Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (42 page)

“For the Imam [Khomeini], Islam was everything. He wanted everyone to topple the shah in order to apply Islam. But he didn’t elaborate on any of these points,” Soroush continued.

“So now it’s the intellectuals’ job to provide a theory for the revolution, to rethink it, and to offer a new logic for it. And the outcome will be not another revolution, but reform. Because—two revolutions in one generation? Well, really! It’s too much!” And he chuckled.

As his public following grew, a follower began to organize free Thursday evening lectures for the public. They were held at private homes and at mosques on the eve of the Muslim weekend. I went to several of them and sat on the floor or outdoors with the overflow crowds, listening to him speak in that soft voice, often for hours.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Akbar Ganji was in the crowd too.

Ganji was a former Revolutionary Guard, a member of the elite unit created to protect the fragile new Islamic republic. In the early years, he provided ideological training for its officer corps. Among those he invited as a guest lecturer was Soroush. He was captivated by the philosopher. Students often describe Soroush’s lectures in Persian as poetry. He can, in fact, recite from memory many of the long works of Iran’s great poets, Rumi and Hafez.

Ganji, who was born in 1959 and also grew up in the shabby suburbs of south Tehran, became a friend and a kind of disciple of Soroush. After the Revolutionary Guards, he moved to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, where he helped to churn out revolutionary propaganda. But the bonds with Soroush strengthened as he, too, grew disillusioned with the revolution.

“We wanted to create a heaven. We didn’t want a shah, but we were not clear on what we desired,” Ganji told me, when we finally met in 2006.

“The more we had repression, executions, as the revolution started swallowing its own children, I started to see this unbelievable reality, and from the other side I started to read about revolutions throughout history. And I ended up seeing one pattern—that all revolutions are the same, they follow the same rules, and they all deviate.

“I realized that repression is in the essence of revolution,” he said, smiling, the crows’-feet around his eyes crinkling. “And I realized that we cannot produce democracy with revolution.”

Soroush provided the inspiration and intellectual foundation for a burgeoning new reform movement. But Ganji became the practitioner of dissent.

Ganji started writing about Soroush’s ideas in
Kiyan,
Iran’s leading intellectual journal.
Kiyan
means “source” or “foundation.” Soroush wrote for it too—until the government denied the magazine access to printing paper. It was a common trick the regime used to close down publications that relied on state-subsidized newsprint.

Ganji then shifted his focus and began investigating the ruling clerics.

He was brazen by the standards of a movement more comfortable with nuance, nudges, and intellectual debate. In a series of investigative articles for the new crop of reformist newspapers, many of them started by Soroush’s followers, Ganji linked Iran’s intelligence ministry to the killings of dozens of dissidents in the late 1990s. He charged that key clerics, whom he dubbed “gray eminences” and “red eminences,” had issued fatwas approving the murders.

As the regime closed the reformist newspapers one after another to silence them, Ganji compiled his accusations in the
Dungeon of Ghosts,
the Iranian equivalent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago.
Other books chronicled corruption by top—very top—clergy.

“Ganji was the down-to-earth rabble-rouser of the reform movement,” Semati, the Tehran University political scientist, told me.

“Despite his junior status, he became the symbol of fierce resistance to a dogmatic vision of Islam and a status quo that had not wanted to change for centuries.”

In 2000, the ruling clerics struck back. Ganji was arrested and charged with defaming the regime and jeopardizing national security. After a series of trials, he was sentenced to ten years in prison, followed by five years of internal exile. The sentence was later modified to six years in prison.

But Ganji was not cowed by the ayatollahs. At his trial, he tore open his gray prison uniform to sit shirtless in court, showing what he said were the wounds of torture. In prison, often in solitary confinement, he secretly started writing again.

In 2002, Ganji managed to sneak out his book-length
Republican Manifesto.
He began with a quote from Thomas Paine. He was brutal about the Islamic republic.

Iran’s revolution was born in circumstances that could never have led to democracy, he wrote. Khomeini had sought to create a society that lived perpetually in an “iron cage.” The Islamic republic, he concluded, had reached a dead end.

“A vast stratum of society is in a state of despair, hopelessness, disillusion and dejection,” he wrote…. “Therefore, only a break from tyranny can make transition possible.”
⁷

As the regime increasingly smothered the voices of reform, Ganji’s missives from prison were the buzz of Tehran. They went out on the Internet, were passed around among students, and were scrutinized in Iran’s political circles.

In 2005, Ganji sneaked out a sequel, a more strident second volume to his manifesto. This time, he went after the reformers.

He lambasted the movement for timidity and selling out. “The reformists’ false idea that only through active participation in the government can one achieve anything has, in practice, only led them to function as mere window-dressing for the system, both inside and outside the country,” he charged.

Change from within, he concluded bluntly, was no longer possible.

The time had come to end theocratic rule through a new strategy of mass civil disobedience. He called on Iranians to boycott all elections, which he charged had a long record of fraud, forged ballots, and “orders given from above” to add votes to bolster turnout figures—and the regime’s legitimacy.

Invoking Mahatma Gandhi, he called on student activists and intellectuals to ignore court summonses for opposition activity that, under Article 500 of Iran’s penal code, made them automatically liable to three to twelve months in prison.

“Citizens must break this law,” he wrote. “If this law is broken extensively, the regime will not be able to send many people to jail for expressing their opposition…. The uneven path to freedom will be opened by our efforts.”

