Children of Paradise (17 page)

Finally, on August 15, 1988, Montazeri took his complaints directly to the members of the death commission for Tehran.

“
I have received more blows from the
monafiqin
than all of you,” Montazeri wrote, “both in prison and outside. My son was martyred by them. If it was a question of revenge, I should pursue it more than you. But I seek the expediency and interests of the revolution, Islam, the Supreme Leader, and the Islamic state. I am worried about the judgment that posterity and history will pass upon us.”

Many prisoners had professed steadfastness in their opposition to the regime precisely because of how they had been mistreated in prison, Montazeri noted. Their beliefs were not a crime, and the apostasy of their leaders did not make them apostates. Montazeri worried about the rule of law in the country he was to take over: “All the studies we did in Islamic jurisprudence about taking caution when dealing with people’s blood and properties, were they all wrong?” He demanded: “By which standard are you executing a prisoner who was not sentenced to execution prior to this? You have cut off prison visits and telephone calls now, but how will you answer the families tomorrow?”

In a devastating final paragraph, the radical ayatollah and coauthor of
velayat-e faqih
made a case for freedom of expression. “The Mojahedin-e Khalq are not individuals,” he wrote; “they are an ideology, a world outlook, a form of logic. To answer wrong logic one must use right logic. With killings it will not be solved but spread.”

Although his plaints fell on deaf ears, Montazeri did not give up. In October he wrote to Prime Minister Mousavi, arguing that arrests and executions would only alienate people who could be assets to the revolution. He laid the problem at the prime minister’s feet because the intelligence minister, Mohammad Reyshahri, popularly known as “the scary ayatollah,” was technically Mousavi’s subordinate: “
We will cause irreparable injustice to many people because of the narrow-minded, draconian and uncaring officials in charge of the ministry of security and information,” Montazeri wrote.

But these objections led to the sparing of no lives, so much as they sealed Montazeri’s political irrelevance. Ayatollah Khomeini accused Montazeri of sympathy with Bazargan’s defeated liberals, into whose hands, he proclaimed, he would never allow the government to fall.
He disinherited Montazeri of leadership with a letter observing that “the responsibility [of being Supreme Leader] requires more endurance than you have shown.”

The once future Leader retreated from politics, but he preserved his copy of Khomeini’s fatwa ordering the executions, with the Leader’s personal seal, along with his own letters of objection, for the records of future historians. In the decades that followed, through all that Montazeri was still to suffer, his example would acquire a profound and lasting luster, and his letters would endure as talismans of enlightened humanity under siege.

• • •

T
WO MONTHS BEFORE HIS DEATH,
Ayatollah Khomeini convened a committee to revise the constitution. Although the radicals put up a spirited fight, the conservatives succeeded in eliminating the position of prime minister and centralizing executive power in the hands of the president. The revised constitution also stipulated that the next Supreme Leader after all need not be a grand ayatollah, as Khomeini and Montazeri were, but should be an expert in Islamic jurisprudence who had “
the appropriate political and managerial skills.”
Rafsanjani saluted this decision, pointing out that to become a grand ayatollah took nearly a lifetime, leaving a pool of potential leaders who were too old to lead the country with the necessary energy. And so the institution of
velayat-e faqih
itself descended from the realm of spiritual leadership into that of political management, raising the question of exactly how the Leader’s far-reaching powers and lack of accountability could be justified. But that was a question for another day.

The next decision before the assembly was whether the leadership would be assumed by a single man or by a council of three. Either was
permissible under the constitution, but as a cleric had once explained, “
We need a focus for people’s emotions. . . . How can the people shout slogans like, ‘We are your soldiers, oh Leadership Council’?” When it was decided that one man would follow Khomeini as Leader, the radicals of Mousavi’s faction lobbied for Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, to inherit his father’s mantle. But they lost this battle as well, and President Khamenei emerged as a compromise candidate among clerics sympathetic to both factions. Because he was not a grand
marja
thronged with acolytes—he had attained only the middle rank of
hojjat ol-eslam
—political actors on all sides may have mistakenly imagined that Khamenei would be pliable.

Khamenei had vast shoes to fill. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, some pounding their chests and slashing their cheeks, poured into Tehran’s streets to mourn Khomeini’s death on June 3, 1989. Eight people died in the crush to touch the body; many more were injured. “We are orphaned,” chanted the crowd. At one point the crowd knocked the Leader’s body from the casket and fell upon the shroud for scraps, mementos. Men leapt into the open grave. Ahmad Khomeini was knocked to the ground. On the spot where Ayatollah Khomeini’s body was at last laid to rest, a vast mausoleum would be erected, a cavernous modern shrine that would become a glittering, minaret-laden landmark off the airport highway outside Tehran.

