuries AD, the Muslim Arabs prevailed militarily over the Iranians and Islamised the region. It took centuries before the majority of Iranians were Muslim. Once military resistance was broken, the population shifted to cultural resistance. Something remarkable happened: the Persian language and parts of the culture survived to this day. Scholarship, however, was conducted in Arabic, even though a large share of Muslim scholars were of Iranian origin, because Arabic became the lingua franca of the Islamic world. That is why Persian contains many Arabic loanwords, especially for more complex concepts, much as German uses Greek and Latin loanwords for similar purposes.
Azerbaijan
Iran is a multi-ethnic state with a dominant Persian identity. This tension has remained surprisingly stable so far, not least because of the Shiite clamp, the relative rise of the Azeris, and the contrast to Sunni neighbours. The shakiest link, however, is the Kurdish question, whose political reference points lie beyond the borders and whose role in recent waves of protest acquired additional symbolic force.
The Arab occupation was not the last cultural upheaval in Iran. In the 11th century the Oghuz Turks came to power and created the Seljuk Empire, which included Iran. From that period onward, Turkic tribes used pasturelands in the Iranian heartland of Media, which the Greeks called Atropatene after its former satrap (governor) Atropates. From this developed the name Azerbaijan for the region in north-western Iran. The present-day Republic of Azerbaijan was called Aran from ancient times until the 19th century. The modern name was borrowed from the neighbouring region because a Turkic language had also taken hold there in the 19th century. Few people know that in Iranian Azerbaijan, until the 18th century, a dialect of Middle Persian was spoken, known as Old Azeri. Only over many centuries did that language give way to today’s Azeri Turkish. Under the Seljuks, Azerbaijan was still predominantly Persian-speaking, and the Seljuks themselves used Persian as the court language. Only under the Safavids did Turkish spread more strongly, and the final blow to Persian came with the Turkmen Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran until 1925 and whose rulers were sometimes barely proficient in Persian.
The Republic of Azerbaijan and the Iranian province of Azerbaijan were thus historically separated almost continuously and for most of the time culturally distinct, which is why “reunification” was never particularly popular. Most Azeris in Iran see themselves as Iranians. They make up a third of Iran’s population, yet dominate the private economy. Azeris are also prominent within the clergy and the regime. Both the “Supreme Leader” Ali Chamenei and the former prime minister, presidential candidate, and supposed reformer Mir Hossein Mussawi are Azeris.
Nevertheless, there is occasional bad blood between ethnic groups, especially since Azeri-Iranian identity, given historical upheavals, is among the most problematic. In 2005, major unrest broke out when, at a conference of the free-market-oriented American Enterprise Institute, a representative of the Azeris argued for decentralism. Not only the regime but also the student “democrats” in the opposition railed against an “American attack on the integrity of the country”. Any expression of Azeri culture that does not present itself as Iranian is also viewed with suspicion. In 2005, many people were arrested at a large cultural gathering. In 2006, a “cartoon affair”, barely noticed in the West, inflamed tensions. An Iranian daily printed a harmless cartoon in which a cockroach replies “Namana?” (Azeri Turkish for “Pardon?”) to a boy who stammers the Persian word for cockroach. Violent demonstrations followed in several cities; fires were set, and five demonstrators were shot by the police.
Inside and Outside
To understand these riots and other “cartoon affairs”, a brief socio-psychological excursus is useful: in the Orient, shame is the disciplining and stabilising element. In contrast to the Occident, which emphasises guilt more strongly, this yields a social form that appears somewhat more collectivist, where prestige plays a greater role, though at first in the harmless form of stronger family orientation. Hence the strict separation between anderouni and birouni, inside and outside: within the intimate family courtyard different rules apply than outside; stepping over the threshold one is immediately on a constant stage and becomes an actor in a public drama. The cartoon is not the causal trigger of an individual rage, but a welcome motif for collective improvisational theatre through which discontent with existing conditions can be expressed.
Identity plays a major role in this theatre, whether cultural, national, or religious. The regime is always careful to cultivate these identities; otherwise it soon finds itself on the other side of the curtain. The “nuclear conflict” is also, in essence, to be understood as such a cultivation of identity. It is a clever move to harness Iranian nationalism for the regime, after football did not turn out as Ahmadi-Neschâd had hoped. In the face of identity-based inferiority complexes, the association works surprisingly well that a “historic superpower”, the homeland of the Aryans, should surely be allowed the peaceful use of high technology. Iranians inside and outside the country rally around the national flag to defend the threatened “right” to “self-determination”. One of the best-known regime-critical bloggers, Hoder (imprisoned since 2007; later released), even criticised Chamenei for having ruled out the development of nuclear weapons. Even the Islamic Revolution had marched under the motto “Independence and Freedom”.
