IHT INSIGHT In Iran, the Struggle to Define 'Islamic Republic'

Geneive Abdo International Herald Tribune Friday, April 13, 2001 QOM, Iran 

Every now and then, the secrecy pervading this city, the nerve center of Shiite Islam, is lifted and the clerics fighting the regime make their opinions known by distributing anonymous leaflets throughout the thousands of mosques. The clerics want their message to resonate far beyond Qom, into the towns and cities throughout Iran, where such dissenting words could end in execution. It is a primitive form of communication, but one they hope could eventually help to dismantle the Islamic Republic - the contemporary world's first theocracy. . Most of the leaflets criticize Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei, but the more profound point is that the Islamic revolution is turning on itself. The same revolutionaries who created a state in the name of Islam 22 years ago are in fact undermining the Shiite faith, according to the authors of the leaflets. . "How we wish that you and your retinue had not created such a climate of terror so that we could have signed our names under this letter, which is but a drop in the ocean of our heartfelt sorrows," reads one leaflet, devoted to criticizing Ayatollah Khamenei. . The intense struggle under way in Iran is often characterized solely in political terms. Unable to penetrate the world of the clerics and lacking an appropriate vocabulary that can encompass such an unfamiliar landscape, the outside world is left dividing Iran's factions into "conservative" and "reformer," into right and left. Or it sees Iran's national struggle strictly in terms of a religious establishment clinging to power in the face of popular secular demands. . But the real battle is not one between Mosque and State. It is a struggle of Islam versus Islam, with three groups of clerics at odds over how to govern an Islamic republic. . One group, the "traditionalists," believes clerics should stay completely out of politics; a second group supports and is part of the establishment, which runs state affairs; and the third group, which considers itself "modernist," opposes the establishment and is fighting to make the Islamic Republic more of a republic, one accountable to the people. . The desert city of Qom - one of the earliest centers of the minority Twelver Shiite sect of Islam that today predominates in Iran, southern Lebanon and parts of Iraq - is ground zero for this epic conflict. . The struggle is more acute now than at any other time since the Islamic revolution, for several primary reasons: society's increasing demands for freedom; the clerical establishment's escalating restraints on that freedom, and the realization that the political system that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established in 1979 was effective only as long as he was alive. . A charismatic cleric and savvy politician, Ayatollah Khomeini fulfilled the role of supreme leader until 1989, when his death bequeathed a system built upon his unique talents to his less equipped and less popular heirs. His successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered to be unqualified in religious terms to be supreme leader, not only by a majority of Iranians but also by many influential clerics. . "If the position of supreme leader is accepted by the majority of people, there is no practical conflict, though there might be a theoretical one," said S.M. Mohaqeqh-Damad, a respected theologian who directs a religious research organization in Tehran. "If the supreme leader is not accepted by the people, there is a conflict. Everything depends upon his popularity." . At different stages in Iran's contemporary history, the debate over the degree to which clerics should be involved in politics has burst into the open. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power, he advanced the role of the clerics in politics for the first time in 100 years, declaring: "No one but God has the right to govern over anyone or to legislate, and reason suggests that God himself must form a government for people and must legislate. The laws are but the laws of Islam." . Ayatollah Khomeini took this to mean that in the contemporary world, the legitimate authority in government should be the mojtaheds, those learned clerics and jurists with the highest religious credentials. . The rise of Iran's mullahs after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, astounded the world. Many ordinary Muslims were energized by the Islamic Revolution, which seemed to hold out the elusive promise of a system that was true to the faith and modern at the same time. . Enthusiasm for pan-Islamic revolt swept much of the Middle East, alarming the West and threatening its cozy relationships with Arab leaders who saw their people on the verge of religious rebellion against foreign influence. . But the panic that greeted the Islamic Republic obscured a fundamental but little noted truth that plagues Ayatollah Khomeini's creation to this day: The notion of placing direct political power in the hands of Shiite Muslim clerics was so radical - even heretical - that it alienated much of Shiism's loose hierarchy, fearful it would undermine the faith for good. In the eyes of many, a revolution in the name of Islam was more of a threat to true religion than the depredations of the secularist shah. . As the conflict of Islam versus Islam rages in Qom, ordinary Iranians are directly affected by this struggle because it infringes on the degree to which free expression is tolerated in society. When President Mohammed Khatami, a midlevel Muslim cleric partial to German philosophy, campaigned for election in 1997, he assured eager voters that the Islamic Republic