God's rule, or man's?
 

AP

As Iran's power struggle approaches a climax, the contradictions of its hybrid constitution grow ever less sustainable, argues John Grimond
 

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NOT far to the south-west of Tehran stands the holy shrine of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, the ayatollah who inspired, led and largely created the modern world's only theocracy. The site is well chosen. To the north is Tehran, the city that swept the ayatollah to power in the revolution of 1979. To the south is Qom, the sun-baked seminary town where he had studied, preached and challenged the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and which is now the theological heart of Shia Islam. Next door is Behesht-e Zahra, the main cemetery for Tehran and the resting-place, too, for about 30,000 Iranian soldiers killed in the 1980-88 war with Iraq. Soon, if all goes to plan, a new international airport will open nearby, bearing the ayatollah's name. Here, if anywhere, it seems, you can appreciate the transformation of Iran from an American-manipulated dependency to a proud, self-sufficient Islamic republic.

At a distance the shrine, a vast edifice with huge courtyards, towering minarets and blue-tiled domes, is certainly impressive. But on closer inspection this is not a building throbbing with life, or even quiet contemplation. True, on official mourning days, and especially on June 4th, the anniversary of the ayatollah's death, the multitudes appear. But usually the buildings are quiet, the pilgrims few and, in the cavernous, alabaster-floored hall where a green-bulbed chandelier shines down on the ayatollah's tomb, only a trickle of devotees come to pay their respects. Most of the shops are unlet, the snack bars unpatronised, and the travertine steps are beginning to break up. Even before it is finished, the shrine is becoming dilapidated. So it is with the Islamic republic itself.

The most striking aspect of this decay is the virtual paralysis of government, a consequence at one level of the power struggle that convulses the country. At a deeper level, though, it is a consequence of the contradiction embedded in a constitution that stipulates for Iran both religious and democratic rule. After nearly 24 post-revolutionary years, it has become apparent, if not admitted, that a government cannot be satisfactorily run both by the elected representatives of the people and by the unelected representatives of God.

In fact, Iran has two competing governments. One, that led by Muhammad Khatami, has been in office, if not in power, since 1997. Mr Khatami, campaigning on a platform of political reform, was first elected with nearly 70% of the vote. He or his fellow reformists have since won three other elections with even bigger majorities: local elections in 1999, a parliamentary poll in 2000 and another presidential contest in 2001. But though the mandate for reform is plain, Mr Khatami has managed to make few changes, at least by legislation. He has been thwarted by conservatives upholding the religious rule of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The conservatives' main agents are the judiciary, which uncompromisingly imposes Islam's sharia law, and the security forces, including the Revolutionary Guards, the basij (volunteer paramilitaries) and the morals police (usually self-appointed vigilantes), as well as the army. The clerics' power has also been fortified by the Council of Guardians, a 12-member body that decides whether laws passed by the majlis (parliament) are compatible with both Islam and the constitution. In addition, the council supervises elections and vets candidates, disqualifying those it disapproves of. Since its six clerical members are appointed by the supreme leader, and the other (lay) six are chosen by the majlis from 12 lawyers selected by the head of the judiciary (himself appointed by the supreme leader), its disapproval tends to be reserved for reformists.

For a while, the conservatives' efforts to frustrate Mr Khatami only made him more popular. As newspapers were shut down, pro-reform candidates disqualified, bills ruled improper, protests quashed and writers and activists murdered by “rogue elements” in the intelligence ministry, the pressure for change mounted—and with it the reformists' electoral majorities. But the conservatives were unbending. Scores more newspapers were banned. Members of the new, reformist majlis who had been elected in 2000 found themselves beset by hostile hardliners. Despite their parliamentary immunity, three were sentenced to prison as part of an anti-corruption campaign, and another was jailed for speaking his mind in the majlis (he was eventually pardoned).

Mr Khatami is what he claims to be: a reformer, one who can improve and thereby safeguard the system, not one who would tear it down

Mr Khatami seemed to give up. A bookish cleric, he has charm and a winning way with the voters, but he has never seen himself as a Gorbachev, a man who would make possible the end of the system, let alone a Yeltsin, a man who might precipitate that end. He is instead what he claims to be: a reformer, one who can improve and thereby safeguard the system by bringing about limited change, not one who would tear it down.

Such a man may have his uses, as Ayatollah Khamenei well knows: by making a few bland reforms, he could help to mollify the voters, and still the students, without threatening the power structure. And though the hardliners do not like to see the liberalisation of anything at all, it is important for the ayatollah and his friends that, at least formally, the democratic element of government should survive. Without it, the theocratic element would lose all popular legitimacy. How lucky for them, then, that Mr Khatami has little appetite for system-shaking showdowns.

