Grave, soft-spoken, the exiled
Iranian religious scholar Abdolkarim
Soroush is a living record of the
Iranian revolution. As a fanatical young
supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini, he
helped purge Iran's universities of
leftists and secularists in the early
1980s. Later, as a founder and editor of
Kiyan, a monthly journal of
religion and philosophy, he upset his
orthodox revolutionary colleagues by
arguing that Islamic law should be
viewed as a product of its time, subject
to alteration as society evolves.
Soroush has since denounced Iran's
system of government, what he calls its
"republic of faith," as harmful both to
Islam and to politics, an argument that
led to his expulsion from Iranian
academic life in 2000 and, more
recently, an extended sojourn in Europe
and the United States. Until this year,
driving troublemakers abroad has been a
useful and politically inexpensive way
for the Islamic Republic to deal with
dissent. Iranian history is full of
people who lost their relevance after
leaving Iran. But this, so far, has not
happened to Soroush.
Iran's summer of discontent started
on June 12, when President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad won an election that his
reformist opponents, Mir Hussein
Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, declared to
have been rigged, setting in motion a
large, peaceful protest movement. While
it had the support of two former
presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the movement
was put down with immense brutality,
although it remains, as continuing
smaller demonstrations show, very much
alive.
Soroush is one of a handful of
dissident public figures who have had a
moral and intellectual influence on the
protesters throughout the crisis in
spite of being outside the country.
During their confrontation with
Ahmadinejad and his main backer, the
country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, reform-minded Iranians drew
encouragement from the supportive words
and actions of Soroush and other
expatriates, which they monitored
through the Internet and overseas TV
stations. In August, Soroush gave his
most significant TV interview in Persian
in several years, to the BBC's new
Persian-language channel, in which he
disputed the legitimacy of a religious
government that imposes its writ by
force. In September, his Web site
carried an extraordinarily forthright
and eloquent open letter with the title
"With God's help, religion and freedom
will remain, and tyranny will die." It
might as easily have been called "The
last rites of the Islamic Republic, by a
zealot who turned against it."
Soroush's open letter
was addressed to the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Khamenei, and it conveyed an
ironic awareness of their respective
standing as religious authorities.
Although Khamenei's supporters refer to
him as a grand ayatollah, the highest
rank in Shiism's clerical hierarchy, he
is known among leading Shia religious
scholars to be an indifferent
theologian. Since he became Supreme
Leader on Khomeini's death in 1989,
Khamenei has favored a dry, severe
interpretation of Islam—the
interpretation favored by the
conservative constituency he has
courted, and which is rejected by
Soroush, who is an authority on the
thirteenth-century mystic poetry of
Jalaluddin Rumi.
When Soroush addresses Khamenei as
simply "Mr. Khamenei," as he did in his
letter, this was in contrast to the
sycophantic language to which the
Supreme Leader is accustomed. In his
letter, Soroush speaks as a morally
superior outcast and sage, a persona
familiar to any reader of mystic poetry.
He speaks also as an embodiment of the
"Islamic Iran" that Khamenei repeatedly
invokes as an ideal to be protected, and
which the Islamic Republic, by
manipulating religion and neglecting
Iran's literary and artistic heritage,
has undermined.
Soroush's letter is a coruscating
denunciation, and its hybrid style,
combining the formal, Arabic-influenced
language of the seminary with a rolling,
alliterative verve, is a further
reminder of its author's two selves.
Soroush denounces Khamenei's readiness
to "wash blood with blood" and to
"disgrace God but not yourself," but he
is not despondent—even though most of
the country's top reformists are behind
bars, and a show trial of nearly a
hundred is underway.
On the contrary, Soroush draws the
conclusion that now, having turned from
an authoritarian into a tyrant, Khamenei
is starting his final decline. Alluding
to the Supreme Leader's admission that
the prestige of the Islamic Republic has
been damaged by reports of brutality in
the nation's jails, Soroush writes
sarcastically, "I salute you for
identifying and declaring the squalor
and abjectness of religious tyranny....
I want to say to you that a page has
been turned in time's ledger and that
fortune has turned her back on the
regime...."
