(Similar version first published in WireTap)
The turmoil in Iran presents the current regime with its greatest crisis in the thirty years since the Islamic Revolution. More than that, however, it offers insight into whether and to what extent political Islam will address and reflect the needs of the younger generations in Muslim countries stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.
Iran is an instructive example in the Muslim world because its population is so young: The median age is 26.4 years. Half the population is under 30 and a third is between the ages of 15 to 29 — too young to have experienced the 1979 revolution or to understand firsthand its causes.
In broad strokes, the Muslim world at large is also disproportionately young, with those under 24 comprising 50 to 65 percent of the Middle East’s population. Many of these youth live under dictatorships or quasi-dictatorships and cannot find employment or any meaningful outlet to realize their potential in the ossified societies that suffocate them.
It is through this prism that Iran can be analyzed and its Islamic revolution will ultimately be judged: What concrete solutions can the state offer to the next generation of Iranians? The fault-lines of Iran’s internal struggle shed light on what younger Iranians themselves think of their state.
In a June 19 blog post, I argued that the turmoil in Iran reflected not simply secularism versus Islamism, but a central disagreement about Ayatollah Khamenei’s status and station as the supreme leader within the context of the Islamic Republic. After the disputed Presidential elections, some clerics who rejected the election results backed the Mousavi-led opposition, while Khamenei relied on the power of the military apparatus to enforce his decree that Ahmedinijad’s re-election victory was a “divine blessing.”
Events since then seem to confirm this view. Only days after the Basij militia — responsible for beating and killing protesters — called for Mousavi to be prosecuted, Khamenei’s own propaganda arm, the daily newspaper Khayan, echoed that sentiment in an editorial, accusing Mousavi of being an American agent. And on the other side of the split, an important voice of the clerical establishment, Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, brazenly defied Khamenei by declaring the election and the government illegitimate.
The clerical insistence that the elections were rigged points to the heart of the matter because the one clear demand of the youth-led protests is recognition of their basic democratic rights. The questionable election results, tainted by widespread accusations of fraud and then stained with the blood of peaceful protesters, indicate that Khamenei wishes to do away with any element of democracy in order to consolidate his theocracy.
As I had indicated in my earlier blog post, the demand for more democracy calls into the question the very legitimacy of the role that Khamenei occupies. The innovation of Valet-e Faqih (a religious scholar’s claim to not only spiritual but temporal authority) was not universally accepted in Iran by religious scholars even on the eve of the revolution, and even given the commanding presence of its designer, Ayotallah Khomenei.
“Some found his line of reasoning and the sources on which he relied weak. Others saw it as a violation of Shia historical tradition and even theology,” the prestigious scholar Vali Nasr writes in his seminal book, The Shia Revival . The mentor of Ayotallah Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Abol-Qasem al-Khoi, bitterly opposed Khomenei’s innovation, Nasr further notes.
As Noah Feldman presciently and bluntly put it in his book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State , “[I]nstead of restoring the balance between the ruler and the scholars,” — the historical precedent in Muslim societies prior to colonialism — “[Khomeini] sought to merge these two separate institutions under a single supreme jurist-ruler-and the failures of the Islamic Republic of Iran are the legacy of this megalomaniacal mistake.”
Millions of young Iranians clearly take this viewpoint, and for them Khamenei has lost the aura of authority. Though the Supreme Leader will not likely regain his standing through his over-reliance on the military’s bludgeon, the status quo is worthy of some reflection.
According to a hadith (or recorded saying of the Prophet), Muhammad said, “The worst scholar is one who visits princes, but the best prince is one who visits scholars.” In Iran, the scholar (Khomeini) did not go to the prince but became the prince, yet his successor must appease other powerful elements in the palace – the Revolutionary Guards and Basij — in order to retain his increasingly tenuous claim to dual authority.
Iran‘s official leadership, of course, takes a different view of things. For them, the opposition represents the insertion and infiltration of Western agents and ideas intent on undermining Islam. They have leaned heavily on this crutch, as indicated by the wild accusations leveled at Mousavi, himself a veteran of the 1979 revolution. But in a country where many are too young to remember the American-backed Shah, let alone the American-backed coup against Mossadegh, these wild charges are no more likely to resonate than a hairpin dropped into a haystack.
It is true that, whatever course Iran charts, it will not determine the trajectory of other Muslim countries: it is the only Shiite country in the world with no claim to spiritual guidance over, say, Turkey or Indonesia, two Muslim countries with functioning democracies.
Nonetheless, Iran is the only large Muslim country that has restored — with whatever distortions — the importance of the role of the scholarly class, or ulema. Its 1979 revolution signaled the ascent of Islam as a political force in the post-colonial era. If the revolution cannot adapt to the demands of its children, and instead mutates from a theocracy with democratic elements to a military junta with a theocratic face, it will reinforce for many Shia Muslims the disastrous idea that they must make a choice between their faith and democracy. Or, as Mousavi said, “the ideology that Islam and republicanism are incompatible will be proven.”
