Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (40 page)

“That’s what will happen here.

“And no, my life has been hard, but it has not been a wasted life,” he added. “Having an opposition is important, but they’re not necessarily the ones to be the ready alternative when the regime collapses. In Russia, there’s still no real alternative to the Communist Party. Vladimir Putin is a former Communist, and he still rules like one. Look what’s happened in Iraq,” Turk said. “It takes time.

“Finding the real alternative,” he said, “only begins with the collapse of the regime.”

The Revolutionaries

R
evolutions often eat themselves up. The turmoil, blood-letting, and failure to produce the promised utopia trigger a backlash. But in the reaction can lie the seeds of longer-term political change.

The French Revolution ended the Bourbon dynasty and introduced equality and civil liberty, but it imploded into a reign of terror. France then needed almost a century to establish a stable republican democracy. The Russian Revolution toppled the Romanov czar and introduced classless egalitarianism, but the new Soviet Union also spawned totalitarian rule for the next seventy years, until its failure opened the way for the current still-tentative experiment with democracy.

The same process is underway in Iran, the launching pad for the Middle East’s most zealous and novel revolution.

In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a spindly cleric with forbidding black eyebrows and a long white beard, combined an old faith with new technology to unite liberals and traditionalists, democrats and communists, conservative merchants and rowdy student activists. Using tape cassettes and faxes from afar, he inspired more than a year of street protests, strikes, and rampages against the monarchy by his followers. Together, they forced the last shah, with the empress at his side and a small jar of Iranian soil in his hand, to depart on an “open-ended vacation.” Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi’s exit ended twenty-five centuries of dynastic rule.

Iran’s Islamic upheaval is the only original revolution among the half-dozen uprisings that have rumbled across the Middle East over the past century, because it introduced a genuinely new political ideology that altered the world’s political spectrum. It introduced a unique and aggressive form of political Islam.

Yet it has also spawned some of the boldest ideas about democracy in the Middle East from revolutionaries who soon soured on the new system and then turned against it.

Among them are two men I met a dozen years apart. They met each other in 1979 as ardent revolutionaries tasked with converting a kingdom ruled from the bejeweled Peacock Throne into a theocracy governed by turbaned clerics. They started out in the new Islamic republic’s inner circle. But over the course of a decade, both became deeply disillusioned.

Together, they illustrate the physics of political change.

Abdolkarim Soroush is a slight man with a whisper of a voice and a neat soft-brown beard. He dresses casually in the neutral tones of an academic and would disappear in any crowd. He is a philosopher. He worked to redefine the political debate in Iran during the last decade of the twentieth century. Soroush was the teacher.

Akbar Ganji is a short and once-beefy man with soulful eyes, a winsome grin, and a perpetual six-day stubble. Ganji is a writer. He worked to expose the regime’s failures and misadventures in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ganji was the student.

Within Iranian society, both of their names became code words for defiance.

“They launched the most dynamic and novel debate about mosque and state, religion and politics, democracy and Islam in Iran in at least 100 years,” Hadi Semati, an American-educated political scientist at the University of Tehran, explained to me. “In fact, probably no where in the region could you find a more vibrant or original debate. And that debate,” Semati added, “is still going on.”

I set out to find Soroush in 1994 because his name was increasingly coming up in coffee-shop conversations, classrooms, think tanks, and seminaries. Iranians talked excitedly about his new ideas of reform. I tracked him down at his Tehran University office, where his big oak desk was covered with neat stacks of books; classical music played in the background. We began a conversation that has continued ever since.

“I’m not such an important man,” he told me in our first meeting, in a little voice that forced me to lean forward to hear him. “I’m just a writer and a thinker, and I’m just toying with ideas about religion.”

Born in 1945, Soroush came from the kind of lower-middle-class family that formed the revolution’s backbone. His mother, Batoul, was named after one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters; she refused to abandon the enveloping black chador that covers all but a woman’s face and hands, even when the shah banned it. His father, a grocer, refused to buy a radio because it meant listening to the shah’s state-controlled news. Most of the homes in old Tehran where Soroush grew up were mud brick; most had only a couple of large rooms and often no bathroom.

Soroush came of age in the 1960s as Ayatollah Khomeini began his campaign against the monarchy’s modernization plan—for failing the poor, deserting religious values, and corrupting a civilization dating back five millennia. Soroush grew up as sleepy Tehran was transformed into a cosmopolitan capital, complete with casinos and discos,
Peyton Place
on television and Kentucky Fried Chicken in restaurants, miniskirts and makeup, and shopping malls and supermarkets to rival traditional commercial powers in the Middle East’s grandest old bazaar. Iran became a hub of foreign influence in the Middle East.

“You see nothing but…self-interest, lechery, immodesty, criminality, treachery, and thousands of associated vices,” Khomeini railed in a little book called
Secrets Exposed.
¹

The ayatollah, already in his sixties, was a rare voice willing to risk the dangers of speaking out. In 1963, after condemning the shah as a “miserable wretch,” Khomeini was arrested and held for ten months. Soroush was only a high-school student at the time. But when the cleric was released, Soroush was among the thousands who traveled to the cleric’s mud-brick home in Qom, the dusty religious center an hour’s drive from Tehran, to celebrate his release.

