Letter From Iran
by Patricia Smith
The Nation magazine, Feb. 28, 2000
In a gritty neighborhood of South Teheran not long ago, Iran's
animated opposition movement gathered at a mosque to mark a grim
occasion. It was November 23, a year since state security agents
assassinated Dariush Foruhar, the longtime leader of an old, outlawed
party of left-liberal nationalists. In the courtyard, pictures
of Foruhar were wreathed in flowers. Koranic chants wafted over
the crowd from the mosque's arched entrance. In the course of
an overcast winter afternoon, several thousand mourners came,
conversed and went. Outside the gates, the Islamic government's
goons might as well have worn sandwich boards.
As snapshots go, this one is rich in revealing detail. The
mosque is sanctuary in Iran; by tradition, not even the shah or
the police could invade it. And it is in the inviolable space
provided by the mosque that Iranians now gather to rethink a revolution
that, after deposing the last shah in 1979, has put the mosque
before all else. Across a sea of faces-some fresh from university
dorms, some with fifty years of politics etched into them-you
see mourning remade as anticipation. Foruhar and his wife died
of stab wounds, the first in a wave of murders since traced to
zealots in the Intelligence Ministry. And now, a year later, the
mood is something close to jubilant. Killing Foruhar gave Iranians
another image of themselves, another face to remind them of what
they aspire to be.
On the eve of elections to the Majlis, as Iranians call their
national assembly, this nation survives on a bittersweet diet
of impatience and exhilaration. Since the stunning victory of
President Mohammad Khatami three years ago, the desire for civil,
social and political reform has been as evident as the snowcapped
peaks that surround Teheran. But Khatami bears two decades of
"political Islam" on his back. He lives in an all but
unworkable cohabitation, as the French say, with a conservative
majority in the Majlis and a hierarchy of orthodox ayatollahs
whose powers supersede his own: divine law above civil law. The
polls scheduled for February 18 will do little to alter the President's
uneasy relations with the clerical establishment. But if Iranians
elect a reformist majority, as they almost certainly will, Khatami
and the "civil society" movement gathered behind him
will have their first real chance to alter Iran.
There is far more than a new political equation at stake.
What is the place of the clergy, and of the popular will, in the
Islamic Republic's political structure? More specifically, where
should power reside-in an elected legislature and the civil code
it produces, or in religious authorities who preside above both?
These are not easy questions-not in a nation that has given the
ulema, the religious authorities, a place at the political table
since 1500, and not now, when defenders of the Islamic Republic
assert vigorously that they have resolved Iran's longstanding
conundrums.
To his credit, Khatami has not only articulated these questions
anew; he has encouraged Iranians to answer them through a kind
of national reinvention. Reformists have been at work in Iran
for more than a decade, long before Khatami's rise to prominence.
But Khatami has given them direction and coherence. And in the
elections this month, the inchoate process of re-imagining Iran
stands to be confirmed-implicitly, at least-as the nation's stated
direction. "Iran is pregnant. We are expecting," says
Ebrahim Yazdi, a reformist of many years' standing. "All
the hustle and bustle, all the back and forth you see every day-these
are the labor pains."
The labor pains have come frequently since Khatami assumed
office in 1997. Orthodox ulema control the judiciary and maintain
close ties with the police and security bureaucracies. Through
these, they have engaged in a pitched guerrilla war with Iran's
newly invigorated press, which has been essential to the advance
of reformist thinking [see Geneive Abdo, "Publish, Then Perish,"
November 29, 1999]. Along with journalists, publishers, students,
reformist officials and others, an unknown number of liberal ayatollahs
now languish in Evin prison, a gruesome sprawl in tony North Teheran
that is left over from the era of the shahs. Notable among the
incarcerated is Abdullah Nouri, who was Khatami's interior minister
until the Majlis impeached him, and a newspaper publisher until
he was jailed and his paper closed. Charged with heresy, Nouri
began a five-year sentence late last year.
