A Quest for Change: Khatami and Democracy within Islam
Ramin Jahanbegloo
by Ramin Jahanbegloo
In: World Affairs - The Journal for Internationale Issues, Ausgabe April-June 2001
This historical overview of the ideological travails focuses on the process of transforming Iran's Shi'ite Islamic Republic into an Islamic Democratic Republic. The challenge of arriving at a synergy between the ethical and moral codes of Islam, with the modern institutions of democracy has not been easy. The stunning victory of Khatami in June 2001, with over 76 per cent votes and on endorsement by Ali Khamenei, the supreme religious head, presages the emergence of Iran as a new polestar in the galaxy of human values, particularly in the Islamic world.
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Beitrag erschienen in: World Affairs The Journal of International Issues April-June 2001 |
Two decades after the Islamic revolution in Iran, the majority of the Iranian people manifested their despair and frustration with its outcome, by voting for democratic reform. Seventy per cent of the electorate voted for Mohammad Khatami, a mid-ranking cleric, who won on a platform of establishing the rule of law and a civil society. The revolution had failed to fulfil its promise of a state where people with varying shades of political views could participate in the affairs of the country. Eighteen years later Khatami who had risen from within the revolutionary establishment, vowed to reform the system, affirming that such reform, based on Islamic principles, was indeed possible.
Earlier, in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a high-ranking Shi'ite cleric, had mobilised the gathering popular fury against the Shah. Khomeini's language of political debate was neither nationalist nor socialist. It was ostensibly Islamic, with terms and religious symbols used as a potent means for overthrowing the regime of the Shah.
Khomeini founded what he called an Islamic Republic, a new kind of government that was both Islamic and a republic. His regime adhered to a Shi'a-defined Shari'a law and for the first time in Iranian history political life came under the control of the religious elite. He entitled himself Veleyat Faqih, or the Supreme Jurisprudence, which as a religious leader gave him the power to accept or reject any legislation. Given his religious Charisma, he became the single most powerful person in the Islamic Republic. Secular European-style Courts were replaced by religious Courts. Clerics and non-clerics serving as judges, gave their rulings according to religious law that considered a woman or a non-Muslim to be half in worth to a male Muslim, allowed fathers to give a daughter away in marriage at the age of nine and punished those found drinking alcohol by flogging.
Shortly after Khomeini was installed, Iran faced a devastating war with Iraq which lasted eight long years. The war helped to rally Iranian national sentiment behind the new regime against the Iraqi aggressor Saddam Hussein as well as against internal opposition, which was out-manoeuvred and finally ruthlessly eliminated. But it left the country to cope with mounting economic problems, several ruined and devastated Cities, two million refugees and the loss of 500,000 human lives.
Khomeini had wanted to export his revolution in the region but did not succeed. Islamic movements in other Middle-Eastern countries were either suppressed or lost popular support. In fact, many of the Islamic countries, more fundamentalist than Iran, such as Saudi Arabia, looked at Khomeini's Shi'ia revolution as a threat to their Sunni establishment.
The failure of the foreign policy following the revolution led the country into nearly two decades of isolation. Khomeini's repeated condemnation of the United States for its support to the Shah led to a seemingly spontaneous attack on the American Embassy in Tehran by a group of young hard-line revolutionaries. The students occupied the embassy in November 1979 for 444 days, with 52 of its diplomats held as hostages. The Chaos resulted in the breaking of relations between the countries, which were never restored. A painting in downtown Tehran of the American flag with missiles for the stripes and human skulls for the stars still reflects the general mass sentiment that fuelled the Iranian revolution.
In February 1989, Khomeini drove Iran's foreign policy to further extreme by issuing a Fatwa, an official religious ruling, declaring forfeit the blood of British author Salman Rushdie, for his book The Satanic Verses, which he said, had insulted the Islamic sanctities. As a result, Britain recalled its Ambassador and severed links and all the European countries also restricted their relationship with Iran. The Rushdie affair did not end there. An Iranian semi-private foundation offered a bounty of $2.8 million to anyone who carried out the sentence.
The dominance of Islamically devised laws over people's public and private lives and the suppression of their individual rights led to growing frustration and anger towards the regime. The ban on music, alcoholic drinks, un-Islamic texts and pictures, social contact between unmarried men and women and the repressive dress regulations for men and women, were followed by the establishment of detention centres and severe punishment to wrong-doers. The regime was successful in its mission of gender Segregation, allocating new physical locations for women's presence anywhere in the society. They were required to ride in the back of a bus, sit in the back rows of public seminar halls and enormous numbers of morality police were present everywhere to ensure observance of the regulations.
