The Last Great Revolution, State, Power, and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East
Iran’s Guardian Council is not unlike the religious authority of Saudi Arabia; it acts as an enforcer of Islamic Shariah law and interrupts the workings of the Majlis (Parliament). An antiquated body, the Guardian Council has nonetheless effectively rendered popular opposition ineffective by strategically disqualifying candidates for governmental positions; any man or woman seeking to take public office essentially has to be approved by the Council before even running. Recent elections have witnessed thousands of politicians dismissed from races, maintaining the Council’s power.
For Iran to function as a modern state, the religious bodies that served to overthrow the Shah must also be deposed. A state is neutral, and cannot be Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. The Guardian Council does not represent the masses; the greatest threat outside bodily harm it wields over the heads of the Iranian populace is the threat of instability. The added danger of a religious theocracy in politics is the adverse political effect on religion. The American separation of church and state, for example, was not implemented for the sake of protecting the state, but rather for the purpose of protecting religion from the impetus of politics.
Ijtihad, or reinterpretation of Islamic text, is a vital aspect to Iranian society. However, it rests in the hands of the Guardian Council who seek to control the Islamic nation. Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a treatise in which he suggested that those trained in religious law should not rule but rather act as guardians of society (Baktiari 53). The duplicity of the ayatollahs and their Quranic interpretations discredited the once-idealized Shi’a utopia envisioned prior to 1979. Another prevailing problem with the Shi’a contention of religious and political separation has always been policy adoption by the state. The Islamic state was created with the constitutional separation of powers between executive branches of government and judiciary (Owen 2004, p. 85).
The overriding power of the Council in Iran extends beyond society, impeding law-making and public policy alteration. It is this inefficacy that hampers political reform and the legislative process, rendering Iran more of a religious absolutism and less of an Islamic democracy than its clerics would care to admit. Democracy itself has not been successfully implemented into Iranian politics, but whether or not it succeeds, it may one day be viewed as the first major experiment blending Islam with democracy (Wright 39). Iranians argue that Islam is an instrument of change, meant originally as the means through which Iran could reach the real mission of revolutionmodernization and empowerment (Wright 50). However, the nature of the disruptive judiciary can never fully allow for either of the revolution’s missions.
Mushrooming, Iran in the Twentieth Century, Inside Iran
There is little dispute that the vast majority of Iranians supported the overthrowing of Shah Pahlavi in 1979. However, the late Ayatollah Khomeini was not the selected leader. Contrary to popular Western contention, the people of Iran did not want a Shi’a theocracy; they merely sought after regime change.
The former shah was a brutal dictator, suppressing the freedom of expression and press to extremes not even surpassed by the current theocrat dictators in power today. The pro-Western shah put heavy pressure on his opposition, using secret police forces known as SAVAK to employ his techniques of conciliation and oppression (Ghods 1989, p. 217). Shah Pahlavi’ s greatest opponents were not the clergy, but nationalists who sought to supplant him. While Pahlavi put down large political resistance groups by day, clerics would host sermons denouncing him by night. In essence the ayatollahs were merely an amalgamating force that bound others who sought reforms, whether those reforms were theological, Marxist, or pro-democracy.
Khomeini insisted that his and the places of his fellow Shi’a clerics was in the holy city of Qom, not in the capital Tehran. Using the specter of nation dissolution and economic recession, he formed the Guardian Council to ensure that Iran’s Islamic identity was protected, uncorrupted by the West. The shah, he argued, was merely a puppet of Great Britain and the United States, only maintaining ties for oil and money. In this sense, Khomeini was not unlike any other dictator. His rise to power was little more than capitalizing on outside scapegoats. Most of the ayatollahs of Iran manipulate the Iranian public touting nationalist ethos in order to consolidate their religious power. For example, the proliferation of Iran’s nuclear program and Israel’s imminent strike has been a key point for Iranian clerics to lambast the West, sentiment reminiscent of the 1979 Revolution (Mushrooming, 2005, p. 58).
The Iranian people were desperate for change, and would pander to anyone who could offer it to them. They wanted a society which was different from the one they had known in Iran, a society where, they claimed, every fourth person was a SAVAK informer, and where you had to stay quiet if you wanted to avoid trouble (Simpson 1988, p. 24).
The Last Great Revolution, Tortured Confessions
In the early 1980s, a group of dissenting Shi’a clerics and students formed the Mojahedin, one of many uprisings against the Iranian theocracy. Though they sought reform, it is questionable how successful their proposed government would have been, even if they had succeeded in disbanding the existing ayatollahs.
A primary reason behind the failure of the Mojahedin uprising was its militant nature. The ayatollahs had effectively quelled the use of print, so the only means left was armed struggle.
Unfortunately, armed struggle initially works against a cause, as a general population will be wont to protect its own physical well-being. Convention will find that people will be more likely to remain with the familiar in cases of extreme duress; not many would join an uprising whose motives they did not fully understand. After all, it was the unwavering support of the mullahs that lead to theocratic Iran.
The ensuing suppression by the Council saw the execution of 2,665 political prisoners; the slain included 2,200 Mojaheds and 400 leftists, mostly from Marxist groups that had [originally] opposed the Mojahedin uprising (Abrahamian 1999, p. 129). The violence spread to other groups such as the Kurdish Democratic Party, the Union of Communists, and [smaller] Marxist organizations, most likely a strategic move on the part of the Council that had previously united similar groups in the 1979 Revolution (Abrahamian 1999, p. 130).
Today, students often publicly protest government policies. Where such protests were once marked by violent suppression, they have grown more peaceful under the current government, which observes Iranian students with a watchful eye. Cautious protests are now almost festive, with hundreds of students regularly marching through the capital publicly showing their concerns (Wright 2000, p. 243). It has been speculated that the Council approves today’s protests in the streets of Tehran; however, the subtleties of protests, including female participants and vocalizations, suggest that the Council merely tolerates the protests as a passive form of youth appeasement.
It is as if the Council recognizes the anger fomenting among its students, doing all it can to avoid violence and martyring students for their causes. Today’s students are less violent than their predecessors. Where groups such as the Mojahedin sought to violently supplant the regime, today’s students seek to bring change within the existing regime’s framework.
Tags: 20th century, Iran, Islam, Middle East, religion, revolution