Nobody here is under any illusion that this month's elections
will transform Iran overnight. Constitutional revision is essential
if Iran is even to modify the concept of velayat, or religious
guardianship. And however the elections turn out, rewriting the
basic law will be no easier here than it would be anywhere else.
Civil institutions are few and weak. The last shahs-the deposed
Mohammed and his father, Reza - built few and destroyed many during
their half-century in power, with the modest exception of those
needed to keep the small, Westernized elite minimally content.
Even the press, though its influence has been immensely positive,
has little notion of disinterest: Papers function less as common
social assets than as substitutes for political parties, which
are banned.
The economy is in rough shape, too: Last year it contracted
marginally, and will grow only modestly this year. Inflation,
now at roughly 25 percent annually, is chronic; the rial, which
traded at about 70 to the dollar before the revolution, now trades
at almost 9,000 on the black market. Khatami has carefully-and
wisely, one must conclude-made social and political reform his
priority. Iran's oil and gas reserves have saved it from economic
calamity, and the sanctions Washington continues to insist upon
are crumbling; at this point they isolate the United States more
than Iran. But the economy needs serious attention, particularly
in view of Iran's extraordinary demographics: Three-quarters of
its 60 million people are under 35, half are under 20. This is
potentially a time bomb. Unemployment is already running at 20
percent.
Iran's youth, however, are more an asset than a liability.
They have lent vitality and momentum to the reformist project.
Indeed, after renewed student demonstrations last summer, Khatami
must worry that however bloody his battles with the orthodox ulema,
he will have trouble riding the tiger he has helped unleash if
he fails to satisfy the younger generation's expectations. This
reflects one of the revolution's larger ironies. For the majority
of Iranians-poor, of traditional backgrounds and beliefs-its social
impact has been unquestionably positive. Literacy has climbed
sharply, for instance. And women have made some of the most striking
gains: They are now prominent in the work force and an important
political force. The university population, less than 25 percent
women in 1979, is now 55 percent women. Another feature of post-revolutionary
Iran is also at work: The nation's drift to the cities has been
swift and without letup. At the moment of the revolution, the
urban population tipped from 49 percent of the total to 51 percent;
it is now approaching two-thirds. For the first time in history,
a majority of Iranians have never known the village mosque or
sought the guidance of the local ulema.
Anticipating the elections, the conservative bloc in the Majlis
has done much to manipulate the process. Not surprisingly, the
conservatives began with the voting age: Last year they I raised
it from 15 to 16, which probably cost the reformist slate close
to 1.5 million votes. The Guardian Council, a clerical body authorized
to vet political slates on the basis of their Islamic credentials,
went to work in January, disqualifying roughly 10 percent of the
6,700 candidates who intended to run for the 270-seat Majlis.
These measures have hobbled the opposition, and Khatami's
caution in dealing with his adversaries is evident. Everyone in
the reformist camp is forced to speak in code. But the price paid
by the conservative ayatollahs is even greater. Iran is a nation
of believers; the ulema have enjoyed close ties with the populace
for centuries. It was because of their influence among ordinary
Iranians that the clergy was able to consolidate its power in
the years after the revolution. But by failing to register the
many social changes, the ulema have lost the old connections.
This is a momentous break, and the numbers one hears confirm
it: Assuming the elections are fair, reformist candidates stand
to take at least the 70 percent of the vote that carried Khatami
to power three years ago. In the major cities-Teheran, Isfahan,
Shiraz and others-the figure could approach 100 percent. These
estimates are consistent and credible. Iranians are not merely
restless; they are also engaged. Spend an hour on any street in
Teheran and it becomes perfectly clear that this is a nation that
has gone far beyond the ideals of the revolution's remaining defenders.