Soroush believes that the regime's
victory is a Pyrrhic one, that the
effort of suppressing the
demonstrations, murdering and torturing
scores of citizens, and staging a show
trial has exhausted it. From Soroush's
viewpoint, the regime that is morally
bankrupt must inevitably fall. This is a
recurrent lesson from Iran's national
epic, the eleventh-century Book of
Kings, which chronicles, in myths and
history-telling, the opposition between
virtue and power. It may also be a
lesson from the last Shah of Iran, who
fled the country in 1979 and whose
successors are now in conflict.
If Soroush is right,
and the Islamic Republic has lost
whatever moral legitimacy it once
possessed, the main damage was inflicted
this summer. In a historic sermon on
June 19—one week after the disputed
election—the Supreme Leader finally
abandoned the fiction of his neutrality
in Iranian politics, favoring
Ahmadinejad over his opponents and
denying widespread fraud in the
elections. The following day, Khamenei
ordered the Basij—a militia group
drawn from the poorer districts whose
members receive privileges—and the
Revolutionary Guard to attack tens of
thousands of peaceful demonstrators in
Tehran and other Iranian cities, leading
to a bloody carnage in which dozens were
killed and thousands arrested or beaten.
The summer was punctuated by further
protests, also savagely put down. As the
regime's leading personalities turned on
one other, two events took place that
might, one day, be regarded as
milestones in the decline of the Islamic
regime.
The first was the circulation of
reports of murder, torture, and rape
from behind the doors of Iran's jails,
atrocities that continue and have become
a major scandal, managed with
spectacular ineptness by the regime. The
reports have discredited the Islamic
Republic's claims to righteousness and
morality, and they have led many
Iranians to compare Tehran's most
notorious detention center, at Kahrizak,
between Tehran and Qom, with Abu Ghraib
and Guantánamo Bay.
The second event was a mass trial
that told us much about the Islamic
Republic's diminishing ability to
manipulate public opinion. This trial,
of leading reformist politicians and
journalists, and also of ordinary
demonstrators, began on August 1. It has
aimed to destroy the reform movement and
convince the public that the reformists
have cooperated with foreigners to
launch a "color revolution" of the kind
that ended other anti-Western regimes in
such European countries as Serbia and
Ukraine. The trial was widely seen as a
failure. The reform movement is not
dead, and the desires that animate it,
for greater political freedom and
personal autonomy, have not been
extinguished. And to judge by copious
anecdotal evidence and the blogs of
people living in Iran, a very large
number of Iranians do not believe the
confessions they have heard from
prisoners; they see the trial primarily
as evidence for the Islamic Republic's
descent into tyranny.
Rumors of ill-treatment in places
such as Kahrizak and the notorious Evin
Prison in north Tehran had been
circulating for weeks before Mehdi
Karroubi—a cleric and presidential
candidate who was officially adjudged to
have come in fourth in the election, and
has since, with Mir Hussein Moussavi,
become a leader of the opposition
movement—went public with allegations of
rape and torture. Karroubi's claims led
to a crisis because for the past three
decades he has been a member of Iran's
political establishment. He has occupied
senior posts, including the speakership
of the parliament, and cannot easily be
dismissed as an opposition troublemaker.
Yet this is what his adversaries have
tried to do—particularly after his Web
site carried extracts from an account by
a man who said he had been sodomized in
jail, and then, after lodging a formal
complaint, was threatened by judiciary
officials. Supporters of the President
and the Supreme Leader have accused
Karroubi of spreading lies at the behest
of Iran's external enemies, and they
have called stridently for his arrest.
On September 12 a judiciary report
described the evidence that Karroubi had
presented in support of his claims as
"fake," and recommended "decisive" legal
action against all who "spread lies" and
damage the "prestige of the system."
Allegations of savagery on the part
of the security forces, judicial
officials, and prison staff are now so
widespread, they amount to a damning
indictment of the system these people
serve. In August, footage was circulated
of new, unmarked graves, allegedly those
of detainees who had been raped and
mutilated, at Tehran's main cemetery. At
the beginning of September, a reformist
Web site carried the names of
seventy-two people who, according to the
site, had lost their lives to official
brutality since the start of the crisis.