The opposition political parties were all suppressed and mang of the serious opponents of the regime were forced to flee the country to save their lives. Any serious criticism of the Islamic regime was considered to be 'undermining and jeopardising the achievements of the revolution' and had to be violently crushed.
The only religious minorities recognised in the country were Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians, who could practise their religion `within the limits of the law' (Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 13). The Bahai, an outlawed Islamic sect, were under enormous pressure and were not allowed to practiseunder any condition. In order to marginalise and destroy the Bahai community of 300,000 in Iran in 1980, the government excluded them from university education and civil Service.
Women were infuriated at the way the primary goals of the new regime affected their lives. Without them the revolution would have lost half of its potential support, but now women began to lose many of the rights they had newly acquired under the previous regime. The Islamic Republic gave men not only the right to divorce their wives on demand but also thecustody of the children. Women who committed adultery were stoned to death according to the Shari'a law. They were even required to obtain their husband's written permission to work outside the home or to leave the country. Women were forced to adhere to a strict dress code that dictated the colour of their clothing and the extent of coverage.
Ayatollah Khomeini was succeeded by Ali Khamenei, a Shi'ite cleric, who was appointed by a religious council. The constitution was amended to give him more power, since he lacked the charismatic character of Khomeini. The 'Supreme Leader', Ayatollah Khamenei, commands the security forces and controls the judiciary. He represents the revolutionary old guard and those elements of the clergy that took power from the Shah twenty years ago. The state radio and television are under his direct control.
The repressive period endured far too long. Hardly any Iranian citizen, regardless of social class, who lived in the Islamic Republic was spared humiliation at the hands of the newly empowered group which enjoyed the power it had been given and fulfilled its duty zealously - stopping cars to search for cassette tapes or alcohol, loading un-Islamically dressed men and women into mini buses to take them to detention centres run by the Islamic volunteer force became routine. In the meantime, the system also proved that it could rally huge numbers of devoted supporters on many occasions (it is widely believed, however, that these were from among peasants and government employees). A powerful focus for the spread of terror throughout the country was the network of small groups of vigilantes who justified their actions as defence of the Islamic revolution.
So, the people of Iran responded positively when, in 1997, Khatami campaigned on a platform of respect for individual freedom and increase of general tolerance in society. He turned to the national feelings which had been neglected for the past 18 years, and claimed religion was the best route for achieving true democracy. He stated, "The principle of a civil society is that people have the right to decide their own future; in Islam we believe that God is the only power that can rule humankind and He wants humankind to decide its fate" (Press conference with domestic and foreign journalists, December 14, 1997). Khatami presented himself as a man with a strong sense of nationalism and devoted to Islam, whose challenge was to build a democracy on the principles of Islam.
Mohammad Khatami was not an outsider. He was part of the establishment right from the early days of the Islamic government after the fall of the Shah. His father was a prominent cleric from the city of Yazd who served as the leader of Friday prayers, one of the most influential positions in the provinces. Khatami married into a clerical family and never took off his religious cloak and turban even when he pursued non-religious studies after finishing his religious education in the city of Qom.
Just before the revolution he was picked to run the Iranian sponsored Islamic centre Hamburg, Germany, where he first came into direct contact with West. He served as the deputy of his home town, Ardakan, in the first Parliament after the revolution and briefly headed a conservative government before being appointed Minister of Culture in 1982. During his ten-year tenure he went along with the repressive policies of the System, but gradually began to ease the cultural controls during his last three years in office. The Iranian film industry flourished and writers were allowed to negotiate what they could publish as an alternative to a complete ban on their work. He reinstated annual awards for the best books and films, and personally presented the first award for the best female actress. His years as Cultural Minister were later considered to be the 'golden era' in this ministry's performance.
In 1992, Khatami was forced to resign by an anti-reformist Parliament. "I prefer to perform my duty in defending Islam and the interests of the country in a different way", he wrote in his resignation letter to the President. "My way is to fight ignorance and religious dogma, which harms a religious society the most." So he did. He spent the next five years as the head of the National Library, a job of little political importance but one which gave him plenty of time to shape his political ideas, to write and to lecture.