Apparently mindful of their isolation, Teheran's hard-liners
now appear to be seeking the strongest minority position they
can get in the next Majlis. Yes, there's still plenty of talk
of blasphemy and betrayal at the huge Friday prayer meeting in
Teheran, always a reliable measure of the conservatives' latest
concerns. And yes, the Guardian Council has eliminated some important
political leaders. But the council chose its victims with unexpected
caution; it even allowed some candidates back into the campaign
by way of an appeals process. Elsewhere, the courts have begun
to ameliorate some of their most provocative decisions. In mid-January,
they reduced the sentence of two Teheran University students jailed
last year after publishing a play that made light of Islamic tradition-a
celebrated case. A few days later, supreme leader Ali Khamenei
pardoned Ghol'amhossein Karbaschi, Teheran's popular, innovative
mayor until he was jailed last year on concocted embezzlement
charges.
It looks a lot like pre-election politics, but the implications
are larger than that. The conservative consensus, which has held
through twenty years of sanctions and an eight-year war with Iraq,
is coming unwound. In effect, the Islamic revolution has come
face to face with the contradiction at its core. Few here question
the necessity of the revolution; nostalgia is limited to the affluent
quarters of North Teheran, and even there it is generally accepted
that the revolution was intended to give voice not to the modernized
few but to the un-modern many. But therein lies the conundrum:
The revolution gave Iranians a sense of identity they never had
under the shahs, but identity begins with the individual. The
revolutionaries set out to build a moral society, but morality
always begins within the individual conscience.
The rule of law, an unfettered press, civic institutions,
tolerance and social justice: These are the components of the
reformist agenda. And the orthodox ulema might have frustrated
every one of these aspirations if they were all the reformists
had on the table. But Khatami and his supporters speak, above
all, for a change in consciousness, and there is no turning back
from that. At the core of the reformists' thinking is a transformation
of the sacred space created by the revolution-Iran as a place
of religious observance, as a mosque and its courtyard-to the
public space of a modern nation. This is not only a matter of
new parks, markets and modern housing-although these have been
part of the reformist project in Teheran and other cities- but
also of the construction of public space within, in people's heads.
That is why newspapers have been the essential tools of the reformists.
The endeavor is to redefine Iran by helping Iranians redefine
themselves.
The igniting spark in this process does not derive from one
figure or any group. After a century of top-down modernization
strategies, it appears to come from deep within. Khatami, who
is 56 and an intellectual of broad learning, is an original thinker.
Like Havel, like Mandela, he is capable of breaking molds. It
is a rare faculty among political figures of his prominence, and
Khatami has used it to offer Iranians a new perspective on themselves
and their place in the post-cold war world. For more than a century
Iran has wandered between a worship of the West and its opposite,
the vigorous xenophobia evident at the height of revolutionary
fervor in the eighties. The missing ingredient has always been
self-confidence, and this is Khatami's gift. He has broken the
spell cast by the West, and with it the cycle of modern Iranian
history: We know ourselves well enough to accept influences from
the West without risking "Westoxicity," as Khatami puts
it. And we are certain enough of our own traditions to avoid imprisoning
ourselves within them. Khatami's message has changed the essential
question posed by the revolution. "What does it mean to be
Islamic?" has been transformed into "What does it mean
to be Iranian?"
The answer to this-who Iranians will be-is not clear, and
won't be anytime soon. Reformist thinkers say their full agendas
must remain hidden for now-and in this they include Khatami's.
This month's elections will almost certainly create the space
within which Khatami and his followers can make more of their
thinking known, but the political and social evolution they propose,
they readily acknowledge, is the project of a generation.
Will Iran develop a secular democracy? It could: It had one
briefly in the early fifties, under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh,
before a US-inspired coup destroyed it, and the Mossadegh era
is a universal point of reference among Iranians today. Will the
country develop a wholly new relationship between church and state,
a relationship that reflects Iran's history instead of the West's?
That is possible, too. Iranians are prepared to engage such questions.
Are we in the West? Without meaning to, Iranians raise that question,
too.
Patrick Smith was a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly
for the International Herald Tribune. He is working on a new book.
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