MAINSTREAM journalism routinely announces the death of the Green Movement in Iran, in part because of its perceived inability to organize street demonstrations against the regime. This argument is often accompanied by another assertion, namely that the elections in Iran were not rigged and that Ahmadinejad was a genuine winner; this ostensibly explains the gradual dissipation of street protest against him. It is claimed that since a majority voted for him, the opponents need to draw the logical conclusion of their defeat and leave the street to the real power holders.

The most vocal voices arguing this position in the US are the Leveretts:¹ for them the Green Movement was a middle class movement, without a genuine base in the majority of the population. These views are based on the assumption that the Green Movement belongs to the past and its protagonists should ‘get over it’ and imagine other ways of looking at the social reality of Iran. This short paper disputes the validity of such a view and presents an alternative perspective of reality in Iran.

The organizations that were supposed to supervise the elections (the Supervising Council, the Interior Ministry, the prefects in different districts, the Pasdaran Army and the Bassij chiefs) were all pro-Ahmadinejad people who, even before the elections, voiced their support for him. For a start, the elections were conducted without any provision for a secret ballot and everyone was aware of the implications. In rural areas where representatives of the state were supervising the vote, any peasant voting for Moussavi would have been stigmatized and denied access to government subsidies.

Around 14000 mobile booths were supposed to facilitate voting by people living in the rural areas. In fact, the booths were not supervised and thus could have been easily stuffed with pro-Ahmadinejad votes. It appears that the vast majority of rural votes were believed to have been cast in favour of Ahmadinejad. Thus, it would not be unfair to ask whether this result that radically changed the fate of the elections was not entirely fraudulent (around a third of the votes belonged to the rural zones where more than 70% of the population supposedly voted for President Ahmadinejad).

 

Given that the entire state apparatus was in the hands of pro-Ahmadinejad supporters, they should have shown the highest degree of probity to not engage in any rigging of the vote. The results, expectedly, were predictable: the incumbent won more than 60% of the votes, in stark contrast to the former presidential elections which had resulted in a second ballot. No wonder, for social scientists present in Iran at that time, the entire political system came across as a plaything in the hands of the conservatives whose major aim was to neutralize the partisans of reform and decisively exclude them from the political process.

In effect, the situation was one where a totally intolerant government organized an election without any system of impartial checks and balances. It is hardly a surprise that the polling process was so flawed. Most voters in small towns and rural or tribal areas were either intimidated or simply bribed by a political system that left no possibility for fair elections from the inception. In many places, the votes cast exceeded even the number of registered voters of that region; to claim that they had come from other regions to cast their vote is simply unconvincing.

It took only four years for the Ahmadinejad government to so put a stranglehold on the electoral system that no outsider could penetrate. The Pasdaran Army, the economic behemoth in Iran that dominates the entire political system (around 30% of the parliamentarians are either its members or have ties to it), has taken control of the rural zones (around 30% of the Iranian population) and no votes there could have been cast against the wishes of its commanders. Little surprise that in the rural areas Ahmadinejad obtained a crushing majority over other candidates.

Sociologically and anthropologically, it would have been surprising that a government so ideologically inclined, so contemptuous of human rights, so inclined to use violence (more than 70 people were killed in street demonstrations in Iran after the elections and more than four thousand arrested and tortured), and so deeply distrustful of democracy, could have organized an impartial election in the absence of any credible supervision, particularly in non-urban areas. Foreign journalists looking for formal proof of electoral fraud find it difficult to contextualize a situation marked by a monopoly of the very same government that is in charge of the polls and their supervision.

 

The paradox is that while Iranian society has become one of the most democratic minded in the Middle East, the government remains firmly theocratic and oligarchic. In his terms, Khatami (he served as president from 1997 to 2005) did attempt culturally (but not politically) to question the foundations of Islamic theocracy. He opened up space for a new generation of people desiring more political participation and less ideology, more economic efficiency and less corruption, more personal freedom and less repression in the name of religion. The religious norms, in the name of which people are so often repressed, are no longer shared by the vast majority of a rejuvenated population that does not identify with the views of the heroic times of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

 

The phrase ‘Green Movement’ was coined during and after the presidential election of June 2009. It is one of the first democratic movements in the Middle East with a large number of followers. The Arab world is beset by autocratic governments. In the Muslim world, other than Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh and partly Malaysia, democracy is not supported either by the government or by any large-scale social movement.