had advanced over two decades to a state secure enough in its religious beliefs to tolerate a diversity of political and social views. Today, Mr. Khatami, who is widely expected to run for and win a second term in June, is still making that argument. . But today far fewer Iranians believe him. Theologians who oppose the increasing role of clerics in politics are in jail or under house arrest, as are laymen - journalists and political activists - who believe that clerics in politics have undermined the main principle of the revolution. That principle was that Iran be an Islamic state that balanced the tenets of the faith with those of democracy. . Clerics who are seen to have violated this principle are generally hard-liners, who use their pulpits to issue edicts on domestic politics and international affairs and critiques of their political rivals. . The span of their directives is breathtaking, ranging from the global to the seemingly mundane. In recent years, the Friday prayer leaders across Iran have proclaimed that Israel, Iran's longtime foe, should be extinguished; they have declared pet dogs to be unclean and un-Islamic; they have claimed a monopoly on religious truth and political interpretation; and they have proclaimed some of their political rivals to be apostates, punishable by death. . Iran's hard-liners have seen their political fortunes bolstered since last spring by the public support of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who at first appeared overawed by Mr. Khatami's reformist landslide. . Ayatollah Khamenei has sided increasingly with the conservative establishment and against the president and his allies, most notably in the launching last April of a devastating campaign to crush the fledgling independent press. . With many editors, journalists and publishers in jail, on trial or simply muzzled out of fear, the conservatives have used their complete control over the judiciary and much of the security services to turn on elected officials close to the president, including his most trusted aides and even his youngest brother. . But such transitory victories may yet prove meaningless in the face of the large and growing reservoir of opposition to today's Islamic system among the religious classes and their millions of devoted followers. . Shiism requires the pious to choose a senior cleric, known as a marjah-e taqlid, or source of emulation, to guide him or her through life as a good Muslim. Believers are expected to give one-fifth of their income to the household of such a cleric, money that in turn is used to support good works, fund religious seminaries and provide stipends for legions of young clerical students. . These funds, which can easily reach into tens of millions of dollars, make such senior clerics virtually independent of the state, which has failed in recent attempts to gain control of this lucrative system of religious taxes. . As a result, these clerics control vast empires of patronage and influence, making them a force to be reckoned with just beneath the surface of the Islamic Republic. . Ayatollah With a Web Site . Inside a house down a side street in Qom, where guards are posted outside, a theologian believes he has the magical formula allowing clerics to run a republic, but one in which public opinion matters. Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, one of the founders of the Islamic Republic, is Iran's best-known and most important dissident. Unlike his comrades, who distribute their protest leaflets anonymously, he at one time spoke out publicly and became a pariah. . Born in 1922, Ayatollah Montazeri is confined to the house where he has spent most of his adult life. He is allowed visitors only on occasion, and relies on his two sons, Ahmad and Saeed, to act as his emissaries to the outside world. . Early last year, he finally broke the silence imposed upon him by opening a Web site, which is read by thousands of his Iranian followers. His edicts are posted on the site as well as personal photographs, including one picturing him taking a stroll along a wooded path. . At one time, Ayatollah Montazeri had been designated to replace Ayatollah Khomeini, but he fell from grace after exposing the clerical establishment's repressive tactics in the late 1980s, including the mass executions of mostly young political prisoners already serving jail sentences. By fighting for human rights, which Ayatollah Montazeri says are required in any Islamic government, he was banished from the inner circle of power and influence. . In the 1990s, he was prohibited from teaching in the seminaries, his assets from contributions by tens of thousands of followers were frozen, and his books were banned. The core of his critique lies in deep opposition to the absolute nature of clerical rule as practiced in the post-Khomeini era. As one of the authors of Iran's Islamic constitution, Ayatollah Montazeri says that the document was never intended to give the supreme leader absolute powers. . "He can never be above the law, and he cannot interfere in all affairs, particularly the affairs that fall outside his area of expertise, such as complex economic issues, or issues of foreign policy and international relations," Ayatollah Montazeri explained in a clandestine interview I conducted by fax last year. . "The most important point to be highlighted is that Islam is for the separation of powers and does not recognize the concentration of power in the hand of a fallible human being," he said. . For decades, Ayatollah Montazeri's readiness to expose his own fallibility won him widespread popularity among his fellow Iranians, accustomed to clerics who demand distance and reverence whenever they are seen in public or encounter their