http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/972/cu4.htm
12 - 18 November 2009
Issue No. 972
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
The crisis of an Islamic Republic
In the light of recent suppression of opposition in Iran, Hamid Dabashi reviews
the effects of the Islamic Revolution
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These are the times that try men's souls . . . . Tyranny, like hell, is not
easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the
conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem
too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows
how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so
celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Click to view caption
From top: the Green Revolution; a modern Iranian depiction of Omar
Khayyam
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Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (1776)
Islamic Revolution (1977-1979) began by a concerted mobilisation of political
forces against the Pahlavi dynasty and succeeded to establish an Islamic
Republic after a violent distortion of Iranian polity. The diverse aspects of
Iranian political culture not compatible with a militant Islamist take of
Ayatollah Khomeini were brutally and systematically eliminated. This worldly
polity was and remains too cosmopolitan simply to be coded as "secular".
Militant secularists are distorting the multifaceted Iranian political culture
are distorting Iranian political culture precisely in the same violent ways
that the militant Islamists do. Thirty years after the forced-fed over-
Islamisation of the Iranian cosmopolitan culture, a new generation of public
intellectuals, political and social leaders, human and civil rights activists
emerged from the very bosom of the Islamic Republic, demanding their civil
liberties and wishing to correct the course of an Islamic Republic they saw had
gone terribly wrong. These liberties, they finally realised, are not only
constitutional to any notion of a republic to which the Islamic Republic seems
to have a claim but also coterminous with the multifaceted Iranian political
culture that was systematically violated in order to make that Islamic Republic
possible. The crisis of legitimacy that has now finally caught up with the
Islamic Republic is not only evident in its vile and violent behavior towards
its own citizens but in fact coterminous with its very existence. Some 30 years
after its violent crackdown of all its alternatives, this crisis is now not
merely political but infinitely more pointedly moral -- going deeply into the
very heart of the very idea of an "Islamic" republic.
The forced transmutation of Iranian political culture into a singularly Islamic
site was an act of epistemic violence that could only be sustained by a
militarised security apparatus that forced its intellectual and political
oppositions into exile or else brutally eliminated them. But the Islamic
Republic could not uproot and transform Iranian society at large, and from the
older roots of the selfsame political culture new branches have sprouted out --
wiser, sharper, stronger, and more intelligent than their parental generation.
Iranian civil society and political culture are not just ahead of its backward
and retrograde leaders but also equally ahead of their stilted intellectuals --
trapped inside a number of binary opposition: in or out of Iran, left or right,
religious or otherwise. The civil rights movement that has finally broken out
in the aftermath of the 12 June presidential election is reducible to neither
side of any such false binary -- for it is, ipso facto, reaching out to
retrieve the Iranian cosmopolitan culture, to which Islam is integral, but not
definitive. Unless we come to terms with the worldly disposition of that
cosmopolitan culture, the nature of the crisis that the Islamic Republic faces,
or the civil rights movement that has now ensued will not make sense or
crtically register.
After Mehdi Karrubi, a founding member of the Islamic republic and an aging
revolutionary, as well as others, disclosed that young Iranians are being raped
and murdered in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic, and then hurriedly buried
in mass graves, something far more crucial than the "republican" claim of the
Islamic republic was in jeopardy -- it was its claim on Islam, and thus Islam
itself that had to run for cover. After violently denying, denigrating,
destroying, forcing into exile, or seeking to discredit the non-Islamist
dimensions of Iranian cosmopolitan culture -- ranging from anticolonial
nationalist to Third World socialist in its political registers -- the Islamic
Republic placed all its legitimacy eggs in one Islamic basket. Once that basket
was dropped on the hard surface of mass graves in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery,
burying scores of young Iranians cold-bloodedly murdered because of their
political positions, or simply having voted for one presidential candidates as
opposed to another, the Islamic Republic was pulling Islam down to its grave
too. It is now Islam, the faith of millions of Iranians and other human beings,
that must survive the banality of this particular evil.
To retrieve the cosmopolitan culture of Iran, with the rightful and democratic
place of Islam in it, we have absolutely no choice but to think of ways to
reduce the magnitude of violence that is unleashed upon us, that is unleashed
upon the world in our name, first and foremost by not falling into its trap and
reciprocating it. Violence is violence and violence must be condemned --
genocidal, homicidal, or suicidal. The Israeli genocidal violence against
Palestinians does not justify Palestinian suicidal violence against Israelis --
it just exacerbates it. American homicidal violence in Afghanistan and Iraq
does not justify Afghan or Iraqi suicidal violence either -- it just extends
its madness. Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Hindus are today at each other's
throat. We have inherited a politics of despair that has reduced us to
desperate measures. In revenge to what the world has done to Afghanistan, it is
as if the whole world is being reduced to Afghanistan -- a disparate people
desperately in search of an illusive peace, robbed of their dignity, commanding
culture, sustained civility, moral whereabouts, and at the mercy of drug
traffickers, highway bandits, and supersonic bombers alike. Iran is today ruled
by a criminal band of militant Taliban lookalikes -- savagely beating, raping,
torturing, and point blank murdering the people they are supposed to protect.
They are, as Mehdi Karrubi once famously put it, worse than Zionists, for the
Zionists do what they do to Palestinians, not to Israelis. The answer to that
kind of indiscriminate violence cannot be violence, for it will plunge us all
into even deeper layers of hell that is now code-named "the Islamic Republic".