In recent years, Tehran has at times appeared more cooperative in nuclear talks, without any fundamental change of course. The clearer the indications of enrichment beyond civilian needs became, and the more internal pressure from waves of protest grew, the more urgent the balancing act became: to avoid escalation abroad and to demonstrate strength at home. In the nuclear question and in domestic politics alike, the same last reserve is at stake: the claimed sovereignty of the government, whose final source of legitimacy is the sovereignty of the country itself. That is why foreign-policy setbacks quickly become costly at home.
At the same time, Iran has, despite all unrest, long remained free of a broadly anchored armed opposition. The once most battle-hardened opponents, the People’s Mujahedin, are widely marginalised politically, not least because they themselves emerged from that ill-fated fusion of Islamism and socialism. The absence of an armed alternative has so far prevented an open civil war, but it also shows how few institutional alternatives to the Islamic Republic are prepared.
Sufism
Back to Islam in Iran, the second essential identity. The Safavids mentioned above were an originally Kurdish-Turkmen dynasty (with later Circassian elements) that arose out of a Sufi order in Azerbaijan. They would shape Iran decisively during their rule from 1501 to 1722, for it was they who introduced the specific Shi’a Islam in Iran to which the majority of Iranians belong today.
Sufism refers to Islamic mysticism, which is at least as old as Islam itself. This mysticism is passed down through teacher-student lineages that trace back to Mohammed and, in almost all Sufi schools, through his son-in-law Ali. Sufism is closely connected to the Iranian world; Iranians made a major contribution to its systematisation, and a great deal of Sufi poetry was written in Persian. It is one of the many absurdities of the supposed theocratic state of Iran that dervishes (Persian for Sufis) are brutally persecuted.
In the Sufi view, God created the world because His hidden attributes (what Islam calls the “Names” of God) yearned to manifest. Human beings were created to recognise these attributes. In this sense God is, as it were, dependent on humans. God even needs the sinner, so that the “hidden treasure” of His grace can become manifest.
While angels are blessed with wisdom and animals with ignorance, human beings, as the creature that can recognise freely and therefore can err, have an existential problem. The counterpart of freedom is an instinctual soul slumbering within, called nafs. This embodiment of temptation is portrayed as a figure holding the Qur’an in one hand and a dagger in the other. The symbolism is striking: piety alone does not protect against sin; on the contrary, one must beware false piety that pursues worldly goals in the name of religion. Against this instinctual soul the greater holy war, al-jihad al-akbar, must be waged. Compared to this, the lesser holy war, al-jihad al-asghar, taking up arms to protect believers, is secondary. The essential instruments of this greater war are reason and love, with love far surpassing reason. Once the instinctual soul is tamed, it becomes conscience, and finally the soul that has found peace.
The mystic’s highest goal is “unbecoming”, fana, the overcoming of the ego. The mystic dies before he dies and therefore no longer fears death. He becomes bibargi, Persian for “stripped of leaves”, that is, free of worries, like a tree that turns wholly inward in winter and waits for grace in spring.
The mystic bears responsibility toward Being and carries his fate not with defeatism but with love: amor fati, as the European tradition has it. The material world is not prettified; rather, what is beautiful in it is honoured. What is ugly, painful, unjust, and false is seen as a test. One’s existence is understood as the expression of a pre-birth choice. The dervish says: I am here to improve myself in the prison of this world. Sufism, in the end, is nothing but the recipe for finding joy in the heart when the time of sorrow comes.
Sufis are often praised as the moderate and tolerant Muslims. This is a misunderstanding. The mystic is radical and “dogmatic”, for he pursues roots and principles without worldly pragmatism. Essential strands of today’s Islamic fundamentalism have unmistakable intellectual-historical ties to Sufism. In light of the above, it should also not be surprising that martyrdom is a profoundly Sufi matter. That is why Shi’ism is particularly close to Sufism. The Safavids, who made Iran a majority Shi’ite country, were a militant Sufi order, in other words something like armed monks.
