Should Iran Bury or Resurrect the Islamic Republic?

Should Iran Bury or Resurrect the Islamic Republic?

Daniel Brumberg on Iran’s Islamic Republic

WHAT IS an “Islamic Republic?” This question is at the root of the current conflict unfolding between the authors of Iran’s June 12 electoral coup and the widening tide of national opposition. For the opposition, the heart of the matter is whether the institutional hybrid created by the late Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies can or should survive. Can clerical and popular authority coexist? Or have the actions of Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei and Presidential “Pretender” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad irrevocably destroyed the institutions—and perhaps even the very idea—of an Islamic Republic?

The absence of former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami–along with presidential aspirants Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi—at this week’s hotly contested inauguration suggests that this fundamental question remains to be answered.

Still, it would be worth recalling that the current struggle over the relationship between mosque and state in Iran is also an elaboration of a debate that dates back to the early years of the Islamic Republic. If we are now witnessing the fullest and most voluntaristic mass expression of this debate, what now gives Iran’s popular opposition such vitality and importance–particularly from the vantage point of Iran’s hardliners—is that Iran’s reform movement emerged from within the very heart of Iran’s revolution family.

This “cracking of the state” began in the late eighties, when the Islamic left and the clerical right were submerged in a dispute that was ostensibly about economic policy, but pivoted in an implicit yet decisive way around basic questions of government and representation.

The Islamic left, led in part by then Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, hoped that something akin to Islamic socialism might emerge in the days after the revolution. Part Shi’ite Islamist, part Marxist, part existentialist, and part social democratic, they argued that Islamic ideals had to be shaped to advance an egalitarian social order that defended the mustazafeen—the “disinherited.” Led by then President (now Supreme Leader) Ali Khamanei, the clerical right, on the other hand, argued that social justice would be best protected by enhancing property rights. Defenders of Ayatollah Khomeini’s concept of clerically run government known as “velayat-e faqih” (the “Rule of the Jurist”), the leaders of the clerical right held that political, social, and economic action had to follow established religious and legal axioms—as interpreted by the faqih.

This dispute drove Ayatollah Khomeini crazy–not only because he found it difficult to choose between the rival economic logics but also because as the Supreme Leader his power derived from his capacity to maintain a balance between these competing groups. But compelled by the mounting economic and social costs of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini did eventually have take to sides, backing in 1988 the social reform legislation advocated by Mousavi and the Islamic left.

The theological position that Khomeini used to legitimate this decision opened the door to many of the political disputes that have raged since then—and that are at the root of the current conflict. Responding to a speech by Khamanei that warned that the new laws (and indeed all legislation) had to remain “within the limits of Islamic laws and principles,” Khomeini set out his now infamous fatwa of January 1988:

While it is perhaps not so surprising that Iran’s Supreme Leader elaborated this theological construction of l’interet d’etat, his statement was hobbled (perhaps intentionally) by one basic ambiguity: if government itself is a “divine injunction” that takes precedence over everything—even prayers—what constitutes government: a directly elected Majles (parliament) and/or the faqih?

IF IN the ensuing twenty or so years Iran’s leaders failed to resolve this fundamental dispute, it might be argued that the electoral coup of June 12, 2009 has settled the debate once and for all. For the authors of the coup—Supreme Leader Khamanei and President Ahmadinejad—are trying to force a more rigid one-dimensional despotism on the relatively supple system of state-managed conflict and competition that defined the Islamic Republic. Moreover, because the survival of this system depends in part on the ability of the Supreme Leader to maintain some measure of credibility as the Supreme Arbiter, Khamanei’s repudiation of this balancing role threatens to destroy a key pillar of the Republic.

In the coup’s wake, the fractious array of groups and leaders that now constitute the opposition must forge a united front around a common strategic vision. It might be argued that this vision must be totally new—untainted by the institutions and ideologies of the regime that preceded it. But because the forces behind the putsch have used such enormous coercive power (and thus are unlikely to be toppled by insurrection), and because there are many disaffected leaders within the clerical right who might be prepared to distance themselves from Ahmadinejad and his allies, the more practical strategy may be to unite around a long-term quest to selectively restore, or otherwise reinvent, some of the Islamic Republic’s republican institutions and ideologies.

This won’t be easy. Even if the regime’s repressive tactics have had the unintended–if not unsurprising–effect of widening the alliance of opposition voices, some of the opposition’s brightest lights have died under torture or are now the victims of a show trial–the likes of which would have warmed Stalin’s heart.

Moreover, the reform movement is led by activists from the Islamic left’s fractious ranks, and it is often divided over questions of strategy. Maximalists want to maintain the purity of their ranks and to pursue a more confrontational approach while accomodationists want to widen the movement to include more conservative clerical and lay political voices.

A similar debate emerged under somewhat different conditions nine years ago, in the lead up to the 2000 parliamentary elections. At the time, former President Rafsanjani—who in 1991 had supported the regime’s political purge of many leading Islamist Leftists—tried to reach a reconciliation with the reform movement. Maximalists spurned his offer, agreeing to only let Rafsanjani run last on the all-important Tehran electoral list. Humiliated, Rafsanjani retaliated by keeping his mouth shut when hardliners accelerated their campaign to muzzle reformist politicians, intellectuals, and journalists.

WHILE THE memories of these days endure, the arduous conditions under which Iran’s oppositionists are now struggling give everyone good reason to forget these past scuffles. Rafsanjani seemed to do so in his extraordinary July 17 sermon when he invoked Khomeini’s words that “without the people, there would be no Islamic system.” Demanding a return to the system of regime-managed consensus that was at the heart of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani called for the release of all political prisoners and for freedom of the press “within the limits of the law.”

While hardly revolutionary, the terms and language that Rafsanjani used have clearly signaled that Iran’s most famous pragmatist and swing-voter has cast his lot with the opposition. Although his words provoked a stinging rebuke from the Supreme Leader, other hardliners carefully amplified some of Rafsanjani’s proposals—suggesting that in the wake of June 12, long-existing cracks within the ranks of the clerical right may now be multiplying and expanding.

The opposition’s chief challenge is to reach out to these disaffected hardliners without alienating the Islamic leftists and the disillusioned populace that is still ready to take to the streets. While this is hardly a new dilemma for Iran’s veteran reformists, the anger towards the regime—and towards the Supreme Leader in particular—runs so deep that even conservative Iranians who once believed in Khamanei are now wondering whether clerical rule can (or should) coexist with popular governance. Some of the disillusioned imagine the day when a new faqih will play the role of guide and arbiter rather than that of enforcer and partisan.

Whether that day will come is anybody’s guess. But for the foreseeable future, the best option for Iran’s opposition leaders may be to focus their energies on reviving and reshaping those elected institutions that have the means (and constitutional duty) to speak on behalf of the populace. These institutions include the parliament itself, and the 86-member “Council of Experts,” a popularly elected body of clerics that has the constitutional duty to select (and if need be, remove) the Supreme Leader. That body is chaired by none other than Rafsanjani.

A long term “war of position”—to use Antonio Gramsci’s term—fought in the trenches of existing institutions will require patience and more than a little cunning. Such a complex and unromantic project is unlikely to command the interest of CNN or the front pages of the New York Times. But it may nevertheless provide the most suitable strategy for sustaining the Iranian struggle for justice and freedom in the coming decade.

Daniel Brumberg is Co-Director of the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown University, and Acting Director of the Muslim World Initiative at the United States Institute of Peace. He is the author of Reinventing Khomeini, the Struggle for Reform in Iran (University of Chicago Press). Photo: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (www.sajed.ir / Wikimedia Commons).