Khamenei assumed Khomeini’s mantle with the humility that was required of him by both culture and circumstance. “
I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian,” he said in his inaugural address. “However, a responsibility has been placed on my shoulders, and I will use all my capabilities and all my faith in the almighty in order to be able to bear this heavy responsibility.”

Bigger men might buckle under such weight. Khamenei would turn out to be smaller than many imagined. He would also prove brittle and stubborn—insecure, many analysts would speculate, in the role that had been thrust upon him.

Just two months after Khomeini’s death, Rafsanjani was elected
president. There was no longer an executive position for Mousavi, and Khamenei and Rafsanjani closed ranks against the remaining radicals in the parliament. For the next eight years, supporters of the Islamic Left would wander the political wilderness of journals, universities, and newspapers. What happened to them there is the rest of the story.

  II  

R
EBIRTH

    FIVE

E
XPANSION AND
C
ONTRACTION

A
KBAR
G
ANJI REMEMBERS THE REVOLUTION
as a love affair that blinded him to everything but the paradise on his mind’s horizon, an Islamic republic where all men would be brothers. He believed, during the revolutionary caesura that was his late adolescence, that he possessed the singular truth. In later years he would define fundamentalism as exactly that belief. By 1989 the Islamic Republic of Iran was no paradise, and Ganji was not a fundamentalist anymore. Along with many former members of the Islamic Left, he was a man on a journey.

Cast out of the inner circle of power, the militants of the Islamic Left turned to philosophy, sociology, and political theory for new answers to the questions they’d once relied on Shariati and Khomeini to resolve. They gathered at a think tank and a journal where they started, dizzyingly, diligently, nearly from scratch. What was the state? Why did it exist? How could they distinguish the work of God from its reflection in their own eyes? For men like Akbar Ganji, the revolution was a work in progress, susceptible to revision and even fundamental challenge. Ganji did not yet know that this outlook would transform him from loyal Islamic Republican foot soldier to national icon of resistance.

Small and lithe, with mirthful dark eyes and a mobile mouth, Ganji was
born in 1960 to a traditional religious family and grew up poor in South Tehran. His mother brought him to mosque and to religious festivals. Islam was the Ganjis’ community. South Tehran was dilapidated and crowded; to the city’s north, the prosperous classes lived on hills that rose above the choking smog. Tehran was a city of just over two million in the 1960s, less than a third the size it would reach by century’s end, and its profound social rifts were difficult to conceal. Ganji came to political consciousness through his resentment of the inequalities that had broken against him, and his attraction to Shariati’s notion that a truly just, egalitarian Islamic society had once existed and could be regained. At a place called the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, there was a library where Ganji, like so many others of his generation, discovered Samad Behrangi and
The Little Black Fish
as well as the work of Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Ganji and his peers left their parents’ traditional mosques for a political mosque of their own, alive with talk of Shariati’s Islam of Ali and with leftist currents that reached Iran from as far away as Albania and Latin America.

In the late 1970s, Ganji became one of the leaders of the youth in his neighborhood, organizing school strikes and demonstrations, distributing Shariati’s books as well as tapes and pamphlets of Khomeini’s speeches. Ganji and other young militants organized strikes in the bazaar, threatening merchants into closing their shops if they didn’t do so of their own accord. When the revolutionaries succeeded in toppling the shah, and committees of the faithful raided the soldiers’ barracks for arms, establishing the Revolutionary Guard, which was loyal to Khomeini, nineteen-year-old Ganji was one of its first recruits.

Ganji met Mostafa Rokhsefat when Howzeh, Mostafa’s artistic army, offered a cultural seminar to Revolutionary Guardsmen. The two men forged a friendship that linked the young guardsman to the revolution’s intellectual vanguard. Ganji’s agile and mischievous intellect distinguished him, then and always, from the movement whose orthodoxy he still embraced. More even than Mostafa, Ganji was a man who burned the bridges he built. In what would become a storied career as a writer and activist,
Ganji remained neutral toward no one, and no one remained neutral toward him. To his admirers he was a fearless freethinker; his detractors found him reckless and polarizing. His friendship with Mostafa would outlast nearly every other affiliation in his life.

Even within the Revolutionary Guard there were factions, with potentially fatal differences of opinion. Ganji belonged to a group that considered itself leftist as well as Islamist, and this group clashed with the Guard Corps commander as well as with the clerics. Much later Ganji would say that he had begun to distance himself from the revolutionary mainstream at that time because he was reading Hannah Arendt’s
On Revolution
, translated into Persian shortly after the overthrow of the shah. He saw shades of the Iranian present in Arendt’s account of the French and Russian pasts, and he was beginning to worry for revolutionary Iran’s future.