The
New Conservatives Take a Turn
Farhad
Khosrokhavar
Farhad
Khosrokhavar is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales in Paris and author of L’Islam
dans les prisons (Paris: Balland, 2004).
|
President Mohammad Khatami, middle,
and Majles Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, left, at
a joint session of the cabinet and Parliament, August
18, 2004. (HENGHAMEH FAHIMI/AFP) |
The
conservative forces that took majority control of Iran’s parliament,
or Majles, in the February 2004 elections were not swept into
office by a mass movement. Conservative candidates had the
help of the Council of Guardians, a body of 12 senior clerics[1] vested by the constitution of the Islamic Republic
with the power to overturn acts of parliament, which blocked
the candidacy of over 1,000 men and women associated with
the reformist trend that held the majority in the Sixth Majles
of 2001-2004. Thanks to this intervention, conservatives won
the majority of seats, because many Iranians were left with
no one for whom to vote.
The
Guardian Council’s wide-ranging disqualification of reformist
candidates symbolized the extent to which unaccountable actors
shape formal politics in the Islamic Republic. The judiciary,
the Expediency Council—another unelected clerical conclave—and
the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, successor to Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution,
are three other conservative-controlled institutions empowered
either to veto initiatives of the elected parliament or to
repress the movement for reform outside parliament. In the
seven years since the first election of reformist-associated
President Mohammad Khatami, the conservatives used all of
these institutions to reestablish control over a system that
seemed to have escaped their domination. Yet the conservative
forces did not regain their strength through repression alone.
Lack
of unity among the reformists, the inability of Khatami to
face down the conservatives and the peculiarities of the constitution
that gave conservative bodies so much power all played a major
role in the conservatives’ reversal of fortune. The parliamentary
reformists’ inability to cope with Iran’s social and economic
problems and their constant feuds with the conservatives discouraged
supporters of reform among the broader population, who became
disenchanted with the reformists and, finally, indifferent
to their overtures. Meanwhile, the conservatives mobilized
economic and social forces loyal to them, but their shrewdness
in these tasks alone does not account for their success. In
order to reconquer the parliament and, they hope, the Iranian
presidency in the election coming up in 2005, a new generation
of conservatives chose a new strategy, one that is quite different
from the course they had followed over the preceding two decades.
Puritanism
to Pragmatism
For
years after the Islamic Revolution, the conservatives in the
regime relied on their alliances with powerful institutions
and did not engage the electorate directly. The most influential
circle supporting the conservatives is the Jamiat Mo’talefeh
Eslami, or Islamic Coalition Society (ICS), a group of laymen
formed in the late 1960s by merchants in the bazaar and early
supporters of Khomeini. Habibollah Asgarowladi, a leading
bazaar merchant with strong ties with the clergy, transformed
the ICS into a party in the course of the revolution. Profoundly
traditionalist in their religious outlook, people like Asgarowladi,
Ali-Naqi Khamouchi and Asadollah Badamtchian, all of them
revolutionary bazaaris with a strong influence in the Revolutionary
Guards, have political clout that extends well beyond their
immense personal wealth. Under the Shah, these bazaaris were politically marginal and their
economic power was waning. But especially after the death
of Khomeini a new “Islamic” economic order took shape that
favored the merchants. Like former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani,
they were for an open-door economic policy combined with cultural
and religious conservatism.
Many
ICS members are married into powerful clerical families, including
the families of many of the conservative clergymen who compose
the Society of Combative Clerics, a political party that holds
seats in the parliament.[2]
Other main backers of the conservatives include the top-ranking
officials of the Revolutionary Guards, an armed force mustered
after the revolution as a sort of praetorian guard for the
regime, the group around Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani,
president of Iran from 1989-1997 and head of the Expediency
Council since 1997, and the revolutionary foundations (bonyads).
These foundations own the nationalized assets of the elite
under the Shah and many other industries. Their money pays
for conservative groups’ street demonstrations and other activities.
After
Speaker of the Majles Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri lost the 1997
presidential race to Khatami and the conservatives
went on to lose their parliamentary majority in 2000, a subgroup
of middle-aged conservatives began to argue for revising the
conservatives’ political message. Many on the old right clung
to revolutionary tenets denouncing the West and preaching
selflessness, with a particular stress on “martyrdom” as the
sacrifice of one’s life—literal and figurative—for the sake
of Islam. These slogans clashed with the reformists’ focus
on opening Iran to the outside world and leaving behind the
heroism of revolutionary martyrs in favor of a society in
which Islam would not impose self-abnegation and self-denial.
