The Resecularization of Iran

www.iranmania.com Tuesday 16 April 2002 - IranMania.com

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Can we learn from our fathers' mistakes?

Why did the Iranian modern middle class go into an alliance with the Mullahs against the Shah? Why cannot secular minded Iranians agree on a political platform even though they all want the same things?

It is high time that we Iranians start to ask and answer these questions regardless of our political opinions if we want to find a way out of our current impasse. In any country, any nation, democratic or semi democratic, military dictatorship or theocratic tyranny, there is always an inner sanctum of power, a control chamber where the state's vital interests, its very existence is protected.  In a democracy, the membership of that higher council is elective. In Turkey, Pakistan or Egypt, they have elections but the military top brass are the final arbiters of power and therefore in charge of distinguishing the country's best interests. In pre revolutionary Iran, the secular intellectuals were in charge of the control chamber, the "deep state". In any moment of serious crisis the consensus of the secular intellectuals had the final and conclusive word on the course of the events. The Iranian secular leadership was far more competent than their counterparts in similar societies .The 1979 Iran or even 1960s Iran was far ahead of Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Brazil, Venezuela, Malaysia or Thailand in terms of economic development, the material basis of modernization. Political development, the building of the intellectual basis of the institutions of civil society did not however materialize. The question then becomes why was not democracy institutionalized in Iran while education and economic development clearly flourished? There has been a range of answers so far:  The institution of monarchy and the personality of Mohammed Reza Shah were the biggest impediment to democracy in Iran or Mohammed Reza Shah was a megalomaniac by nature since he liked to fly airplanes and would always take his picture with Damavand in the background. (See Marvin Zonis, "The Majestic Failure"). Or the all too familiar conspiracy theory: Mohammed Reza Shah was groomed to be a dictator at the pay of the British and the Americans since the moment of his birth. (See the fictitious memoirs of Hossein Fardoust by the IR intelligence service).  These infantalizing, patronizing and ideology-ridden readings of history fail to answer one basic and simple question. Supposing they are right why did the builders of the common secular consensus, the very architects of the Pahlavi State let it happen. Where were they? Why did not they stop it? It is therefore logical to consider that perhaps the secular state itself with or without the Shah had underlying design flaws when it came to the distribution of power or the production of a democratic consensus. I believe that the lack of institutionalization of democracy in Iran during the Pahlavi State can be traced to the value system of the secular intellectuals themselves. I believe that the social milieu into which Iranian institutions of civil society were borne and within which they operated had everything to do with their failure. The social institutions of the Enlightment, an independent judiciary, a parliament, a free press can only exist if there is a consensus in society that individual humans as its members are "persons." In the beginning of the Pahlavi era with an illiteracy rate of over 95%, neither the intellectuals looked at the majority of people as "persons" nor the majority of people thought of themselves as equal human beings to intellectuals.  That was the curse of our history. In her 1926 memorable Travel diary to Iran, "Passenger to Tehran", Vita Sackville-West, a member of the famous Bloomsbury group and a keen social observer makes an interesting comment: "This country is like the sands of its deserts, you can mold them any way you wish but the mold breaks the moment you loosen your grip. The reason is they have never experienced the 19th century when the foundations were built." 

