Iran

Fourth Lecture delivered at Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West,” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

No consideration of Islam and modern politics would be complete without attention to Iran and its regime, called by its founders an “Islamic republic.” It is more accurately described as an Islamic aristocracy or Islamic oligarchy, with an extremely powerful Islamic executive.

Larger than all the Western European countries combined, Iran’s population of some 78 million dwarfs that of its Arab rivals, including Saudi Arabia (30 million) and Iraq (32 million, if it survives as one country). Neighboring Afghanistan has 30 million. Iran is a natural fortress, rather like a giant Salt Lake City, with mountain ranges on all sides except along the border with Iraq, which accounts for the many wars fought in that area, and also for the Shi’ism of the population there. Whether they have called themselves Iranians or Persians, rulers have always wanted to dominate that section of what is now Iraq.

The population lives not in the interior, which consists mostly of uninhabitable marshes, but in those natural ramparts, the mountains. Iran has been conquered only once, and it took the Mongols to do it. Iran is fundamentally a land power, but the navy it has built wields disproportionate strength because Iran sits next to a key geopolitical and geo-economic chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz.

Economically, despite its substantial oil reserves, Iran is a poor country per capita because it lacks refining capacity. The last shah, Reza Pahlavi, cultivated Western oil refining firms, but the 1979 revolution detested such influences, and despised the kind of deal the enemy Saudis had worked out in the 1930s. As a result, the Islamic Republic has less money with which to pacify the many ethno-religious groups that live in the country, which is only about 55-to-60 percent Persian, and includes many Sunnis and even some non-Muslim sects, including Zoroastrians.

As a result, Iran’s rulers worry not about invasion but about subversion, about foreigners who stir up restive minorities. To guard against this, they deploy strict religious controls, a powerful security apparatus, intermediate-range missiles, and, perhaps some day, nuclear warheads. The United States being the only formidable foreign threat at this time, their policy aims at getting the Americans out of the Middle East.

It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the sons of the Iranian royal and aristocratic families began attending to universities in Europe—almost always in Paris, which at the time laid claim to intellectual preeminence among the cities of the West. The political liberalism they brought back to their home country was perforce French republicanism of the sort seen in the Third Republic, not for example the republicanism of Britain or the United States. French republicanism had a strong anti-clerical and indeed anti-religious edge. (To put it another way, Anglo-American liberalism was Lockean; French liberalism was Voltairean, with a dash of Rousseau for piquancy). Young Persians often returned to their country thinking of Islam the way French intellectuals thought about the Catholic Church. Although some Islamic clerics attempted to integrate European liberalism with Islam (as had some French Catholics, prior to the French Revolution), most recognized an enemy when they saw one.

What interested the reigning monarch, Nasir al Din, was Western technology—specifically, military technology. The features of the modern West that made technological progress possible—property law, experimental science—did not seem very interesting to him. In an attempt to accelerate his country’s modernization, the Shah sold rights to minerals, railway lines, and banking to Europeans. Not only the clerics opposed this, but also the merchants, who wanted economic protection, and secularized young intellectuals, who had adopted the European ideology of nationalism.

This set up the factions seen in Iran to this day. Clerics opposed foreign modernism as a new form of infidelism. Overmatched by Western capital, merchants opposed modernism for business reasons. Secular intellectuals opposed one piece of the modern project—international capitalism—in the name of another piece of it—politically liberal nationalism. These groups could unite both against foreigners and the shah. But if they won, they could not stay united, having fundamental, principled disagreements with one another. Of the three groups, only the clerics had the mass of peasants on their side, and in the long run that proved decisive.

