The loom of time, p.36
The Loom of Time, page 36
The Safavid-inspired Shi‘ite clergy that came to power in 1979, with its elaborate bureaucracy and hierarchy formed over the course of the past five centuries, and profiting from an imperial and cultural tradition going back to antiquity, had no comparison in the Sunni Arab world. That is mainly why the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution, rather than a mere coup or popular rebellion or spate of anarchy as is common throughout the Middle East, saw one intricate power structure, that of the shah, quickly replaced by another, that of the ayatollahs, with their tradition of deep learning and Jesuit and Dominican flair.[4] Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had represented a Westernized state harking back to ancient and implicitly secular Persian traditions, whereas Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, to give him his full name and title, represented a Shi‘ite state based on Iran’s early modern Safavid roots.[5] In either case, basic stability and the question of wielding enough coercive power to govern were never the problem. “The Persians have understood the machinery of government longer than Arabs, Berbers, or Turks,” observes Carleton Coon.[6]
In addition to historical and cultural advantages over the Arabs, revolutionary Iran had demographic and economic ones as well.
Iran, along with Egypt and Turkey, is one of the most populous states in the Middle East. But unlike many Arab states, Iran over the years has gotten its rate of population growth down to 1.3 percent in 2020, with only 10 percent of its people under the age of fifteen, so that its population is not dramatically increasing and is therefore not a burden upon it, as it is a burden on Iran’s rival Saudi Arabia, where a quarter of the population is under fifteen.[7] Iran, moreover, one of the world’s leading oil and gas producers, is located astride not one but two hydrocarbon-rich zones, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Iran, thus, is the geopolitical organizing principle for both the Middle East and Central Asia.
And yet Iran would not have fallen into the depths that it did, with such a bleak, radical, utterly despised, and dysfunctional regime that virtually destroyed the middle class, without serious weaknesses that also hark back to history and culture.
For example, as well-defined as Persia is as a polity, almost 40 percent of the population is Azeri Turk, Turkmen, Kurd, Arab, or some other non-Persian ethnic group.[8] And given the far-flung geographical mosaic of these communities, distributed as they are around the vast Iranian plateau, stability and sufficient governmental control could never be taken for granted. Iran is full of contradictions, even geographical ones.
The twentieth century actually began hopefully for Iran, with a constitution and separation of powers promulgated under the severely weakened Turkic Qajar dynasty in 1907. At this juncture, the rest of the Middle East was far behind Iran in political development. Yet the advancement was short-lived, and was followed within two years by civil war, before a restoration of the constitution in 1909: this tumultuous march of events demonstrated just how fragile the society, political system, and Qajar dynasty were. Following the even greater turmoil of World War I, with the Russian Revolution literally right on Iran’s doorstep, an atmosphere of institutional feebleness and decline enabled the rise to power of Reza Khan, an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, who toppled the Qajars and founded his own Pahlavi dynasty in 1925.[*1]
Reza Khan Shah, as he came to be known, was inspired by Atatürk, who had taken power in Turkey in the same period. But Reza Khan proved to be only a lesser Atatürk, without the latter’s sophistication and cosmopolitan upbringing at the western edge of the Ottoman Empire. Reza Shah’s Westernization of the country was highly superficial and eccentric—nomads were ordered to stop wandering; pictures of the camel, judged a “backward” beast, were forbidden—while the new shah amassed vast personal wealth. Modernization and institution-building were concentrated in the capital, creating “two cultures” in Iran, writes the UCLA professor Nikki R. Keddie: the Westernized culture of the cities and the increasingly embittered peasant culture of the countryside.[9] Then, over time, as oil wealth accumulated and urbanization accelerated, the contradictions between a glittering Westernized class around Reza Shah’s son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and a profoundly backward peasantry also accelerated, and in the 1970s the village essentially migrated en masse to the city and vanquished it, with the faction of ayatollahs led by Khomeini as the vanguard.[10] Whereas in the 1950s, 30 percent of Iranians lived in cities, by the 1970s half of Iranians did.[11] I noted the same phenomenon elsewhere in my travels, but in Iran it had been more extreme and had its own peculiar characteristics.