followers. He has become Iran's antidote to the akhund, a derogatory term applied to clerics in politics who are painted as greedy exploiters living lavishly off the contributions of their followers. Despite his high status as one of Shiite Islam's most senior theologians, Ayatollah Montazeri built his popular base by trying to appear as an average man. Iranians still recall how he used to shop for his own groceries in his native town of Najafabad before the revolution and how he always made time for his followers. . "Ayatollah Montazeri led an ordinary life. His father was poor and he would gather bushes in the desert and bring them to town to sell as fuel," said Mostafa Ezadi, the ayatollah's biographer, who once published a magazine devoted to his life and teachings. . "Montazeri feels very close to people of the lower classes. He would always call on officials to keep the people happy, and that's what he is saying now. He sees the government's legitimacy as coming from below, from society," Mr. Ezadi said. . Ayatollah Montazeri's greatest sin, according to the clerical establishment, is considered by many Iranians to be his greatest gift. Throughout his life, he has exposed the duplicitous nature of the clerics involved in state affairs who often did whatever it took to retain power. Repeatedly, he has done so at great political and personal risk. . When Ayatollah Khomeini was ailing near the end of his life in the late 1980s, Ayatollah Montazeri revealed to Ayatollah Khomeini the injustices being committed by those clerics in government who claimed to be carrying out his orders. . "At the time he was critical of the way the country was being governed," Mr. Ezadi said. "He was critical of young children being sent to the front lines during the Iran-Iraq war. He had critical opinions about the economy. He was a bold person and he would report all this to Khomeini. But officials would contradict him and say that everything was O.K. When Khomeini finally received enough reports casting doubt on Montazeri, he dismissed him as his successor. Of course, this is what his rivals in the establishment wanted all along." . In the memoirs published on his Web site a few months ago, Ayatollah Montazeri provides the first credible confirmation that Ayatollah Khomeini himself gave the order to kill tens of thousands of political prisoners charged with trying to undermine the regime. . Ayatollah Montazeri also reveals that once he was ostracized by the establishment, Mohammed Khatami, the future reformist president who was then the minister for culture and Islamic guidance, went to Qom and appealed to seminarians to stop attending Ayatollah Montazeri's lectures. President Khatami, who would later espouse views not unlike those of Ayatollah Montazeri, took this action to be on the winning side of the regime. . Today, those who maintain any association with Ayatollah Montazeri are punished. Mr. Ezadi's magazine, Aban, was banned last year, and he faced charges before a revolutionary court. A journalist and former cleric, Emaddedin Baqi, who wrote many essays about Ayatollah Montazeri, is now in the Evin prison in Tehran. And one month ago, another journalist, Faribah Davudi, was arrested and faces charges before a revolutionary court. Officials said that they confiscated Ayatollah Montazeri's books from her home at the time of her arrest. . If Ayatollah Montazeri's views are considered by the establishment to be a threat, the ideas of his star pupil, Mohsen Kadivar, go even further. He casts doubt on the entire premise upon which the Islamic Republic was established. Mr. Kadivar, who was released last summer from prison after serving an 18-month term, believes that the clerical establishments' monopoly on religious interpretation is just as offensive as the autocratic reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Clerics who believe their interpretation of Islamic principles should be the unchallenged law of the land, says Mr. Kadivar, have simply replaced one despotic system with another. . In recent years, Mr. Kadivar's ideas became more radical as the clerical establishment clamped down on dissent. By the time he was released from jail in the summer of 2000, he appeared more determined than ever that some form of republican rule should take hold in Iran. As he sat in his living room, surrounded by his wife and parents at his home in north Tehran, he appeared more fearless, having survived prison. . "The article I wrote which landed me in jail is the one where I said that we did not have a revolution to replace a repressive monarch with a just jurisprudent," said Mr. Kadivar, using an alternative title for the supreme leader. . "The revolution was aimed at turning the monarchy into a republic. A republic means that statesmen should be chosen by the people for fixed terms, that they should be controlled by people, that they should do what the people say, not force people to obey the orders of statesmen." . For much of his life, Mr. Kadivar has battled the system, first under the shah and now the Islamic Republic. He has devoted his time to creating a theory of how to establish a religious government that is compatible with true democracy. As a boy growing up in the southern Iranian town of Shiraz, he was a child prodigy. When he was 10 years old, he was awarded a gold coin for a poem he wrote on the fight of the Shiite hero Imam Ali against injustice. . Mr. Kadivar said he believed that some clerics have undermined the principles of Shiite Islam by confusing cultural rituals with religious laws. . "What we find in the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed's traditions are general political values," he said. "To attain these values, the clerics have proposed