Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (53 page)

This collision between political and religious principles is key to understanding the evolution of the Islamic Revolution. In his search for a workable political structure that would ensure the “guardianship of the jurists” while observing the niceties of democracy, Ayatollah Khomeini created a system of unwieldy compromises and institutionalized chaos. The 1979 constitution, which remained in force for the first decade of the Islamic Republic, welded together the incompatible notions of a popularly elected legislature and virtually unchecked executive power vested in the supreme leader.

The inherent conflict between these two views of the revolution was anything but academic. They came out into the open, sometimes to lethal effect, during the power struggle between Khomeini and Abolhassan Banisadr, who was elected president in Januarys 1980. Banisadr, who had gained renown before the revolution with a book that detailed his own socialistic theory of “Islamic economics,” had a simple problem: he was not a cleric. When his aides had suggested a cleric as a candidate for the office of president, Khomeini had demurred, saying that the president should come from outside the clerical establishment. At this stage, Khomeini had no reason to doubt Banisadr’s devotion to the revolution; during the shah’s rule, Banisadr had established himself as an Islamist intellectual with his theoretical
writings on Islam and the application of Quranic social justice to the economy. Yet once Banisadr assumed office, it quickly became clear that he, like Bazargan, had a considerably more restrained view of the clergy’s proper political role than Khomeini himself. As a result, Banisadr soon found himself engaged in all-out battle with the Islamic Republican Party, which controlled parliament. His main foe was the ruthless Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti, the chairman of the IRP and the head of the revolutionary court system.

The divide between these camps deepened as the Khomeinists unleashed a campaign to purge the new regime of the last pernicious influences of alien culture. In April 1980, Khomeini gave a speech denouncing the lingering effects of the shah’s Westernizing policies. It was the signal for an all-out assault by the
hezbollahi
on universities and colleges around the country. The radical defenders of the new republic turned the campuses into battlegrounds, particularly targeting the student activist groups that provided much of the manpower for the left-wing militias that, by now, remained the only organizations capable of mustering armed resistance to the new regime. The most vicious of these groups was the People’s Mujahideen, which had declared itself in opposition to the new order and succeeded in assassinating several key figures of the Khomeini government. But moderates felt the heat as well—including many who saw Banisadr as the champion of a more tolerant approach to Islamic government. In an odd borrowing from Mao’s China, the leaders of the Islamic Republic called their purge “the Cultural Revolution.”
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Iran’s universities were closed for three years, and thousands of scholars and leading cultural figures lost their jobs. Many responded by going into exile.

For those who remained, Banisadr gradually became the last remaining focus of opposition to the stiffening clerical regime. The fronts between the two sides hardened. His own newspaper gradually became more outspoken in its criticisms of the harsh treatment the Khomeinists meted out to their foes. When the People’s Mujahideen declared their support for Banisadr, Khomeini’s entourage took that as further evidence of his traitorous intentions. The president’s supporters, invoking those sections of the constitution that drew on popular sovereignty, claimed his vote total as evidence of his popular mandate. Banisadr’s clerical opponents, on the other hand, could point to constitutional articles that enshrined the dominance of the supreme leader, who embodied the principle of the sovereignty of God over man. This was more than the usual constitutional feud between different branches of government; it was a conflict that expressed an inherent tension between the mutually exclusive worldviews that had been uncomfortably fused under the new system.

The schism also expressed itself in defense policy. In September 1980, Saddam Hussein, who had assumed the presidency of Iraq the year before, launched a series of attacks on Iran, his major rival for regional supremacy. Saddam believed that the revolutionary turmoil had compromised Tehran’s ability to defend itself, and he knew that the quality and equipment of his armed forces were superior. His assessment proved only partly correct, however. The Iranian military response eloquently demonstrated both the strengths and the weaknesses of the clerical regime. The war, which lasted for a total of eight years and ultimately claimed somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million lives, showed that countless Iranians were ready to defend Khomeinis state. The Iran-Iraq War gave ample display to the militant spirit unleashed by the revolution, a fervor that combined the deeply entrenched ethos of Shiite martyrology with the righteous new rhetoric of anti-imperialism.

Yet it also exposed the inherently unstable character of the Islamic Republic. Banisadr’s job as president came to include leadership of the Defense Council, and he embraced his position for all that it was worth, repeatedly showing up at the battlefront to underline his solidarity with the soldiers. The clerics, however, commanded the Revolutionary Guard, which distinguished itself by its single-minded devotion to the revolutionary cause. This lack of unity among the Iranian military leaders—in stark contrast to Saddam Hussein’s rigidly hierarchical, Soviet-style chain of command—did not contribute to efficient prosecution of the war and undoubtedly helped to prolong the conflict.

In the end, of course, Khomeini’s regime survived the war, shored up by the wave of patriotic emotion inspired by the fighting. Saddam, too, remained in place, right up until he was toppled by the US invasion of his country in 2003. But Banisadr did not have anything like the same staying power. In 1981 his enemies in parliament succeeded in impeaching him. By the time his removal from office became official, Iran’s former president was hiding in the underground in Tehran. He managed to escape the country and later established himself, now in French exile, as a leading opponent of the clerical regime. But the conflict between the branches of Iran’s government, as well as the underlying trend toward power struggles among the regime’s leading figures, continued.

The confusion extended to management of the economy. Here, too, the differences among competing constituencies ran deep and were aggravated by the jury-rigged quality of the Islamic Republic’s institutional arrangements. Part of the problem was the paucity of religious guidance on matters relating to modern economics. The Quran, while clearly defining social justice as the centerpiece of economic life, is notably silent on issues like monetary policy, labor relations, or industrial
organization. In prerevolutionary Iran, a number of theorists—including both Bazargan and Banisadr—had published elaborate treatises on the proper Islamic approach to economics that arrived at strikingly divergent conclusions. Khomeini himself had little to say on the subject—a reflection of his general contempt for materialistic thinking. His assumption seemed to be that a proper Islamic government would effortlessly dispense with the inequities of development that so characterized Iran under the shah.