Iran isn’t Turkey, in other words. The Anatolian plateau, because it is less arid than its Iranian counterpart, holds enough interconnected areas of settlement so that the difference between villages and large towns and cities, as marked as it is, is still less pronounced than in Iran. More important, Anatolia has a thousand miles of frontage on the Mediterranean, besides a long Black Sea coast that has linked it throughout history to the Balkans and European Russia.[12] The Iranian plateau was a geographical bridge too far: just too far away and cut off from Europe for a Westernization strategy—a badly conceived one at that, and one distorted by the economics of oil—to take hold without a violent revolutionary reversal. This revolutionary reversal, it should be said, was not supported by all of the ayatollahs, since many of them believed that political power would only corrupt their ranks, and would eventually cause them to be hated. Even within clerical ranks, Khomeini was a radical.
Culturally brilliant and geographically vital to both the Middle East and Central Asia, revolutionary Iran was a mass of ironies, as I discovered during a visit of several weeks there in the mid-1990s, when I was able to obtain a visa to travel throughout the country, thanks to an Iranian official I had met at an international conference. This resulted in two long chapters on Iran that I published in earlier books, The Ends of the Earth (1996) and The Revenge of Geography (2012). But now, in the age of Google, I could not go back to Iran since the Iranian security services could easily learn that I had served in the Israeli military.
In 1994, when I traveled throughout Iran, I saw that the Islamic Revolution had already begun disintegrating. In Tehran back then, the mullahs in parliament were railing against declining morals, while the facades of apartment buildings were cluttered with satellite dishes, with the most popular television show Baywatch and the most popular channel MTV. Following the 1980–89 Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the communications revolution had started to make inroads on the geography of the Iranian plateau, so that the battle between East and West was being fought anew inside Iran itself. I discovered that the economy had been placed in the hands of opaque and informal mobster-traders, with links to the working-class bazaars, who mixed the trade in consumer goods with illegal arms shipments. (I even did a profile of one such bazaari for The Atlantic.[13]) I visited the holy city of Qom, with its spectacular faience shrines framed against dun-drab volcanic mountains, and interviewed Islamic seminary students engaged in the abstractions of medieval thought while tyranny and corruption filled the void around them. But I also found Qom a major center for the study of law, languages, and philosophy, another example of Iran’s high level of culture. The students asked about my Judaism, in a curious and respectful way. In Isfahan, I took a late night walk along the Zayande Rud, the river that runs through the town, where families camped out, sitting on carpets around little fires that they had made to celebrate the Zoroastrian holiday of No Ruz. It was a sign of Iran’s robust pre-Islamic identity, which, combined with its unique Persian language, made it an authentic age-old cluster of civilization and not an artificial state like Syria and Iraq. And on that late night walk, despite the remonstrations of the clergy, I noticed a lot of hand-holding between young men and women, and a lot of makeup and fingernail polish on the women. In Shiraz, I visited the tomb of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, a place where large numbers of Iranians gather at dusk, bearing roses in their hands to celebrate Hafiz’s life-giving sensuality. Hafiz wrote metaphorically of wine and the pleasures of the flesh, and is denounced by Islamic conservatives as quasi-blasphemous. Yet I saw groups of Iranians having their pictures taken by his tomb.[14]
I sensed a culture of layers, rich with paradoxes as well as with ideas and philosophy, where people had discovered private spaces of freedom within an elaborate revolutionary system. Whereas Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states were venues of raw, transparent, and empirical power politics, emanating from a tradition of tribal disputes in the desert, interpreting Iran had always been more difficult, since it emanated from a rich tapestry of empires, in which Khomeini, to quote the late intellectual and Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami, was but a “turbaned shah.”[15]
The past is everywhere in Iranian politics. Indeed, there has always been this stylistic extravagance and tendency for rhetorical overreach. When Khomeini spoke of “Great and Lesser Satans” and of the “world-devouring arrogance” of the United States, former CIA area specialist Graham Fuller observed that Khomeini was echoing the theatrical manner of the Safavid Empire.[16]
* * *
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Yet to understand the nature and the mechanics of the clerical regime—so necessary in order to glimpse Iran’s future beyond the Islamic Revolution—one must first explore the Safavid imperial inheritance in terms of the Shi‘ite religion.