The first revolution on these terms came between 1905 and 1911, at the same time the Ottoman Empire faced similar convulsions. That is, both Sunni Islam and Shia Islam suffered the same sort of crisis at the same time. But in Iran, as we’ll see, no one of the stature of Mustafa Kemal would emerge.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 saw the establishment of a parliament or majlis. This represented a victory for the secular intellectuals. But they had no base of support among the Iranian people as a whole, who continued to follow the clerics. Furthermore, like so many French intellectuals of the 1790s, the Iranian secularists had more experience in writing and speaking than they had in governing. Thus the same situation that has prevailed in many Muslim countries in this century prevailed then: secular liberals supported republicanism, but the anti-liberal clerics commanded more votes. In Iran’s case, however, the clergy itself was factionalized between apolitical quietists called “Twelvers,” who told their followers to avoid politics and wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam, and the followers of the Ayatollah Nuri, who rejected constitutional republicanism and advocated a regime based on Shar’ia.

The British and Russian empires backed the accession of a new shah, Muhammad Ali, who came to power in 1908. In response to the coup, the clerics realigned themselves with the Constitutionalists (as the republicans were called), making the Europeans, ever calculating the balance of forces within the country desert the shah and back the Constitutionalists. Muhammad Ali fled and the parliament chose his twelve-year-old son to reign as a figurehead. This republican regime lasted until 1911, wracked immediately by the same factionalism which had contributed to the ruin of the previous republican regime. Now the British and the Russians tilted toward the monarchy. Unlike most of the other countries in the Middle East, Iranians were never conquered by European empires, but they were whipsawed by them.

Iran endured the First World War in the resulting condition of political weakness and confusion. Oil had been discovered in some of its provinces, but British oil interests simply bypassed the central government, such as it was, to cut deals for drilling rights with local tribes. Needless to say, little in the way of revenues from oil got as far as Tehran. By 1921, however, the Soviet Union was stirring the Iranian pot. The Bolshevik regime declared the Soviet Republic of Gilan on the Iranian side of the Caspian Sea. The British sought to drive them out by demanding control of a nearby division of the Iranian army. But an ambitious mid-lever named Reza Khan acted before the shah could agree, marching his troops toward Tehran and extracting the shah’s blessing for command of the division. He then turned around, crushed the Gilan Bolsheviks and went on to defeat rebellions in Azerbaijan and Khorasan, Iran’s richest provinces. He finally brought the rebellious Kurds to heel. By 1923 he had reunited all but one sheikdom in Iran.

Reza Khan briefly considered imitating Mustafa Kemal’s republican founding, but preferred monarchy. He also listened to the clerics, who called him to Qom and explained forcefully that they would have no part of republicanism. They offered a deal. They would back Reza Khan as the new shah in exchange for his rejection of republicanism and his endorsement of Shiism. This was essentially a Shi’a version of the alliance between the Wahhabis and the House of Saud. Reza Khan agreed, and became the new shah in 1925.

With this, secular nationalism in Iran passed from republicanism to monarchy, as Reza Khan gave lip service to Islam while embarking on a campaign of enforced modernization. In his first ten years he organized a standing army of 100,000 and a 90,000-strong modern bureaucracy. He attacked the ancient social structures of the tribes by conscripting the youths into his army and relocating their chiefs to Tehran. Whole tribes were resettled, often on lands that could not be cultivated, resulting in mass deaths. As for the aristocrats, Reza Khan (now Reza Shah) stripped them of lands and titles, while redistributing their lands not to the peasants but, in large measure, to himself. He renamed himself ‘Pahlavi’ (which means ‘Persian’), intending to found a new royal dynasty drawing its authority from nationalism and, he hoped, clerical compliance.

Attempting to overcome and co-opt clerical authority, he harkened to the glories of ancient Persia. Islam, he rightly proclaimed, had come not from the Persians but from the Arabs, Indeed, the term ‘Persian’ itself had been imposed upon the Iranians by the Greeks, and so the country should be renamed ‘Iran,’ a move he made in 1935, when he was allied with Nazi Germany. Iconography recalling Zorastrianism and Cyrus the Great began to appear throughout the country, but of course entirely at the service of modernization. He required every mullah to serve two years active duty in the national army, outlawed the veil, and extended secular education to women because “one-half of the country’s working force has been idle.” He attempted to make Shiite Islam a civil religion by putting the clerics on the state payroll and claiming most of the income of the shrines for the state. The clerics took care to maintain their financial support outside the state grid, retaining a degree of independence that proved crucial to their survival and, eventually, their revenge.