Yet that does not mean he is always averse to lesser confrontations. Twice in his career he has resigned from office, once as editor of a newspaper, Keyhan, and once as culture minister (in 1992, in a row about censorship). Now he is letting it be known that he may resign again. This time it would be an act of desperation, recognition of the fact that his two terms in office will be judged a fruitless failure if he does not soon assert some authority.

That realisation seems to have struck him last August. By then it had become clear that the voters were losing faith in their tribune, and opinion surveys were soon putting his support at 43%, compared with over 75% in 1998. Some people were openly critical of his caution. Most simply seemed to be retreating into disillusion. “I accept that there is a sort of hopelessness in our society,” said Mr Khatami himself, before declaring that “the president must have the power to perform his duties.”

The gauntlet he was thereby throwing down took the form of two parliamentary bills, one designed to rein in the judges who have done so much to squelch free speech and other civil liberties, the other to curb the Council of Guardians and restore to the interior ministry (answerable to Mr Khatami) the power to approve or disqualify candidates. Together these bills would in effect confirm the president as number two in the system and not, as conservatives sometimes assert, a co-equal with the head of the judiciary.

The stage was thus set for the showdown Mr Khatami had so long put off. The script seemed to promise an unfolding of events that would start with the passage of the bills, their prompt veto by the Guardian Council, followed by the possibility—if nothing were done to avert a crisis, and if Mr Khatami remained defiant—of a referendum. After that, assuming a big yes from the people and a big no from the clerics, would come the resignation of Mr Khatami and most of his supporters in the majlis. Out of the ensuing chaos, right would triumph. The inflexible rule of the mullahs would be tempered, the concept of Islamic republicanism would be saved, and Mr Khatami would have his place in history.

The script, however, began to go wrong almost at once—thanks, typically, to a hardline judicial decision. In a speech last June, Hashem Aghajari, a dissident academic, had dared to challenge the clerics' divine right to rule, calling for a “religious reformation” of Shia Islam and criticising Shias' readiness to emulate top ayatollahs like “monkeys”. For such “blasphemy” Mr Aghajari was sentenced on November 6th not just to a few years in prison, which might have passed without protest, but to imprisonment, flogging and death.

The reaction must have surprised even the judiciary. Iran's universities erupted, and even an assurance from Ayatollah Khamenei himself that the sentence would be reviewed—soon denied by the prosecutor-general—was not enough to restore calm. The demonstrations continued into December. Bigger and bolder than any since the student protests brutally suppressed in July 1999, they made it clear that the popular desire for reform was far from dead. And since they rapidly gave rise to calls not just for Mr Aghajari's freedom but for an end to unaccountable religious rule, they must also have sent a frisson down the backs of the clerics, and perhaps of Mr Khatami too. Yet, though the hardliners were visibly divided, they gave no ground, leading some onlookers to believe they would soon seize complete power.

It is conventional wisdom in Iran that no one wants to go through another revolution: the last one was too recent and too bloody, and was followed not just by a terrible war with Iraq but also by the ghastly violence that so often attends revolutions, while one side consolidates power and the other strikes back. Sure enough, November's protests stopped for a while, after the supreme leader and his thugs had made it clear that they were ready to suppress them by force. But in due course they resumed. By then it was clear, not least because of the increasing number of complaints raised by the protesters, that the power struggle must soon reach a decisive climax: compromise may yet be attempted but it will not endure. And with an end to the power struggle will come an even clearer exposure of the contradiction behind it, the contradiction between clerical and representative government—or, if you like, between God's rule and man's.

This survey will argue that even if dual control were possible, it would not last in Iran. The end of Khomeini's experiment in theodemocracy started when Mr Khatami was elected in 1997. In their conflicting ways, both reformers and conservatives—the terms are loosely used—have been trying to save it ever since. But the decay is terminal, and almost every aspect of Iran shaped by its rulers is a failure. Since they try to control so much of their subjects' lives—public, private, spiritual, temporal—the failure is extensive. The only exceptions are some of the few measures taken by the elected government that have not been sabotaged by the unelected.

The surreal world of Iranian politics
 

Anatomy of a power struggle

MAKING sense of Iranian politics is no simple matter. Indeed, even making sense of the power structure is far from easy. The institutions have names that may seem ingenuously descriptive (such as the Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between the majlis and the Council of Guardians) or positively Orwellian: don't expect the 86 members of the Assembly of Experts, who choose the supreme leader, to know anything about law, art, physics, medicine or in fact anything except religion. Put that down, if you will, to the exuberance of Iranian political discourse and nomenclature—any country that has a Society of Combatant Clerics and celebrates Global Arrogance Day can't be all bad—but you may still be no closer to knowing where real power lies.

