The problem

WHY is understanding Iran of such great interest to many of us? Perhaps because it allows for a shift in attention from a stereotypical consideration of the Iranian theocracy and Islamic fundamentalism, followed by the question of the country’s nuclear ambitions which has dominated the analyses of Iranian politics for the past thirty-two years, to a discussion of Iranian society and its sociological and political actors. These include women’s groups, youth and students, intellectuals and some workers’ groups, representing a wide spectrum of ideologies, tactics and demands. Some are seeking only minor changes, others serious reforms within the existing system, and still others an immediate end to the regime through a revolution.

One way or another, civil society has become the subject of intense debate in Iran today, in part because of the limits of accountability and political decentralization in the country. The key actors in Iranian civil society are most concerned with the structures that mediate between government and citizens; they are as important as were the members of civil society in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Communist period. Civil society in Iran today does not merely mean running a market economy separate from the state. Rather, it represents an alternative sphere of citizenship which holds a promise of individual autonomy beyond the political and religious sectarian attitudes.

More than serving as just a ‘voluntary sector’ or a ‘charitable sector’, Iranian civil society is an ‘ethical sector’. It is an everyday effort to feel more at home as a citizen as opposed to being part of a society organized on a theological-political basis. Because of their role in giving meaning to what does not currently exist, the moral responsibility of members of Iranian civil society is greater than at any other previous time. As such, the idea of civil society has moved to the centre-stage of political discourse in Iran today. Iranians rightly believe that they are witnessing a most fateful turning point in the history of their nation.

It was Iranian civil society that produced the post-electoral events in June 2009 and no one, inside or outside Iran, predicted such a major shift in Iranian politics before it happened. There is common agreement among the demonstrators and civil activists that the main contradiction in contemporary Iran is one between authoritarian violence and democratic nonviolence. This is due to the fact that the protest movement is nonviolent and civil in its methods of creating social change, while simultaneously seeking to infuse an ethical dimension in Iranian politics. This judgment implies that Iranian civil society is ready to make a distinction between two kinds of approaches to social change: searching for truth and solidarity versus lying and using violence. Today young Iranians couch their conversations about politics in a moral vocabulary. Regardless of how things ultimately turn out, it nevertheless seems clear that the Islamic Republic will never be the same again.

Ever since the initial days of the Islamic Republic of Iran there have been two contending sovereignties in Iran, a divine and a popular. The concept of popular sovereignty, which is derived from the indivisible will of the Iranian nation, is inscribed in Article I of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. The divine concept of sovereignty, in contrast, is derived from God’s will which, through the medium of Shi’i institutions of an Imamate, is bestowed on the existing ‘faqih’ as the rightful ruler of the Shi’ite community, a perception which forms the foundation of the doctrine of the Velayat i Fagih.

Increasingly, however, divine sovereignty has been less about religion than political theology. As for popular sovereignty, it has found its due place in the social work and political action of Iranian civil society. The presence of these two incompatible and conflicting conceptions of sovereignty, authority and legitimacy have always been a bone of contention in Iranian politics, often defining the ideological contours of political power struggle among the contending forces.

The advocates of civil and democratic liberties in Iran have tried to give the popular conception its due place in the framework of Iranian social and political institutions. The present crisis in Iran following the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, is thus rooted in the popular quest for the democratization of the state and society and the conservative reaction and opposition to it. Furthermore, there is another factor distinguishing the current political crisis from previous instances of political factionalism and internal power struggles in Iran – a crisis over a deep-seated ideological structure inherited from the Iranian Revolution.

On the one hand there are those like Mousavi and Karubi, among the architects of the Islamic regime as also contenders for the presidency in Iran, who believe that the Islamic nomenclature provides adequate scope for reform and renewal, and who find themselves at the head of a pro-democracy and pro-reform movement that continues to defy the results of the presidential election, seeing it as the very essence of illiberalism and authoritarianism in Iran. On the other hand are the demonstrators questioning the entire legitimacy of Iran’s electoral process, and who are not, unlike their parents, revolutionaries. They belong to a new generation that did not experience the revolution of 1979 and want another Iran. They also constituted one-third of the eligible voters in the recent presidential election. These youngsters remind us that a monolithic image of Iran does not necessarily reflect the mindset of seventy per cent of its population who are under the age of thirty. A young Iran’s quest for democracy thus presents a serious challenge, not only to the status of the doctrine of the Velayat i Fagih, questioning its legitimacy, but also to the reform movement and its democratic authenticity.