Ali’s Party
The Shi’ites represent such a clear break with the Sunni mainstream of Islam that they are persecuted by the latter as heretics, that is, regarded as worse than Christians or Jews. It is hardly surprising that Shi’a Islam could spread in Iran, where a spirit of resistance to Arab Islamisation survived. This resistance thus took a new form.
Shi’a means “party” and refers to those who took Ali ibn Abi Tâlib’s side in the succession dispute after the Prophet’s death. Such succession disputes run through the entire history of Islam and of modern Iran. The parallels with 2009 were striking and explained the sharpness of the conflict at the time. After Mohammed’s death, his companion Abu Bakr prevailed over Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali. He owed this to the negotiating skill of Umar, another companion of the Prophet. After Mohammed died, while his family was still occupied with the burial, Umar played some tribes against others at a secret meeting in order to push through Abu Bakr as a compromise successor. Mohammed’s daughter Fatimah, who holds the highest significance in Islam, rejected Bakr’s caliphate and did not speak a word to him until her death. Umar then threatened to burn down the house of Fatimah and her husband Ali and beat the pregnant woman so that she lost her child and died soon after. Ali gave in to the pressure. Abu Bakr, unsurprisingly, named Umar as his successor. Umar’s successor Uthman was soon considered an unjust tyrant because of favouring his clan and enriching them, and he was murdered. Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law and husband of Fatimah, was then elected caliph. But Uthman’s clan, the Umayyads, did not want to give up power so easily. Muawiya, governor of Syria, proclaimed himself caliph and confronted Ali, who was soon murdered. Ali’s elder son did not dare to avenge his father against superior forces. Only when Muawiya installed his son Yazid as successor, turning the caliphate into a dynasty and thereby provoking growing resistance among Muslims, did Ali’s younger son Husayn find the courage to confront Yazid. Husayn and his entire family were massacred by Yazid’s troops in Karbala. This martyrdom shapes Shi’ism to this day; Husayn is commemorated annually on the mourning day of Ashura. Because Husayn was abandoned by his Shi’ite companions, the idea of penance is especially strong among Shi’ites; mourning is sometimes accompanied by self-flagellation. Groups of Shi’ite believers often stand out for sudden wailing rituals that can seem alien to outsiders.
Shi’ites were long a brutally persecuted minority in the Islamic world. A mentality thus developed of being victims of unjust circumstances. From their perspective, Islam was hijacked and among Sunnis became an instrument of unjust rule. Had Islam not been corrupted by the pursuit of worldly power, Islamic history would have unfolded very differently, Shi’ites believe. A leader of the Shi’ite Hezbollah once claimed that the bloody conquests and imperial expansions under Shi’ite leadership would never have occurred. Because of their history, Shi’ites tended to see themselves as representatives of principled fidelity in contrast to the pragmatism of power; philosophical and theological studies took on special importance.
It is therefore not all that surprising that it was in Iran that Ali’s Shi’a took hold as a more philosophical, principle-oriented pure doctrine against the power of the Arab mainstream. And it becomes clear why demonstrators in Iran in 2009 chanted “Ya Husayn, Mir Husayn”: first the invocation of the martyred Husayn, then the apt name of Ahmadi-Neschâd’s opponent. Mir Hossein Mussawi had already declared that he had performed the ritual washing for martyrdom. At the time, the question of succession to the already ill “Supreme Leader” Ali Chamenei also loomed. The candidates were said to be Mesbah Yazdi († 2021), mentor of Ahmadi-Neschâd, and Haschemi Rafsandschani, supporter of Mussawi († 2017). But the parallels did not end there. More on that later.
Shi’ites, in place of worldly, corrupt, power-hungry caliphs, see Mohammed’s tradition continued in the spiritual Imams. Imam has a different meaning among Shi’ites than among Sunnis; Sunnis call mere prayer leaders imams, of whom there are countless. With the seventh Imam, another succession dispute erupted among Shi’ites, leading to a split between Seveners and Twelvers. The latter make up the great majority in Iran. Further succession disputes were, in theory, to be ruled out thereafter, because Twelvers believe that the twelfth Imam, Mohammad al-Mahdi, disappeared from the earth. One day he will return with Jesus to hold the Last Judgment and to end every tyranny and injustice. Until then there are no more Imams.