...by supreme Khomeini and Khamenei

The chart on the right, which shows who appoints or elects whom, may help. Less easy to depict, however, is the spectrum of political opinion. Never mind the Iraq-based Mujahidin-e Khalq, the armed opposition. Even within the ruling coalition, according to Atieh Bahar, a Tehran consultancy, the factions include the conservative right, reformists, moderates, old leftists, new leftists and some liberal critics. Another analyst of the Iranian scene, the International Crisis Group, in a recent study broke the factions down into conservatives and reformers (which include members of the modernist right, the Islamic left and technocrats), plus intellectual and Islamic dissenters, some of them nationalists, some students. Few analyses, however, can do justice to the relationships—blood as well as political—between many prominent Iranians, still less to the personal animosities that excite them.

To confuse matters further, many people fit naturally into one faction on one issue but a different one on another. Thus Ali Akbar Mohtashemipour may be considered a reformist on domestic affairs but a hardliner on the Palestinian question; and ex-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who now serves as head of the Expediency Council, has been variously cast as ideologue, pragmatist and reformer—as well as has-been and possible future leader after a conservative coup.

Parties do not help much either. They exist, but sometimes not for long. Khomeini dissolved even his own, dominant, post-revolutionary Islamic Republic Party in 1984 when it became difficult to reconcile it with the exigencies of clerical rule. Iran's political groups are better described as factions, mostly based on personalities rather than programmes, though often they have a newspaper in tow.

That is because, despite the importance of personalities, ideas count for a lot in Iran, and papers are vehicles for opinion and ideas as much as for reporting. It is difficult to discuss politics with a leading member of any camp without references to philosophers of every era and every school of thought. The walls tend to be book-lined, whether you are sitting in an armchair in the Tehran apartment of Khosan Ghadery, a professor of politics at Modarres University, or at a table in the office of Mohsen Sazegara, another reformist, in the Institute for Epistemological Research, or cross-legged on a carpet in the house in Qom of Ayatollah Ali-Reza Amini, a conservative cleric. And the chat may be as much about hermeneutics as political tactics, about Popper or Hayek as Khomeini or Hobbes.

The philosopher who inspires the reformists more than any other is probably Abdolkarim Soroush. He was once a good Islamic revolutionary, a Khomeini ally who was largely responsible for the “cultural revolution” of the early 1980s, in which the universities were purged (they were closed between 1980 and 1983). More recently, though, Mr Soroush has come to believe that religion must remain separate from worldly power, and he now opposes the use of Islam as a state ideology, though he sees it and democracy as essentially linked. Just as his ideas today inspire the reformists, so he is widely loathed by conservatives. His books are available in Iran, but the periodical that published many of his articles, Kiyan, was closed down in 2001.

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Khatami, elected but looked down on...

The crucial text for the conservatives is, of course, the Koran. But the philosophical base on which Iran's theocratic edifice is built is Khomeini's velayat-e faqih, the rule of the Islamic jurist, a concept the ayatollah developed in exile in Iraq in the 1970s. Shia Muslims believe that Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law, was the rightful successor to the prophet, followed by 11 other imams. Twelver Shia, the branch of Islam that has been Iran's official religion since 1501, holds that the 12th imam, the Mahdi, who disappeared in 873 and is thought to be not really dead but in hiding, will one day return to “fill the world with justice”. Khomeini's contribution was to argue that, while awaiting the return of the “hidden” imam, the leading Shia clerics should assume both judicial and executive authority. They should select one of their own as the supreme leader, whose essential qualifications should be knowledge of Islamic law and justice in its implementation. Ultimate sovereignty lay with God, so opposition to the government was blasphemy.

The trouble with such an arrangement is that, except to those who are both devout and convinced of Khomeini's interpretation of Shia doctrine, it lacks legitimacy. That is presumably why Iran's constitution also has democratic characteristics. Fortunately or unfortunately, they are quite incompatible with the theocratic ones: the popular sovereignty implicit in universal suffrage is completely at odds with the sovereignty of God. Hence the clash between the elected and the unelected rulers of today's Iran.

Some, such as Amir Mohebbiyan, a conservative columnist for Resalat, say there is no crisis of legitimacy. The supreme leader is in fact chosen by the people, in the shape of the popularly elected Assembly of Experts, just as the American president is chosen by the popularly elected Electoral College. But this argument overlooks the fact that all the candidates for the Qom-based Assembly of Experts must be clerics, and moreover clerics approved by the Council of Guardians.

