FusiOrari

As all good things, our Persian journey comes to an end. We started with a tour of ancient Persia, then we stopped in Ctesiphon and Persepolis, symbols of the Arab onslaught against millenarian Persian culture. From there, we went to the hot plain of Kerbala, in order to understand why the cult of martyrdom is so widely adopted as a terrorist tactic in nowadays Middle East; we finally went back to Qom, the holy city of Shiism, to make the acquaintance of ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic. This is the last stage of our journey: we can now try to strike a balance of our experience.

ANSWERS WITHOUT QUESTIONS – Tehran, 2011. Thirty-two years have gone by since a violent revolution brought Islam to power. What is left today of all the zeal, passion and promises that mobilized an entire country? Towards what horizon is Iran moving today? In his novel Baltasar and Blimunda, Portuguese writer Josè Saramago states: “everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions”. Those people who follow a conventional cause-and-effect logic will find it hard to make sense of that strong feeling of protest that is driving young people, writers, journalists and artists to take position against the government, no matter the consequences. Iranian society is conveying a clear answer to government's harsh measures, yet this answer remains obscure to all those people and foreign governments that are not interested in understanding the causes of such a discontent. In the course of years, Iran has repeatedly been hostage of short-sighted and profit-centered policies that have contributed to build what former president Mohammad Khatami has called “a wall of mistrust”. Of course, opening should be reciprocal. Instead, Iranian rough behaviour in the days following the revolution has earned him the reputation of pariah of the international political system. In the autobiographical film Persepolis, Iranian director Marjane Satrapi, asked about her nationality, professes to be French rather than Iranian. Why in the world should a proud Iranian woman feel ashamed of her country of origin? When “being Iranian” stops to be something to be proud and becomes something to feel ashamed of, those people who are responsible of such an identity shift should start posing themselves some questions. Of course, if you think you have God by your side, probably you will not be prone to doubt and auto-criticism. At the same time, the necessity to maintain a strong position of power will not leave room for practices such as listening to citizens' voices and granting them fundamental political and civil rights. Yet, in the middle of Islamist heat subjugated to a political God, Iran has been able to give birth to enlightened men such as, for example, Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar, members of the so-called group of “religious intellectuals” or “post-islamist intellectuals”. These intellectuals, far from what official conservative religious discourse affirms, aim at offering an alternative interpretation of religious texts, call for the depoliticization of Shiite clergy, and support the democratic reform of the Islamic Republic. In their opinion, Islam and democracy are deeply interconnected: “true Islam”, in fact, contains teachings that are very close to natural rights of men, such as freedom, justice and peace.

FROM ISLAMIC GOVERNMENT TO ISLAMIC REPUBLIC – As post-islamists affirm, Khomeini was deeply conscious that Islam – though containing a series of teachings bound to govern human life “from the cradle to the grave” - does not give a clear indication of how Islamic government should be organized. Drawing on the lenghty doctrinal debate that originated in the Middle Ages, grew in Safavid Persia and reached its peak under Qajar domination, Khomeini rehabilitates the old theory of velayat-e faqih, “the guardianship of the Islamic jurist”, introducing it as the instrument to implement Islamic government on Earth. According to Khomeini's velayat-e faqih, the Islamic state should be ruled by the vali-e faqih, the Islamic jurist, who plays at the same time the roles of custodian, interpreter and executor of divine law. In Khomeini's Islamic government, differently from what happens in monarchical as well as in republican forms of government, sovereignty comes directly from God; while monarchies are ruled by the king's representatives, and republics by the people's representatives, Islamic state is ruled by God's representative on Earth, who happens to be the maximum expert of Islamic law. Anyway, Iran's troubled history through the years of Pahlavi domination that led to revolution, persuaded Khomeini to give birth to an Islamic Republic (Jomhuri-e Eslami), rather than a pure Islamic Government (Hokumat-e Eslami). The new constitution, though incorporating velayat-e faqih, provided Iran with a parallel institutional apparatus whose soverignty comes directly from the people. Despite being regarded as a Medieval theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran brings together – or better, tries to bring together – religious principles coming from Islamic tradition and secular principles coming from Western political thought. The coexistence of popular legitimacy institutions - as the Parliament and the President of the Islamic Republic - and religious legitimacy institutions - as the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council and the Expediency Discernment Council – provides a limitation to the arbitrariness of government action and grants the people a role in the government. Anyway, in such a system which comprehended a popular and a religious legitimacy, it was clear which of the two should have been given the priority. This meant the incorporation of Shariah principles in the Iranian constitution and the sacrifice of secular, republican, principles to Islamic Sharaitic law. Iranian fundamental law, in fact, clearly states that Islamic principles should be given the priority over republican values. And so it happens that the people, when called to elect a new President of the Republic, have to choose between a restricted number of candidates who have gone past the rigid selection of the Guardian Council; even the Parliament must pay attention not to formulate bills which go against Islamic principles, otherwise the legislative process will be blocked, thus paralysing the entire political life of the country.