Unlike Sunnis, Shi’ites have a clergy for whom theological study is taken very seriously. After a life of intense engagement with theology, philosophy, and law, a scholar can become an ayatollah. Only a few are recognised as grand ayatollahs, by being voluntarily acknowledged by many believers as sources of emulation. The grand ayatollah unanimously accepted by all other grand ayatollahs as their source of emulation is regarded as the marja-e taqlid and holds, in theory, the highest spiritual rank. The last grand ayatollah accepted by all others, whose role resembles that of the Pope among Catholics, died in 1961: Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Borudscherdi. He held firmly to the traditional Shi’ite approach to politics, namely that the clergy should stay out of politics until the return of the hidden Imam Mahdi and concern itself with spiritual guidance. This highest authority of Shi’ite Islam stated unambiguously: Should we, the clergy, found an Islamic state? We would be a hundred times greater criminals than those now in power. No wonder Khomeini later turned decisively against Borudscherdi. This contradiction, and many that followed, make it hard to avoid evaluating Khomeini’s theology as a Shi’ite heresy.
Islamic Liberation Theology
The ideology of the Islamic Revolution itself had markedly Western roots and arose through the fusion of leftist ideology with Islamist fragments. This strange mixture was produced by the Iranian intellectual Ali Schariati. As a student in Paris, he absorbed the then academically dominant Marxism and Third-Worldism. The one-sided presentations of professors and colleagues made these “isms” appear as hopes that would bring forth a just world. Hope is a central motif in Islam, and justice a central category.
Yet class struggle, from Schariati’s Islamically shaped view, was not enough; a moral struggle also had to be waged. Here he drew inspiration from the emerging Islamic puritanism of his time. Faced with the miserable condition of states with Muslim populations, the idea grew in the modern era that current evils stemmed from a falling away from true faith.
Schariati developed the millenarian notion that it was not enough merely to wait for the return of the hidden twelfth Imam. Rather, believers must actively struggle to hasten that return. This struggle, he argued, was a struggle for “social justice” and against “Western imperialism”. It had to be pursued to the point of martyrdom under the motto: every day is Ashura, every place is Karbala.
Schariati called his new doctrine “red Shi’a” as opposed to the “black Shi’a” of the Safavids. This “red Shi’a” plays a role in Islam similar, and similarly ominous, to liberation theology in Christianity. Schariati’s idea was compelling: revolutions in the Orient could not be led in Marx’s name, but Shi’ite masses can always be mobilised to avenge Husayn’s murder. Raising the oppressed people in the name of the martyr against unjust rulers is a quintessentially Shi’ite motif, which can all too easily be misused for socialist, and more recently democratist, illusions.
The students who risked their lives against the Shah in the late 1970s chanted Schariati’s name in Tehran’s streets. In the West, too, Schariati found approval. Jean-Paul Sartre once remarked: I have no religion, but if I knew which one to choose, I would choose Schariati’s.
Schariati was only one of many bridges between postmodern Western thought and the East’s uprising to assert its identity. In Europe, this mood was fuelled at the time even by Gramsci quotations: A crisis consists in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.
Most Iranian intellectuals, and most clerics as well, possess substantial knowledge of modern Western philosophy. One of the most widely read Western authors in Iran is Jürgen Habermas. Postmodern thought could push especially easily into Oriental identity crises. Because more traditional elements survived in the Orient, modernity in a Western mould often appeared as a foreign body. Against that foreign body there seem to be only two reactions: fierce rejection to the point of isolation, and acceptance at the price of an equally fierce rejection of one’s own culture and religion.
Another decisive source for political “Islamism” in Iran, alongside “critical” post- and neo-Marxists, is what might, with a hint of irony, be called Third-Worldism. A key proponent of this thinking is Frantz Fanon, the anti-racist ethno-leftist who influenced figures up to and including Barack Obama. Fanon combined Marx, Freud, and Sartre into an explosive mixture. His anti-racism is highly violence-prone and anti-Western. His most important work is The Wretched of the Earth. The Persian translation of this title, Mostasafineje-Samin, was not by chance Khomeini’s rallying cry with which he mobilised the masses. Traditional clerics wanted to ban Fanon’s books because they called for violence, but Khomeini prevented that.
Islamic Revolution
In 1979 the great promise marched to victory. The stirring marches of that time had their own earworms, and one slogan echoed through the streets: Allâhu akbar, Chomeini rahbar! God is the greatest, Chomeini is the leader! The leader was charismatic and so full of promise that, under his strong arm, communists, democrats, and Islamists united with enthusiasm to drive the fearful Shah out of Iran. After the decadence and autocracy of the would-be monarch, morality and democracy were to take the helm. Finally, the hidden Imam Mahdi would return and rule over a millenarian heavenly kingdom of justice. In Iran’s constitution, the legendary figure of the returning Imam was even enshrined as head of state.