Resisting British interest, the Shah brought technicians from Germany, Italy, France, and other Europeans countries into Iran for assistance in his various development projects. What he did not foresee was the Second World War. Britain regarded the German technicians in Iran as spies intending to sabotage British-owned oil fields and demanded that the Germans be expelled. The Shah refused. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Britain, in collaboration with its newfound Bolshevik ally, invaded Iran, deposed the shah, replaced him with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and took control of Iran’s railroad network, the key link between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf. Both powers agreed to withdraw their troops within six months of the war’s end, a commitment reaffirmed at the Tehran Conference, which included the United States as well as the British and Soviet governments. The Soviets dragged their feet, but eventually did leave in May 1946.

During the war, under the hesitant reign of the young shah, Iranian politics liberalized somewhat, with the parliament gaining some authority. The Soviets financed an Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, which organized quickly. By May Day 1946, the Tudeh could mobilize 80,000 marchers in Tehran. Like the young Persian intellectuals of the turn of the century, however, the communists’ secularism offended the clerics and therefore never sank roots in the countryside, where the clerics prevented that. In this, Iran differed from Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, where the small proletarian communist parties received indispensable support from the peasants.

Frustrated by this lack of popular support, in 1946 the Tudeh made the mistake of attempting to take a short-cut to power; they tried to assassinate the Shah. He survived, and followed up by forging an anti-communist alliance with military and clerical factions. As the United States confronted the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it moved to strengthen the shah. U. S. Army Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, earlier the head of the New Jersey State Police during the Lindbergh baby kidnapping investigation, organized a national police force in Iran, fortifying the still-shaky modern Iranian state.

But the shah faced not so much a military or policing problem as a civil/political problem. The parliament had assumed significant power during the war. Nationalistic as ever, the parliamentarians resented the continued presence of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For some years, the move to nationalize the oil companies stalled, but in March 1951 the parliament installed Mohammad Mosaddeqq as prime minister.

Mosadeqq was 69 years old, an old enemy of the Pahlavis. He had started in politics in 1914 as a provincial governor under the Qajar dynasty, and gained election to parliament in 1923. He had resigned after Reza Khan became the new shah, only returning to parliament in 1944 as a member of the National Front Party, whose platform called for the expulsion of foreigners. After becoming prime minister, Mosaddeq enforced legislation to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Unamused, the British blockaded the Persian Gulf. Additionally, as Mosaddeq had not quite grasped, Iran had no experts in either the oil extracting or oil financing businesses, which boded ill for nationalization. Nonetheless, the ensuing economic hardships only increased Mosaddeq’s popularity, and he requested emergency military powers from the shah. These the distrustful shah refused, and Mosaddeq resigned. When the new prime minister announced a return to the bargaining table with the British, nationalist, communist, and radical Muslim protestors filled the streets, prompting the shah to bring Mosaddeq back and granting him the military powers he had requested. This led to another alliance of convenience between the republics and the clerics, with the communists adding even more volatility to the mixture. Mosaddeq proceeded with the nationalization of the oil industry and also collectivized agriculture.

He then made what proved a politically fatal error. Seeking to bring the military further under his control, he fired officers who had been loyal to the shah. The disaffected officers approached the British and the Americans with plans to overthrow Mosaddeq. The United States envoy, Vernon Walters, had become increasingly out of patience with Mosaddeq, who inclined to an emotional rhetoric in public and private which played better with Iranians than it did with the business-is-business sensibilities cultivated in the American regime. Mosaddeq’s increasingly close alliance with the Tudeh Party, the possibilities of Iranian overtures to the Soviet Union, and his rash breakoff of diplomatic relations with Great Britain finally persuaded President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill to remove him in 1953.

Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s grandson, ran the CIA’s Near East and Africa division. Roosevelt directed Operation Ajax, a joint CIA-British effort to get rid of Mosaddeq. He first tried to get the shah to dismiss Mosaddeqq from office, as he was constitutionally empowered to do. The shah refused. The CIA turned to fomenting distrust between the communist and Shiite elements of Mosaddeq’s political base. Increasingly suspicious, Mosaddeq called for a national referendum to dissolve parliament, then rigged the vote to win a nearly 100% approval for the move. This accomplished little, other than to give the American- and British-funded opposition newspapers a major talking point. Communists, clerics, and merchants all abandoned the coalition. This left the communists as the single most powerful organized political faction in Iran, although the main social power remained in the hands of the clerics, headed by the Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani. Kashani turned against Mosaddeq when Mosadeqq refused to implement government under sharia law. Kashani also feared the increasing power of the Soviet-backed Tudeh Party.

He tried to persuade the shah to leave the country, and the shah responded by firing him. When Mosaddeq refused and prepared to fight, the shah (by no means the military man his father had been) got out of the country. Civil war broke out. Backed financially by the CIA and British MI6, pro-shah military forces ousted Mosadeqq in August 1953. After the shah’s return, he negotiated an agreement with foreign oil companies in 1954. The shah and the clerics agreed to implement a two-year campaign to crush the Iranian communists, and the Ayatollah Kashani’s successor, Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi, remained in alliance with the Shah until the Ayatollah’s death in 1961. For this brief period, the shah and the clerics reconstituted something of the relationship the Persian shahs and clerics had forged during the centuries of the empire.

The alliance could not survive the ayatollah’s death because the shah persisted in the Pahlavi dynasty’s decades-long modernizing project. He rested his power squarely on the military, the police, and his internal intelligence organization, SAVAK. This tendency towards institutions supportive of absolutist monarchy or even tyranny alarmed the Kennedy administration, which pressured him to implement economic and social reforms in 1963. These proved cosmetic in most cases. Called, grandly, the White Revolution (in contrast to the black garb of the clerics), the movement was abandoned after President Kennedy’s murder, when the Johnson administration turned its attentions to southeast Asia.

Nonetheless, the White Revolution had consequences. Its basic strategy was a renewal of his father’s efforts to remove the economic foundations of both the landed aristocrats and the clerics by redistributing land. It is crucial to see that the leading clerics came from the aristocratic class—that is, the shah’s move would have put the axe to both the secular and religious enemies of the monarchic regime and the modern state at the same time. Further, the shah’s plan differed from his father’s plan in being much more populist; the peasants who worked the land—some 75% of the population—would actually get the land, not the shah. At the same time, because the shah had initiated the plan, he would prevent the communists from exploiting the destruction of the country-based aristocrats, as they had done in so many places earlier in the century. If the plan had worked, it would have been another example of a major strategy of modern state-builders in Europe and elsewhere: to centralize the government, ally with ‘the many’ against ‘the few’ who stand between yourself and ‘the many.’ Then replace the old regime’s political structures by extending your own, modern-statist bureaucratic structures, military and civilian.

The clerics divided between those who preferred to remain quiet and those who did not—exactly the division seen in the 1905-1911 period. The shah did his best to widen this division in a speech at Qom, the informal capital of Iranian Shiism, claiming that only supporters of land reform were truly “our religious leaders.” By ratcheting up the pressure on the clerics who had enjoyed a considerable measure of authority in Iranian civil society, the shah pushed modernization in their faces. To use the jargon of political sociologists, he wanted to ‘cage’ them. Generally speaking, when people are ‘caged’ by the modern state they act more and more like the citizens of the ancient ‘city-states’: they have incentive to start working hard to take control of the cage. In other words, by ‘caging’ the clerics, the shah helped to turn them more decisively toward Islamism, a re-politicized Islam which would attempt to take over the modern state or, alternatively, to break it and get rid of it.