In practice, of course, that proved anything but simple. The new government expropriated the banks and factories of those who opted for emigration and transformed the Pahlavi Foundation, which controlled many of the royal family’s business interests, into a charitable organization devoted to the needs of the underprivileged. Such foundations, known as
bonyads
, quickly proliferated, often as cover for the business interests of the new governing class. Meanwhile, the war with Iraq bolstered state control over distribution networks. The Majlis, the popularly elected parliament, inclined toward quasi-socialist policies, favoring radical land reform and nationalization of industry. But the parliamentarians often found themselves running into resistance from the traditionalist clerics in the Council of Guardians, who, tending to regard private property as sacrosanct, canceled some of the more radical laws the legislators proposed.

Khomeini, who often indulged in scorching anticapitalist rhetoric, sided now with one view, then with the other. As historian Shaul Bakhash notes, clerics have never quite managed to achieve a consensus on the precise role of the state in economic affairs, including such crucial issues as the role to be played by private business or the extent to which the government should use policy to ensure more equitable distribution of wealth.
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The end effect of this back-and-forth is a system in which a wide-ranging welfare state and nationalized industry awkwardly coexist with privileged interest groups, from individual politicians to institutions like the Revolutionary Guard, that hold sway over large swaths of the economy. The shah’s defenders can point out, with some justice, that world leaders no longer take the trouble, as they did in the 1970s, to visit Iran for clues on how to achieve highspeed growth. Today’s Iran struggles to make ends meet. Globalization and the corresponding surge of technological innovation have largely passed the country by.

Khomeini died in 1989, not long after grudgingly agreeing to a compromise that ended the Iran-Iraq War without a clear victory for either side. Within Iran, of course, his influence is all-permeating. Khomeini holds a place comparable to the one that Mao once occupied for many Chinese: he enjoys near-divine status as the
founding figure of the regime, the man who liberated Iran from long years of foreign domination. The system that Khomeini bequeathed to his political heirs, this bewildering blend of traditional faith and twentieth-century modernism, still reflects the sometimes mysterious motives of its chief architect. In 1987, indeed, Khomeini actually declared that the needs of the state take precedence over the dictates of the Quran—a move that dramatized the degree to which he was capable of startling departures from orthodoxy. Khomeini’s political views evolved according to the needs of the moment. He began his political career in 1963 by deriding the vote for women but extended the franchise to them during the revolution, when they had proved themselves avid supporters of the cause. For that matter, the phrase
Islamic republic
does not occur in his famous book
Islamic Government
. He once famously described Islam as a “religio-political faith.”
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To describe the government established by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as a reversion to medieval obscurantism is to miss many of its essential characteristics. As one historian has noted, the revolution drew its force both from the long-established institutions of the Shia clergy and from the rise of the centralized twentieth-century state; both factors are crucial to our understanding of the house that Khomeini built.
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Scholar Ervand Abrahamian notes Khomeini’s remarkable capacity for moving outside the limits of received religious wisdom. As he points out, the word
fundamentalist
evokes an image of inflexible dogmatism that does little credit to Khomeini’s penchant for innovative thinking. Khomeini showed a remarkable willingness to reject many Shia traditions that he regarded as irrelevant to current political problems while freely absorbing other concepts from the non-Muslim world. “The final product,” Abrahamian writes, “has less in common with conventional fundamentalism than with Third World populism, especially in Latin America.”
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It is worth noting that the postrevolutionary government quietly chose to continue some of the modernization programs started by the shah (like the Literacy Corps).
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Indeed, in some ways the Islamic Republic has accelerated that very process. By using the nationwide network of mosques—the most ubiquitous and deeply rooted social institution—as conduits for the transmission of government policy, the mullahs have extended the reach of the state into realms of private life that the shah never succeeded in penetrating.

In so doing, however, Khomeini’s vision of “Islamic government” may have ended up doing itself a disfavor. For most of the history of Islamic Iran, the religious establishment has existed as a separate institution, distinct from and parallel to the state. The events of 1979 changed that relationship to dramatic effect. It was Khomeini’s hope that clerical rule would purify the state, and thus restore truly Islamic
principles to the everyday life of Iranian society. But there is an inescapable sense that the revolution has instead brought religion down to the grubby level of everyday politics. Iranian officials routinely decry the increasing apathy toward religion displayed by young people; studies suggest that mosque attendance in modern-day Iran is notably lower than in other Muslim countries.
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All-encompassing surveillance by overlapping security services, the obvious corruption of many government officials, and the conspicuous failure of the regime to provide for genuine economic development have all tarnished the reputation of the holy men who now hold the responsibility for the country’s administration. “A chasm has opened between public and private life,” wrote historian Bakhash on the tenth anniversary of the revolution. “A popular saying in Tehran has it that under the Shah, Iranians prayed in private and drank in public; under the Islamic Republic, they pray in public and drink in private.”
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If anything, that chasm is much greater today than it was when Bakhash was writing.

In the end Khomeini bequeathed to the Islamic Republic not only his religion-based philosophy of government, but also a volatile legacy of institutionalized instability, tensions between elections and despotism, brutal factional rivalry, and rigidly centralized control. Some thirty years after its founding, the revolution has yet to fulfill its original promise. Yet the simple fact that it was able to make that promise to begin with has been remarkably influential.