During the reign of Reza Shah, the intellectuals were convinced that democracy could wait until there actually was an Iran. As a result the secular intellectuals were the planners and Reza Shah was the muscle, the raw executive power behind economic modernization. The relations between Mohammed Reza Shah and the intellectuals were different. At the outset, as Iran was occupied, they looked at the Shah as a figurehead, a symbol of the continuation of the sovereign state. As the threat to the country's national integrity subsided, the modern middle class and their delegates, the intellectuals started to treat the Shah as an independent arbiter of their differing views regarding the future path of the country.  The Shah was not the dominating power but the umpire, the power broker who maintained the balance of the secular consensus. The attempts at building of grassroots genuine party politics in Iran were short lived and failed because of two main reasons: First, the country as a whole was still culturally and politically underdeveloped. Meaningful debates on substantive issues were nonexistent and parties would only exist as the expression of the political ambitions of their founders. Second, the material basis of Iran's modern middle class was weak. As a result power politics in the sense of independent nongovernmental civic entities exacting authority and demanding their agenda did not exist. Politics was more a case of the intellectuals theorizing and expecting change from the state. As the institutions of the Enlightment failed to materialize, the intellectuals started to become disillusioned with the feasibility of the whole project itself rather than looking for the underlying faults. As a result, the modern middle classes were attracted by the ideals of communism in its various guises. The Stalinist Tudeh party was a body blow to the secular consensus for not only it robbed it from some of its best talents in every field of humanities but also it imported the violent, ideological, uncivil discourse of third worldist Marxism to Iranian politics. The events of the 28th Mordad and the fall of Mossadegh were the definitive coup the grace, the one cataclysmic event that sealed the fate of the secular alliance. From its very beginning the motto of the constitutional movement was "The idea of legality and progress," "Andisheh Ghanoun va Taraghi". Mohammed Mossadegh represented "Ghanoun", the political development side of Iranian modernization, the ideal of democratic legitimacy. Mohammed Reza Shah represented "Taraghi", the economic development side of modernization, the ideal of material progress. On the surface, Mossadegh and the Shah looked as opposites. In reality they complimented each other. No two men ever needed each other more than Mossadegh and Mohammed Reza Shah. For one was the body and the other the soul. One was critical logic and the other instrumental rationality. Mossadegh was the consummate communicator, political tactician and crisis manager. Mohammed Reza Shah was a builder, the aloof, calculating long-term strategist. The secular alliance needed both.  Their failure to work with each other for the common good of Iran destroyed each of them in turn and blew up the secular alliance. Mohammed Mossadegh was arguably one of Iran's most honest, secular minded, patriotic and capable politicians. However by virtue of being a nineteenth century trained jurist, Mossadegh had very little understanding of the post war international politics and modern economics. He actually believed that he could defeat Britain by not selling them Iranian oil. In his memoirs he makes claims such as: " Reza Shah's building of the trans Iranian railway was a British plot. The project of sending students to Europe was a mistake for they all came back as scoundrels. Iranians do not need freight insurance for they trust each other." Mossadegh's first year in power, was one of the best years in Iran's history. The whole of Iran united behind Mossadegh and Mohammed Reza Shah and together they accomplished one of Iran's proudest moments. The Nationalization of the oil industry. More important than the nationalization itself is how they did it. There was no hostage taking, no hate rallies, and no terrorist bombings. The Jews, Bahais or Armenians were not singled out as the enemy's fifth column. In a manner befitting a proud, noble, old nation, they fought in the world's courts of justice and public opinion and they won. Mossadegh's second year in power, 1953 was the year of Iran's shame. For the one man who was the symbol of democracy in Iran, Mossadegh, closed the Majlis, the Senate, the Supreme Court and ruled by decree. And the symbol of Iran's national sovereignty and the country's best technocrat, the Shah, formed an alliance with foreigners against his own prime minister. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi has been universally condemned and blamed for the failure of the secular state. The reality is that Mossadegh is as much responsible as Mohammed Reza Shah. Mohammed Reza Shah did nothing wrong when he signed the edict removing Mossadegh from power. The constitution clearly gave him that right in the absence of the Majlis. The whole story of the CIA and MI6 involvement in the removal of Mossadegh is true but aggrandized way out of proportion. Regardless, had Mohammed Reza Shah faced Mossadegh alone and defeated him without foreign interference of any amount or nature, Iran's history would undoubtedly be different. The involvement of foreign powers as insignificant and minuscule as it was made all the difference as far as the legitimacy of the Shah and the future disposition of the secular alliance were concerned. The economic boom which started in the 1960s mainly as a result of the Shah's and the technocratic elite's managerial expertise actually made matters worse since it laid bare the non existence and the necessity of the civic institutions of the Enlightment. The whole modernization paradigm in Iran can be compared to a stool standing on the two pillars of economic progress and political development. The more emphasis on linear economic buildup in the absence of democracy resulted in the instability of the whole system. As a result those secular forces that supported the Shah lost their faith in the whole system. They either retreated from politics altogether or worse they stayed on but became cynical participants in a macabre game of make believe.  