Land of the mullahs

Tehran. Walk near the former royal palace of the late Shah Pahlavi. It’s Friday. The hip youngsters are not at work. Couples walk around defiantly holding hands, though if caught by the Islamic morality police, they risk at least an admonishment, if not a trip to the police station ending with a fine and maybe even a few beatings. Alongside the youngsters, elegant mullahs in traditional garb pass by unnoticed by their less than pious attitudes. “Look, this one with the black turban. Do you know what it means? That he comes from the family of the Prophet. He’s seyyed,” a friend tells me, stopping to eat the pistachio sponge we stopped for at a street vendor.

He continues with a sneer: “I can’t find work and these guys are loaded, look at this one, he’s got designer glasses”. I for one find the combination of religious garb and a pair of expensive sunglasses perched on the turbaned mullah’s nose amusing to say the least. My friend is already packing up, not noticing that the ice cream is starting to drip down his fingers. He starts to perorate: “They run this country, they decide everything, and they have a lot of money, and not just from donations, they control the oil, they also have money to buy technology of all kinds”. So says a young student.

Geneive Abdo in “Answering only to Allah” perfectly reflected the bewildering and often paradoxical role of Iranian mullahs: “One of the mysteries of the Iranian clerical world is how a few theologians, with little exposure to the modern world, can develop astonishingly modernist ideas, while the majority, equally experienced, believe that Islamic texts are infallible and should remain unchanged until the end of time.”

Not so the poor young people of Tehran’s famed south. Here most follow the Islamic dress code and for most the mullahs’ word is law. “They are holy people, they should be listened to because they have studied the Koran and religious texts, they know what they are talking about, they are saving us from the depravity that is consuming the rest of the world,” one young Iranian woman tells me. “I don’t wear a chador because someone forces me to, but because I want to. Look at you Westerners, you have nothing holy! If it weren’t for the mullahs, we’d still be under the dictatorship of the Shah and at the mercy of foreign powers today,” she continues.

Interestingly, among the poor, this view is not unanimous. Many of those who supported President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and with whom I spoke, believed that the mullahs who made the Islamic revolution had become corrupt and that there was a need for a strengthening of the sharia, but by lay people of faith, such as Ahmadinejad and neoconservatives. “The old mullahs got rich and corruptible after Khomeini died and nobody supervised them, but now young people like Ahmadinejad will cut corruption and bring back the ideals of the Islamic revolution,” a young woman in southern Tehran was convinced in 2008.

Iran’s mullahs have stepped from the mosques into the political gallery and hold the country’s destiny in their hands. Sometimes a force for change, sometimes a traditionalist redoubt, a good part of the ulama – the mullah community – is the backbone of the Iranian regime, but for how long?

Iran was the first country in the Middle East to have a parliament, in 1906, following the so-called “constitutional revolution” supported by the mullahs. Iran seemed a source of nascent democracy. Since then there has been another revolution, also driven by the mullahs, but the word democracy has slowly begun to disappear from public discourse, buried under Islamic sharia law.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ulama was at the forefront of the reform process in Iran, alongside the Marxist, secularist and pro-democracy currents. Then Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, an Iranian politician and diplomat, decreed a rapprochement with Europe that is inconceivable today: “We must accept and promote European civilisation unconditionally. Iran must become European in its image, in its essence, in its physical and spiritual aspects”.

When the winds of reform began to blow in Iran in the 19th century, all segments of Iranian society got involved, including the ulama, who played a key role in rallying public support for reforms. But as the reforms took on increasingly secular features, the coalition broke down. An Iranian historian once said, “the attempt to make wine resulted in vinegar”. Radical change in Iranian politics was not tolerated by the traditional religious segments of society and the result was the first generation of Iranians oriented almost exclusively on Islamic revival.

The main thrust of the constitutional revolution was the creation of a ‘house of justice’ – the Edalat Khaneh, later to become the Majlis – parliament. However, the constitutional revolution was not against the monarchy, as the Islamic revolution was to be, but against absolutism. The aim was not to give more power to the individual but to limit the arbitrary exercise of authority. Ulama had consistently supported monarchical absolutism since 1501, when the Safavid dynasty established the Shiite monarchy in Iran. Ulama saw the monarch as a protector of Shiism, a promoter of the faith.

When monarchical absolutism was no longer Shi’ism’s bulwark against dangerous Western ideas, the mullahs saw no contradiction between the demands of Shi’ism and constitutionalism. However, the main concern of the “constitutionalists” was social justice, not secularism, so they were not oriented against religion, the mullahs or their power.

Precepts of Islamic law were used as arguments to protest against injustice and absolutism. Sharia – Islamic law was seen as a personal code of behaviour rather than a code of public organisation and administration. It is obvious that Iran would not have had a constitution and a parliament so early on if it had not been for the support of the religious class, which had huge popular influence and which acted then, albeit for different reasons from other ‘constitutionalists’, as a reformist and modernist factor.

