Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (62 page)

Religious thinkers had one response: man does not live by bread alone. Though the Iranian Revolution was fueled by many economic concerns, its ultimate impulse was a moral one. The Westernized intellectuals had failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the fundamental dilemma of identity that Iranians felt themselves to be
facing. Khomeini offered a clear and brutal response: “Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1400 years. You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.”
⁶

To be sure, Khomeini and his revolutionary supporters among the clergy strove to outflank the “enlightened intellectuals” by redefining Islam as the more “progressive” force. (Both Shariati and Mawdudi served as sources of inspiration in this case.) Yet the extraordinary intensity of the popular joy and rage that Khomeini was able to summon in his campaign to sweep away the world’s most powerful monarch drew its energy from the profound anxiety of people who felt that their most cherished values were under direct attack from those who claimed to be improving the material conditions of their existence.

Religious reactions can assume radically different forms. To Khomeini, the only viable response to the shah’s rule was revolution—and violence was an essential ingredient of the process by which the revolutionaries were supposed to purge society of secular excess. John Paul II came at the problem from a radically different perspective. His personal experience of twentieth-century totalitarianism at its most vicious—Nazism and Stalinism—led him to embrace an approach to resistance that minimized the possibility of violence. His first encyclical,
Redemptor Hominis
, expressly addressed “the subject of development and progress [that] is on everybody’s lips and appears in the columns of all the newspapers and other publications in all the languages of the modern world.” For all its virtues, the pontiff warned, material progress always contains the potential to become an end unto itself—to lose sight of the individual lives it aspires to improve: “Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products. A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns man to such slavery, even if at times, no doubt, this occurs contrary to the intentions and the very premises of its pioneers.”
⁷

“A civilization purely materialistic in outline” sounds very much, of course, like the Soviet Communism that John Paul II was striving to resist. It is clear that he regarded such a system as an absolute evil to be opposed. Yet that recognition did not justify absolute means. The strategy of cultural resistance—the construction of alternate society, of “living in truth”—implied the same quality of “self-restraint” that later provided the basis for the “self-limiting revolution” of Solidarity and 1989.
It is striking, indeed, that the most influential nonviolent activist movements of the twentieth century—notably Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for independence from the British Empire and Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign (both of which drew, in their turn, on the writings of that Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy)—had overtly religious origins. Their legacy can be traced in the 1980s through such diverse events as the uprisings against dictatorship in South Korea, the 1986 “People’s Power” revolution in the Philippines, and the “velvet revolutions” in East Central Europe.

Progress is often presented by its proponents as the only rational course. For much of the twentieth century, radical progressives were convinced that they were armed with the truth. But the fact of the matter is that people do not always want to do the allegedly reasonable thing—especially if it runs counter to the cherished sources of identity that give meaning to their lives. This is what made the events of that year so hard to fathom for many secular radicals. The Iraqi dissident, ex-Trotskyite, and self-described atheist Kanan Makiya still recalls how he and his fellow left-wing radicals were blindsided by the Islamic Revolution. “Here we had these forces that we thought we had confined to the dustbins of history that reappeared and turned out to have nothing to do with what we had always expected,” he says. “The working classes were nowhere to be seen. All the categories through which we had viewed the world had fallen apart.”
⁸
The Tudeh, once the most powerful Communist Party in its region, effectively ceased to exist after the Iranian Revolution—a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to real-existing socialism elsewhere. The dream of the brotherhood of man was a powerful one, but it could not compete, in the final analysis, with the brotherhood of believers.

The man who started the Arab Spring was not an Islamist. On December 17, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in Tunisia, a high school graduate with an income of some $140 a month, changed the course of history. That day Mohammed Bouazizi went to a local government office in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid to register a protest against the police who had confiscated his vegetable cart. The official in charge refused to see him or acknowledge his complaints. Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline and set himself alight.
⁹

Bouazizi’s death touched off a revolution in his home country that quickly found emulators across the Arab world. In Tunisia itself, the protesters who took to the streets in empathy with Bouazizi’s frustrations brought down the country’s long-entrenched president. In Egypt millions of other demonstrators challenged
President Hosni Mubarak—and won. Yemenis successfully dislodged their leader, Libyans toppled the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Syrians rose up against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The unrest spanned, to varying degrees, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Each uprising was different. Economic and political factors worked to unique effect in each country. Yet common to all of these rebellions was an essentially moral impulse: the urge to fight against the corruption and injustice that spring from long years of dictatorial rule.

The Arab Spring caught the world—not to mention many of the people directly affected by it—completely off guard. But one of the most surprising things about it was, at least initially, the comparatively subdued role of political Islam. Islamist movements exist in all of the countries affected by the Arab revolutions, yet religious activists were relatively inconspicuous in the early stages of upheaval. The demands of the people in the vanguard of change in the Middle East in 2010 and 2011 were remarkably similar to those protesting dictatorship in other parts of the world. Demonstrators proclaimed their desires for an end to tyranny, for free elections and freedom of speech, for an end to corruption, for transparent institutions and good governance, for impartial courts and strong parliaments. They did not call—at least at first—for the implementation of the sharia, for rule by the
ulama
or a jihadi avant-garde, for God’s sovereignty to override that of the people. For the crowds demonstrating on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, and Manama, Islam—to paraphrase the famous Islamist slogan—was not necessarily the answer. Many members of the younger generation of activists claimed to see their salvation in parliamentary democracy rather than the precepts of Quranic government.

Yet the ghost of 1979 has still managed to haunt the Arab Spring. The Iranian precedent has come to seem particularly ominous in the case of Egypt, the country that gave the Arab world its most prominent revivalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s success in the first free presidential and parliamentary elections since Mubarak’s downfall was, for many Egyptians, the logical outcome of the revolution; for many others, it represented nothing less than a betrayal of the cause.