From his isolated cell in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, Ganji acknowledged that most Iranians were wary of more revolution, warfare, turmoil, and uncertainty. After a quarter century of upheaval, most Iranians simply wanted to make it through the day. Ganji tried to egg on fledgling democrats.

The regime repeatedly tried to force Ganji to recant his treatises. When he fell ill, he later told me, the prosecutor refused to allow him medical treatment unless he repudiated his work. That’s when Ganji heeded his own message.

Two weeks after the second manifesto was published, he went on a hunger strike. As the weeks passed, he dropped ten pounds, then twenty, then thirty. Pictures were sneaked out of prison showing his once beefy figure frail and gaunt, huge dark gullies encircling his eyes.

As he weakened, Ganji wrote two “Letters to the Free People of the World.” Both were smuggled out of prison. In the second letter, he drew a parallel between his own struggle and Socrates’ defiance of the state and his willingness to “invite death.”

“Life in slavery is not worth a dime in my eyes,” he wrote.
⁹

On the forty-third day of his hunger strike, Ganji wrote Soroush. His mentor was among dozens of friends and fellow reformers—including Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights activist Shirin Ebadi, who was one of Ganji’s lawyers—who had appealed to him to end the hunger strike.

Ganji expressed the gratitude of his generation to their “beloved teacher” and was wistful about missing the freedom to have another long discussion with Soroush. But he had no choice, he wrote, because of the clerics’ betrayal, hypocrisy, and deceptions.

“They are immersed in corruptions but claim to be innocents. Their other service is to defend killers and murderers,” he wrote. “They know nothing but claim to be the holders of divine secrets. They are experts in breaking promises.”

With scathing bitterness, he described the clerics’ “machine” of terror and assassination. “It knew no limits, and every single dissident had to be eliminated,” he told Soroush.

In his letter to Soroush, Ganji’s transformation was complete. Ganji was not among the well-heeled in the villas and condos of North Tehran who had rejected the revolution from the early days. He was not among the thousands of the Western-educated elite embarrassed by the revolution’s excesses and Iran’s isolation. He was not among the businessmen who wanted to end economic sanctions as well as tensions with the outside world. He was not among the artists, writers, and filmmakers who felt confined by the Islamic republic’s restrictions. He was not even among the prominent student leaders, many of whom were also jailed and tortured.

Once charged with protecting the clerical regime and teaching its virtues, the former Revolutionary Guard had become Iran’s noisiest democratic activist and, some claimed, the most popular.

“No other dissident has emerged since the revolution who has the respect of all the disparate elements of Iranian society, from Revolutionary Guardsmen and Basij [volunteers], senior clergy and religious intellectuals, to the secular and religious middle class within Iran, and the strong Iranian exile communities in Europe and North America,” Karim Sadjadpour, the Iran analyst for the International Crisis Group, told me.

“The fact that Ganji is held in such high esteem by all of these disparate actors is really quite remarkable.”

Ganji held out for seventy-three days. By then, however, he was suffering severe kidney problems and other medical complications. He had lost over fifty-five pounds. In the end, he was lapsing in and out of consciousness. Pressured by family and friends, who argued that he would be more effective alive, he finally ended his hunger strike.

In March 2006, Ganji completed his prison term. Reformers and friends swamped his home to celebrate his release. International groups wanted to honor him; universities abroad wanted him to lecture.

The more important question, however, was how relevant he was at home. By the time he was freed, Iran’s reform movement had faded into a whisper. The political environment had changed completely while he was in prison.

Parliamentary elections in 2004 and presidential elections in 2005 had put hard-liners in office. Even friends questioned his ability to effect change.

“Ganji probably represents the loudest and most courageous voice of dissent in Iran, but it’s not necessarily a pragmatic or effective one,” Semati told me. “His combative and aggressive ideas on reform may not be in tune with the broader popular mood. The economic situation and the problems of everyday life and people are their priorities.”

But Ganji continued to speak out.

“The regime is driving Iran toward a catastrophe,” he told me when we met several weeks after his release in 2006. “Iran is today an archipelago of prisons.”

We met in Washington. He had always been in jail when I was in Tehran. He had come to pick up the 2006 International Freedom of the Press Award from the National Press Club. “There is perhaps no greater exemplar of journalistic heroism in the world today than Iranian investigative reporter and dissident Akbar Ganji,” the club said in honoring him.

In his acceptance speech, Ganji said he became a journalist “in order to instigate protest.” He cited Albert Camus’
The Plague,
a tale of a disease’s devastating toll on society that is often interpreted as a metaphor for repression’s deadly impact.

“I am with you here today in order to bear witness on behalf of the fallen victims of the plague of violence,” he said. “It recognizes no boundaries. One day, incarnated as Stalin, it ran over the vast territories of Russia. One day, as Hitler, it tormented the people of Germany, the Jews, and other people…. One day, as Mussolini, it wreaked devastation on the beautiful landscape of Italy. And another day, as bin Laden, it wrought havoc on the United States.”

As he traveled abroad, Ganji continued his protests. En route to Washington, he stopped in New York and held a symbolic three-day hunger strike in front of United Nations headquarters. Friends and supporters organized small simultaneous demonstrations in eighteen cities around the world to demand the release of Iranian political prisoners, particularly a philosopher, a bus-driving labor activist, and a male former legislator arrested during a women’s-rights rally.