various courses of action, many of which were rooted in the traditions of their own time. Then in the course of several centuries, such customs became understood as religious customs when they had nothing to do with religion at all." . Mr. Kadivar has become a hero among Iran's university students. When he was in jail, students held rallies demanding his release. Now he is often invited to speak on university campuses. His belief that universal values of human rights and social justice are not in conflict with an Islamic system is what inspires students to follow him. It is also such ideas that have driven the hard-liners to try to silence him. . When he arrived in the western city of Khorramabad last August to give a talk before the largest national student organization in Iran, hard-line vigilantes blocked his way and refused to allow him to leave the airport. . He was forced to return to Tehran, and the incident sparked five days of bloody clashes between the students and the militants, who acted under the protection of the police and the security services. . Many see Mr. Kadivar as a radical ahead of his time. The question is whether his mass following will ever acquire enough direct power to bring about change. . "There are many difficulties for writers and speakers," he said. "I have accepted these difficulties. I think that if the number of people willing to accept these difficulties increases, the system will be forced to retreat." . This retreat, however, appears nowhere on the horizon. Powerful clerics running the state differ with their rivals on one central issue: They believe that the supreme leader is a divine appointment that comes from God and the people should have no say in the matter. . The supreme leader is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, a body of clerics who are elected in semi-free polls. According to clerics such as Ayatollah Mohammed Yazdi, former head of Iran's judiciary and still a powerful political player, the supreme leader should refer to the Koran and the hadith, the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, to rule on contemporary affairs. . "The supreme leader, for example, should use these texts to determine whether it is right to take out the heart from a patient who is brain dead," said Ayatollah Yazdi in his first interview with a Western journalist, held in the offices of the Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists who make decisions on Iranian laws' conformity with Islamic precepts. . "Islam forbids the body of a Muslim to be cut up, and there is a hadith which says that the body of a Muslim is to be respected as if he were alive. The supreme leader must be able to understand God's command and say this is what God orders. . "God has appointed the supreme leader through the Prophet Mohammed and his successors. The people should not give him this position through their vote." Potential Modernizers Are Leaving . Iran's Islamic revolution remains a work in progress, one overseen by many of the same men and women who brought down the shah in a fury of religious sentiment and cultural backlash against Western influence. More than two decades later, it is clear that the demands of the revolutionaries - greater social justice, enhanced individual rights, shared prosperity and a modern system of government that respected the majority Shiite faith - remain elusive. . Just as "modernists" such as Ayatollah Montazeri are confined to house arrest, hard-liners such as Ayatollah Yazdi appear trapped in a dead end very much of their own making. The system they have fashioned faces a crisis of legitimacy, with more and more Iranians losing hope that any Islamic system of government can ever meet their needs. . The most overt sign of such national despair is the enormous brain drain plaguing the country. Western embassies are swamped with applications for emigration; Canadian officials alone say they have almost 200,000 under consideration. Iranian news reports say that some three-quarters of Iran's best science and math students leave for higher education abroad and never return. University professors say that their top students think only of jobs overseas. . The net effect is the depletion of Iran's class of technocrats and managers, the constituency that the so-called reformers grouped around Mr. Khatami have depended upon to fuel their modernization drive. . Without a rising middle class to demand a greater share of political influence, the clerical establishment appears likely to maintain its hold on power. Reformist politicians and modernist clerics claim that young men in the seminaries support their views. They say it is only a matter of time before they muster enough power to transform the system. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many seminarians support the establishment. . At the Marvi seminary in downtown Tehran, considered a haven for hard-liners, young men aspiring to be clerics argued that if more of their peers had direct contact with the mullahs running the country they would see that the application of Islam is the key to Iran's future. . They said they supported the clerical establishment's views that the supreme leader should never be elected by the people, that there should always be mandatory veiling for women, and that individuals should never be trusted to practice the faith independently of the Shiite clergy. . "Given the religious fabric of most families, young people are suited for religious education," said one young man, leaning over a computer in one of the seminary's classrooms. . "There is a belief that if you do not teach young people about religion, our enemies will teach them their ideas instead." 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