The new conservatives saw that the rhetoric of self-sacrifice
had become meaningless to the generation born after the revolution—over
half of Iran’s total population. In their newspapers, they
began to question the old guard’s puritanism and obsession
with lamentation and, instead, to borrow themes from the reformists
to better compete in the electoral arena.[3] Progressively, expressions of the
conservatives’ message sounded less and less like the dolorous
exhortations of the old guard. Their widely publicized slogan
in the 2004 parliamentary campaign—“a free, developed and
joyful Iran” (Iran-e azad, abad va shad)—had no specifically
Islamic component. Instead, the conservatives spoke of economic
wellbeing (refah-e eqtesadi) and the transformation
of Iran into a kind of “Islamic Japan.” While the traditional
conservatives had mentioned economic justice, they had normally
rejected rhetoric of economic development and material progress
in deference to Khomeini’s saying that “economics are for
the beasts.”
The
new generation of conservatives, mostly aged in the forties
and fifties, are further distinguished by their university
educations, as most of them are engineers or hold doctorates.
Their manner of speech, relying on Western words instead of
Arabic to augment their Persian, sets them apart from the
bazaaris or the older generation. They do not reject “democracy”
outright as being anti-Islamic or a strategy of Western powers
against Muslim countries, and they speak favorably of the
citizen’s right to privacy. Even their use of these terms
distinguishes them from the old guard, who still denounce
democracy for its hypocrisy and secularism and believes in
no real private life as a right of the citizens. Ayatollahs
Mesbah Yazdi and Ahmad Jannati, official Tehran prayer leaders
nominated by the Supreme Leader, use their Friday sermons
to denounce democracies as innately corrupt political regimes
that rule against the commandments of God. This view, rejected
by the reformists, has also been challenged by the new generation
of the conservatives.
Consolidating
the Base
|
Men and women separate themselves during
a demonstration by several thousand student members
of the Basij militia, at Tehran University on November
19, 2002. They protested against pro-reform students
who staged demonstrations and sit-ins for over a week
in support of freedom of speech. (KEIVAN/GETTY IMAGES) |
The
most prominent of the new conservatives are the three leaders
of the Seventh Majles elected in 2004. Gholamreza Haddad Adel,
who has family ties with the Leader, is the speaker of the
parliament. His deputy speaker, Mohammad Reza Bahonar, is
the head of the Islamic Society of Engineers. Ahmad Tavakkoli,
a member of Parliament, rounds out the troika. Other important
new conservative voices are those of Mostafa Mirsalim, the
Supreme Leader’s councillor, ICS member Hamid Reza Taraqi,
Mohammad Nabi Habibi, elected president of the ICS in July
2004, and Ali Larijani, former head of state radio and television.
The reformists particularly hate Larijani because they regarded
the state broadcast media as biased against them. In June
2004, Larijani left his position to another conservative of
his generation, his deputy Ezzatollah Zarqami, who held a
high rank in the Revolutionary Guards. There is also Elias
Naderian, one of the main organizers of the impeachment of
the reformist minister of transportation, Ahmad Khorram, on
October 3, 2004. One might add the names of some 90 others
who have shown their loyalty to the Iranian political system
by serving in the Revolutionary Guards and who were elected
as new members of the Majles in 2004.[4]
A
new social and institutional framework undergirds the new
conservative ideology. The major new institution is the Islamic
Society of Engineers, whose middle-aged leaders pride themselves
on being more “modern” in their rhetoric and even their look
than the established conservatives epitomized by the old generation
of the ICS. Bahonar played a major role in the conservatives’
successes in the municipal elections of February 2003 and
the parliamentary contests a year later, uniting the heterogeneous
groups of the right under the banner of “Unity of the Partisans
of the Imam’s Way and the Supreme Leader” (e’telaf-e peyrovan-e
khat-e emam va rahbari). He promoted the group known as
Organizations Convergent with the Militant Clerics’ Association,
thus strengthening the coalition of the conservative clergy
and lay members of the conservative groups (particularly the
new generations of the ICS). In order to clear the way for
younger conservative candidates, people like Bahonar had to
convince the gerontocracy in charge of the conservative organizations
to retire. Prominent figures within the ICS like Asgarowladi,
Khamouchi and Badamtchian were not willing simply to give
up power,[5] so the task was difficult. But by the time of
the parliamentary elections of 2004, the new conservatives
had achieved it: none of the old guard figures stood as a
candidate. While the electoral “victory” of the new conservative
formations was due to the Guardian Council’s disqualification
of their reformist opponents, through the elections the new
conservatives were able to marginalize not only the reformists,
but also most of the grandfathers in the conservative elite.
