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The Islamic Republic of Iran has survived longer than anybody had a proper to anticipate. As we speak nice revolutions are uncommon, as a result of revolutions require the unflinching perception that one other world is feasible. In 1979, when clerics took energy in Tehran, one other world was attainable. That is the world that Iranians nonetheless stay in. A big—and apparently rising—variety of them don’t appear to love it. After a 22-year-old lady named Mahsa Amini died in police custody on September 16 after being arrested for carrying her scarf improperly, anti-government protests unfold throughout the nation, simply as they seemingly do each few years.
Forty-three years after its founding, the Islamic Republic sputters alongside as yet one more repressive, sclerotic regime. What makes the Iranian system completely different—distinctive, even—is the arc of its tragedy and the bizarre position performed by a wholly novel theological doctrine. At first, the Islamic revolution was common. In any other case, it wouldn’t have succeeded. The aggressive secularization underneath the shah within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s had been discredited, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians turned to Islamic symbols, ideas, and leaders for inspiration. If the shah’s Westernization undertaking was the issue, then maybe Islam could possibly be the answer. And but that answer took a peculiar kind, one which foreordained at the moment’s discontent: Iran’s new rulers created a system way more intrusive than clerics of earlier centuries might have ever imagined.
If one might sum up the unique intent of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution, it was, fairly merely, to protect Islam. In his most influential treatise, Islamic Authorities, revealed in 1970, Khomeini wrote, “The preservation of Islam is much more necessary than prayer”—an odd if maddeningly imprecise declare. In observe, nevertheless, this meant one thing fairly particular. For Khomeini, Islam could possibly be “preserved” solely by means of Islamic authorities. And this, in flip, was attainable provided that jurists—that’s, clerics specializing in Islamic jurisprudence—led the federal government as guardians of Islam.
The rationale this Islamic regime can appear so un-Islamic—cruel and absolutist—is as a result of it did one thing with out precedent in Islamic historical past. What got here to be often known as wilayat al-faqih, or “guardianship of the jurist,” married clerical and government energy and intertwined them in a kind of Frankenstein ideology. Within the nice Islamic caliphates of the premodern period, the authorized system was decentralized and the state’s attain was restricted, with clerics having fun with appreciable autonomy. Because the keepers of sharia, God’s legislation, they interpreted the way it utilized to issues as diversified as felony codes, enterprise contracts, and inheritance. However these clerics had by no means dominated straight. As a substitute, the caliph—who, usually, was not skilled as a non secular scholar—was liable for executing legal guidelines and devising new ones on points not explicitly lined by sharia. In revolutionary Iran, such distinctions can be put to the facet, with a notably sectarian factor added to the combination. Iran’s clerics, just like the overwhelming majority of Iranians, had been a part of the Shiite department of Islam. They might take Shiism’s historic reverence for clergy and fuse it with a contemporary conception of the state.
Till the Safavid empire emerged in Persia within the sixteenth century, Shiite Muslims had largely lived as minorities underneath Sunni rule. As a result of Shias had been not often able to manipulate, Shiite doctrine had comparatively little to say concerning the applicable train of political energy. Shias believed that official authority was to be discovered within the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, in contrast to Sunnis, who—in principle, if not essentially in observe—chosen their leaders by means of a consultative course of. Importantly, Shiite custom held that the imams within the line of the prophet had been divinely protected against error on theological issues.
The issue was that the twelfth of those imams went into occultation within the tenth century. He was, and nonetheless is, the hidden imam. As a result of he was endowed with infallible powers of non secular interpretation, his absence disadvantaged the Shiite clergy of their supply of authority and led them—albeit with some exceptions centuries later—towards a politics of political resignation. Because the Islamic authorized scholar Mohammad Fadel notes in a forthcoming paper, “All hopes for political transformation had been deferred to an indefinite, apocalyptic future.”
For Khomeini, the long run arrived in 1979. Any variety of questions on govern legitimately whereas the imam was in occultation remained unresolved. Khomeini offered a solution—the duties of the inerrant imam had been to be, in impact, delegated to the jurists, after which extra particularly to the jurist. It simply so occurred that Khomeini was that jurist.
In equity to Khomeini, when he was giving the lectures that will kind the core of Islamic Authorities, he most likely hadn’t absolutely entertained the likelihood that, in the future, he’d return triumphant to Tehran and get the prospect to implement his concepts. Past the kind of imprecise sketching that one tends to do in exile, Khomeini had provided few specifics about how he may really govern. A few of this ambiguity was strategic. To keep away from scary leftist and liberal allies in the course of the revolution’s honeymoon, he and his supporters downplayed the tougher edges of juristic rule.
Concepts matter. Ideology made Iran’s Islamic revolution attainable. However concepts don’t come absolutely shaped in a vacuum. Uncommon concepts are usually the product of bizarre conditions. As maybe all political doctrines are, the unadorned radicalism of Khomeini’s philosophy of presidency was a response to what had come earlier than. The shah wasn’t simply any dictator. He was an exceptionally brutal one. Greater than that, he original himself an authoritarian modernizer, like Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk earlier than him, who would lower Islam right down to dimension and reorganize society on strictly secular traces—with Western backing no much less. The orchestrated assault on Islam that many Iranians perceived was made extra sinister by the unlucky reality of a CIA-supported coup that had ousted the democratically elected prime minister in 1953, thereby elevating the shah.
Khomeini, together with a rising variety of conservative clerics and laymen, got here to imagine that Islam was in peril of being extinguished. If as a lot as Islam’s very preservation was at stake, distinctive measures must be taken, with a frown and a grimace if want be. This helps clarify how Khomeini might probably declare that absolutely the mandate (velayat-e-motlaq) of Islamic authorities was “a very powerful of the divine commandments … and has precedence over all by-product commandments, even over prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.” In one other time and place, this may have been dismissed as nonsensical ranting, or worse, heresy.
Okayhomeini’s radicalism was actual and deeply felt. His grievances had been official. However the totalizing nature of the dictatorship to return was not foreordained. One other ingredient was obligatory. That one thing else was the fashionable state, in all of its sprawling, overbearing glory. Till the twentieth century, states merely couldn’t be authoritarian within the fullest sense of the phrase. Their bureaucratic, technological, and surveillance capability was restricted. Even underneath despots, abnormal individuals might nonetheless stay comparatively free lives as a result of the state might solely prolong its tentacles of management thus far. The introduction of the nation-state eliminated any such constraints. Leaders might search dominion not simply over authorities however over society, too. Not solely did they wish to change your habits; they needed to remodel the best way you perceived the world.
If the shah’s sturdy state was what threatened Islam, a robust state—and even perhaps a stronger one—can be required to guard it from its enemies at dwelling and from these overseas as nicely. This expansiveness is within the character of revolutions, once they succeed. They’re wondrous occasions. Because the longtime Berkeley professor Hamid Algar as soon as argued, maybe with a touch of hyperbole, the Iranian revolution was “probably the most important, hopeful, and profound occasion within the entirety of up to date Islamic historical past.” However many revolutions show too wondrous. As a result of they struggle in opposition to nice injustice and promise, in flip, an incredible reordering, revolutions can’t assist however forge a stronger state than the one they search to destroy.
The irony is that the clerics had been nicely conscious of those pitfalls. Because the Iranian American sociologist Mentioned Arjomand writes, Khomeini’s authentic imaginative and prescient was considered one of “a withered state.” For each higher and worse, this antiauthoritarian impulse is embedded in Islam. Within the fall of 1979, in the course of the early, heady days of revolution, Khomeini noticed that “dictatorship is the best sin in Islam.” On this, he wasn’t essentially flawed.
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