Shi‘ism lends itself to being a state religion, not only because it was spread throughout Iran by the Safavid Empire, but because of its particular religious ideology. Shi‘ism literally means Shi‘at Ali, or “the party of Ali,” the nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, and according to Shi‘ites the Prophet’s rightful successor. Ali ruled as caliph from A.D. 656 to 661, when he was assassinated. Since then Shi‘ites were essentially in opposition against the traditional line of succession of the Sunni caliphs, becoming a faction or “party,” as their name suggests. Iranians, moreover, are Twelver Shi‘ites. They believe in both the political and spiritual rule of the twelve successive and rightful imams following Muhammad, the last of whom, the Mahdi, is hidden and lives in “occultation” and will reveal himself at the end of days. Shi‘ite tradition, in other words, significantly more so than Sunni tradition, is obsessed with power and who rules the faithful. This is because of a great perceived wrong done to them in Islam’s early days, when not only was Ali assassinated, but his son Husayn and Husayn’s army were massacred at Karbala in southern Iraq by the forces of the Caliph Yazid of the Umayyad Empire. A strong degree of pessimism and resentment, as well as of martyrdom, is thus baked into Shi‘ite psychology, making Shiʽites generally suspicious of political authority except for their own. Indeed, as Vali Nasr explains, while the Sunnis have a “preoccupation with order,” the Shi‘ites have a preoccupation with “values,” and therefore put less stock in what the ruling majority believes. They are true oppositionists.[17]
The British journalist Edward Mortimer, in his pathbreaking book Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam, points out that in the case of Twelver Shi‘ites, such skepticism about those in authority has a firm doctrinal basis. “The fact that government tends to be bad or un-Islamic is not just an observable and regrettable fact: it is in the nature of things so long as the rightful Imam has not taken matters in hand, which is now not going to happen until the end of time.” Because of this debasement of the state, it renders a separate “religious organization…not dependent on the state, absolutely necessary.” Thus, the Iranian Shi‘ite clergy were able to develop a “distinct corporate identity” that eventually made them a highly organized, alternative political force to that of the shah.[18]
Yet it was Khomeini who, opposed to other Shi‘ite clerics, took this corporate identity one step further in the struggle against a fiercely secular, repressive, and bombastic shah. Islam, Khomeini insisted, is political or it is nothing. Driving home the point: “Was not the Prophet, God’s prayers be upon him, a politician?”[*2] Thus, Khomeini in his writings has circled back to Muhammad as the first true revolutionary, who created a faith that bred a chain of unending political upheavals. But whereas Sunni Islam in recent decades has had difficulty in creating stable political entities, on account of its weaker bureaucratic tendency, Khomeini was personally leading his Twelver Shi‘ites precisely in the direction of state control.