Imam Mahdi did not come. His deputies had to deal on their own with the tedium of day-to-day politics and the contradictory expectations of their allies. What does it mean to make divine justice prevail on earth? Markets or socialism? Free press or censorship? Divine illumination did not arrive. Chomeini later excused himself by claiming that the erratic policy that failed to produce the hoped-for paradise was the handiwork of presidents and cabinets. True, he had appointed them, but, he later claimed, he had suspected from the outset that these politicians were unfit in character. One can draw one’s own conclusions. Particularly plaintive is the letter with which he disinherited his intended successor, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, whom he once called the fruit of my body and my work. Betrayal! By his closest friend and a grand ayatollah! Montazeri († 2009) had dared to criticise human rights violations and thereby, in Chomeini’s words, betrayed the Islamic Revolution to “liberal hypocrites”.
In that disoriented early phase of the theocratic state, salvation for Chomeini came not from God but from the devil himself. Saddam Hussein exploited the power vacuum after the revolution and tried to seize an oil-rich territory. Against Saddam, who was supplied with modern weapons, among others, by the United States, Iran, whose Shah-loyal army had been smashed and paralysed, could have had no chance. But Saddam had not reckoned with providing the revolution, at that very moment, with the fire it urgently needed. At last the great test had come, after the “revolution” had been proclaimed rather than fought. The righteous cause could now prove itself. Revolutionary Guards replaced missing army units. A Volkssturm of Goebbelsian dimensions was ignited. A million young people became martyrs on the battlefield. The Iraqi attack was repelled. But Chomeini could not get enough; the war was carried into Iraq. Saddam used poison gas. A slaughter as senseless as that war belongs to the madness of the last century. This bloodbath at least produced, for a time, a certain war-weariness. The two thirds of Iran’s population who today are under 30 heard from their mothers what war and revolution mean. For that reason, many young Iranians react to prevailing grievances more with escapism than with a longing for martyrdom.
The war itself created another paradox. While a generation of young men ended as cannon fodder, the educational level and social importance of women rose, not least because they had to fill gaps the war tore open. An order that invoked a backward-looking sharia could not acknowledge this shift and responded with coercion. Thus a cold civil war began in everyday life, which later protests would make visible above all by exposing what had long been smouldering.
After the war, the old problem returned. In the ankle-deep blood of the war years, former companions, communists and moderates, could indeed be disposed of easily, but these “purges” solved nothing. Chomeini saw the succession question approaching and was surely aware that things had not unfolded according to divine providence. No grand ayatollah could be found for the function of Supreme Leader. The constitution had to be amended in haste to allow even lower-ranking clerics to hold the office. After Chomeini’s death, the then president Ali Chamenei was installed as leader: a politician in a turban, not a spiritual “object of emulation”.
Religion and Politics
The theocratic state lost God’s blessing. Chamenei was quickly promoted to ayatollah, but his standing among Shi’ite clerics is low. In Iran, religious authorities had to learn an old lesson the hard way: in trying to cleanse politics through religion, religion was stained by politics. Contrary to common perception, Iran is not a theocracy. Chomeini’s intended successor and one of the highest Shi’ite clerics, the aforementioned Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, was kept under house arrest for a long time. This was so even though Montazeri was the only one of the twenty Shi’ite grand ayatollahs who advocated an explicitly political Islam and did not reject the principle of velayat-e faqih, the rule of the jurists. Montazeri could afford to criticise the regime relatively openly: “There is no freedom; repression is carried out in the name of Islam […]. All these court summonses, newspaper closures, and persecutions of dissidents are wrong. These are the same things that were done under the Shah and are now being repeated. And now they are done in the name of Islam and thereby estrange people from Islam.”
Another grand ayatollah, al-Udhma Yousof al-Sane’i († 2020), also a former companion of Chomeini, was even more explicit: “The clergy have lost their sanctity because they became part of the power elite.” He continued with an insight one would hardly expect from an ayatollah: “I have recognised how much power corrupts. The oneness of religion and power is therefore a great harm. Power is always bound up with lies, theft, oppression, and betrayal. […] For governing requires deceiving people. The world of governing is a world of oppressing.” Sane’i also surprised with a clear condemnation of terror and issued a fatwa against suicide attacks.