In many Muslim countries, the humiliation felt by the predicament of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine on the one hand, and the permanence of corrupt and despotic political regimes who claim to be secular on the other, has induced a return to political Islam as the ultimate political and social solution. Even though Islamic radicalism is no longer on the rise, Islamic fundamentalism and jihadism are still regarded as credible solutions in many parts of the Muslim world.

In Iran, after more than three decades of Islamic theocracy, the utopia of political Islam has lost credibility for an overwhelming majority of the population. If we look closely at the elections in the last two decades, a prominent fact stands out – around 15% of the population staunchly supports the conservatives and the fundamentalists of the Ahmadinejad kind. They are afraid of modernity and its consequences: women’s emancipation, sexual freedom, secularization, the crisis of the patriarchal family, the decline of religious orthodoxy, the rise of economic individualism (regarded as selfishness), the loss of religious bonds that tied society together and the inroads of leisure and individual demand for freedom, political and cultural.²

A large section of these people are either financially supported by the revolutionary foundations or tied in through the pork barrel vote-catching of the government and its organizations, Bassij and the Pasdaran Army. Apart from them, the rest of society bears a grudge against the theocratic rule of the government that increasingly resembles a despotic system with the Supreme Leader at its head. Its economic achievements have been meagre, if not regressive: high rates of inflation and high unemployment on the one hand, and a pariah status on the international scene due to the nuclear issue on the other. Both elements are regarded as an uncalled for burden by a society where close to half of the people live below the poverty line, and without any prospects of economic progress.

 

At one level the Green Movement is a result of the deep disappointment of a large strata with the theocratic ‘powers that be’; equally, the positioning of the movement during many weeks as a social and cultural phenomenon has contributed to the deepening of the chasm between Iranian society and the government. One can thus argue that there was a period before the Green Movement and another after it. Within the Green Movement too one can clearly distinguish between the few weeks before the election and the few months after the election. The two phases, within this social movement, are quite distinct in their content and action.

The Green Movement’s characteristics are manifold. For a start, the circumstances behind its sudden eruption in Iranian society were unique. Before the candidacy of Moussawi during the presidential elections of 2009, apathy and a lack of interest seemed to dominate the public scene in Iran. The previous presidential election of 2005 had been rigged, according to many observers. Not only were the candidates not ‘charismatic’, the disappointment with the presidency of Khatami too further contributed to a lack of public interest.

 

Two major novelties characterize the presidential elections of June 2009. First, the TV debates between the candidates, where the temporary freedom of speech stood in contrast to the general style of debate on a media tightly controlled by the government. The debates took on a character of exceptionality, a momentary freedom in an atmosphere of general restriction of freedom of speech.

The second major characteristic was the unusual freedom of gathering in the streets of the large cities, in particular Tehran, in which millions of youth gathered up to 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, creating huge traffic jams and bottlenecks, before the declaration of election results. The street demonstrations and festivities during the few weeks preceding the elections served as a socialization ritual in which young boys and girls could mingle without interference from members of the moral brigades who normally impose strict Islamic norms of segregation and forbid physical contact between the two sexes (holding hands or coming into close contact on the street).

The atmosphere of street demonstrations was one of a carnival and festival, very different from that of the previous elections. A feeling of joy and happiness prevailed for almost a month among the youth, leaving a deep imprint in the minds of the many thousands who spent their nights and days on the streets, as much to defend the new reformist candidates (Moussawi and Karrubi) as to celebrate their recovered freedom and aspiration to live their own lives without any repression from above. Those few weeks were fundamental to the demonstrating youth on the streets of Tehran who for the first time concretely experienced what freedom of speech and act can mean.

