What we are witnessing right now in
the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political
battle for the future of the Iranian
state. But closely linked to this
political fight is also an old
theological dispute about the nature of
Shiism--a dispute that has been roiling
Iran
for more than a century.
Shiism, like most religions, is no
stranger to heated schisms. Shia and
Sunnis split over the question of
whether Muhammad had designated his
son-in-law, Ali, as his successor (Shia
believed he had). Some Shia, called
Alawites, believe the only divinely
designated successor was Ali, while
another group, Zaydis, believe there
were four imams. A large, intellectually
vibrant third group is known as the
Ismailis because it believes the line of
imams ended with the seventh, Ismail.
And the largest Shia sect is called the
Ithna Ashari--or the Twelvers. Dominant
in Iran, they believe in twelve imams
and posit that the last imam went into
hiding some 1,100 years ago. His return,
bloody and vengeful, will mark the
redemptive dawn of the age of justice.
It is within this branch that a
further split took place beginning in
the late nineteenth century--the moment
when the Iranian elite began to confront
the challenge of modernity. Ideas like
rationalism, individualism,
constitutionalism, rule of law,
equality, democracy, secularism,
privacy, and separation of powers began
to find currency in Iran's political discourse. By 1905,
these ideas, prevalent primarily among
the intelligentsia, led to the
Constitutional Revolution--the first of
its kind in the Muslim world. The Shia
clergy were faced with a historic
challenge not unlike what the Catholic
Church experienced with the advent of
the Renaissance. How two rival
ayatollahs reacted to that challenge
would divide Iranian Shiism--and lay the
groundwork for what is taking place
today.
Over the years, many
scholars, both in Iran and the
West, have argued over the years that
Shiism shares less with Islam than with
pre-Islamic Persian ideas. They point to
the fact that, while Iran became
Muslim in the seventh century, it
refused to accept Arabic as its
language. Islam won the battle, these
historians argue, but pre-Islamic ways
and values won the war by surviving in a
Shia veneer. As an example, they cite
the Zoroastrian belief in messianic
eschatology. The messianic role of the
twelfth imam, they say, is essentially a
Muslim version of the same Zoroastrian
idea. Shiism, according to this view, is
really a thinly disguised form of
Iranian nationalism. And this helps
explain why so much of Iran's political debate has over the
years played out in the realm of
theology.
The roots of
Iran's
current divide to a great extent lie at
the turn of the century, when the
country's ayatollahs essentially split
into two camps on questions of religion
and politics. The first was led by
Ayatollah Na'ini, an advocate of what is
called the "Quietist"
school
of Shiism--today
best exemplified in the character and
behavior of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq. According to Na'ini, true
"Islamic government" could only be
established when the twelfth imam
returned. Such a government would be the
government of God on earth: Its words,
deeds, laws, and courts would be
absolute and could tolerate no errors.
But humans, Na'ini said, were fallible
and thus ill-fitted to the sacred task
of establishing God's government. As the
pious await the return of the infallible
twelfth imam, they must in the interim
search for the best form of government.
And the form most befitting this period,
Na'ini argued, was constitutional
democracy. The role of ayatollahs under
this arrangement would be to "advise"
the rulers and ensure that laws inimical
to sharia were not implemented.
But it would not be to rule the country
themselves.
Opposing Na'ini was an ayatollah
named Nuri. He dismissed democracy and
the rule of law as inferior alternatives
to the divine, eternal, atemporal,
nonerrant wisdom embodied in the Koran
and sharia. As Ayatollah
Khomeini would declare more than once,
his own ideas were nothing but an
incarnation of Nuri's arguments. But for
the moment, at least, those ideas were
on the defensive. It would be decades
before they would reemerge to dominate
Iranian politics.
Na'ini's paradigm, and the idea that
Shiism must reinvent itself, continued
to beget newer and more radical
interpretations. During the Reza Shah
period (1925-1941), as the clergy came
under direct pressure from a forced
secularism modeled on Ataturk's
Turkey,
a number of ideas critical of
traditional Shiism began to take shape.
Iranian reformers at the time called for
a more rational, less rigid Shiism, and
an end to the self-mutilation that takes
place annually in honor of the third
imam's martyrdom. They went so far as to
advocate abolishing the dominant role of
the clergy. Even in the conservative
city of
Qom, reformist
ideas about Shiism found popularity in a
magazine published by the son of a
cleric. Ayatollah Khomeini's first book
was a response to these arguments,
calling them sacrilege and asking the
pious to cleanse the nation of such
heretical ideas.
The 1940s in
Iran
were a period of rising political
aspirations. Marxist ideas began to
dominate the intellectual discourse,
while democratic ideas began to permeate
middle-class life. Faced with these new
challenges, Shiism again tried to
reinvent itself in ways that made it
intellectually competitive. Mehdi
Bazargan, at the time a professor of
engineering--and destined to become the
first prime minister of the Islamic
Republic--tried to use the laws of
thermodynamics to prove the existence of
God. Another activist, based in the city
of Mashhad, founded a group
called the Movement of God-Worshipping
Socialists, arguing that, long before
Marx, Muhammad had been a proletarian
revolutionary. In the smithy of this
city's rapidly changing intellectual
landscape, two young men were educated.
One was named Ali Khamenei, and the
other was named Ali Shariati.