One of the regime’s most prominent opponents, Akbar Ganji, was also once a companion of Chomeini, even his bodyguard. He is striking in his recognition that even a dictatorship is always traceable to “the people”, and he reckons with his former attitude: “We always glorified the people.” Later he recommended forgiving, but not forgetting. Revolution, he said, is always an act of violence, violence against those branded counterrevolutionaries and liquidated.
It is particularly noteworthy that Chomeini’s descendants turned against the “Islamic Republic”. His son Ahmad Chomeini died in 1995 under circumstances disputed to this day. Chomeini’s granddaughter Sahra Eshraghi is a renowned human-rights activist and reform politician in Iran. She is married to the reform politician Seyyed Mohammad Reza Chatami, brother of former president Mohammad Chatami. Chomeini’s grandson Hossein went far: he even wished for a US invasion to get rid of the regime.
Interventionism
Iran offers not only a lesson in how politics stains religion, but also in the failure of interventionism. The Islamic Republic was meant to bring morality to rule by force of law. The streets were made unsafe by state morality enforcers who used iron repression to impose rules of dress and gender. Young women who wore make-up had acid thrown in their faces. Unmarried couples caught without a chaperone were flogged; alcoholics were whipped. One might expect that after decades of such terror, every “sin” would have vanished from Iranian everyday life. The opposite is the case: among Islamic countries, Iran is a leader in prostitution and drug consumption. Even ayatollahs run brothels. Seriously: in Shi’ite Islam there is the institution of temporary marriage. A cleric can contract a marriage for a limited time, which permits sex. No wonder some ayatollahs earn extra money by concluding marriages by the hour and renting out rooms for the “wedding night” themselves. The drug problem grew so large that the state distributes clean needles (and condoms as well) to reduce HIV infections. In most households there are high-proof spirits, often cleverly hidden behind a Khomeini portrait in a wall safe, smuggled across the border on pack animals. The exuberant parties in Tehran’s affluent districts are legendary. And to top it off, within the “Islamic Republic” there lives today the most secularised society in the region. By then religious youths were mocked by fellow students; shortly after the revolution it had been very different. The attempt to create a moral order through state interventionism failed spectacularly; the clergy became either thoroughly corrupt or apolitical. Moral violations turned into tradable privileges; with money, almost any lifestyle became possible in Iran. The “mullahs” or “turbans” became the most hated people in Iran.
This fault line also shows up demographically. Within a generation, the birth rate fell drastically, after the state at times pursued family planning and later switched to the opposite, a population policy. The counter-offensive took, in part, draconian forms, including tighter control over abortion and sexuality. It is the same struggle for power, only more long-term: not only over the headscarf, but over the body as a resource of the state.
As Montazeri rightly noted, the Shah’s mistakes were repeated with reversed signs. The Shah had tried to modernise the country by decree. The legal ban on the headscarf was supposed to bring progress, but this intervention naturally produced the opposite of its intention: the consequence of the ban was that women were confined even more to the anderouni (the inner domestic sphere) and had far less access to education and work than women later achieved in the Islamic Republic, where female students eventually became the majority at universities.
Gradually, a process set in within the Islamic Republic as Étienne de La Boétie described it: one hand and one eye after another was taken from the pseudo-religious tyrant. Today, it is the lived reality of Iranians that the state is enemy number one. Practically the entire life of young people takes place hidden from the despised enforcers and beneficiaries of the state. Despite the repeatedly flaring rule of the regime’s last-ditch forces, chadors slip ever further back behind the hairline; couples meet in parks; colourful headscarves and make-up shape the street scene in the cities. Again and again it already looked like the regime might end, yet the final moment of change was repeatedly numbed by the drug of political reformism. Another lesson.
Reformism
The political reform forces persuaded Chatami to run. The charismatic ayatollah seemed the ideal candidate. Youth and women brought him to power. But instead of delivering change, the supposed “reformer” bound his voters back into the “political process” and served merely as a valve for pent-up pressure. The Islamic Republic survived the crisis through a boost of legitimacy created by the illusion of reform. Naturally, no changes of real significance could be implemented. The “judiciary”, the regime’s pillar under the leadership of Ali Chamenei, stands above the president; Iran’s structure resembles, in a surprising way, the naive Hayekian utopia of a juristic guardians’ council standing above party politics.