Having said this, one needs also to add that Islamic Iran is today more divided than at any time since the Islamic Revolution, a deep divide between traditionalists and modernists. The recent election has only exacerbated the divide between the state and the nation. It has also created a gap between those who believe that normal economic and political relations with the West are vital to Iran’s future and those who hold such relations in disdain as a violation of the Islamic Revolution’s ideals. Clearly, the outcome of the ninth presidential elections, which led to Ahmadinejad’s victory, is indicative of an internal crisis at the heart of the Islamic Republic’s political framework, as exemplified by the conflict between popular sovereignty and authoritarian rule.

The current conflicts between pro-reform and pro-Ahmadinejad groups after the re-election of the former president represent a political struggle between the republican essence of Iran and its clerical oligarchy. The republican tendency pays attention, almost exclusively, to the legitimacy of the public space, but the clerical establishment refuses to grant any legitimacy to the judgment of the public space. At such moments it should not be forgotten that each time democracy is intimated, silenced and postponed for another day by a show of force in a country like Iran, it represents a loss of credibility for those in charge and creates a crisis of legitimacy for the entire political system.

The crisis in Iran thus is not simply between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad; nor is it merely a conflict between pragmatists and utopians or between reformists and conservatives. It is basically over how political agency and political sphere are to be defined in Iran. What we have witnessed in the past two years in Iran is a conflict between the realm of politics, which aims at imposing an absolute sovereignty through the practice of violence, and the realm of the political, meaning the resumption of popular agency in the public sphere. The multiple actors of the Iranian civil society are not only trying to challenge the legitimacy of an extant sovereignty, but also to discover the better ‘angels’ of their social nature in an effort to form and express moral capital. In essence, the level of future success of democratization of the Iranian society is closely related to the level of moral capital expressed and practiced by the Iranian civil society.

Iran with its young population has today become a society that has achieved moral and political progress through an ability to understand the motives and meanings of dissent as resistance to unjust laws. It is interesting to underline that even as the Iranian political structure is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy and the current power holders have lost moral credibility by virtue of misgovernment and lying in politics, Iranian civil society is redefining its legitimacy by rediscovering and refining its republican principles. The Iranian public space is faced, then, with the problem of combining a rejection of absolute sovereignty with the need to infuse faith in a challenge ‘from below’ – in the independent life of ‘civil society’ outside the frame of state power.

This possibility, of course, resides in the self-organization of Iranian civil society that defies the violence embodied in the Iranian state and its instruments of control and domination. But it is also closely related to new ethical standards against which Iranian political reality might be measured. By assuming an ethical stance, Iranian civil society can make a stronger political case. In a violent political society in which most of the ethical values have been largely discarded, the notion of nonviolent action needs once again to be highlighted. Violence is after all violence, even if it holds up the banner of populism under the cloak of religious institutions. There is no way today for Iranian civil society to fight against lies in politics without holding to the truth of nonviolence.

Post-revolutionary Iran has experienced the failure of two major political paradigms in the last thirty years: revolutionary leftism and ideological Islam. Both have failed in practice as well as in theory, and the Iranian people no longer trust the groups associated with them. It is evident that nonviolent action is the new paradigm that is attempting to carve out a distinct space and overcome the intellectual and political weaknesses of its predecessors. Though this nonviolent paradigm is still in the making, it can nonetheless be characterized as ‘post-ideological’. This is due to the fact that the protest movement in Iran is nonviolent and civil in its methods of creating social change, while simultaneously seeking to infuse an ethical dimension in Iranian politics.

Today, the most difficult challenge before Iranian civil society is to face the violence of the dominant political system without itself descending into violence. True, many among us believe that it is not possible to turn the Iranian political system around through nonviolent action. That might well be the case. Nevertheless, many of us also realize the total inability of violence to change anything for the better. Nonviolence doesn’t always work, but violence never does. Gandhi once said: ‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world.’ In the past few weeks, many Iranians have shown the world that they have enough maturity and tolerance to be the nonviolent change in Iran.

RAMIN JAHANBEGLOO