Most striking of all, perhaps, is the extent to which Egyptians have not turned to Iran, the first Islamic Republic, for inspiration. History is probably to blame. In 1979 there was no precedent for an Islamic revolution; no one knew what it would look like or what course it would take. By 2010, however, the revolutionaries in Egypt could look back on three decades of Islamist experiments around the world. Few of them wanted to emulate Iran, where the initial euphoria associated with Khomeini’s experiment had long since degenerated into stagnant authoritarianism,
a vicious, bureaucratic dictatorship with a frozen economy. Most Egyptians, of course, are Sunnis, so many of them might be inclined to seek examples closer to their own version of Islam. But the precedents established so far are hardly inspiring. Endless intra-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan after the victory over the Soviets, including the Neanderthal interval of Taliban rule, did not make for an attractive model, either. Nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, the attractions of al-Qaeda-style apocalyptic nihilism—certainly always somewhat exaggerated—had almost entirely evaporated.

There were also examples closer to home. Indigenous Egyptian groups like al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, led by Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “blind sheikh”), and Islamic Jihad, controlled since the beginning of the 1990s by Bin Ladens ally Ayman al-Zawahiri, both indulged in long campaigns of assassination and terror inside the country. In particular, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya’s 1990s campaign to destabilize the national economy by targeting foreign tourists proved deeply alienating to ordinary Egyptians desperate to find jobs and sustenance. In 1997 members of the group dressed as policemen staged a brutal attack on tourists at a temple complex in Luxor, killing fifty-eight foreigners and four Egyptians. The popular backlash against the act was so intense that the group ultimately found itself compelled to forswear violence altogether.

Still, it would be premature to claim that the lure of political Islam has faded altogether. To the contrary, there are many indications around the Muslim world that believers still yearn for a political order that will give place of honor to religious values. Jihadis still exist, and they will for many years. But there is reason to believe that their ideas will meet with greater competition from within the community of believers in the years to come. There are signs of a great intellectual ferment beginning to get under way within Islam. Just like Khomeini and Qutb, the theorists of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers have conspicuously avoided mapping out the details of the state they are trying to achieve—betraying an otherworldly utopianism that hardly looks compelling in a world filled with many far more attractive alternatives. The newer generation of Islamic activists seems less inclined to leave all the details up to the fanatics who claim to know what’s better for them.

Some of the most interesting examples of this dynamic come from the very country that pioneered Islamic revolution: Iran. Even as the regime there has concentrated power within an ever-narrowing elite, excluding even many former members of Khomeini’s entourage, the institutional order bequeathed by the revolution has continued to offer at least the possibility of self-correction through elections. Again and again, Iranian voters have used their right to vote to express their desires
for liberalization and reform, and again and again the governing elite has fought to thwart those desires by whatever means it can. The most dramatic example to date came with the 2009 presidential election, when alleged government vote-fixing in favor of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, triggered popular protests that brought thousands of mostly young Iranians into the streets.

The main candidate opposing Ahmadinejad, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, hardly qualified as a dissident; he was a well-established stalwart of the regime, a former prime minister of the Islamic Republic. Originally a sympathizer of Shariati (and an admirer of Che Guevara), during the revolution he quickly gravitated to Khomeini, and in 1979 he joined forces with Ayatollah Beheshti to found the Islamic Republican Party. It would be hard to find someone with more impeccable insider qualifications, and, indeed, Mousavis campaign program was hardly the stuff of all-out counterrevolution. He promised a few modest correctives to the existing system, including an expansion of women’s rights. (Among his supporters was Mohsen Sazegara, the young idealist who joined Khomeini from Chicago in the fall of 1978. Like many former Iranian revolutionaries, he has now become a reformist.)

Yet the huge protests that followed his defeat dramatized the yawning gap between the expectations of many Iranians and the increasingly isolated circle of people at the top of the regime. (Many of those who chose to defy the regime were less active supporters of Mousavi than people determined to see that their votes were respected.) It was no accident that the protesters chose the color green—the traditional emblem of Islam—as the insignia of their movement. The protesters who took to the streets in what have been described as the biggest demonstrations in Iran since 1979 called not for a secular polity, but rather for the fulfillment of what they described as authentic Islamic values of tolerance and social justice. At the same time, their dominant slogan—”Where is my vote?”—spoke to democratic norms, not religious ones. Many of the postelection protesters did call for a fundamental, even revolutionary, transformation of the Islamic Republic—demonstrating that Mousavi was, to some extent, a figurehead of widespread longing for much more radical change. But strikingly few of them called for the use of force to achieve that aim. In fact, the emphasis on nonviolence has been one of the salient characteristics of the Green Movement.

This grassroots demand for a true melding of democracy and Islam within the country that gave the world the very concept of “Islamic Revolution” underlines a fundamental incongruity. For centuries Shiite clerics had remained independent of Iranian state power, a position that gave them immense political legitimacy and spiritual authority. But having captured the state in an attempt to assert the sovereignty of God, they effectively transformed themselves into just another set of
worldly rulers—a point noted by commentators at the time of the 2009 protests. “What is ironic is that instead of empowering the clerical establishment, [the revolution] made the clerical establishment a puppet of the government,” the Iranian-born scholar Mehdi Khalaji told a reporter in 2009. “So, the clerical establishment has lost its independence, its social popularity, and so on; and instead, the government, in 30 years, has been transformed into a military-economic-religious complex.”
¹⁰
By politicizing religion, the mullahs have transformed religion into mere politics.