Chatami, with his intellectual habitus and his empty talk about “dialogue”, laced with sociologists’ Arabic, could briefly nourish Western illusions about “reform”. Young Iranians learned from the failure of reformism faster than political addicts in Europe: after bitterly disappointed hopes, many became apolitical and boycotted “elections”. Chatami had, against the intention of his voters, rescued the unjust regime of the “Islamic Republic”. He is regarded as well-meaning and intelligent, but cowardly and opportunistic.
Once it was obvious that the broad masses would stay away from the next election, a farce seemed pre-programmed, one that could have marked the end of the regime, if the missing legitimacy among urban, young voters could not be offset. At that point, the regime achieved a masterstroke with Mahmud Ahmadi-Neschâd. In the West his election caused great bewilderment: a “hardliner”, how could that be? Yet the result becomes clear once we ask: how could the legitimacy deficit among urban, young voters be offset? Of course, by doing far better with the “little man”. Ahmadi-Neschâd was pious, but that is not why he was elected. It was his socialist populism that won the hearts of the “little men”. Coming from simple circumstances, Ahmadi-Neschâd made a name for himself as mayor of Tehran within a short time: in this highly corrupt country he renounced personal luxury and served soup to the poor in Tehran. While still mayor he welcomed Hugo Chávez in Tehran and erected a statue of Simón Bolívar in a Tehran park. As president he continued along this path: he raised state wages by 40 percent, introduced price controls, lowered interest rates for the poor, created subsidies for families and rural areas, increased minimum wages, renovated schools, and ended all privatisations. He declared: This government will not allow a few to plunder public property. State spending reached record heights; prices more than doubled since Ahmadi-Neschâd took office. Before the 2009 election, fifty Iranian economists wrote a letter to the president warning that larger economic problems lay ahead. Ahmadi-Neschâd reacted with great anger and publicly rejected the criticism.
Ahmadi-Neschâd pursued, in his own eyes, a programme of restoring Islamism, because he misread the pro-Western, hedonistic, and secular tendencies in Iran completely. In spring 2006, the regime had already made a mistake that foreshadowed the events of 2009: the traditional Iranian New Year celebrations (Norouz) were denounced as “un-Islamic” and punishments were announced for those who celebrated. Nevertheless, countless families poured into the streets to celebrate. Youths attacked police stations. While official security forces watched, paramilitary groups carried out massive intimidation. Stability hung by a thread and could be restored only by allowing the festivities after all, and celebrating them as usual on state television, but layering them with an Islamic month of mourning. Thus, on television, guests sat around the traditionally set festive table to weeping music and pulled mournful faces.
Modernity and Countermodernity
What happened in the 2009 presidential election? After rapidly falling turnout, the regime faced a legitimacy problem. So a particularly strong performance of democratising theatre in a Western mould was staged. There were even televised “candidate” debates. In one respect, the recipe worked: turnout reached record levels again. Voters who had already written off the system as a farce were mobilised. For something occurred that was probably not entirely intended: the conflict between the two major camps entered the public sphere with surprising sharpness in the course of the “campaign”. Ahmadi-Neschâd openly attacked Haschemi, who was not even running but pulled the strings behind Mussawi. The accusation of corruption and enrichment was surely justified. And Mussawi, too, fired heavy guns. That someone like Mussawi, who held no office at the time, openly attacked office-holders of the Islamic Republic in prime-time on state television quickly made him a figure of hope. The staging meant to legitimise the regime seemed to backfire.
As it looked then, it was likely that Ahmadi-Neschâd would not win the election, or only by a narrow margin. His support in the population should not be underestimated. Some of it was bought through social populism; some of it derived from his image as an ordinary man. But those who could be mobilised this time, unlike last time, likely wanted to send a signal against the regime. The most plausible interpretation was that there were fewer irregularities during the vote itself, and that the result was falsified afterwards. Ahmadi-Neschâd’s spiritual adviser, Mohammad Taghi Mesbâh Yazdi, was said to have judged election fraud religiously permissible even before the vote.
The “Supreme Leader” Chamenei immediately took Ahmadi-Neschâd’s side. Before that, he had hardly intervened in daily politics in order to float above events as a “spiritual authority”. As long as he behaved this way, he did convey the impression of a leader. Now, as his recognition and thus his natural authority were rapidly sinking, he began, in panic, to seduce and to intervene. This is a vicious circle already described above: the more he tries to exercise “power”, the more his power dwindles. He loses his image as a leader and becomes a mere “politician”.