Today, Khamenei is the intransigent
and embattled Supreme Leader. And
Shariati, who some have called the
Luther of Shiism, would become his
faith's most influential reformer. His
eclectic use of Marx, Freud, Sartre, and
Fanon, and his attempt to combine them
with elements of Shia faith, allowed him
to create an ideology appealing to the
intelligentsia and the Iranian middle
class. It was part fashionable piety
(the way Kabbalah is the spiritual fad
of Hollywood) and part facile
radicalism. From Fanon, he borrowed the
idea of the redemptive power of
violence, and from Marx, he learned
about the evils of alienation. He called
for a Shiism bereft of the clergy,
accusing them of offering a reactionary
and deeply neutered rendition of Islam.
What he lacked in theoretical rigor and
intellectual depth he more than made up
for with the power of his oratory. To
many in the current generation of
reformists, he is known simply as "the
teacher." He provided the possibility of
a new reading of Shiism--one as
compatible with Marx's idea of praxis as
with Muhammad's notion of piety.
But, as soon became evident,
Shariati's ultimate goal was less the
reform of Shiism than using it as an
instrument for social change. Many of
today's reformists, though inspired by
his ideas, have not adopted this
"instrumental" disposition toward their
religion. Ironically, however, one
person who did come to share
Shariati's "instrumental" attitude
toward Islam was Ayatollah Khomeini. And
this is an area where the traditions of
Na'ini and Nuri--that is, reform and
absolutism--would combine to legitimize
despotism.
Before coming to power, Khomeini
argued that the most important duty,
indeed the raison d'etre of an Islamic
government, was to implement fully the
tenets of sharia. But once in
power and faced with the complexities of
modern Iranian society, he subtly
changed the very foundation of his
theory. He introduced the concept of
maslaha--interests of the
regime--and declared, much to the
consternation of nearly every other
ayatollah, that these interests, as
determined by him or his successor,
would supersede even the fundamentals of
Islam. In other words, the state was
everything--and sharia was nothing but
its legitimizing narrative, a narrative
that could be suspended at the will of
the leader.
Khomeini muddled the Na'ini and Nuri
traditions in another way as well: Aware
that people wanted democracy in 1979, he
pretended to be in the Na'ini camp. He
even promised that he wouldn't allow a
single cleric to hold a position of
executive authority. After taking
office, however, he would use an iron
fist to implement the Nuri vision.
Iranians rightly felt stung by this
development. But reformers in the Na'ini
tradition did not give up. Betrayed by
Khomeini, they became as interested in
political strategy as in theological
innovation. Saeed Hajjarian, once a
mastermind of the regime's intelligence
agency, turned into an Andropov-style
reformer. He argued that a frontal
assault on the country's bastions of
power was impractical. Instead, he
called for his allies to mobilize the
masses and use them as bargaining chips
with Iran's rulers--a strategy by which
he thought reformers could gradually
chip away at the absolute power of the
clerics. Other reformers, foremost among
them Akbar Ganji, dismissed Hajjarian's
strategy as unworkable. The only way out
of the current morass, Ganji said, was
to use the invincible power of peaceful
civil disobedience.
Then there were the ideas of Iranian
intellectual Abdolkarim Soroush. Around
1990, he published a seminal series of
articles questioning the epistemological
foundations of Khomeini's concept of
velayat-e-faqih, the guardianship
of the jurist. Soroush argued that any
cognition of sacred text is ultimately
no more than a mere mortal's
cognition--and thus, contingent and
relative, not absolute. Privileging one
person's reading of these texts over
others, he said, was an arbitrary
political decision with no theological
validity. Not surprisingly, Soroush's
essays created an uproar in Iran.
Apologists for the regime attacked him
for channeling "Zionist" ideas, while
many in the reform movement began to
apply the same decidedly democratic
principles to other arenas. The essays
were also the beginning of Soroush's own
odyssey, which took him from being an
ally--if not a theorist--of the regime
to being one of its most intractable and
influential critics.
In recent years, many Shia
intellectuals have traveled the same
path as Soroush. Hitherto sacred
topics--the life of the prophet, the
nature of his mission, the meaning of
the Koran, the place of metaphor in
sacred texts, and, most importantly, the
role of women--have been hotly debated.
Those who voted for Khatami in 1997; the
student movement of 1999; the recent
struggle of the bus drivers' union for
the rights of its workers; the
relentlessly defiant but peaceful
women's movement, particularly the
attempt to solicit one million
signatures in favor of reforming
discriminatory laws; and, now, the green
uprising of 2009--all owe something to
the tradition that Na'ini established
more than 100 years ago.
This tradition has not always found
itself on the side of the angels: For
instance, many Na'ini disciples, worried
about the creeping influence of
communism, supported the Shah against
Mossadegh in 1953. Moreover, like any
diffuse intellectual tradition, it has
spawned its share of destructive ideas
and has sometimes been co-opted by its
opponents. But it has also achieved
something very valuable: It has kept
alive the hope, through heady times and
dark ones, that a different Shiism, and
therefore a different Iran, was
possible. Just as Shiism has been a
thinly disguised manifestation of
Iranian nationalism, the reform movement
has been, from Na'ini to Mousavi, a
thinly pious veneer for a country's
relentless quest for democracy.
Abbas Milani is Hamid and
Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian
Studies at Stanford University.
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