And this direction in which he led them was also decidedly undemocratic, though with a twist. Khomeini stated that Islamic government for Shi‘ite Iran must be “the representative of [the martyred] Ali.” Therefore it must be legitimate, unlike Ali’s usurpers, and that meant in Khomeini’s view “constitutional.” But as Mortimer explains, Khomeini did not mean constitutional in the usual—or at least in the Western—sense of the term. For above the government there must be a “supreme leader,” a faqih or jurist, “an expert in divine law which the government exists to enforce.”[19] This Wilayat al-Faqih (“rule of the jurist”) meant guardianship on the basis of theological knowledge that gives the faqih or jurist a semi-divine mandate.[20] Khomeini here quotes a proverb that “the jurists are rulers over the sultans,” since the former are wiser in the ways of Islamic law and therefore wiser in the ways of the political world.[21]
The nineteenth-century Egyptian Sunni modernist Mohammed Abduh also wrote about a jurist ruling according to his knowledge of the law, and in constant consultation with popular leaders.[22] But in Khomeini’s formulation there is something dangerously utopian about this construct and imitation of the Platonic notion of a philosopher-king: that of an infallible wise man to whom elected leaders must submit.[23] For example, the key difference between a supreme leader, a faqih, and a pope is that the Catholic pope rules not a defined geography but a community of the faithful who all live under their own elected or nonelected governments in their own sovereign territories, to which the pope himself can always appeal but cannot order in a secular sense to do anything, whereas Khomeini’s faqih holds supreme power over a specific government and a specific geography. This makes Khomeini’s ideal jurist, who rules in the name of religion but whose rulings must be unequivocally political—because they involve human beings within concrete physical borders—the most dangerous sort of dictator, since his rulings, however cruel or unjust, are given in the name of a higher religious and moral virtue.
There is a name for this phenomenon: Leninism. Vladimir Lenin minted the modern technique and justification for mass, organized cruelty and thought-control in the name of a higher virtue and purity. For Communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat might as well have been a religion, in which all forms and manner of human activity were judged according to a single ideological standard, just as most everything in revolutionary Iran was seen and judged in religious terms. Whether it was the Communist Party or the theocratic rulebook, it was forced upon everyone’s mind, was in every school, in every private company, in every military unit, and so forth. In the early years at least, before the Islamic Revolution began to calcify, the Shi‘ite clergy practically sucked the oxygen out of the air of politics.
In a way what had happened was almost inevitable. Because the Pahlavi state’s own absolutism, coupled with its failure to build a political constituency, had demolished all forms of political infrastructure, little other than a revolutionary Shi‘ite regime could have emerged back then. The fact that one stable political system led to another was a mark of both Iran’s modernity and the abiding influence of the early modern Safavids.[24]
In fact, while the images and symbolism were Islamic, the methods of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, in which Khomeini was installed as the supreme leader or faqih, were European. The show trials and executions of the ideological enemies of the new regime (usually officials of the former Pahlavi monarchy), the large-scale confiscation of private property, the theatrical indoctrination sessions and shaming, the forcing into exile of hundreds of thousands of men and women—“all this owes far more to the examples of Robespierre and Stalin than to those of Muhammed and Ali,” writes Bernard Lewis.[25]
Tragically, though the Islamic Revolution claimed to have given Iran a new and more egalitarian start, all links to Iran’s late Qajar-era constitutional past, which had seemed so promising and democratic at the time, were rejected and barely even thought of.[26] The tyranny of the Pahlavis was simply replaced by that of the ayatollahs; just as the tyranny of the tsars was replaced by that of the Bolsheviks in Russia. And in each case, the result was worse than before, owing to the radical, utopian element—and assumption of perfect virtue—which traditional monarchy often thankfully lacks. Had it not been for the Russian and Iranian revolutions, both Russia and Iran might have evolved in the course of the twentieth century into highly imperfect constitutional monarchies and half-hearted friends of the West, rather than into the moral and political monstrosities that they became.
One might add that the new Islamic Republic, especially under the pseudo-French influence of Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, who served as its first president directly under the Supreme Leader, bore a hazy Marxist tiers-mondisme (third-worldist element), as the revolution reached out especially to the ruralized urban poor in the spirit of class warfare, and owing to the revolution’s support for liberation movements across the globe.[27] In fact, the first foreign visitor to the Islamic Republic was Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, the very icon of third world revolution at the time. Moreover, Egypt’s late leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was championed in revolutionary Tehran for his anti-Westernism, and for humiliating the United States and the European powers a generation before Khomeini did.
