Iran’s Islamic revolution: three paradoxes
Abbas Milani
Iran’s century-old constitutional and democratic heritage is a key to the future of its current theocratic polity, says Abbas Milani.
The Islamic revolution of 1979 is an event defined as much by its ironies and paradoxes as by its novelties and cruelties.
It was, by near-consensus among scholars and experts, the most "popular revolution" in modern times: almost 11% of the population participated in it, compared to the estimated proportionate of citizens who took part in the French (7%) and Russian (9%) revolutions.
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where he is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His most recent book is the two-volume Eminent Persians: The Men and Women who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979 (Syracuse University Press, 2008)
Also by Abbas Milani in openDemocracy:
"Iran's conservative triumph"
(27 June 2005) - part of a post-election symposium with contributions by Roshanak Ameli-Tehrani, Nader Entessar, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Bahman Kalbasi, Trita Parsi, Bahram Rajaee, and Hamid Zanganeh
As a concept, revolution is itself a child of modernity, in that it centres on the idea that legitimate power can emanate only from a social contract consecrated by the general will of a sovereign people. Before the rise of modernity and the idea of the natural rights of human beings, "revolution" as a word had no political connotation and simply referred to the movement of celestial bodies. The word took on its new political meaning - the sudden, often violent, structural change in the nature and distribution of power and privilege - when the idea of a citizenry (imbued with natural rights, including the right to decide who rules over them) replaced the medieval idea of "subjects" (a passive populace, bereft of rights, deemed needful of the guardianship of an aristocracy or royalty).
In Iran, despite the requisite popular agency of a revolution, events in 1979 paradoxically gave rise to a regime whose founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, denigrated popular sovereignty as a colonial construct, created to undermine the Islamic concept of umma (spiritual community). In Ayatollah Khomeini's treatise on Islamic government, the will of the people is subservient to the dictates of the divine, as articulated by the supreme leader.
In this sense, his concept of an Islamic revolution is an oxymoron and its concomitant idea of Islamic government (velayat-e faqih, or rule of the jurist) is irreconcilable with the modern democratic ideal of popular sovereignty. In opposition to the latter, velayat-e faqih posits a population in need of a guardian, much as minors need guardians. The people are, in other words, "subjects", not citizens.
At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini called the same populace to a revolution - historically, the defiant act of a citizenry cognisant of its ability and right - to demand a new social contract. The most popular of all "modern revolutions" then led to the creation of a state whose constitution places absolute power in the hand of an unelected, unimpeachable man, and whose basic political philosophy posits people as subjects and pliable tools of the faqih (jurist).
The claim to power
If this constitutes the first, philosophical paradox of the Islamic revolution, there is a second and stark historic paradox evident in its evolution.
The Islamic revolution was in a sense a replay of Iran's first attempt at a democratic constitutional government, one that took place in the course of the "constitutional revolution" of 1905-07. At that time, a coalition of secular intellectuals, enlightened Shi‘a clergy, bazaar merchants, the rudiments of a working class, and even some members of the landed gentry came together to topple the "oriental despotism" of the Qajar kings and replace it with a monarchy whose power was limited by a constitution (mashruteh).
Among openDemocracy's articles about Iran:
Ardashir Tehrani, "Iran's presidential coup" (26 June 2005)
Fred Halliday, "Iran's revolutionary spasm" (30 June 2005)
Trita Parsi, "The Iran-Israel cold war" (28 October 2005)
Nayereh Tohidi, "Iran: regionalism, ethnicity and democracy" (28 June 2006)
Hooshang Amirahmadi, "Iran and the international community: roots of perpetual crisis" (24 November 2006)
Kamin Mohammadi, "Voices from Tehran" (31 January 2007)
Fred Halliday,
"The matter with Iran" (1 March 2007)
Anoush Ehteshami, "Iran and the United States: back from the brink" (16 March 2007)
Rasool Nafisi, "Iran's cultural prison" (17 May 2007)
Nasrin Alavi, "The Iran paradox" (11 October 2007)
Omid Memarian, "Iran: prepared for the worst" (30 October 2007)
Sanam Vakil,
"Iran's political shadow war" (16 July 2008)
Nasrin Alavi,
"Iran: after the dawn"
(2 February 2009)
Indeed, the new constitution emulated one of the European models of a liberal-democratic polity - one that allowed for elections and separation of powers, yet had a monarch as the head of the state. In those years, the most ideologically cohesive and powerful opposition to this new democratic paradigm was spearheaded by Ayatollah Nouri - a Shi‘a zealot who dismissed modern, democratically formulated constitutions as the faulty and feeble concoctions of "syphilitic men".