(The real number is thought to be
higher; many have been intimidated into
concealing the circumstances of the
deaths of members of their families.)
Then there are the lesser outrages
and humiliations that now, after a
bloody summer, seem almost mundane. How
many Iranians were beaten by the
security forces, how many female
demonstrators subjected to vile insults
by marauding basijis?[*]
How many state employees and students
have been threatened for supporting the
opposition? The answer is many
thousands, and it may be assumed that
they and their friends and families have
abandoned whatever positive feelings
they once had for the Islamic Republic.
A peaceful movement of protest can
usually be suppressed, but violence and
intimidation are costly instruments.
Each brutal action
has been followed by a ludicrously
incompetent cover-up. In the aftermath
of the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, a
young Iranian woman whose death, almost
certainly by police firing, was captured
on film and seen around the world,
Iranian officials and pro-government
media outlets claimed, variously, that
the film was fake, that the CIA might
have killed Neda, that the BBC had
arranged her death, and that she was
alive and living in Greece. In July, an
official from Tehran's prison service
announced that a detainee called Mohsen
Ruholamini had died from meningitis at
Kahrizak; it was later revealed that he,
along with others, had died from brutal
treatment. Eventually, in late July,
Khamenei ordered Kahrizak prison to be
closed, and it was announced that
several unnamed officials there were
being prosecuted. This judicial process,
if indeed it exists, may end up like the
earlier trial of several members of the
security forces for launching a
murderous attack on protesting students
in a university dormitory in 1999. That
trial ended with the conviction of a
conscript doing military service for
stealing a razor.
The inability of the authorities to
prevent the disclosure of atrocities,
and Iranians' widespread belief that
their leaders are lying to them, show
how much the country has changed since
the first decade of the revolution.
Measured in brutality and scale, the
events at Kahrizak and other detention
centers are not in the same league as
the mass executions of thousands of
imprisoned dissidents that Ayatollah
Khomeini authorized in 1988. That was
Khomeini's attempt, the historian Ervand
Abrahamian has plausibly speculated, to
"weed out the half-hearted from the true
believers" before he died. It was a
measure of the regime's discipline and
cohesion back then, shortly after the
end of the Iran–Iraq War, that the
authorities were able to deny for years
that the executions had taken place,
despite the existence of letters of
complaint about the killings from
Khomeini's then heir-designate,
Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri. "The
curtain of secrecy," Abrahamian wrote in
his book Tortured Confessions (1999),
"was so effective that no Western
journalist heard of it and no Western
academic discussed it."
Nowadays there is no such cohesion,
and the curtain is ragged. Despite the
regime's attempts to disrupt Internet
and mobile phone communications,
dissidents have been able to pass around
appalling allegations. Iranians have
changed considerably since the first
decade of the revolution: they are
politically more sophisticated, well
acquainted with modern technology, and a
lot more cynical. But Iran's leaders
sometimes seem to forget this. Khamenei
has berated the critics of atrocities
for neglecting the sacred values that,
in his view, form the core of the
Islamic Republic; in fact, many Iranians
believe that the effect of the
atrocities has been to eviscerate that
core. The ongoing show trial is another
example of the regime's miscalculation.
It is based on the premise that Iranians
are as credulous and as captive to
ideology as they were a quarter of a
century ago.
In the 1980s, much of the Iranian
public seemed willing to accept staged
trials and recantations, and these
events often succeeded in their aims to
destroy the prestige of opposition
groups and impress on people the
ideological superiority of revolutionary
Islam over rival beliefs. When leading
Iranian Communists made public
confessions in 1983 and 1984, in many
cases after being horrifically tortured,
relatively few people denounced these
confessions as coerced and, as such,
worthless. As dozens of Communists
appeared on state television confessing
to "treason," "self-worship,"
"dependency," and an attachment to
"irrelevant" ideologies, Khomeini's
supporters boasted of the power of Islam
to return deviants to the true path,
while some former friends of the
tortured leftists said they were ashamed
to have known them. The "penitent" who
was let out of jail (often on condition
that he desist from discussing prison
life) was typically ostracized by his
former colleagues. As Abrahamian wrote,
quoting from the response of one
Communist to another's confession, "We
never expected someone of his reputation
to get down on his knees.... It was as
revolting as watching a human being
cannibalize himself."