This, the control of candidates, is one of the three ways in which the conservatives maintain their wider grip. The second is their control of the judiciary (get rid of half a dozen judges, sighs one foreign diplomat, and most of Iran's civil-rights problems would be gone). The third is control of the armed forces, notably the Revolutionary Guards and the basij. Last November's student protests faltered only after a rally by some 10,000 basijis outside the former American embassy in Tehran. Although the students had by then decided to suspend their demonstrations, this show of strength lent visible credence to Ayatollah Khamenei's earlier threat to unleash the “force of the people”.

These forms of control—plus powers of appointment over, for instance, the head of state radio and television—are greater even than those granted to the shah in Iran's 1906 constitution. But they are even more necessary to Mr Khamenei's hold on power than they were to his predecessor's. Khomeini, after all, was a theologian of repute, indeed an Object of Emulation, the highest rank for a Shia cleric. He was also undoubtedly popular: 10m people flocked to his funeral in 1989. But when Mr Khamenei took over, he had only just been made an ayatollah—to improve his credentials—and Khomeini had had to have the constitution changed to allow the supreme leadership to be held by anyone other than an Object of Emulation. Several clerics still outrank Mr Khamenei in the Shia hierarchy, and many more are troubled by the promotion of someone of only fairly senior standing to the top theocratic job.

The reason for the constitutional adjustment also contributes to the uneasy lying of the head that wears the clerical crown. It concerns the fall from grace two months before Khomeini's death of his chosen successor, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. Ayatollah Montazeri has the best of religious and revolutionary credentials—he is an Object of Emulation, and helped write the 1979 constitution—but he has since become a democrat and, for his dangerous impudence, has spent the past five years under house arrest in Qom.

AP

... by supreme Khomeini and Khamenei

He is not altogether silenced, though: his friends keep in touch and his views are disseminated via audio cassettes and the internet. Moreover, he has influential supporters. Some are in the majlis, where a call for his release was backed by 129 of the 290 members in 2001. But others may carry more clout. One such is Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, an Object of Emulation who lives across the road from his arrested counterpart. There he describes how he thinks the Guardian Council, of which he was once a member, has taken too much authority for itself. The council is part of the constitution, and should not be abolished, he says; but its members reflect the views of only a tiny minority. Ayatollah Saanei is an authority on Islamic jurisprudence who has issued a number of enlightened fatwas, notably about women's rights, ethnic and sexual discrimination and human rights in general, which he considers entirely compatible with Islam.

Such voices carry weight in Iran. The holy city of Qom, with its 45,000 or more clerics and 35,000 seminarists, has ten grand ayatollahs (Objects of Emulation), each of whom has a personal following of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, both inside and outside the country. From these followers they receive huge quantities of zakkat and khoms, the Islamic taxes (a fifth of income) which every good Muslim should pay, and which finance charities and Islamic causes.

Nor is Ayatollah Saanei's a lone voice. In an open letter last July, another leading cleric appointed by Khomeini, Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, announced his resignation as the leader of Friday prayers in Isfahan, a post to which he had been appointed by Khomeini from exile in 1976. In an unprecedented attack on the country's rulers, he inveighed against “despair, unemployment, inflation and high prices, the hellish gap between poverty and wealth, the deep and daily growing distance between the classes, the stagnation and decline of national revenue, a sick economy, bureaucratic corruption, desperately weak administrators, the growing flaws in the country's political structure, embezzlement, bribery and addiction”. He went on to castigate “those who are astride the unruly camel of power...society's dregs and fascists who consist of a concoction of ignorance and madness, whose umbilical cords are attached to the centres of power...and those [vigilantes who take their inspiration from the velayat] who are convinced that yoghurt is black”.

The impact of this outburst was extraordinary, although somewhat diminished by a statement on Iran issued by George Bush in Washington a few days later. However, it hit home in three ways. First, it drew attention to the regime's failures (“Woe and alas! A thousand promises and not one kept!”). Second, it pointed to the allied problem of corruption, to which holy men are manifestly not immune. Third, it came close to a direct attack on Mr Khamenei's credentials as supreme leader, while extolling Ayatollah Montazeri.

Criticisms of this kind are particularly unsettling to clerics, many of whom, heeding the words of Khomeini himself, are increasingly concerned that the conduct of government, with its inevitable failures and consequent unpopularity, must tarnish the clergy. But the conservatives had only a few months to ponder that problem before the students were up in arms about the death sentence passed on Mr Aghajari. By the end of November they had seen the biggest student protests since 1999, and were beleaguered as never before.