Iran experienced an astonishing phenomenon: a fusion of Marxist ideas into a new ideology of modernist, “intellectual” mullahs. Iranian Islamic modernists in the 1940s were promoting the reform of Sharia to reflect the modern age. At this point, leftist ideologies and dialectical philosophy played an overwhelming role. In the 1960s and 1970s so-called socialist Shiism was widespread in the Iranian political class. The main ideologue was the Iranian Ayatollah Ali Shariati, who went so far as to demonstrate that Marxism was Islamic, especially with its emphasis on social justice.

The 1950s brought a religious awakening in Iran and an unprecedented involvement of the ulama in politics. Shiite forces go on the offensive against the secularism imposed by the Pahlavi Shah and demand, for the first time, the institutionalisation of the role of religion and the clerical class in society and politics. Ulama moves from supporting the monarchy and political passivity to involvement. The reason: constant attacks by the Pahlavi Shah that left the mullahs without serious sources of income, from land to religious taxes and donations. Militant Ulama were concentrated in the holy city of Qom. From there, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini launched militant resistance against secularism and the monarchy that promoted it. Initially, Khomeni did not hesitate to ally himself even with communist parties such as Tudeh or liberal anti-absolutist forces. Later, the allies would be crushed beyond appeal. Thus began the wave that was to sweep Iran in 1979 through the Islamic revolution, and which was to bring the clerical camp to power in absolute domination until the 2000s.

Ayatollah Shariati’s ideas were taken up by urban guerrilla movements such as the People’s Mujahedin, which linked Islamic modernism to armed struggle. The same goes for Fedaiyan-e Islam – Devotees of Islam, considered perhaps the world’s first organised form of militant fundamentalism, fundamentalism that dominated politics in the Muslim world after the 1980s. The Fedaians were young seminarians mostly from the middle class, promoters of pan-Islamism and Muslim unity, which would guarantee Islamic societies and governments.

The Iranian Islamic revolution was rapid and took place over just 18 months. It began in Qom on 8 January 1978 with protests by seminarians against attacks on Khomeini. The blood-soaked protest sparked others that spread like wildfire across Iran. Khomeini becomes the symbol of the revolution. The demonstrations take on an increasingly religious hue, with the emphasis on “Islamic purification”. The Islamism of the revolution is supported by the network of mosques, seminaries and religious organisations. In the face of disaster, the Shah tries to negotiate but Khomeini cannot settle for less when he feels he can get it all – Islamic rule. The Shah flees, the mullahs’ revolution triumphs. Step by step, the non-Islamic forces that had helped oust the Shah are either silenced or physically liquidated.

The new constitution leaves no room for doubt, it is Islamic as Khomeini wished and puts power in the hands of the clerical class – through the institution of the velayat-e fariq the supreme spiritual leader, the Council of Guardians and the Council for Discernment and Mediation – with appointed members, not elected by popular vote, leaving the government and parliament, elected by the people, with only administrative powers. Saeed Hajjarian, adviser to former President Khatami (1997-2005) said: “Here is the irony of history. Nietsche decreed the death of the gods. But the dead gods took revenge by reviving religion in the form of ideology”.

On 6 June 1989 Khomeini died. Soon, fighting begins between factions with different interpretations of Khomeini’s ideology and Islam in politics. Quickly, mullahs calling for the separation of religion and state are silenced. The political struggle is fought exclusively between clerics. Conservatives win the day and elect Ali Khamenei as supreme leader.

Meanwhile, moderate mullahs, called “pragmatists”, have been pushing for limited social freedoms, such as for the press, and the resumption of diplomatic relations with countries demonised by Khomeini. Using aspects of the ideology of the Islamic revolution, moderate and liberal conservative forces have begun to link the legitimacy of the state more closely to those institutions, such as the presidency and parliament, elected by direct vote.

The focus is on popular will, at least at the discursive level. It is in this atmosphere that the reformist cleric Mohhamad Khatami becomes president in 1997. Iran enjoys a degree of freedom of expression, but long-awaited economic reforms leave much to be desired. There is increasing talk of clerical corruption and fabulous wealth. The conservative camp is growing stronger and the failure of reformist governments to bring economic prosperity is being exploited by a new camp of neo-conservatives, especially former members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards such as Ahmadinejad. Slowly but surely, Iran is being swept by a new, quiet but relentless revolution. The Iranian economy became increasingly controlled by the Pasdaran – the so-called Revolutionary Guards – and the Basij – Islamic volunteer militias, with the acquiescence of a section of the ulama, headed by Supreme Leader Khamenei.

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