KHOMEINISM WITHOUT KHOMEINI – During Khomeinist decade (1979-1989), the Islamic Republic has been able to store a huge capital of legitimacy, built on the dead bodies of the “enemies of the revolution”, strengthened by the attacks against U.S. Great Satan, and washed in the blood of young shahid giving their life on the Iraqi war front. In those years, Khomeini acted as glue among different political factions which were growing inside the Islamic Republican Party and as lubricant for the wheels of the complex institutional system, thus guaranteeing the functioning of the system. This does not mean that it was a fair and good system, but, at its own manner, it worked. After the ayatollah's death, in 1989, new contrasts have grown inside revolutionary élite, thus opening a difficult period for the Republic. Ali Khamenei's elevation to the rank of rahbar (Supreme Guide), notwithstanding his lack of juridical and theological requirements, has ratified the pre-eminence of politics above religion while producing a dangerous paradox: the Islamic government, that Khomeini had accepted to be an Islamic Republic, was depriving itself of the republican component, thus going back to the start, the original idea of velayat-e faqih. In this sense, the etymological analysis of the term “revolution” - from Latin revolvere, turn back - sounds like a mocking twist of fate. The explanation of the paradox lies in the fact that, lacking the necessary theological requirements to accede to the role of rahbar, Khamenei chose the political way, thus realizing that particular form of neo-patrimonialism and giving birth to an uncommon alliance between religious and military that has ended with threatening his own power. The ascent of the military to the highest ranks of the state, begun silently in the aftermath of Iran-Iraq war and come to the fore with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, has now become a dangerous double-edged sword. If it's true that there is no danger that the army, especially powerful pasdaran and basij, sides with protesting people – contrary to what happened at the time of the protest against Pahlavi regime – it is also true that the huge amount of power they accumulated in these years represents a potential threat and a destabilizing agent for the good health of the system.

THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED – The dangerous precedent set by Khamenei's blessing of Ahmadinejad's controversial re-election in 2009 has contributed to deepen the crisis of legitimacy that the Islamic Republic is currently going through. By legitimizing the electoral fraud, the Islamic Republic has reached a dangerous point of no return, while taking a further step toward the breaking-point of the delicate balance between religious and political. When Khamenei - whose primary duty is to exercise the guardianship of Islamic principles - legitimizes an electoral fraud which goes against the people's will, he implicitly affirms that the electoral fraud is part of the Islamic teachings. It is against this dangerous and instrumental deformation of Islamic principles that contemporary post-islamist thought stands out. Religious intellectuals, though remaining in the Islamic horizon, call for a reconcilement of Islamic principles – as originally listed in the Holy Quran, not as artificially recreated by Islamic government – and democratic principles. The Green Wave, the movement of protest born after Ahmadinejad re-election, legitimizes its parades at the shout of “Allah is great”, thus demonstrating that current malaise is not against the Islamic component of the government, but rather against the emargination of the republican component in the name of a distorted interpretation of Islam. So, the weak point in the Islamic Republic system is represented neither by the Islamic nor by the republican component, but by the exploitation of the former in order to emarginate the latter. Thirty years after the revolution, the popular movement of protest that Shiite clergy has been able to turn into an Islamic one, is expressing a growing discontent not against revolutionary ideals, but rather against the never fulfilled promises that brought to revolution. Today, the ultra-conservatives blame the reformists for the betrayal of revolutionary ideals; actually, those who really betrayed the revolution are those who, by shouting out “disinherited of the world, unite” made promises that have never been able, or willing, to fulfill; those who, in the name of the slogan “neither East, nor West; only Islamic Republic” closed the borders of a country born to cast its beauty over the world; again, those who, by continuously blaming an “external enemy”, ended up wearing out the entire country. By accepting to become Islamic, Iranian revolution had to come to terms with that “original sin” represented by the combination of religious and political elements; a gamble with a few winners and too many losers. By the loss of this gamble a new challenge has grown: the challenge between the military and the political wrapped in religious clothes. When militant clergy makes an alliance with the miltary imbued with revolutionary rethoric, the entire country becomes a field of battle. Resistance is in the hands of those soldiers of reason, no matter if religious or secular thinkers, whose discourse is bound to plant the seeds of those trees from which the new generations will, one day, pick the fruits of justice and freedom; written on their helmets are words of tolerance, through which they exhort and support young men and women who, by shouting out “Allah is great” while deployed on the front line in Iranian streets, lay claim to neglected freedom promises.

Read the first part: Pre-islamic identity and the encounter with shiism

Read the second part: Knocking on the mosque door

Read the third part: Fundamentally, a non-fundamentalist revolution