Forces
on the Far Right
Recognizing
the deep changes in Iranian society since the halcyon days
of the Islamic Revolution, the new conservatives present a
platform in which economic development and some tolerance
for individual autonomy and cultural creativity go hand in
hand. But this does not mean that they will succeed in imposing
their platform on more hard-line factions of the conservatives.
The
extreme religious right is still powerful in many sectors
of Iran’s institutional life, particularly within the Revolutionary
Guards and in the Baseej, a branch of the Guards some of whose
young volunteers still believe in categorical rejection of
the West and its “fifth column”—the new generation of consumerists.
The Baseej have supplied the foot soldiers for the regime’s
proxy attacks on protesting students in 1999, 2002 and 2003.
Many prominent members of the clergy, moreover, are still
imbued with Khomeinist ideology: opposition to the West, refusal
to let economic development take precedence over ideological
purity and opposition to any cultural opening of the society.
Even some older ayatollahs within the hierarchy who are not
strict Khomeinists rejected the reformists as dangerous “innovators”
(the partisans of bid‘a, anti-Islamic innovation) and
are suspicious that the new conservatives will diverge from
the path of Islam if they are left to their own devices.
Finally,
entanglement in a web of patronage bolsters the staunch ideology
of many conservatives. The bonyads and the equally
closed hierarchies of the ICS and the Chamber of Commerce
reject any innovation that threatens their privileged status,
which they claim derives from the Islamic legitimacy of their
institutions. The Chamber of Commerce, which warded off many
“modernization” attempts by the reformists, has not been liberalized
under the conservatives, either. Ali-Naqi Khamouchi, the powerful
old member of the ICS and head of the Chamber, selected the
technocrat Ahmad Mir Motahhari to introduce reforms, but Motahhari
presented his resignation in September 2004 after only a few
months.[6] The
revolutionary foundations profit from their proximity to power,
importing products into Iran without paying heed to government
regulations or paying taxes, since they are tax-exempt. An
official Ministry of Information account told in July 2004
of how some 110 cranes controlled by bonyads in various
Iranian ports, particularly Hormozgan in the south, transfer
goods duty-free from ships onto trucks. These goods are then
sold in the market, constituting unfair competition for importers
who must pay duties and for local manufacturers.[7] The bonyads regarded the
reformists as enemies in so far as they asked that the revolutionary
organizations be accountable to the elected bodies and the
government.
The
loudest opposition to the modulated tone of the new conservatives
has come from Ansar-e Hezbollah (Partisans of Hezbollah),
the most puritanical branch of the Revolutionary Guards. This
organization formed during the first years of the revolution
to monitor the personal conduct of youth, and now it is attempting
to reimpose strict rules for female veiling and gender segregation
of young people in parks, cinemas and university campuses.[8] In the Majles, Mojtaba Kashani, a young cleric
who is a member of the central council of the Ansar-e Hezbollah,
has inveighed against Bahonar’s wish not to impose the chador
and permit women to wear the “Islamic hijab,” a tightly knit
scarf, instead of the full body covering.[9] With the backing of the daily newspaper Keyhan,
this group revives the old denunciations of insidious attacks
upon Islam in Iran by both the West and the Westernized enemy
within.
If
these brigades enforcing “Islamic” mores or other repressive
institutions tied to the Revolutionary Guards are able to
reverse the socio-cultural opening that accompanied the reformist
ascendancy of 1997-2004, the new generation that never knew
the self-sacrificing ethic of the early revolutionary years
will probably not accept its predicament passively. To avert
a rise in social tensions, the new conservatives will have
to rein in the forces to their right, as well as promote job-creating
economic development. It could be a tall order.