In his book entitled Fear of the Wave, published in the spring of 1994, he presented a survey of Islamic philosophy and asserted that the backwardness of religion lay in ascribing sanctity and eternity to the limited and incomplete interpretations by humans, and giving priority to emotions over rationality and realistic appraisal. His views on a modern interpretation of Islam are evident in the translation of his Speeches and writing:
If we ask a dogmatic believer - who may nee himself as a thinker and intellectual - what he expects from the revolution, he claims he wants a return to Islamic civilisation. We must alert such people that their wishes are anachronistic. The specific thoughts that underpinned Islamic civilisation ended with the passing of that civilisation. If it had maintained its dynamism, relevance and ability to provide answers to people's problems, that civilisation would have endured (Khatami, Mohammad, Hope and Challenges, the Iranian President Speaks, Binghamton University, 1997 p 26).
In his writings Khatami affirms his commitment to the revolution and to Islam. "We wish to base our life on the tenets of Islam; we possess the will to create an Islamic civilisation. The Islamic revolution was a momentous event in the history of the Iranian nation and the Islamic community, and we can rightly say that because of our revolution, we have dispensed with borrowed values and the Western values that dominated our thinking. By realising our own authentic historical and cultural identity, we have laid a completely new groundwork for regulating our society" .
But first, he believes, the revolution must solve its internal problem, which arises because of "the atheists who try to prevent the formation of an Islamic society, and the dogmatically religious who try to impose their backward ideas on the society" (Khatami, Mohammad, Fear of the Wave, Simayeh Javan Institution, 1994, p 23). The solution is to reinterpret Islam in a way that addresses the problems of the modern world.
Khatami's admiration for the western political traditions is revealed in his book entitled From the World of the City to the City of the World. He admits freedom is a 'vital necessity' and that, historically, human beings have always fought and sacrificed for freedom - and now there are systems in the West that invite people to live freely.
Khatami was fortunate to be one of the four presidential candidates out of more than 200, approved by a clerical screening council in 1997. He had been considered no threat and not even a serious rival to the candidate who was supported by the traditional clerical establishment until, a month before the election, polls began indicating Khatami's possible victory.
Khatami enjoyed the backing of the President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had already served two terms and was barred by law fromrunning for a third term. Because of Rafsanjani's support there was no rigging of the election by the rival group who controlled many of the influential positions in the provinces, such as leaders of Friday prayers who were appointed by the successor of Ayatollah Khomeini and had enjoyed a great deal of Power and influence among the masses since 1979. The powerful mayor of Tehran, who also headed a popular moderate political group, threw his financial and organisational support behind Khatami.
During his campaign, Khatami acknowledged many of the ignored factions living under the Islamic regime. Among them were youth, women and the dissenters living in Iran who were tolerated but not allowed to engage in political activity. He introduced a new vocabulary into the political debate: establishment of jameyeh madani, meaning civil society. He used the Persian word for tolerante borrowed from the French, and invited all the groups to increase their degree of tolerante.
When he won in a landslide victory on May 23, 1997, Khatami had no authority as President, but only the people's support. The head of the judiciary, appointed by Ayatollah Khamenei, was one of his vehement opponents. The state television and radio, both controlled by the leader, were not on his side either. The leader refused to hand over to Khatami's Interior Minister the authority of the Police forte, which had been transferred to the Interior Minister under the previous governments. The Parliament was also dominated by his anti-reformist opponents.
Khatami's civil society threatened the Power of the clerics. Within a democratic state, candidates from other political factions, except for the religious elite, would be allowed to run for elections. The present rulers could not tolerate the more liberal thinkers even among themselves. They feared they could lose their grip on Power as a result of Khatami's reform policies. These anti-reform politicians still had not realised that they had survived by their repressive policies and not by popular support.
The press became Khatami's arm for spreading his message around the country and building a foundation to develop democracy. For the first time in the history of Iran, independent newspapers flourished and began criticising the government and the establishment. They echoed public dissatisfaction and demanded more freedom. They began asking if the Islamic Republic was, indeed, a democratic state and they even suggested the Separation of state from religion. When the groups of vigilantes attacked students' prodemocracy rallies, the pro-Khatami press supported the students and suggested that the vigilantes must be receiving support from the establishment if their acts were neither condemned nor stopped by the authorities.
The anti-reformists confronted the wave strongly and began shutting down the papees one by one. Before Khatami's time conservatives could have closed a paper merely by physical force, butKhatami's call for Ghanoonmadari, meaning the rule of law, now forced them to look for legal means to get their way and they began to resort to Islamic courts that ruled in their favour. Khatami's government issued more licenses for newspapers and whenever a paper was shut down there were others ready to take its place. One newspaper, which called itself the first civil newspaper in Iran, has kept up publishing under six successive names in the past two years. As Khatami had suggested, the media became the forum for lively debate and dialogue; as the anti-reformists had feared, issues were raised that had never been considered before and the battle for reform expanded its base.