Instead, he suggested relying on what he considered the divine infinite wisdom of God, manifest in sharia (mashrua). So powerful were the advocates of the constitutional form of democracy that Nouri became the only ayatollah in Iran's modern history to be executed on the fatwa (order) of fellow ayatollahs. For decades, in Iran's modern political discourse, Nouri's name was synonymous with the reactionary political creed of despots who sought their legitimacy in Shi‘a sharia.
In a profoundly paradoxical twist of politics, almost seventy years later, the same coalition of forces that created the constitutional movement coalesced once again, this time to topple the Shah's authoritarian rule. Each of the social classes constituting that coalition had, by the 1970s, become stronger and more politically experienced.
Nevertheless, they chose as their leader Ayatollah Khomeini, a man who espoused an even more radical version of sharia-based politics than the one proposed by Ayatollah Nouri. While Nouri had simply talked of a government based on sharia (mashrua), Khomeini now advocated the absolute rule of a man whose essential claim to power rested in his mastery of sharia, and for whom sharia was not the end but a means of power.
In the decade before the revolution, some secular Iranian intellectuals like al-Ahmad - imbued with the false certitudes of a peculiar brand of radical anti-colonial politics - paved the way for this kind of clerical regime by "rehabilitating" Nouri and offering a revisionist view of Iranian history wherein the clergy emerged as leaders of the all-important, over-determined anti-colonial struggle. It mattered little to these intellectuals that some forms of anti-colonialism - like that of Nouri and his later cohorts - were rooted in pious xenophobia and not progressive nationalism.
The next tide
The third, temporal paradox of the Islamic revolution and the ultimate creation of clerical absolutism instead of a democratic polity relates to the fact that it took place in the 1970s, when the third and fourth waves of democracy around the world had begun.
The late 19th century witnessed the first democratic wave, and the years after the second world war and the collapse of the British empire ushered in the second wave. The gradual decline of authoritarian regimes like those of Spain and Portugal, and the dissolution of Soviet totalitarianism embodied the third and fourth waves.
Some of these large trends promised the "end of history", or at least the end of ideology, while others celebrated the claim that the age of liberal democracy was inevitably and irrevocably at hand. But Ayatollah Khomeini fought against this tide of history and erected a pseudo-totalitarian state founded on the divine edicts of God and the absolute wisdom of the faqih. This third and still lasting paradox of the Islamic revolution will also bring about its end. The century-old coalition for democracy still awaits the realisation of its dream.
(Source:Open Democracy)
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Iran and the Gaza war
Sadegh Zibakalam
The reaction to the three-week war in Gaza among Iran's rulers and state-run media was predictable. They reported graphically the extent of Palestinian suffering as a result of heavy Israeli bombardment; and they did everything they could to capitalise on this suffering as a way of demonstrating - to Arabs and indeed the world at large as well as Iranians - how right their regional political assessments had been all along. But the fury they unleashed at the leading Arab regimes, particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, was unprecedented. In fact, the regime's attacks on those Arab regimes were on occasion far more severe than those on Israel itself.Sadegh Zibakalam is professor of Iranian studies at Tehran University. This article, with slight editorial variations, was published in bitterlemons.org
Among openDemocracy's articles on the Gaza conflict of 2008-09:
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: hope after attack" (1 January 2009)
Ghassan Khatib, "Gaza: outlines of an endgame" (6 January 2009)
Avi Shlaim, "Israel and Gaza: rhetoric and reality" (7 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the Israel-United States connection" (7 January 2009)
Tarek Osman, "Egypt's dilemma: Gaza and beyond" (12 January 2009)
Mary Robinson, "A crisis of dignity in Gaza" (13 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the wider war" (13 January 2009)
Menachem Kellner, "Israel's Gaza war: five asymmetries" (14 January 2009)
Khaled Hroub, "Hamas after the Gaza war" (15 January 2009)
Prince Hassan of Jordan, "The failure of force: an alternative option" (16 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "After Gaza: Israel's last chance" (17 January 2009)
Martin Shaw, "Israel's politics of war" (19 January 2009)
Conor Gearty, "Israel, Gaza and international law" (21 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the war after the war" (22 January 2009)
A polemical wave
This official response was reflected on the streets and in public gatherings. Pro-government students and basiji militants staged several raucous protests in front of the Saudi embassy, demanding that diplomatic relations with Riyadh be severed; they also assembled outside the building that houses the Egyptian interests section in Tehran. Two of the radical Tehran imams with close ties to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even accused Cairo and Riyadh during their Friday sermons of collusion with the Israelis (while expressing the hope that such suspicions were incorrect).
