Iran's Pioneering Ways
by Amir Taheri
Wall Street Journal
November 18, 2002

While Iraq and Afghanistan dominate the headlines in the West, it is in a country located between those two that the real duel between Islamism and democracy is being fought. The first Muslim nation in modern times to experiment with theocratic rule, Iranis moving towards what observers see as "pre-revolutionary effervescence."

For the past 10 days thousands of students have been holding daily meetings to denounce the regime and call for a separation of mosque and state. The movement began in one of Tehran University's 34 faculties and schools but soon spread to almost half the university. By last weekend there were protest gatherings in other universities including those in Mashahd, Isfahan and Tabriz, the nation's three largest cities after Tehran.

The protests were triggered by the decision of a clerical court last month to sentence to death by hanging Hashem Aghajari, a history teacher in Hamadan, west of Tehran. The charges were "blasphemy." Mr. Aghajari had told his students that since "they were not monkeys" they should not imitate the religious leaders without question. "In all matters, especially in religion, your reason is a better tool of discernment than all the sayings of prophets and clerics," Mr. Aghajari had said.

Inspired by the student protest some workers have also staged symbolic strikes affecting factories in the industrial cities of Alborz, Arak and Asfrayen. At the Bidboland gas works in the town of Aghajari, southwest of Tehran, workers stopped work to express support for the students last Thursday.

Last Friday's traditional prayer gathering, held on the campus of Tehran University, illustrated the Khomeinist regime's growing isolation. Faced with a student boycott, the organizers had to bus in hundreds of professional street fighters, known as "Ansar Hezb-Allah" (Companions of the Party of Allah) to act as extras in a bizarre show watched over by heavily armed militia.

The real students held their own Friday prayer gathering half a mile from there in the courtyard of the Faculty of Science. "We cannot pray alongside those who oppress the people," said Akbar Atri, a student leader in a telephone conversation after the prayers.

This is not the first time that students raise the banner of revolt against the mullahs. On previous occasions in 1998 and 2000 the mullahs were able to contain the movement through a mixture of brutality and concessions. This time things may turn out differently. The reason is that the current protest is clearly aimed at overthrowing the regime. The students are no longer calling for "estahaleh" (internal evolution) as promised by President Muhammad Khatami. They are calling for a referendum to abolish the position of "Supreme Guide," to separate mosque from state, and to establish a democratic system based on multiparty elections. The non-elected position of Supreme Guide, presently held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is the highest in Iran.

Mr. Khatami and his vague promises of reform, which were never spelled out, are no longer enough to ease the tension. Addressing one protest meeting in Tehran last Wednesday one of the student leaders, Saeed Habibi, summed up the protesters demands like this: "We want a referendum so that political power which belongs to the people can revert to the people."

He then addressed "Supreme Guide" Khamenehi in these terms: "Mr. Khamenehi! There is only one kind of democracy, the kind that represents the will of a free people. The adjective Islamic cancels the very concept of democracy."

Now, how should we interpret these events? For any regime to be overthrown several conditions must exist simultaneously. Some are already present, at least in part, in the Iranian context.

The fist is that the regime must lose its legitimacy. This is already clearly the case in Iran. The regime lost its initial revolutionary legitimacy by crushing most of the other forces that had coalesced to overthrow the Shah, and by establishing a narrow based theocracy. But it has also lost its religious legitimacy by persecuting many leading religious leaders. It may sound paradoxical but mullahs form the largest single group of political prisoners in Irantoday. The three most senior grand ayatollahs of Shiism in Iranare currently under house arrest.

What we see in Irantoday is a regime dominated by junior mullahs and their non-clerical allies, often merchants from the bazaars, on the basis of a Third Worldist ideology presented in an Islamist vocabulary. The next condition for the overthrow of a regime is that a substantial section of its original constituency must break with it.

This is also happening in Iran. At least a third of the members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament) have signalled support for constitutional reform to separate mosque from state. The same is true of at least five members of the Khatami Cabinet and thousands of technocrats who have served the regime over the years. Two Majlis members have already resigned in protest against the regime. At least 40 others (out of a total of 290) have threatened to do the same. A big walkout could paralyze the Majlis altogether.

The regime has lost most of its supporters in the intelligentsia. Today, not a single well-known writer, poet, filmmaker or other cultural figure can be found in the Khomeinist camp.

The third condition that makes a regime "overthrowable" is that it loses the support of at least part of the coercive forces at its disposal. Again this is happening in Iran.

The regular army, which the Khomeinists never trusted, will certainly not turn its guns against the people in order to preserve the present bankrupt system. Even the Revolutionary Guard, created by Khomeini to counter-balance the army, can no longer be trusted.

Last week a senior commander was dismissed after he made it clear he would not shoot unarmed protestors. Some 30 junior commanders have been moved to "less sensitive" positions in the remoter provinces. It is not at all certain that the regime would be able to count on the loyalty of all the guard units in a major confrontation with the people. Finally, overthrow becomes possible when one more condition is met. This is the emergence of an alternative leadership that begins by exercising moral authority and, then, develops into a government-in-waiting.

This last condition is not yet present in Iran. But some of the elements that might form it are identifiable. These include a number of clerics who have broken with the regime and fought it in the name of democracy. To these will be added scores of technocrats, members of parliament, journalists, university teachers and students, business managers, and trade union leaders.

There is also the expatriate Iranian community, believed to number more than four million, that is beginning to mobilize in support of regime change in Iran.

For at least the past three centuries only three countries have mattered as trendsetters in Islam: Iran, Turkey and Egypt. Iranpioneered the neo-Islamist movement in the late 1970s and seems to be the first Muslim nation to emerge from it disillusioned, and hoping to build a democratic system. The coming change in Irancould directly impact developments throughout the Muslim world for a generation.

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