On Revolutionary Iran

This is a good book. Ultimately, the view that underlies Axworthy’s writing is that there is a fundamental tension between Islam and democracy and the past thirty years of Iranian governance has seen the political establishment from one end to the other and back. For those of us living in the West, it makes sense that Islam and democracy (or really any religion and democracy) should produce tension, as these ideas seem fundamentally contradictory. However, Ayatollah Khomeini’s view of government was that the state does not gain legitimacy from “the people,” but from God. Already, this sounds even more autocratic than I’ve alluded to, but a key aspect here is that, in Khomeini’s view, the will of God could be seen in the acts of “the people” as a group. Therefore, if a majority of the people supported a policy or direction, it must have been the will of God.

However, this tension became more strained after the death of Khomeini in 1989, and even more after the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997. The death of Khomeini represented a sea of change, as nobody post-revolutionary Iran (or really, revolutionary Iran) stood as high as he did. Nobody else could command respect the same grace and authority as Khomeini. Indeed, it is highly unusual that Ali Khamenei became the Supreme Leader in the first place. Initially, Hussein-Ali Montazeri looked as though he would take power, and it was only a result of his reformist attitudes that Khomeini replaced him with Khamenei as his desired successor. Although Khamenei was weak from the outset, he gradually gained power at the expense of other clerics and elected officials, until 2009 when repressive measures against the Green Revolution caused him to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people (more on this in a bit).

Khatami’s election as president of the Islamic Republic was also a radical change in the Iranian government, as his government looked to thaw relations with the West. It was not mere rhetoric when Khatami called for a “dialogue of civilizations” (directly challenging Samuel Huntington’s popular but ridiculous claim that the end of the Cold War represents a shift in global conflict, especially between the “West” and the “Islamic world,” completely ignoring that these two categories are far too broad to be used in this context).

With the reforms of Khatami’s government, Khamenei and the ulama (if they were following Khomeini’s views) should have recognized that reform was the will of God, as it commanded the support of the majority of the people. Even though Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005 (in an election of questionable veracity), the election of 2009 further represented a wave of support for reform over conservatism (or “principlism” as it became known under Ahmadinejad), and potentially, as a result, God’s own support.

The book itself ends in 2012, which is a shame (no disrespect to the author here, this is always a problem when reading books about the present) because the election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 and the Saudi-Iranian Cold War that emerged after the Arab Spring raises even more questions about the relationship between Islam, democracy, and nationalism as well.

In spite of recent difficulties, Axworthy refused to name Iran as “totalitarian.” Admittedly, the Iranian state is nowhere near fully democratic, but Axworthy argues that even the principlists in the ulama have faith in democracy, and want to think of themselves as democrats, which is why there is so much tension between democracy and Islam in the present (if there wasn’t, Islamic theocracy could potentially run roughshod over democratic elements). Axworthy finds that the Sepah (or the Revolutionary Guards as they’re known in the West) is much more a threat to Iranian democracy than principlism or the ulama. Over the past thirty years, the Sepah has gradually gained power at the expense of other branches of government, allowing the state to look more like a military dictatorship that relies on Islamic norms than an “Islamic republic” or an “Islamic theocracy.” Indeed, the military establishment (including the secret police) have a great deal in common with the Shah’s dictatorship that the Iranian Revolution sought to overthrow in the first place.

Overall, this is a well-written, easy to read, nuanced, and thoughtful book about the Islamic Republic of Iran. Highly recommend.