One of these imams, Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Khatami, stated that the Egyptian regime had permitted Israeli jet-fighters to use Egyptian airspace to bomb Gaza. He also charged the Egyptian intelligence agencies with giving the Israelis secret information about the whereabouts of Hamas fighters, their ammunition-depots and some rocket-launching sites.
Iranian media outlets also voiced anger at the Arab regimes' response to the Israeli attack on Gaza. Some pro-government student groups, in a gesture of protest against Saudi Arabia, refused to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina they had won; they declared that they would travel instead to the Iraqi holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Iranian leaders' bitterly critical language directed against Arab leaders contrasted with the respect and praise they showered on Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez and the leader of another of Latin America's radical regimes, Bolivia (Evo Morales), who severed diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv during the war; this served to demonstrate Ahmadinejad's wise and prudent strategy of expanding ties with ideological soulmates in the region.
A political opening
The Islamic government also used the war in Gaza as an opportunity to settle accounts with some of its domestic opponents. For example, the government agency responsible for monitoring press conduct immediately closed down a pro-reformist newspaper that printed a statement from the student movement Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat blaming Hamas for firing missiles into Israel as well as Israel for its own assault on Gaza. This was even though the paper's editorial board apologised and stated that it did not share the student organisation's view.
The political intent of the agency's action was obvious in the way that the same statement was printed by pro-government newspapers without any punishment - for their motive was interpreted as exposing to the public "the pro-Zionist nature of the reformist student movement". The government's line was that all the freedom-loving people in the world, even non-Muslims, were condemning the Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people in Gaza; whereas "the so-called reformist students in Iran were ashamedly condoning the Zionist aggression."
The Israeli attack on Gaza was therefore bad news for human rights in Iran. Iranian leaders and state media repeatedly alleged that all those who had regularly criticised human-rights violations in Iran were today closing their eyes to the Zionists' crimes in Gaza.
The charge of hypocrisy was extended to these figures' alleged western friends; a leading hardline newspaper argued that the war demonstrated yet again the cynicism of the west's claims regarding human rights. Another leading militant clergyman close to Ahmadinejad - speaking on behalf of hundreds of students who had organised a mass sit-in at Tehran's Mehrabad airport demanding to go to Gaza to fight alongside Hamas - stated that George W Bush's understanding of justice and democracy encompassed only white westerners; Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians were in his eyes insufficiently human to qualify for those values.
A different view
But this deluge of rhetoric notwithstanding, the Islamic regime didn't have it all its own way on Gaza. In the midst of the war, another leading newspaper published an article by a well-known Iranian academic that posed two serious questions.
First, why was it that in many Muslim countries tens and even hundreds of thousands of protestors had come out in support of the Palestinians, whereas the number in Iran (including in the capital) was just a few hundred or at most a couple of thousand?
Second, had Iran's diplomacy toward the Arab states and its neighbours been all that wise? The war on Gaza, the writer suggested, can be seen as proving yet again the failure of Iran's foreign policy toward Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egypt is a key player in the middle east, whether Iran likes it or not; the war on Gaza vividly demonstrates that by severing relations with Cairo, Iranian leaders had hobbled their capacity to play an indispensable role in the Arab-Israel dispute.
(Source:Open Democracy)
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Russian eye on the Chinese
Tatiana Shcherbina, 6 - 02 - 2009
The poet Tatyana Shcherbina, on holiday in China, finds the Chinese weird. But she reflects that they share a lot with the Russians: it takes socialism or totalitarianism to stop them fighting and stealing
It's the Chinese and the Russians that take their holidays on the island of Hainan- no one else. The terror of finding yourself in an impenetrable world of characters and language where you can't understand a sound gives way to a terror of foreign Russian things. Everywhere you go the menus are in Russian, shop signs are in Russian, sometimes only in Russian, without a single Chinese sign; the hotels buzz with Russian-speaking guides. In the city of Sanya, the local centre, if the Chinese know any foreign words, then they know them in Russian, but the pronunciation, writing and script are all Chinese. Yes, even the script - always the same specific one with a Chinese accent. What is written is comprehensible, but it is also clear that the writers didn't understand what they were writing. Words break off in the middle or are run together, and the letters "r" and "l" are mutually interchangeable in both speech and writing. Some of the guides who have studied in Russian pronounce this intermediary sound simply as "l", while others get mixed up: they say "kulitsa" (kuritsa, chicken, a word that is frequently encountered on menus), or "khorodno" (kholodno, cold). "R" is on the whole a mysterious letter. Different peoples pronounce it differently. Arabs and Russians are usually unable to master the French guttural r, while Russian children often take a long time to say the Russian "r" correctly.