Here is where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini comes in. Born in 1902 to a middle-class family claiming descent from Mohammad, Khomeini followed the example of many of the men in his line, becoming a mullah in 1925, when Reza Khan founded his dynasty. A firm anti-modernist, he had followed both the activist Ayatollah Kashani and the quietist Ayatollah Borujerdi in the postwar years. But after Borujerdi’s death he emerged as an opponent of the regime, condemning the White Revolution as anti-Islamic. A year later, he denounced Iran’s Status of Forces Agreement with the U. S. military, which he regarded as a compromise of Iranian sovereignty. For his pains, the Ayatollah was exiled to Baghdad.

What was the substance of the Islamist political stance Khomeini developed?

Unlike many other prominent Islamists, Khomeini was a respected if controversial cleric, not a mere intellectual or political organizer. He had extensive formal training in Islamic theology, and enjoyed the authority of a learned man in a country where learning was thought to bring a man closer to God, and therefore to the highest authority. He intended to replace the modern state with something else, and he outlines what that is in his book, Islam and Revolution. There, Khomeini condemns the imperialists, notably the Americans who supported the shah. The Americans’ materialism makes them “even more satanic” than Jews. Against them stands Islam, a militant and revolutionary religion, now traduced by servile false Muslims who follow the imperialists by attempting to separate politics from religion—making the mosque into a mere church. Apostate clerics serve as mere tools of the imperialists, for whom an apolitical misreading of Islam is all-too-useful, as it renders their subjects docile. The imperialists, however, misread even their own nominal religion. Jesus could never have told His disciples to “turn the other cheek,” for example. Imperialists want people to believe such things, not prophets.

To those who fear the technological power of the imperialists, Khomeini replies, “Let them go all the way to Mars or beyond the Milky Way; they will still be deprived of true happiness, moral virtue, and spiritual advancement, and be unable to solve their social problems.” Technology itself is good, but imperialists use it only to drag civilization into “barbarism.” Barbarism results from what the West calls liberalism. “Government that do not base themselves on divine law conceive of justice only in the natural realm”—natural right. “You will find them concerned only with the prevention of disorder and not with the moral refinement of the people. Whatever a person does in his own home is of no importance, so long as he causes no disorder in the street…. Divine governments, however, set themselves the task of making man into what he should be. In his unredeemed state, man is like an animal, even worse than other animals…. And if a person were to conquer the entire globe, he would begin planning the conquest of the moon or Mars. Men’s passions and covetousness, then, are unlimited, and it was in order to limit men, to tame them, that the prophets were sent.”

Thus Khomeini sees several of the key elements of the modern project. He sees, and rejects, the modern attempt to conquer nature with a technologized science. He imputes to the conquest of nature exactly what Machiavelli and Francis Bacon had intended: the liberation of the human desire for acquisition from religious and rational restraints. He also sees and rejects the attempt to limit Machiavellianism with natural justice or natural right. To reduce government to the securing of natural rights is to give up the most important function of government, namely, to hold human souls to higher standards than those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Political liberalism forgets or denies that ‘statecraft’ must be ‘soulcraft.’

How, then, to get rid of the modern project, both its statism and the modern liberalism that seeks both to establish and limit the state the modern project established? Every Muslim should be “a walking embodiment” of the divine law. Such men will eliminate the problem of faction—the problem the American founders addressed by founding an extended, commercial republic—as they “join together like the fingers of one hand.” This unity notwithstanding, after a law is established, it is necessary also to create an “executive power”; Muslims need a leader, an Imam, because men never “become angels”—Khomeini’s language closely parallels that of Publius, here. The leader is the most perfect embodiment of the divine law, and he becomes the leader through the consensus of other clerics, who can be depended upon to recognize such moral excellence. The leader rules a constitutional government whose constitution consists (as it does in Wahhabi-Sunni Saudi Arabia) of the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad, the Hadiths. “Islamic government may be defined as the rule of divine law over men.” Its difference from all other governments is its lack of human legislators. God alone is sovereign in the Islamic Republic. In practice, this means that the clerics are the sovereigns on earth.