In the two years of his presidency, Khatami defended himself with only his principle of tolerance and his insistence on the rule of law. He does not, however, directly challenge the rule of the hard-line clerics. He has repeatedly said that he will respond to violence by tolerance until all groups learn to increase their tolerance for the views of others. His patience has cost him two of his strongest allies, the powerful mayor of Tehran, Gholam Hussein Karbaschi, and his reformist Interior Minister, Abdollah Nouri.
Gholam Hussein Karbaschi is also the Secretary General of a moderate political party without whose help Khatami could not have competed with the more traditional presidential candidate favoured by the clerical establishment. Karbaschi came under intense attack from the wounded rival faction in the election. Karbaschi had won popular support for his effffrts to modernise the city and had earned the hostility of the radicals for it. He cleaned up the revolutionary graffiti and replaced pictures of martyrs with modern paintings. Further, the city's western-style cultural centres, where young men and women could mingle without the presence of the morality police, were contrary to the primary principles of Khomeini's revolution.
Karbaschi, and as many as 54 of his deputies, were charged with corruption and with misuse of public funds to help Khatami in his election campaign. He was officially declared guilty of misusing the municipality funds; in reality this was nothing but political revenge and an effort to remove him from the scene, and in this his opponents were successful. He received a two-year prison term, a hefty fine, and a ten-year ban on holding any executive office. It was an attempt to put an end to his political career.
The next attack was targeted at Abdollah Nouri, the President's Interior Minister, who had enraged his opponents by giving more freedom to political parties and allowing rallies in support of the President. He had also appointed new reform-minded governors in all the cities to challenge the traditional religious leaders of these cities. Nouri repeatedly spoke out against conservatives for what he perceived as attempts to slow reforms initiated by Khatami. As a challenge to these initiatives, Nouri was accused of "creating tension in the society, giving provocative interviews and speeches in different provinces and appointing inexperienced people to managerial posts at the Ministry". In July 1998, he was dismissed by the Parliament on charges of creating disorder and insecurity in the country. Khatami retaliated swiftly. He made Abdollah Nouri the Vice-President and defended him as "one of the strongest ministers in the Cabinet". The President predicted that "his absence from the Cabinet will entail massive damage for the government and the country." When Nouri ran as a candidate for the provincial city councils in March 1999, he won majority of the votes. He resigned from the council in August 1999 to run for the parliamentary election of February 2000, a seat he lost when the President appointed him as his minister. But with the popularity he has gained in the past two years and hisambitious reform policies, he is seen as one who looks forward to heading the Parliament, a big threat to the anti-reformists.
Despite all the obstacles, Khatami's new language of dialogue and tolerance has won him support of the outside world and ended Iran's twenty years of isolation. He has reached out to the Muslim countries and called for 'unity to develop the goals of the Islamic, world' (Islamic Conference held in
Tehran in December 1998). In an interview with an American television network in January 1998 he sent a message to the "American people" and called forcultural exchange between the two nations. For the first time an Iranian President spoke highly of America. He said that "the significance of American civilisation is in the fact that liberty found religion as a cradle for its growth, and religion found the protection of liberty for its divine calling."
What Khatami initiated was a big step to mend relations with the United States and send a signal that Iran is ready to re-enter the international community. This was a courageous initiative that could have brought him down for acting against one of the pillars of Khomeini's revolution. But the clear distinction he made between the American people and American politicians, spared him from domestic attacks and also gave him the opportunity to begin "cracking the wall of mistrust between the two countries" (interview with CNN television in Tehran, January 1998). He continued following the path of Rafsanjani, the previous President, in resolving the Salman Rushdie affair, which had been initiated by Khomeini and remained a serious obstacle to Iran's foreign policy. Khatami firmly labeled it "as a case completely finished for Iran" (press conference in New York, September 1998) and said that Iran would not dispatch anyone to execute the Fatwa.