A Nakba of no less catastrophic consequence than that of the Palestinians,
though perpetrated against now more than 72 million people, is casting its
deadly and languorous shadow over an entire nation. A worldly cosmopolitan
culture has been reduced to a narrowly exacting Shia juridicalism and the
tongue-twisting legalese of a fraternity club that insists on speaking their
clerically inflected Persian with Latinate obscurantism written into its very
diction. Perfectly beautiful Arabic words, such as Tanfidh and Tahlif, are
clumsily thrown at Persian syntax and morphology and made to look and sound
strange and self-alienating in Persian when uttered by the clerically-inflected
obscurantism of a band of clerics who think Iran is their paternal inheritance
and we ordinary folks are just a nuisance that ought to be regulated in the
sanctified letters of their law. In this regard, it really makes no difference
how progressive or retrograde a Faqih is -- for they are identical in their
excessive fiqhification of Iranian political culture. The only reason, as a
result, that such prominent clerical figures as Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah
Sane'i, or Hojjat Al-Islam Kadivar are dearer to us than others is because they
declare themselves and do their best (and sometime they succeed) to speak a
decidedly civil language, a language of our common citizenry. As one blogger
put it so bluntly, referring to a famous story about the first Shia Imam Ali
not being able to sleep because one of his soldiers had stolen an anklet off
the feet of a Jewish girl, "they are now tearing the pants off our young
brothers and sisters and violently raping them, and you want us to think highly
of Imam Ali having lost sleep about an anklet?"
These are indeed terrifying times that are trying our souls, a time when
principles sacrosanct to who and what we are have become the first victims of a
vicious banality that has no regards for the most basic human decency. The
moral and political crisis of the Islamic republic, however, is the
emancipatory passage of both Islam and republicanism from a flawed and
murderous mismatch. As political Zionism, militant Islamism (or Christian or
Hindu fundamentalism for that matter), has been a horrific historical faux pas.
Once Muslims are released from implicating their multifaceted religion in a
singularly militant ideology or a tyrannical theocracy they are freed once
again to embrace their faith and piety in the cosmopolitan worldliness of its
historical experiences; and once Iranians are freed from force-feeding their
democratic aspirations down the narrow throat of an "Islamic Republic" they
have ipso facto joined a public space in which their societal modernity gives
birth to enduring democratic institutions. None of this is either to call for
or else to discourage the dismantling of the Islamic Republic altogether -- a
historical eventuality beyond any single person's wish or will. This is simply
to begin to think through the current crisis of the Islamic Republic and the
ungodly terror it has visited upon a nation for over 30 years, and articulate
manners of civil liberties that will be needed to sustain enduring democratic
institutions -- during or after this Islamic Republic.
The difficult task ahead is that the barbarity of the violent custodians of the
Islamic Republic is evidently determined to dictate the terms of not just
obedience to it but in fact, and far more dangerously, the manner of opposition
to it. It is not that by violence the belligerent leadership of the theocracy
demand and exact obedience; it is that by the selfsame violence they are
determining the terms of opposition to their illegitimate rule. The Green
Movement as a result needs to be exceedingly conscious not to fall into that
easy trap. At the writing of this passage, I cannot think of a more noble act
of resistance to their barbarity than the peaceful, pious, and gracious
gathering of the families of the unjustly incarcerated activists in Evin prison
for their Iftar (breaking their fast) on the first day of Ramadan 1430 AH, 22
August 2009 -- spreading their Sofreh and sporting their green plastic plates.
The central volume of the Green movement is very conscious not to allow the
violent behavior of the militarised security apparatus of the Islamic Republic
to determine the course of their actions, thoughts and strategies. They insist
on crossing over their psychological barrier and come to terms with a future
bereft of violence. There is in fact no better way of fighting against this
regime than celebrating life, embracing joy -- ba del-e khonin lab khandan
biyavar hamcho jam, as the contemporary Persian poet Houshang Ebtehaj teaches
us --
With a heart full of blood
Bring forth a pair of smiling lips --
Just like a cup of wine.
This assessment is not a wish. It is written to the body of the movement. "I am
absolutely convinced," writes Fatemeh Shams, a prominent blogger whose own
husband Mohammadreza Jala'ipour was arrested and charged with plotting to
topple the regime, "that the incarceration of people like Somayyeh Towhidlu,
Hamzeh Ghalebi, Mohammadreza Jala'ipour, Sa'id Shari'ati, and Shahab al-Din
Tabataba'i is to target a young generation that wishes both to have faith and
is committed to reform, is both preoccupied with [the betterment of ] our
homeland and is committed to legal frameworks and societal principles. This
time around, the fundamentalists have targeted a generation that was determined
to follow a third path, the path upon which it was possible to be religious but
not be retrograde, to be a reformist but oppose the toppling of the regime and
violence."
Fatemeh Shams' appraisal of the movement, based on being born and raised in an
Islamic Republic, is exceedingly important because there is always the danger
that the moral dissolution of the regime and the systemic violence that it is
perpetrating upon its own citizens might succeed in dictating the terms of
opposition to its benighted rule. The transmutation of legitimate resistance to
tyranny into tyrannous terms in the opposite direction is already very much
evident among the Quixotic expatriate "opposition" that speaks, writes, and
acts in precisely the same vulgar manners that their counterparts in the
Islamic Republic do. Outside the purview of the Islamic Republic and the
violent expatriate "opposition" it has generated against itself, the Green
Movement needs to stay clear of both and turn to our extended literary humanism
to sustain its moral rectitude. For all the terror that the Islamic Republic
has perpetrated upon Islam and Muslims, the heart of Islam beats happily and
resoundingly, sound and safe, where it has always been, in the best of our
poetry, in our literature, in the solitude of our dis/belief -- with one line
of Sa'di we can rebuild our humanity, with one ghazal of Hafez we will learn
how to love anew, and in the aromatic pages of Rumi we will look for God again
-- just before we turn to our sagacious Khayyam and play hide and seek with
Him.
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