By contrast, many,
perhaps most, Iranians do not believe
what they have seen and heard during the
five sessions of the trial of alleged
offenders—excerpts of which have been
broadcast on state television—that have
so far taken place since last June. Many
citizens have reacted less to the
details alleged and to the confessions
than to the wretched condition of the
defendants. For many, what was striking
about the courtroom appearance of
Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, who served as
vice-president for the reformist
President Khatami and later became
Karroubi's aide in this year's election
campaign, was neither his blanket
acceptance of the public prosecutor's
accusations, nor his assertions that the
election was fair, nor his description
of Khatami's behavior as "treasonous."
Instead, for days after state TV
broadcast Abtahi's testimony and an
"interview" with him, people in Iran
spoke with shock and sympathy of his
physical deterioration.
When Abtahi was arrested a few hours
after the election results were
announced, he was a cheerful and portly
mullah. The emaciated defendant who
appeared in court on August 1 had been
stripped not only of his turban and
robes, but also of his dignity. In
London, an exiled former minister told
BBC Persian TV that the Abtahi he had
seen in court was not the Abtahi he had
known. It's as if the cleric had
suffered so much that he had changed
into a different person.
So far, during the five open sessions
that have been exhaustively reported in
the pro-government press, the court has
tried scores of leading reformist
politicians, journalists, and
intellectuals. The reformist politicians
included supporters of Khatami when he
was president between 1997 and 2005.
Some confessed to carrying out missions
for armed opposition groups; ordinary
protesters said they attacked public
property and basijis. Two Iranian
employees of European embassies and a
terrified French student who took part
in a demonstration were charged with
acting against national security. (The
student was released on bail six weeks
later, but so far has not been granted
amnesty.)
There was little in the way of
cross-examination. The public prosecutor
read from charge sheets and the
defendants—or, less often, their
lawyers—responded. The senior reformists
accepted the charges in toto, and
their defense consisted of prepared
confessions. Some of them thanked the
prison authorities for treating them so
splendidly, praised the Supreme Leader,
and claimed to have experienced
enlightenment about the virtues of the
regime. Again and again, these
defendants testified that the elections
were not rigged in any way and that any
such claims were absurd. Only a
relatively few small fry were allowed to
contest their guilt or try to elicit the
judge's sympathy. (There is no jury in
the Revolutionary Courts.) A drug addict
claimed he was out of his mind when he
allegedly set fire to military property.
A member of Iran's Jewish minority
apologized to the Supreme Leader for
smashing a bank window.
Taken together, the list of charges
provide some insight into the people who
devised the trial—the officials in the
judiciary and intelligence ministry, and
perhaps the Revolutionary Guard, who set
out to implicate the reformists and a
variety of actual, potential, and
imagined enemies in a plot to overthrow
the Islamic Republic and abolish the
unelected office, the Guardianship of
the Jurist, that Khamenei occupies.
These alleged foes include the People's
Mujahideen Organization, which has been
defeated militarily but survives in Iraq
and in Europe; monarchist groups; trade
union leaders; women's rights activists;
local and foreign NGOs; and a
considerable number of foreign states,
Britain in particular.
They also include Western foundations
with a history of promoting democracy
and human rights (including Freedom
House and the Open Society Institute of
George Soros), Western writers on
nonviolent struggle, such as the
American Gene Sharp, Iranian bloggers,
the BBC, and Ahmadinejad's chief
opponents Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hussein
Moussavi. Some of the information buried
in the indictments may be true, for many
of these countries, groups, and
individuals are, indeed, very critical
of the Islamic Republic. For the most
part, however, the prosecutor did no
more than concoct fantasy.