Khatami's other major success which must be mentioned was putting an end to the underground murder of opposition members and intellectuals by a powerful intelligence ministry network that had killed some 80 people and caused intense fear among intellectuals. Khatami has been much criticised for not making the whole case public and dealing with it more transparently. But the fact that he received the approval of the leader to do so signifiesbehind-the-scene negotiations and the possibility of the leader favouring his side. His priority was to put an end to the killings that seemed to have been supported by powerful elements within the system. Had he tried to make the case public, he might have engaged his government in another tug-of-war that would have meant slowing the trend toward reforms. With or without Khatami, Iranian society has reached a stage that demands more cultural and political freedom. Sixty-five per cent of the population is under the age of 25 and sees no hope in Iran with its failing economy. They have grown up under a system that dictates what they should eat, drink, watch, read and who they are allowed to socialise with. They now demand such basic rights as job opportunities and freedom to socialise and choose their future spouses. These people can neither wait nor be crushed any longer. Foreign satellite television programmes and internet access have familiarised this generation with the life of people in other countries. The repressive policies of the conservative regime and its fear of the so-called "western cultural invasion" succeeded in keeping them blind-folded to the freedom and progress elsewhere in the outside world.
However, the numerous economic problems that Khatami's government has inherited makes the fulfillment of many promises almost impossible. Widespread corruption in government institutions, the monopoly of major industries held by a semi-private foundation under the authority of 'the leader', and lack of security for private or foreign investment, all require long-term economic recovery. The Iranian population has almost doubled, from thirty-five million to sixty-five million, after the revolution. The price of oil, which represents up to 80 per cent of the country's revenue, dropped to as little as $10 per barrel as compared with its price in 1980, when it was $40 a barrel. Khatami's government announced that it must create one million jobs per year to tackle the surging unemployment crisis; in the meantime the government admitted that Iran ranks second in the world in the number of young people leaving the country.
The main question still remains: will Khatami succeed in creating a democratic state within an Islamic system? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because this is the best way to start reform in Iran. Iran has already witnessed two revolutions in the past century and both plunged the country into deeper problems. These problems can only be mended by non-violent democratic reforms. No, because reform will begin with secular laws replacing the Islamic ones and it would gradually lead to the elimination of a large part of the current Islamic system.
The large number of votes for Khatami in the presidential election of 1997 did not necessarily signify support for Khatami as a person. The voters said a loud "No" to the candidate of the clerical establishment and the performance of the Islamic Republic. Yet they did not call for the downfall of the regime. In the meantime, Khatami's increasing popularity after the election and his determination to establish a democratic government confirmed that he would retain considerable popularity in the foreseeable future.
Khatami has clearly stated that he wants to be the saviour of Islam and of the revolution by defining religion anew. If he moves too fast he may unleash chaos or provoke a backlash from entrenched interests. If he moves too slowly, his own followers may become frustrated and withdraw their support. So far his achievement has been limited to cultural and political development, but these have been steady and firm.
Khatami has shown himself to be a skillful politician and he is not lacking in courage or resources. Economic problems resulting from the war with Iraq, the subsequent drop in the country's export revenues, general corruption and structural problems in the economy require long-term planning. Moreover, the demonstrations and the riots that broke out in Tehran and several major cities in the summer of 1999 clearly proved that the people, especially the youth, also want liberation from the strict Islamic rules that control their lives.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, says the mullahs have three choices now:
One is to go on searching for some Gorbachev-like synthesis between Islam and modernism, which they will not find. Another is to opt for Ayatollah Deng, which would mean pretending that Iran is still a theocracy- the way China pretends it is a Maoist state - but in reality turning a blind eye to people's behaviour and setting them free to run their ownlives, provided they don't challenge the regime. And the third option is to go on trying to rule and run everyone's personal life, using vigilantes to beat people into conformity, which simply will not work - not in an age when everyone knows how everyone else lives. (The New York Times, July 20, 1999).
The re-election of President Khatami opens once again the political debate about democratisation in Iran. By reconfirming his strong backing from the electorate, Khatami is in a much better position today to persuade the hardliners, to merge the three concepts of dialogue, tolerance and pluralism within Iran's Islamic system. The whole point is to see how far and how fast Khatami can integrate these concepts in a political reality built upon a revolutionary heritage. As a matter of fact, Khatami's second term will not be without domestic and foreign challenges. As a reformist president, he will have to face more institutional obstacles, coming notably from the Supreme Guide of the Revolution who controls the armed forces, the judiciary and the state broadcasting. At the same time, he will need to improve the country's economy which remains fragile despite Iran's oil wealth, re-establish diplomatic relations with the US and empower Iranian civil society by bringing new hope to the young professionals who have been leaving Iran to study and work in Europe and North America. It is difficult to say how long it will take Khatami to gain control of events and steer the country away from the threat of chaos.
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