The public demonstrations cemented their ties with one another. It vindicated their urge to intermingle in defiance of a puritanical regime that denied them their sense of being full-fledged individuals with an urge to live according to a less restrictive moral code. A new type of social movement, largely spontaneous, unpredictable in its consequences, based on the internet and new communication technologies, largely self-organized and loosely tied together through a few formal organizations was born in Iran.

Highly unpredictable even for its own organizers, without a formal leadership (Moussavi became one of its leaders along with Karrubi only after the elections), and based on the ability of the young people to organize themselves through informal channels and communication networks based on the internet, the movement took the government by surprise.

 

After the elections and the official declaration of results, the nature of the Green Movement changed. From being a movement of joy and consensus, it became a movement of pacifically incensed people convinced of their democratic legitimacy and the fraudulent nature of the government. The Iranian theocratic regime falsely believed that not only could it programme elections based on a large participation by the new generation, but also that once the elections ended, the voters would go home without any public expression of discontent or anger in the face of rigged electoral results. The very large public demonstrations of outrage and indignation after the election, in contrast, revealed the deep roots of the Green Movement in civil society and the attachment of the youth to its aims and values.

The government’s miscalculation about the docility of the youth in society only revealed its contempt and total incomprehension of the new generation. For the latter, the utopia of the Islamic revolution is dead and they now seek new forms of participation in society, including in the political realm. The velayat faqih (the rule of the Islamic Jurist) takes away politics from society in the name of a sacred vision of the Islamic Jurist which seeks to impose an Islamic view, in spite of vox populi. The Green Movement exposed the deep chasm between the new society and a theocratic conception of power.

 

The Green Movement is also a tribute to the reformist religious intellectuals who, in the name of Islam, denied legitimacy to the theocracy of the velayat faqih. But it goes much further. First, its emergence in the large cities uncovered a new civil society, far more secular than the official version of the ‘Islamic society’ depicted by the political elites in Iran, including the religious reformists. Not a single major slogan of the Green Movement had a religious content. The separation between civil society and religious authority seemed a foregone conclusion for most participants.

No utopia inhabited the movement either. Rather what characterized it was the demand for accountability and the search for a ‘legal society’. The demonstrators held no grudge against religion either. In contrast to the French Revolution in which many leading groups were infused with an anti-religious mindset, the Green Movement in general abided by Islam but demanded lawfulness and civil rights in contrast to the heyday of the Islamic Revolution in the 1980s where Islam was to be implemented in all corners of society by revolutionary violence.

 

The change from the Islamic Revolution to the Green Movement is striking. The former drew mainly on the religious tenets of martyrdom and demanded a society in which Islam would play a comprehensive role in all aspects of social life in order to establish a ‘pure’ and ‘immaculate’ Islamic community (ummat). The Green Movement carries no trace of martyrdom as an ideology, its main focus being the respect for the vote of the people and the notion that vox populi should be vox dei.

This idea is in direct contradiction to the prevailing theocracy. But as long as no votes were cast and the results were not known, ambivalence was the main characteristic of the social claim. After the vote count and the disclosure of the massive electoral fraud, the demands became more explicit and the ambivalence largely surmounted. The slogans became: ‘death to the dictator’, indicating that the head of the Islamic Regime, the top cleric, was seen as the main culprit. Similarly, the even more widespread slogan ‘where is my vote’ became a motto for the majority of the participants in the demonstrations. The new social claim was respect for the law and the end of autocracy established in the name of Islam.

The secularization process has deeply expanded during the Islamic regime. This is paradoxical as the entire state machinery, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has been at the service of the ideological tenets of political Islam in which the society is supposed to become entirely religious, throwing off the remnants of secularization instituted during the Pahlavi regime. The results so far have been just the opposite. Large sections of Iranian civil society have been secularized due to the internal evolution, the access of many young people to education, the influence of the Iranian diaspora (more than three millions are living mainly in the US, Canada, Turkey and a minority in Australia, India, Malaysia, the Arab Emirates among others) and an internet culture which has partially neutralized the ideological views propagated by the regime.