The final confrontation between king and cleric unfolded in 1964, when Khomeini attacked a new law granting immunity to thousands of U.S. military personnel—and all their dependents—for any crimes committed in Iran. To followers assembled in front of his home, the ayatollah thundered that Iran’s dignity had been destroyed. He linked the law to a $200-million loan from the United States.
²
The controversial legislation, Khomeini pronounced,

On November 4, 1964, the shah expelled the fiery ayatollah.
*

Soroush kept up with the ayatollah’s wandering exile—in Turkey for seven months, in Iraq for twelve years until he was deported by Saddam Hussein, and the final four months in Paris. The first in his family to go to university and the first to go to the West, Soroush took a break from his studies in London to visit Khomeini in France in 1978, as the revolution was building up steam back home. The two men hit it off. When the ayatollah returned triumphantly to Tehran to install Islamic rule several weeks later, Soroush followed him home.

Soroush quickly became a prominent figure in revolutionary circles. He was the youngest of seven men named to the Committee of the Cultural Revolution. Before Iran’s universities were allowed to reopen, the committee conformed curriculum to Khomeini’s version of Islam and purged hundreds of intellectuals sympathetic to the shah.

But the turmoil of the revolution’s first decade took a toll. Daily life was harder for the average Iranian, and many were forced to take second or third jobs. Despite oil wealth, Iran’s economy was in trouble. The country was isolated diplomatically and under economic sanctions by major powers. It fought the longest war in modern Middle East history against Iraq, suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties. Corruption was worse, far worse, than during the monarchy. Squabbling among the theocrats forced them to disband their own revolutionary party.

By the late 1980s, Soroush was deeply disillusioned, even with Khomeini. The charismatic ayatollah, he told me, had proven to be only a function of the political transition, and not the symbol of its ultimate goal. Soroush gradually weaned himself from the inner circle and worked on his own political theories.

In the early 1990s, Soroush tapped into a debate that had been brewing for a century in the Islamic world about the scope of individual freedom. Islam literally means “submission”—to God’s will. The concept is enshrined in Iran’s constitution. Chapter One stipulates that government is based on faith in one God and that “man should submit to His will.”

But Soroush began to argue that Islam and democracy are not only compatible but inevitably intertwined.

“To be religious necessitates being a democrat as well,” he told me during our first meeting. “An ideal religious society can’t have anything but a democratic government.”

Soroush pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, as he often did when making an important point.

“You see, in order to be a true believer, one must be free,” he continued. “True believers must embrace their faith of their own free will—not because it was imposed, or inherited, or part of the dominant local culture. To become a believer under pressure or coercion isn’t true belief.”

Thus freedom always precedes religion—a revolutionary idea in the Islamic world.

I thought of Soroush’s argument a few months later when I walked the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., during the cherry-blossom festival and decided to duck into the Jefferson Memorial. I was struck by the four quotations carved into the stone walls around Jefferson’s statue, and I took a picture of each. On a trip to Tehran later that year, I showed them to Soroush.

The first inscription from Jefferson reads,

Another is Jefferson’s language from the Declaration of Independence:

Each of the four invoked God as the guarantor of freedom.

I laid the pictures out on Soroush’s oak desk.

“Yes,” Soroush replied, “Exactly.”

Soroush provided the intellectual bridge that allowed Iranians to be, at the same time, authentically Muslim and authentically democratic.

He quickly built up a strong following in Iran. A magazine was founded largely to promote his ideas—and the debate about them. Students and young clerics flocked to his lectures. A burgeoning reform movement grew up around his discourse—to the fury of Iran’s theocrats.

“Way back before September 11, Iran started the war on ideas—among Muslims themselves,” said Hadi Semati, the jovial Tehran University political scientist who has long been one of my guides to reform and politics in Iran.

“For almost a century, intellectuals had not produced anything of note. Mostly, they brought ideas from the West. But Soroush initiated new ideas on Islam. He changed the redlines of Islamic discourse. And he did it in our own political space. This made it genuine.”

Soroush’s emergence reflected the wider context of political change in the Middle East.

In the West, the timeline of democratic change was slow and sequential. The Reformation within Christianity gave birth to the Age of Enlightenment, which in turn paved the way for new political ideas about individual rights and democracy. The process unfolded over four centuries—and is still far from complete even in the world’s most durable democracies.

The Middle East is confronted with the extraordinary challenge of reforming Islam and overhauling political systems at the same time.

Adapting Islam is a process known as
ijtihad,
or “interpretation.” It is applying the essence of the faith—based on the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed, known as the hadith—to new problems or a changing world. The word
ijtihad
derives from jihad.

Jihad is today easily the most misunderstood word in the world. It literally means “trying” or “struggle.” For practicing Muslims, it means engaging in the daily struggle—with oneself—to be a good Muslim. Jihad only becomes a legitimate military struggle with outsiders when Islam is believed to be endangered, in defense of the faith.

In the twenty-first century,
ijtihad
is the key to Islam’s own version of a reformation. It is also the key to political change. But no issue is more sensitive in the Islamic world today than
ijtihad.
Deciding just
how
to interpret and
who
has the right to interpret are hotly disputed. Outsiders beware.

The
ijtihad
camps fall into three categories. Think of them like three doors.

The first are the purists, such as Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda or the ultraconservative Salafi ideologues. They believe Islam was perfect and absolute in its original form. They see the early generations of Muslims, particularly the first three in the seventh century, as the model for all Islamic life in any age. They are literalists. Most are Sunnis.