30 April, 1998
"Ideological power struggles in Iran have claimed a new victim. Eqbal Ahmad looks into the rift"
Falling through the cracks
By Eqbal Ahmad
On 15 April, Gholam Hussein Karbaschi, Teheran's 44-year-old mayor, was released after 11 days in prison by the order of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 'supreme guide' who wields the ultimate judicial and executive powers in Iran. The release order came following a violent confrontation by supporters and opponents of the mayor, after President Mohamed Khatami pleaded with the Faqih and former president Hashemi Rafsanjani backed his successor's plea.
Iran's Islamic reformists have thus won an early battle in what is most likely a long-drawn ideological struggle over the future of the Iranian state and society. Even this limited victory is by no means decisive. Mr Karbaschi remains under indictment. His prosecution shall proceed, as the Faqih's order underlined, "with precision". The court's antipathy to him is widely known. If he is condemned, his supporters, among whom are a majority of President Khatami's cabinet, will continue to battle their opponents, who are well entrenched in the power structure as they control nearly all the levers of power -- the judiciary, police and armed forces, nationalised industries, radio and television, and the influential foundations which hold the purse strings of Iran's welfare system. Above all, they enjoy the sympathies of Ayatollah Khamenei and, in a crunch, are likely to have the support of the Supreme Guide.
Against this formidable array of opponents, the reformists' assets are elements of the bureaucracy, Iran's enfeebled intelligentsia, the twenty million voters who brought President Khatami into office, and an activated student community. Their effectiveness will depend on the extent of their political mobilisation at critical junctures, a human factor impossible at this point to predict. Additionally, the reformists should be aided by Hujjat-ul-Islam Hashemi Rafsanjani, who chairs the Expediency Council, an advisory body to the Velayet-i-Faqih, an ideal stage for the former president to exert his moderating influence in a complex struggle of high stakes and shrewd protagonists.
The issues behind the contestations are the same as those that surfaced soon after the Islamists' seizure of power: who shall govern Iran, how, and in accordance with what perspectives on Islam? Mehdi Bazargan and Karim Sanjabi, Mohamed Yazdi and Sadegh Qotubzadeh, Abul-Hassan Bani Sadr and the Mujahideen-i-Islam, Ayatollah Beheshti, and Ayatollah Taleghani were all, in their differing ways, protagonists in this battle over the shape of Islamic polity. Those unresolved questions have re-surfaced now in a new guise.
The worst way to watch its progress is to read the Western media uncritically, as it is simultaneously well-informed, profoundly ignorant, and blinded by analytical categories such as 'conservatives, liberals and leftists'. Familiar, therefore comforting, such classifications do not clarify much about Iranian and Islamic ideological disputes. The so-called 'conservatives', for example, are die-hard anti-Americans, while the 'leftists' favour restoration of normal relations with the West, and the 'liberals' are split on nearly every important issue. Contrary to classical conservative precept, Iran's so-called conservatives are committed 'statists'. They are endowed with the attributes associated with Soviet-style socialism and Third World radicals. They oppose market oriented re-structuring of the economy and privatisation of Iran's nationalised industry, wish to hold on to the nationalised foundations as welfare fiefdoms, and favour centralised power as well as state control over culture, education, the press and other publications. They are conservative only in the limited, literal sense of wanting to conserve Iran's post-revolutionary status quo of power and privilege, of which they are the primary beneficiaries.
The 'leftists', on the other hand, are hardly that. They favour a liberal economy with an increasing role for private enterprise, freedoms of speech and association, greater participation of women in public life, and a lively civil society gaining hegemony over the state. In the context of the Iranian revolution, their outlook is congruent with those of Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Taleghani, and Mehdi Bazargan, which is to say that Islam remains the defining factor in their politics as a source of preamble and principle of legitimation. But their perspective on Islam is modernist, influenced by the thoughts of the ulema and nationalist intellectuals of the Constitutional Movement, which yielded Iran's first constitution in 1905, and by such Muslim reformers as Sayed Ahmed Khan, Rashid Rida, Mohamed Iqbal and, more contemporaneously, Ali Shariati and Mehdi Bazargan..
Not accidentally, the first confrontation of this recent period occurred at Bazargan's death anniversary. Khatami's government permitted it to be commemorated publicly. Ibrahim Yazdi, a former aide to Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran's foreign minister in the government headed by Bazargan, led the event as leader of Bazargan's Iran Freedom Party. An unexpectedly large audience turned up at the memorial service, which became an occasion for invoking modernist Islamic perspectives on citizens' rights, ecumenism, democracy and cultural freedom. Opponents criticised the government for allowing such an event to take place. Some weeks later, in mid-December, Yazdi was hauled into Teheran's Evin prison, from where he was released after a chorus of protests in Iran and outside. The immediate cause of his arrest was a collective letter he signed with fifty other persons, including some prominent clerics, to demand that the rights of Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri be respected. Montazeri's situation reveals yet another irony of the nexus between religion and state in Iran.