Insofar as all individuals in the country consent to the sharia, the problem of faction that concerns Publius and all thoughtful writers on politics simply disappears, in principle. But given the non-angelic character even of Muslims, the law needs an enforcer. Faction will not be solved the American way, by the encouragement of liberty under a government that merely secures natural rights, but by the exercise of executive power by one virtuous man, selected by a ruling body of lesser but still virtuous men. Such a selection obviates the need for a wider election, which would involve giving people the executive, the leader, they want—satisfying mere desires, rather than God.

The Imam needs no bureaucracy—no “file-keeping and paper-shuffling.” The whole modern, statist apparatus will disappear. The Imam needs only judges. “When the judicial methods of Islam were applied, the sharia judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and an inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people.” Such judges obviate the need for central bureaucracy and maintain local government without local legislation, as in the town meetings Tocqueville had admired in New England. Unlike those townships, in Muslim society the people must not rule. They are children with respect to their local judges and the nation’s Imam, who are the “trustees of the Prophet.”

Whereas the American founders defined tyranny as the consolidation of executive, legislative, and judicial power in one set of hands, and whereas Aristotle defines tyranny as monarchy in the service of the selfish interest of the monarch, Khomeini defines it as rebellion against God in the form of self-legislation, human-all-too-human legislation. The consolidation of executive and judicial power is not only in-tyrannical but just, as it gives action to law, requiring no separation of powers that would only pervert the law and excuse perverse or unlawful actions.

To oppose the tyranny of the imperialists and their puppet-shah, Khomeini writes, “We must create our own apparatus to refute whatever lies they issue.” Propagation of correct ideas and instruction “are our two most important fundamental activities,” activities which will “pave the way in society for the implementation of Islamic law and the establishment of Islamic institutions.” Muslims must sever relations with existing government agencies; refuse to cooperate with those agencies; refuse even to appear to aid them; and establish new judicial, financial, economic, cultural, and political institutions that will take over when the secular monarchy collapses. Thus Khomeini sees exactly what Gandhi had seen in India, and what Vaclav Havel would later see in Czechoslovakia: he sees that his followers can overthrow the modern state, get out from under a modern empire, by constructing their own independent, parallel set of institutions on the level of civil society, institutions that will undermine the official state offices and replace them. New rulers and new offices, animated by an Islamic rather than a modernist ethos and all developed in this time of “incubation,” will then effect regime change. Even more ambitiously, they will change the kind of political partnership which is emblematic of the modern world; they will eliminate the centralized state itself, replacing it with the Shi’ite version of the Islamic ummah or body of believers united under the sharia. The City of God will replace the City of Man.

Once established, this new regime and new political partnership will not survive if isolated and encircled by its enemies. “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world.” After the shah’s overthrow and the founding of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini exhorted Iranian youth to “defend your dignity and honor” with “the Koran in one hand and a gun in the other.” The “oppressed,” worldwide, “will inherit the earth and build the government of God.” It will do so in opposition to America, “the number one enemy of the deprived and oppressed people of the world,” a country whose actions are coordinated by “international Zionism.” “Iran,” he tells Iranians, “is a country effectively at war with America.”