Was the conflict about more democracy? Mesbâh Taghi was, in fact, a sharp critic of democracy. He held that once a sufficiently good deputy of the Imam Mahdi is found, further elections are basically unnecessary. But one should not be misled by the term. No side wanted to forgo the legitimacy that the staging of national democracy brings. Whether Haschemi’s clique or the “Revolutionary Guards” held the presidency was, in terms of the basic pattern, secondary. A deep change would be conceivable only if parts of the regular forces turned against the paramilitaries. First signs of this seemed to appear, but it remained unclear. Even within the paramilitaries, many sympathisers of the “revolution” were already arrested. Had Mussawi prevailed, it would have meant a shift of power from the paramilitaries toward the Haschemi clique; the state apparatus would, however, have received massive legitimation.
The young population in the more affluent parts of the cities, reacting against repression in the name of religion, is strongly “Western” in orientation, meaning today: hedonistic and anti-religious. On the other side stand those who have a legitimate concern for their identity. The only hope for Iran would lie in a decentralised coexistence, which was partly possible because the regime’s legitimacy was weak enough to allow a segregation of society: for example, a “Western” lifestyle could be practised in North Tehran. Another example is the island of Kish in the Persian Gulf, whose natural separation from the mainland has led the regime to tolerate a much “freer”, that is, more Western, lifestyle there. Kish is a popular holiday destination in Iran where one can get a taste of hedonism without leaving the country.
Aggressive rejection of the West is often a counter-reaction. That is why the Marxist thesis of “structural violence” is so popular in the Orient. And this thesis is not entirely without merit: modernity has indeed produced structures that contain an intolerant claim. The image of the West as a seductive poisonous snake is widespread. Ali Schariati coined the term gharb-zadeghi: poisoned by the West. From the perspective of tradition-bound Islamic scholars, this poison is essentially a new mode of thought that Western intellectuals developed to create a new human being.
How can this rejection of modernity be lived in a postmodern world without fighting modern structures by force? It is hard to imagine how the opposing lived realities and wishes in metropolises such as Tehran can be reconciled in the long run. While the north of the city is home to affluent, Western-oriented people, the south is home to traditionally minded poor. Their life plans are only partly compatible. Some want more individualism and consumption, less constraint of morality and greater permissiveness. Others, no less young, long for identity and seek it in principled religiosity.
Because religion has been instrumentalised by politics, religiosity in Iran has by now fallen so low that, should the regime one day fall, there might rather be a need for small islands of Islam within a secularised society. Small Islamworlds where women can rent a veil at the entrance.
This approach is not foreign to the Islamic world. The Ottoman Empire functioned according to the millet system: the practically complete autonomy of religious communities, which also allowed their own competing legal systems. In addition to the classical religious communities, a contemporary Islam would also have to allow the possibility of a secular milla, in which Western surrogate religions may be freely embraced, provided that those living there assume full responsibility for their religion. And if, in millenarian Puritania, in a neighbourhood of Qom, the Mahdi then climbs out of a well because the inhabitants were sufficiently virtuous, the rest of us may follow their example in embarrassed admiration.
Until then, however, the decisive question remains: how does a system tip that is losing legitimacy but retains its means of coercion? Protests can erode the taken-for-granted nature of the order and make fault lines visible, but the question of power is rarely decided in the street and far more often in the apparatus.
Contrary to revolutionary romanticism, upheavals, even or especially in totalitarian regimes, rarely come from the masses. The most plausible scenario is a military coup, in other words, the uprising of regular units against irregular ones. The Republic, of course, has this scenario in mind, which helps explain the increase in political offices for military men. In deploying force against its own population, the regime is cautious with regular units; for that purpose, it relies on the paramilitaries of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij. Iran is indeed an active party in several proxy wars, but so far it has managed to avoid a home front.
Upheavals tend to succeed when the second tier, or parts of an old regime, seize an opportunity to get rid of the first tier. About internal power struggles in Iran, one can only speculate. In any case, the Islamic Republic never achieved a fully centralised totalitarianism; it always had a conflict-ridden inner life. The institutional core does not shrink from mass murder of internal enemies or from attacks abroad, but over time it has developed a somewhat less bloody tactic of compromises, house arrests, reform vents, and selection procedures. The succession question around the ageing Chamenei could make the clash of internal forces, and thus alternatives to the Islamic Republic, more visible again.