The Grand Ayatollah is a greatly revered figure as a religious scholar and persistent opponent of the Pahlevi regime. He was Ayatollah Khomeini's most cherished student, colleague, and political collaborator. When Khomeini was imprisoned following the June 1963 uprising, it was Montazeri who led the campaign for his release. In 1965, when Khomeini was exiled to Turkey, Montazeri remained in Iran and was promptly imprisoned. Thereafter he became a mainstay of the ulema's opposition to the Shah, and served several stints in the Shah's prisons, where he was subjected to harsh treatment. In post-Shah Iran, he became Ayatollah Khomeini's designated successor, a designation confirmed in November 1984 by the Council of Experts. In 1987 began the series of internal intrigues which included allegations of his association with "liberal circles", a reference to Bazargan and other modernists. The infighting finally led to his resignation in March 1989. A mere three months later Ayatollah Khomeini passed away and a relatively junior cleric, Hujjat-ul-Islam Ali Khamenei, succeeded him as the Faqih although he had not then attained the rank of Ayatollah, and was nowhere near being regarded as marja-i-taqlid. In the Shi'a tradition, the marja is an acknowledged theological scholar whose opinion carries decisive weight.
As the author of an authoritative two-volume work on Velayet-i-Faqih, Ayatollah Montazeri is the most respected living authority on the subject. As the president of the Assembly of Experts, which drafted the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, he also guided its investiture as Iran's unique constitutional innovation -- rule by a jurisconsult -- which has its origins in Shi'a theology and also, via Al-Farabi, in Plato's philosopher-king. Ayatollah Beheshti, who was killed in June 1981 by a bomb planted by the Mujahideen-i-Islam, drafted Article 5, which laid down that, during the occultation (of the Hidden Imam) "the governance and leadership [of the state] devolve upon the just and pious faqih who is acquainted with circumstances of his age; courageous, resourceful and possessed of administrative ability; and recognised and accepted as leader by the majority of the people." The constitution explicitly provided that the faqih must be a marja. This latter provision was repealed in 1989 to make it possible for Ali Khamenei to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini.
Since then, the extraordinary powers of the faqih have been a subject of whispered controversy in Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei has from the start tended to argue that the faqih's authority cannot be questioned or subjected to checks and balances. "One who acts on God's behalf is not a dictator," he argued during the constitutional debate in 1986. Last November, Ayatollah Montazeri brought the matter back into the open, causing a political earthquake. From Qom he spoke out on the primacy of the faqih's role as spiritual guide, mujtahid, and arbiter, implying that it was not for him to control such institutions as the police, security departments, and armed forces. There was immediate reaction: a mob attacked his home in Qom, and restrictions were imposed on the Grand Ayatollah's movement and activities as teacher and scholar. Public protests followed. Even the clerics of Iran became divided over the issue. Thus Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri exposed to full view the cracks in Iran's ideological consensus, which leaders like Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohamed Khatami had been trying hard to keep under the carpet.
Gholam Hussein Karbaschi is the first person, but by no means the last, to have fallen between the cracks. The dynamic, no-nonsense mayor of Teheran was an obvious target. An 'alim by training, he attained the rank of Hujjat-ul-Islam before electing to be a layman. He is flamboyant, outspoken, runs afoul of vested interests, and gets things done. He first attracted attention as the mayor who restored war-decayed Isfahan to its erstwhile glory. Rafsanjani appointed him mayor of Teheran. Minus the daily violence, Teheran was more impossible to restore to health than Karabachi or Casablanca. He has helped transform it into a modern metropolis, with cultural centres in major neighborhoods, community centres in poor areas, parks, playgrounds, art galleries, and pollution control. The slaughterhouse that filled half a million homes with foul smell is now a community centre where the city's poor people have easy access to all kinds of amenities. On the graffiti-covered city walls now hang colorful posters. A city-sponsored newspaper, Hamshehri, is among the most widely read in Iran.
Karbaschi taxed the rich to rebuild the city. Developers, political land grabbers, and patronage distributors disliked him. The entrenched clerical elite distrusted his modern style of governance and his contemporary preferences. He campaigned vigorously for Mohamed Khatami and became identified as an advance man of his reformist agenda. The die was then cast for Gholam Hussein Karbaschi.