In the hotel park by a small pool of the Jacuzzi type there is a sign advertising ‘healing fish'. When you take a closer look, you see that there are indeed numerous small fish swimming in the pool. These are no ordinary fish - they eat people, and that's why people come here. You lie down and the fish eat the dead layer of skin off you, starting with your heels. If you lie there for two hours, your heels will be as smooth as a baby's.
The Chinese attitude to nature is different from the Europeans'. We are disgusted by spiders and don't look death (a viper, for instance) in the eye, but the Chinese accept all challenges. The children of the Miao people, the native inhabitants of the island of Hainan, like to play with snakes: they put the snake in their nostrils and pull it out of their mouths. Adult Miao people have invented an antidote to the bite of the most poisonous snake in the world - the royal cobra. I was given a demonstration: a girl rubbed antidote on her arm, then took a cobra out of the terrarium and let it bite her. Of course, this may be just an "anti-snake ointment": a cobra won't bite a spot that has been rubbed with antidote. In China you never know: everything is a fake and a forgery. When someone tries to sell you something (and they try to sell you everything - from extract of shark fat to medicinal tea or a infusion of snake poison), they will praise the article in identical terms, assuring you that it will cure arthritis, cholesterol, high blood pressure, cirrhosis of the liver, cancer and heart attacks.
In the past, the island of Hainan was a prison for the whole of China, like Siberia for us. But unlike Siberia, this prison is in the south. Until recently there was nothing here but jungles, the tribes of the Miao and Li peoples and the South China Sea. The island teemed with snakes, mosquitoes and wild monkeys, but they have all vanished. Some were eaten, others were packed off to the circus, and yet others were used to make infusions, ointments and powders to cure all ailments. And to lose weight, of course. The Miao and Li tribes also went into business: they had a folklore village built for them, where they show off their skills, and themselves. Girls are prepared to give themselves to any tourist. Not for real, of course, only pretend, as a way to demonstrate their traditional way of life. When a Li girl turns 13, her parents build a separate house next to their own, where she can receive young men. The most enviable bride is a pregnant one. It doesn't matter who the father is, the main thing is that there are children. If the bride is not pregnant, it may turn out that she or her future husband are infertile, and divorce is forbidden. As soon as a girl marries, her face and body is thickly covered in black tattoos, to disfigure her. No one will be interested in her anymore, and her husband has seen her in her former state, which is enough to imprint her "untarnished" image in his memory for the rest of his days.
Virginity, however, is also valued, but for quite different reasons: only undefiled maidens aged between 13 and 16 can gather pu-er tea that grows on the Five Fingers mountain. This expensive tea (which, naturally, cures all illnesses) is sold at a tea factory for 10 times more than in the supermarkets. "Why?" I asked. "Because the tea in the supermarkets is fake". "Why is it fake?" "So poor people can buy it too." It's different tea, but that doesn't matter - people buy it for the name. Although if a person whose rank means he should give his guests expensive tea, gives them the cheap tea, there will be some discomfiture. The Chinese take the same attitude to tea as the French do to wine. But with wine, everything is written on the label, while the Chinese are guided by the price. How do real brands differ from the fake western brands, which the Chinese manufacture in enormous quantities and Russian tourists fill their suitcases with? Price. The Chinese don't see the real difference in quality, just as they don't hear the sound "r". For them, any old thing will do.
Hainan has been built up rapidly over the last decade: they have a Capitol building just like the other one, but smaller. They have 19th century style European mansions, slums, and Stalinist gothic - all mixed up together and all hung with enormous multicoloured characters that light up at night. It all looks rather garish to me. The Chinese like everything to be bright, multicoloured, lit up and shining with gold. In Thailand and Vietnam, unlike China, there are lots of slums, and a great deal of poverty (although it's a happy, non-oppressive sort of poverty). Where they choose to make an effort, however, things are done with taste. However, I haven't been to mainland China, so I can't judge.
On Hainan, the restaurants are like train stations - large and uncomfortable. I was disappointed by Chinese food, of which I am quite a fan. It's not like Chinese cooking in Europe, there is no cuisine here as such: just a heap of prawns, a lump of meat and a dish of rice. I went to the two most expensive restaurants on Hainan and to some very cheap restaurants. I preferred the cheap ones. At least the portions are large there, whereas I left the expensive restaurants hungry, and the imitation of gastronomic dishes - with a sprig of parsley and preserves - were a waste of effort. At the expensive restaurants I earned the tips myself: I cleared away the dirty dishes, poured the tea and went to look for the menu to order dessert. The guides all said: "It's the south, what can you do? Things are different in the north."