A new version of ‘secular Islam’ has emerged, one that meticulously separates the realms of spirituality and social norms. This is a movement from below, in contrast to the intellectuals’ movement of ideas that exhorts a new exegesis of Islam in reference to the Holy Koran and the tradition. Here, social practice rather than a theoretical view is at the root of ‘secular Islam’, distinct from the reformist view in that it proposes the autonomy of the social and political domains through culture and social praxis rather than theology.

 

The Green Movement had another major characteristic, namely the coeval participation of girls and boys involving a mingling of sexes that contravened the tenet of the Islamic theocracy on segregation of men and women in the public sphere. The egalitarian trend in men and women, sympathizing with each other and together claiming respect for law, is a result of the last three decades of socialization in which young girls were sent to school and university (the participation of the girls in the university is on par with boys, if not slightly higher among the 3.5 million students in Iran).

The development of new types of subjectivity and the questioning of the patriarchal family in most of its tenets resulted in a new awareness about the rights of one another beyond the barriers of gender. The paradox is that one of the most theocentric regimes in the Muslim world is hosting a society in which the new generation is looking for more legality, more gender equality and fewer religious rules. The secularization induced by the two decades of school and university education in Iran found its apogee in the Green Movement in which large parts of society were demanding less segregation, a law-abiding state and free access to modernity.

 

The deliberate eschewing of violence has been another distinctive feature of the Green Movement. There is a ‘Gandhian side’ to it that is largely autonomous and a result of the evolution of the minds and hearts during the last decade. The Islamic regime claims legitimacy in the use of revolutionary violence against all those who do not recognize the authority of its version of Islam. In tune with western extreme left and extreme right movements, Islamic theocracy has shown no qualms in using violence against the political opposition and people who deny its legality in the name of another version of Islam or human rights.

The loss of legitimacy of all revolutionary ideologies (extreme left as well as radical Islam) after more than three decades of an ideological state has made the new generation far more aware about morality and the urgent need to define an ethical code of conduct. A few decades back, young people repressed by the imperial government had reacted by promoting guerrilla or other types of violent reaction. Nowadays, the same youth refuses to engage in acts of violence in its confrontation with a theocracy that is seeking to confront the opposition, even at the price of a bloodbath. Shunning violence makes the movement far more inclined towards passive acts of insubordination than revolutionary activism, at least in the short run. The future resilience of the movement will depend on its ability to master the urge to use violence and promote active and enduring forms of action, not unlike the Tibetan movement facing the Chinese regime and its power holders in the recent decades.

 

What the Green Movement has therefore achieved is less a political victory than undermining the legitimacy of the theocracy by demanding a new moral societal code in which lawfulness and popular sovereignty go hand in hand. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was once seen as the ultimate victory of revolutionary Islam, whereas the prevailing situation is more like an ‘Indian turn’ in Iran: claiming a democracy that does not cut-off ties with society and its indigenous culture, but nevertheless asks for due respect for citizens, thus indigenizing democracy much in the same way as Gandhi and his political descendants did according to a renewed ‘Indian’ view of society.

Iran’s religious-reformist as well as secular intellectuals have together managed to achieve similar results during the last two decades. The major difference with India is the presence of an Islamic theocracy that holds the reins of power and has become increasingly disconnected from the actual society. Even as the latter remains, for the time being, powerless, the state too is at the mercy of a crisis that might fracture its hegemony in society for lack of moral authority over the citizens.

 

Footnotes:

1. See their latest article on this issue: Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann Leveret, ‘Who’s Really Misreading Tehran? Wishful thinking and bad analysis has inflated Iran’s Green Movement into something it certainly is not: viable alternative to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’, Foreign Policy, 2010/06/14.

2. See Farhad Khosrokhavar, Amir Nikpey, Avoir vingt ans au pays des ayatollahs, la vie quotidienne à Qom. Robert Lafont Publishers, Paris, 2009.