In the first session,
the prosecutor read extensively from
what he described as the statement of an
unnamed "spy" who had been arrested and
was in custody; it read more like the
incontinent theorizing of a conspiracy
nut with an Internet connection. At one
point in this account, the "spy"
described a meeting he claimed to have
had with the head of an American
foundation in Israel, who apparently
told him, "Our goal is to foster and
promote the ideas of people like
Abdolkarim Soroush in Iran."
The main point of the second session,
on August 8, was to implicate the
British in the riots. (Early in the
crisis, the Iranians expelled two
British diplomats for "activities
incompatible with their status"; Britain
expelled two Iranian diplomats in
response.) Hossein Rassam, an Iranian
employee at the British embassy in
Tehran, confessed to arranging and
attending meetings between British
diplomats and Iranian politicians. The
ambassador and his team were apparently
engaged in gathering information about
Iran and sending it back to the Foreign
Office—what diplomats do. But
Ahmadinejad's supporters eagerly
depicted the "old imperialist" as a
prime mover behind what they, in a neat
inversion of reality, called the
reformist " coup d'état." The
third session was dominated by
allegations that Mehdi Hashemi, whose
father, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is a
bitter foe of Ahmadinejad, is a
money-launderer and helped fund the
Moussavi campaign from the public purse.
Many of the defendants have been
accused of capital charges, but the
granting of pardon is a recognized part
of Iranian, and Islamic, justice, and
Khamenei has not shied from using it in
the past. For his part, Ahmadinejad has
himself urged "Islamic compassion" for
all save the "ringleaders" of the
protests.
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s,
when the country's official and
semi-official mass media were in control
of the information that was available to
Iranians, many more might have swallowed
the big lie. Nowadays, for every
choreographed hearing, every
confessional interview, there is a
second, parallel account coming from
reformist and opposition Web sites,
overseas TV stations, and the rumor mill
of a regime that has forgotten how to
keep a secret. Some Iranians are so
disgusted by the pro-government bias of
the state broadcasts that they boycott
them. The numbers of viewers of state TV
are said to have declined, and at the
end of August a reformist newspaper
claimed that the station's advertising
revenue had dropped dramatically, though
not solely for political reasons.
Reform-minded Iranians seldom
criticize those who have recanted,
although the sympathy felt by some has
been tempered by the knowledge that
today's oppressed reformists were, in
many cases, yesterday's ideologues and
fanatics. Admiring speculation swirls
around the prisoners who appear in court
haggard and worn, and yet have not
confessed. Some of them, it is said,
have endured unimaginable torments but
have refused to give in.
All those hours of interrogating and
torturing—in the end, they are unlikely
to make a difference. The Iranians who
are receptive to theories of a vast
conspiracy are the basijis, as
well as other hard-liners from
Ahmadinejad's core constituency of the
urban and rural poor, people who didn't
need convincing in the first place. From
all the evidence emerging from Iran, the
rest, those millions of Iranians who
think that theft was committed on June
12, and assault thereafter, have not
changed their minds.
Ahmadinejad has
survived. Iran continues to sell its oil
on the international markets. An Iranian
delegation began talks in early October
with the five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council, plus
Germany. (Foremost on the agenda will be
Iran's disclosure, in late September, of
an additional nuclear facility believed
by many Western intelligence officials
to be designed for a weapons program.
Ahmadinejad has refused to negotiate on
the subject of Iran's nuclear program,
which is what everyone else wants to
talk about.) The authorities want to
give the impression that, in the Islamic
Republic, it is business as usual. But
it is not. The economy is moribund.
Senior officials are obliged to spend
much of their time denying that the
country is in crisis. Even Ramadan was
different this year. The authorities
canceled many public sermons and
religious meetings for fear that they
would provide a pretext for reformist
supporters to come out and demonstrate.
Internal conflict is eating away at
the system. A deep rift has opened up
between today's ruling hard-liners and
the heirs of Khomeini—yesterday's ruling
hard-liners. Hassan Khomeini, the
Ayatollah's most prominent grandson,
boycotted Ahmadinejad's swearing-in
ceremony in August, and the family
foundation is suing a newspaper, whose
editor is appointed by the Supreme
Leader, for claiming that the foundation
has been infiltrated by "conspirators."