The guides are all from the north, from Harbin. It was they who took us to the incredibly expensive restaurants. They shrugged their shoulders and said that if this was the way things were in the expensive restaurants, then we could imagine what the cheap ones were like. This was not true, but after three days you get used to the fact that everyone is trying to rip you off. Everything on the island is more expensive than in Vietnam and Thailand, with prices for "Chinese things", which are the symbol of shoddy goods, hiked quite high. In one of the expensive restaurants I found myself in the company of two tourists from Yakutia and an elderly woman who was the director of an institute in Khabarovsk. All the Chinese guides study under an exchange programme in her institute. The Russians who go to China, according to the director, try to stay there any way they can: the standard of living in Harbin is much higher. "China's right next door, and Moscow's far away. Now the Chinese are building a new city right on the border, and Khabarovsk residents dream of moving there". Half the population of Khabarovsk is Chinese and they are gradually integrating with the locals. The Chinese are conquering the territory, but with their bodies rather than with tanks. According to the director, girls in the Far East dream of marrying Chinese men. They are good husbands, and hard workers.
Compared with Russians, the Chinese are indeed very industrious, but it's the Japanese that are the model of hard workers for them. Japan is the only country that they hate and respect at the same time for its hard-working population. Though hard-working is not the right word. I saw a car in Sanya: it was the copy of a Nissan Note, but with Chinese insignia and I'm sure that it hadn't been manufactured under licence. It's the same with everything: the Chinese can reproduce the appearance of something and imitate it, but are quite incapable of inventing or developing anything themselves, and manufacturing is always sloppy. They can't tell the difference, just like the letter „r", and that's fine for them. It's very like Russia, where the level of sloppiness is even lower.
The Chinese consider the Koreans to be their brothers, both from South and North Korea, („what's wrong with Juche?"). I was able to get them to admit what they thought about the Russians. „Russians are noisy, they talk loudly," said the guide who was the best at pronouncing the letter „r". (I would say the same thing about the Chinese. In Thailand, for example, they are easily identifiable because they are noisy and pushy). "Russians are mean, they like to fight and to kill". It's hard to disagree. Russians are either sacrificed by their fierce Tsars, or wipe each other off the face of the earth.
Yura from Mirny in Yakutia who has a small business and works at Alrosa says: „In Russia the officials are all-powerful and unpunished and corruption has reached such a level that bribes form the main part of every price. The mayoral elections are also corrupt - we elected someone that the bosses didn't want, and the results were faked the next day, quite shamelessly. You can't get to the bottom of it either. We did have one seeker after truth - he had drugs planted on him and was thrown in prison. No one else is stupid enough to try." Living in Russia is not the same as living in Moscow. In order to travel abroad, you need to get to the capital, apply for a visa, and then stay somewhere while you're waiting. This is why residents of Yakutia who can afford to travel only go to countries where they don't need a visa. But it costs them three times as much as the Muscovites.
Socialism and totalitarianism, I thought to myself on the island of Hainan, are a punishment for bad nations. People who are incapable of self-organisation or self-control, and lack any stimulus to improve themselves. These systems stop them from constantly fighting and stealing everything, so they at least get something done. "Socialism is accountability and control" - the formula went, but that is not the point. In France regulation is 100 times stricter than it is in China, but the French have an inborn idea of perfection (and hence the taste, beauty, elegance and creative energy that gave the world vaccinations, photography, cinema and fashion). For the Chinese this concept wore very thin at some point, because they rejected modernisation.
Of course they did: China is the home of ceremony, patriarchy and martial arts. You can still feel this in every Chinese person. The smiles of charming girls mask a harshness, as if they were all masters of Kung Fu and Wu Shu. When they talk their hands don't fly through the air, they chop it as if they were writing characters. China, like Russia, proved powerless in the face of the qualitative leap required by the 20th century. Or rather, Russia made its leap - into space, but the population remained a "mass". And Russia got bogged down in the mass, while China began preparing for its leap later, and is now overtaking Russia. In China all the best things are state-owned, while private business is all rather shady. Perhaps the only private business is making fake shell jewellery and selling mangos on the street - this sort of private business also existed in Soviet seaside towns. There are no shells or stones on the beach - as soon as the sea washes anything up, the Chinese take it: it may come in useful. This is the main power of the Chinese: the ability to turn everything to their advantage. From rattlesnakes to the financial crisis: there is no crisis in China, they have never played at agreeing prices with the rest of the world, so they can steal other brands and technology unpunished. The Yuan is strengthening everyday against international currencies. Perhaps the Russians and the Chinese really will become brothers forever.
(Source:Open Democracy)
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