In its rivalry with Iran, America will speak of the alleged virtues of democracy. But the Islamic Republic must never be a democratic republic. “To juxtapose ‘democratic’ and ‘Islam’ is an insult to Islam,” which is “superior to all forms of democracy.” At best, democracy might limit itself by respecting natural right. Khomeini insists that all persons must limit themselves by divine right, for which the only earthly source is the Koran and the sayings of Mohammad. In a larger sense, then, Khomeini is right to say that Iran is effectively at war with America—with the idea of America. He therefore calls for a return to the old empire of Islam, against the empire of modernity and, more specifically, against the American empire of liberty. The American empire of liberty is really the tyranny of Zionism and, ultimately, of Satan.

Khomeini offers a comprehensive critique of modernity, including the modern state, and of the commercial republican regime the Americans founded as an antidote to the bad features of statism. This critique parallels other Islamist critiques, but adds to them a key strategic dimension: an appeal to oppressed classes in Iran and oppressed peoples worldwide. In adopting and Islamically adapting the language of ‘Third Worldism,’ the language deployed most famously by the Marxist writer Franz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth, he spoke to the radically democratic social circumstances of modernity. He brought the authority of Islam to a young, sometimes Marxist-oriented constituency, those who had read Fanon, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the other leftist polemicists fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining their rhetoric with his own, he speaks “in the name of the God of the disinherited.” In Latin America, leftist Catholic clerics did this, too, crafting the ‘Liberation Theology’ that came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. But precisely because Khomeini needed and wanted almost nothing from Marxist doctrine itself, his Islamism easily withstood the crackup of communism in the years 1989-91. Islamism seemed the ‘last man standing’ against the empire of modern liberalism, led by the United States.

The regime Khomeini founded consists of an 88-member Assembly of Experts—initially, mullahs who backed Khomeini—empowered to select and remove the Supreme Leader or Grand Ayatollah. The Assembly also disqualifies candidates for the presidency whom it deems Islamically unfit; once elected by the people, the President’s portfolio consists of domestic policy only. The Supreme Leader may remove the President, and he also controls foreign and military policy, including the elite Revolutionary Guard and the police/intelligence services. The Parliament, consisting of 290 members serving in four-year terms introduces laws intended to supplement the Koran/Constitution. A six-member Guardian Council, appointed by the Supreme Leader, determines who may run for Parliament and governs the elections themselves. This already gave the Supreme Leader a fair amount of supremacy. When Khomeini died in 1989, his successor, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, set to work enhancing that supremacy by placing persons loyal to him throughout the bureaucracy. In this, he departed from Khomeini’s generally anti-bureaucratic inclinations, preferring to build the bureaucracy, taking care to keep it well-Islamified and subordinate to himself. The Islamic Republic remains as Islamic as ever, but it has never been a genuine republic, and is probably less so today than ever.

Now in its fourth decade after the revolution, the Islamic Republic has problems, though not regime-ending problems. Economically, it has declined since the shah’s ouster. Its per capita income is one-third since then; its oil production about two-thirds of what it was. Inflation has remained high and, with two-thirds of its population under the age of thirty, economic stagnation has resulted in high unemployment. In response, the clerical regime has announced that it will adopt the Chinese model, meaning economic growth via state-owned enterprises in exchange for continued political authority. This strategy might work. Most Iranians have returned to the political quietism they exhibited during the many Persian monarchies. It may not work as well as it has worked in China because Iran has no access to the U. S. market and offers a far less inviting picture to foreign investment. But, as the founder, the Ayatollah Khomeini, told an aid a few years before his death, the revolution is not about the price of watermelons. Its legitimacy derives from Shi’ism and nationalism, not the gross national product.

 

Further readings in original sources:

Ruhollah Khomeini: Islam and Revolution. Hamid Algar translation. Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1970.

_____. “The Prophetic Tradition of Thaqalain.” Available on the Internet.

 

Secondary readings:

Sandra Mackey: The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation. Harmondworth: Dutton, 1996.

Keddie, Nikki R.: Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

For an informative recent account of the regime, see Sanam Vakil and Hossein Rassam: “Iran’s Next Supreme Leader: The Islamic Republic After Khamenei.” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017.