On the side of the secular opposition to the Shah, from the late sixties onward the whole discourse was characterized by almost a complete lack of concern for the ideas of the Enlightment. Instead, attention was focused with what extremist political ideologies had to offer for emancipation from the domination of the West. Sociopolitical institutions were no longer discussed as a key to progress. If and when there was talk of civil liberties, it was clear from the context that it was meant only to signify the desire of the protagonists of this or that ideology to be able to have everything their own way. The whole social milieu of the Iranian middle class became slanted and paradoxical. In one hand, the modern middle class loved the end products of economic modernization: material comfort, modern education and a cosmopolitan life style. On the other hand, they hated the very system that had produced them because of the lack of the other necessary ingredient: civil liberties. The dilemma of the modern middle class was not just political, it extended itself within every sphere of social activity: gender relations, family relations, etc. The Iranian modern middle class attempted to resolve its identity crisis, its spiritual dissatisfaction by going through a devotional metamorphosis, a metaphysical reconfiguration. On the political side, to hide their role in the creation of the secular alliance, Iranian intellectuals created the "Myth of 28th Mordad" as the secular version of the "Karbala Syndrome". The whole semiotics, screen play, Manichist set up of the legend of 1953 as portrayed by lay Iranian intellectuals in the 70s is reminiscent of a "Tazieh" play. Mossadegh became the secular saint, the infallible, the Mazloum, the Shahid, the latter day Imam Hussein. Mohammed Reza Shah became the Shiaa villain par excellence, the usurper, the tyrannical modern Yazid. It did not matter how many dams, roads, universities, power plants the Shah built. It did not matter what the creation of OPEC did for Iran and the whole region. It did not matter that Iranian Armed Forces became the fifth in the world. It did not matter that for the very first time in our entire post Islamic history, women and religious minorities enjoyed full citizenship rights. It did not matter that the Pahlavi State succeeded where Amir Kabir and Abbas Mirza had failed To carry the flag of patriotism, to be an authentic Iranian; you had to defy the Shah. Lock, stock and barrel. On the social side, "Cultural Authenticity" was hailed as the solution to Iran's identity crisis. Cosmopolitanism became Westoxication, "Gharbzadegi." The opening of the Iranian culture to the world and the resulting scrutiny became "Cultural Invasion." To top it off, the intellectuals became suicidal and labeled themselves "Cultural Traitors," those who sold their ancestral faith to the devil of western modernity. When a half literate, apprentice village Mullah, Ali Khamenei calls the whole Iranian intelligentsia, "A sick plant imported from abroad." Do not blame him. We the secular intellectuals taught him. The exchange of the ideals of the Enlightment for "Cultural Particularism " became the grounds for the odd coalition of the secular middle class and the political clergy to topple the last bastion of modernity in Iran, the Pahlavi State. It did not however lead to the successful assumption of power by the secularists. The reason is obvious, in the same way that Political Shiism has never surpassed its Karbala syndrome and is doomed to remain a creed of protest, the 70s version of Iranian ethnic nationalism could not surpass its Mossadegh myth and therefore remained the party of the honorable vanquished. Bazargan's unwillingness to face off Khomeini when he was in control of all the levers of power is clear indication of the defeatist mind set. In the whole fervor of the 1978-1979 Iran, three men of the secular alliance understood the depth of the tragic faith that the Iranian modern middle class faced and had the courage to stand up against the overwhelming flow. Gholam Hossein Sadighi when he asked the Shah not to leave Iran. Shahpour Bakhtiar when he put a last ditch effort to stop the inevitable. Abbas Amir Entezam when he opposed the passing of Velayat Faghih though the establishment of the assembly of experts. All three of these men were isolated or banned by their colleagues from the remnants of the secular alliance. While in the past hundred years, we secular middle class Iranians have been busy with the demons of our past, the creations of our culture and collective conscience: the Iranian Enlightment, the Myth of Mossadegh and Cultural Authenticity; another metanarrative, a new global mega reality has been happening right under our nose. If one takes a country's economy as a proxy for its competitive advantage amongst nations then we have miserably failed. The general profile of Iran's economic predicament at the beginning of the Twenty first century is exactly as it was at the turn of the Twentieth century. It is as if the collapse of the Oriental monarchy of the Qajars, the rise and demise of the Pahlavi State, the succesfull institutionalization of Political Islam and now its decay have not in the slightest measure changed the destiny of the Iranians from relying on a mono product economy for their survival. We are still an insignificant, miniscule, marginal link in the global economic order. The consequences of this predicament in the next decades will be catastrophic for Iran and will test the entire existence of our culture and nation. What we have witnessed in the past twenty years is that economic globalization and the telecommunication revolution has made all kinds of third worldist Marxism, chauvinist nationalism and ethnic religious nativism simply obsolete. The claims of those inside or outside Iran who brandish "Islamic Reformism" as a substitute to or a parallel project with the ideals of the Enlightment is entirely bogus. It is hard to believe that serious people still talk about Islamic modernism when the dramatic failure of the two hundred years old project of the construction of Political Shiism and Velayat e Fafghih as an ideology of governance out of the medieval faith of a nation is in full view of history. "Islamic Reformism" is yet another trap to plunge the Iranian polity even deeper into an exclusively religious discourse. If there is an iota of self-respect in the common travails that we Iranians have endured in the last two hundred years, it is certainly not in the sophistry of Ali Shariati or his reincarnation, Haj Hossein Dabagh circa AbdolKarim Sorush but in the works of Mohammad Ali Foroughi or AbdolHossein Zarinkoub or Ehsan Yarshater. If Iran has done anything where two hundred years from today, our children may proudly look back at it, it is not in the acts of hostage taking or terrorism but the trans Iranian railway, the Tehran University, the nationalization of oil, the creation of OPEC. We do not have a choice but to rebuild the secular alliance where our fathers left it. We are condemned to learn the art of disagreement if we are to survive.