The First Charter of Human Rights, By The Persian Emperor
Kourosh The Great Over 2700 Years Ago

"Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely"

In Iran, Daring to Dream of Democracy

Sunday, March 07, 2004

The Washington Post
- By Afshin Molavi

This past summer at a major intersection in Tehran, I stood under a massive mural of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, watching a gray-bearded cleric trying to hail a cab. None stopped for him. By my count, eight empty taxis passed by without picking him up.

Residents of the Iranian capital have become familiar with this scene. Several clerics have told me that they literally de-frock and put on civilian clothes when they want to catch a cab. One young seminary student told me: "I don't even bother with taxis, but buses aren't much better. When I get on, people whisper behind my back. When I'm in a store, people smile and wish me well, but I see in their eyes that they don't like me." My Tehran barber, Hossein, a 38-year-old man who grew up in a religious home, puts it this way: "When I was growing up and we saw a cleric walking down the street, my father would insist that I go out of my way to say hello to him. Today, I steer my own children away from them."

Given these anti-clerical attitudes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it's small wonder that the 25th anniversary of Khomeini's return from exile passed with little note there. But it is still remarkable nonetheless. On Feb. 1, 1979, the unbending cleric who dared to defy the shah was met in Tehran by a jubilant, expectant crowd of nearly 2 million. He proclaimed "the spring of freedom" for the Iranian people, promised economic deliverance for the poor, and lambasted America and the West with a sound and fury that stunned many in Western capitals.

Today, the radical experiment in religious governance that he launched is viewed with widespread disillusion. Khomeini and his allies created a system that gave only limited democratic spaces to the people and granted decisive power to the new inheritors of the Iranian realm -- the clergy. The traditional authoritarianism of Persia held. This time, however, the king wore a turban.

It is often noted that Iranians are frustrated with their isolation and deteriorating economy. But something deeper is going on in Iran -- a wide-ranging repudiation of the mingling of religion and politics, and a growing movement for secular democracy. As a Farsi speaker (I left Iran when I was a child), I've been able to speak to Iranians directly. In villages and cities I visited last summer, I often heard people say, "Let the necktie-wearers come back," a direct reference to secular technocrats whose record of economic management in the Shah's era far exceeded the past 25 years.

Even in seminaries, a rising number of clerics publicly advocate the separation of mosque and state, arguing (accurately) that Khomeini's vision of Islamic rule upended more than a thousand years of classical Shiite tradition, which prohibited clergy from ruling the state. It's time to get back to the fundamentals of private religious guidance and instruction, they argue -- a critical point since Khomeini is often referred to in the West as a fundamentalist. In reality, he was a Shiite aberration.

Although much of Iran's population -- weary of social and political restrictions and the failed promises of the revolution -- has embraced the idea of democratic change, it still isn't sure how to get there. The reform movement that captivated the population with the 1997 and 2001 presidential election victories of Mohammad Khatami is largely spent, outmuscled by its hard-line foes. February's conservative "victory" in a parliamentary election in which the vast majority of reformist candidates were barred from running is another nail in the reformist coffin. Pro-democracy student groups have publicly renounced their support for Khatami and the country's reformists. The rest of Iran's population has given up on them, too. As one Iranian businessman told me, "Enough of the timid reformers in turbans. We need to move on."

Move on to what? Though no major figure has emerged as a leader, the idea of secular democracy is filling the vacuum, particularly among Iranians under the age of 30, who comprise nearly two-thirds of the population. One need look only at the country's Islamic student unions, once a bastion of pro-Khomeini zealotry, to witness this change. Today, they serve as leading voices for secular democracy. One student group, the Daftar-e-Tahkim-e-Vahdat (formed upon Khomeini's orders in the early days of the revolution to counter campus leftists), has repudiated Khomeini's vision of Islamic government and has dismissed Khatami's "Islamic democracy" as irrelevant. As one Daftar leader, Akbar Atri, put it, "We want democracy without a prefix or suffix. That means no Islamic democracy."

What's more, some of the most vigorous student democracy advocates hail from families of former revolutionaries, the religious middle classes and clerics. This is not an elitist movement of Westernized, secular liberals, but a homegrown one composed of many of the same classes that supported Khomeini. We recall that Khomeini once dismissed democracy as alien to Iranian culture. Before him, the shah said Iranians need kings, not parliaments. Today's Iranians see democracy as the natural next step in their evolution.

How long that will take, though, with the conservative clerics still in control, is anyone's guess.

Admittedly, not all Iranians have embraced the principles of secular democracy. For many, it's just the next system worth trying after the Islamic Republic's economic failures.

If the great Ronald Reagan debating line -- "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" -- were put to Iranians with a different timeline -- "Are you better off today than you were 25 years ago?" -- the answer would be "no." Iranians are today poorer, less free in the social realm and only marginally more free politically than before the revolution. In inflation-adjusted terms, Iranians today earn roughly one-fourth of what they did before the revolution. Educational opportunities have expanded, but job opportunities have not. Unemployment hovers at 20 percent and underemployment is widespread: engineers drive taxis, professors work as traders. The secular, technocratic middle class has been decimated.

In public protests, people chant, "The mullahs live like kings, while we live in poverty!" Leading Iranian clerics, who plied populist themes and class-based resentment in their rise to power, have settled comfortably into the villas and palaces of the shah's elite. Iranians under the age of 30, "the children of the revolution," live their lives in varying degrees of revolt ranging from active political dissent to more common and more subtle acts of resistance -- quiet defiance of strict social laws or simply voting with their feet. Last year, nearly 200,000 of the best and brightest left the country legally; tens of thousands leave illegally.

Iranian college campuses, however, offer glimmers of hope. The leftist, anti-imperialist ideas of the 1970s have given way to a more pragmatic discourse about economic and political dignity based on Western models of secular democracy. Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents' generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third World anti-imperialism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism. "We just want to be normal," is typical of what hundreds of students have told me. "We're tired of radicalism." Another student told me, "We're not rich enough to be radical leftists. We have to worry about getting a job."

For inspiration, Iranian youth would do well to turn back to the era of their great-grandparents and the 1906-11 Constitutional Revolution, Iran's first attempt at democratic reform. That era produced a constitution that embraced democracy, secularism, women's rights and a strong parliament. Ultimately, the movement was snuffed out by royalist reactionaries and foreign powers (namely the British and Russians). But the dream of that movement -- of a fair society based on just laws and of an independent, democratic, secular and prosperous Iran -- has not died. It lives even stronger among today's "children of the Islamic revolution." That, in the end, might be the Islamic Republic's most lasting -- and ironic -- legacy.

Author's e-mail:afshinmol@aol.com

Afshin Molavi is the author of "Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran" (W.W Norton). As a Post stringer, he reported from Iran from 1999 to 2000 and continues to write about Iranian politics and economics for international publications.