The sons of some of Khomeini's closest
clerical colleagues are now closely
associated with the reformists. Ali-Reza
Beheshti, the son of the Islamic
Republic's first chief justice, was one
of two prominent reformists who were
arrested for gathering evidence of
torture in jails. (He was later released
on bail.)
There is widespread revulsion at the
growing political influence of senior
officers in the Revolutionary Guard, and
their economic power. Iran's leading
theologian, the same Hossein Ali
Montazeri who objected to the prison
executions of the 1980s, has referred to
Iran's current system of government—a
coalition of the Supreme Leader, the
president, and the Revolutionary
Guard—as a "military guardianship."
Opposed to the hard-liners is a
reformist movement that might, in the
absence of most of its leaders, become
more radical. Thousands of ordinary
Iranians gave vent to anti-Khamenei
slogans this summer. They no longer
resemble a loyal opposition, but a force
for deeper change.
At the beginning of September, an
ordinary Iranian woman, Zahra Baqeri,
the sister of three famous martyrs—one
of whom was killed under the Shah and
the other two fighting against Iraq in
the war of 1980–1988—vented her
frustration in an explosive open letter
in which she compared the basijis
to the "Mongol hordes" and denounced
those who "have shut their eyes to the
truth because of filthy, material
power." Baqeri's fury is shared by many
others who devoted much of their lives,
and lost members of their family, in
pursuit of a dream of justice that never
materialized.
Alongside the anger, there is,
particularly among the former
revolutionaries, a mood of historical
introspection, lending itself to ironic
comparisons. In her open letter, Baqeri
favorably compared the treatment of
political prisoners and their families
under the Shah to what has taken place
under the Islamic Republic. In August a
reformist newspaper reprinted a poignant
interview with a much-loved
revolutionary figure, Ayatollah Mahmud
Taleghani. Taleghani had been among the
first to enter Evin Prison after the
Shah's fall. Standing in a blood-stained
cell, Taleghani had described the fall
of Evin—which had been built by the Shah
to house political prisoners—as one of
the revolution's great achievements.
"Islam," he was quoted in the newspaper
Etemad-e Melli, as having said
all those years ago, "has come to free
people...in Islam, there is no such
thing as a jail."
For millions of Iranians, of course,
the whole of their country increasingly
resembles a big jail, and this has
ramifications for anyone trying to do
business with the Islamic Republic.
Monitored and bullied by myriad
intelligence-gathering organs, many
Iranians are dismayed by the West's
enduring readiness to negotiate with the
Iranians about their steadily advancing
nuclear program. The alternative, an
increase in pressure on the Islamic
Republic, brings its own problems.
Talks in Geneva at the end of
September yielded hopeful headlines: the
first official bilateral negotiations
between Iran and the US in three
decades, and an apparent Iranian
undertaking to ship some of its
low-enriched uranium abroad for further
enrichment before being returned to Iran
for use in a research reactor—a "farming
out" of the process that Iran, hitherto,
has balked at accepting. The West's long
experience of Iran's negotiating
strategy, which centers on providing
Russia and China with plausible pretexts
to withhold their support for serious
sanctions, suggests that the chances
remain heavily weighted against a deal
that would satisfy the US and its
allies. If, as remains unlikely,
sanctions-shy Russia agrees to an
increase in diplomatic and economic
pressure, and the Chinese go along for
the sake of consensus, Iran's
international isolation will be a
pretext for further repression on
grounds of "national security."
In the past, Iran's leaders were able
to use broad public support for the
nuclear program to conceal other, more
fundamental cracks. No longer. For those
who took to the streets this summer, and
most recently, on September 18, when
opposition supporters hijacked a
pro-government demonstration against
Israel to put forward their own
grievances, anything that endows the
Islamic Republic with legitimacy,
including a prestige-enhancing deal with
the West, would be regarded as a
sell-out and a betrayal—although the
demonstrators, by embarrassing the
regime, may have helped to bring about a
change.
—October 7, 2009
Notes
[*]See the account of such
treatment by the anonymous Iranian woman
in "Veiled Threat," The New Yorker,
October 5, 2009.
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