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Iran's
Aghajari: Scourge of the clergy
By Ian Urbina
 WASHINGTON - When a hardline court in Iran
sentenced dissident academic Hashem Aghajari to death
for questioning clerical rule, several thousand students
took to the streets. After two weeks of protests, the
unrest in Tehran is over for the time being. But it is
only a matter of time before the growing demographic,
theological and political rifts within Iranian society
trigger further tremors.
What set off the recent
fury was Aghajari’s call for "Islamic Protestantism" - a
significant reference to the Protestant Reformation that
changed the face of Christiandom. Significantly, the
Protestant Reformation began with a dissident priest
named Martin Luther nailing his famous "95 theses" - his
point-by-point rebuttal of certain pronouncements of the
ruling clerical authorities in Rome - to the wooden door
of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Germany, on October
31, 1517.
Aghajari's version of the 95 Theses
was delivered this past June in a speech on the
anniversary of the death of Ali Shariati - an important
but suppressed thinker behind the 1979 Islamic
revolution - in which Aghajari called for a "religious
renewal" of Shi'ite Islam. The speech drew from the
teachings of Shariati, who contended that Shi'ite
clerics had no monopoly on the interpretation of Islamic
law. Conservative clerics in the Iranian regime
immediately began calling for the silencing of Aghajari,
comparing him to British novelist Salman Rushdie. In
1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the late founder of the
Islamic Republic, decreed that Rushdie’s "blasphemous"
writings warranted a death sentence.
For
Aghajari and other reformists in theocratic Iran, the
fight for free speech and democratic institutions is as
much political as it is theological.
In
questioning whether the faithful were expected to
blindly follow doctrine like "monkeys", Aghajari pushed
the envelope at a time when the nation’s clerics were
still on edge from an embarrassing resignation. Several
months ago, Jalaluddin Taheri, a long-venerated and
senior prayer leader, stepped down from office. His
final gesture was to publish a scathing letter referring
to the current patriarchs as "louts and fascists" who
had betrayed the principles of the revolution. Taheri
remains under house arrest.
The political
frustrations voiced by Aghajari and his student backers
have been compounded by a sluggish economy and climbing
unemployment, as 53 percent of Iranians currently live
below the poverty line. But the struggle for reform in
Iran is also a fight between fathers and sons. The
nation of 66 million is facing a demographic tidal wave
as 65 percent of the total population is under the age
of 30. Reformism draws its strongest support from the
younger set, especially those who do not view the
revolution with any particular fondness, having been
born after it swept into power. The politics of this
generation gap could not have been more apparent as
Khomeini’s grandson decided to join the protesters on
the streets.
For now, the students have called
off all rallies. They had good reason for caution, as
the government threatened to crack down and declare a
state of emergency. No one has forgotten Tehran’s
Tiananmen Square of July 1999, when the government
unleashed hardline militiamen, called the Basij, on
crowds rallying against the closure of a liberal
newspaper. The Basij killed one protester and injured a
great many others. Most of the student protesters
rounded up in those mass arrests still remain in jail.
During the recent student rallies,
baton-wielding groups of Basij again waded into the
crowds, sending many of the protesters to hospital. But
the real show of force came as the Basij staged a
protest of their own, nominally to mark the Israeli
occupation of Jerusalem, turning out tens of thousands
on the streets. Declaring their readiness to combat
internal as well as external enemies, the Basij rattled
their sabers loud enough that student leaders opted to
call off further demonstrations.
It is not just
Aghajari who faces a death sentence. Politically
speaking, President Mohammad Khatami has been fighting
for his very survival for the past year, and the student
turnout may have given him a new (if perhaps short)
lease on life. During past political crises in Iran,
popular discontent has been channeled into support for
Khatami as the icon of Iranian reformism. But the
student slogans showed growing distrust in the campaign
promises which first ushered Khatami into office in 1997
with an 80 percent majority of the vote. When one
student speaker at the rally remarked that the president
"only smiles beautifully and speaks nice words" there
were raucous cheers from the crowd.
But the
president may be ready to throw down the gauntlet.
Taking aim at the two main bastions of conservative
sentiment, Khatami is pressing legislation that would
limit the discretionary powers of the judiciary and the
Council of Guardians. He has a personal gripe with the
judiciary, which has imprisoned dozens of reformists,
including some of his inner circle. The unelected
Guardians are no less an obstacle as they vet all
candidates for election and all legislation coming from
parliament. Khatami is threatening that if his
conservative foes yet again move to block his
legislation, he will step down from office and take most
of the parliament with him. But if the hardliners decide
to call his bluff, Khatami cannot afford to fold,
particularly now that the students have done their part
in bravely taking to the streets.
The Bush
administration is not making things easier for a
peaceful transition to democracy in Iran. Hopes for
bridge-building - backed by opinion polls released in
September indicating that 74 percent of the Iranian
population favors dialogue with the US - have been
largely rebuffed by the US. Aside from blocking Iran’s
application to the World Trade Organization, limiting
exports of food and medicine to the country, and
tightening restrictions on assistance to refugees, the
Bush administration’s decision to include Iran in the
axis of evil has further enabled conservative clerics to
pose as defenders of the republic.
To top it
off, the US administration has put the reformists in an
extremely awkward position by asking the government for
help in US efforts to invade Iraq. After losing hundreds
of thousands of its citizens in their war with Iraq,
Iranians have little sympathy for Saddam, but they are
hardly in the mood to extend a helping hand to the US in
light of current policies in the region.
The
reformists vow to keep up their fight, and Aghajari will
not be an easy opponent for the ruling mullahs. A
firebrand as a public speaker, he is also a decorated
war veteran who lost a brother and a leg in the
Iran-Iraq conflict of 1980-88. Despite the fact that his
sentence will probably be overturned if he takes it to
the higher court, he says that he will not appeal
because to do so would recognize the authority of the
original verdict. In demanding that the case be thrown
out entirely, he is not just challenging his verdict,
but the judicial process itself. Student leaders
recently released from jail vow to conduct campus
"referenda" on the legitimacy of the conservative
clerics.
If a second Iranian revolution is
coming, it has a way to go. The same people who two
decades ago led the protests against the Shah are well
aware of the potential of the students on the streets.
Nevertheless, the reform movement, taken to its logical
conclusion, ultimately leads to regime change, but as
different from the externally and forcefully imposed
plans for Iraq, the student movement in Iran is
internally and democratically driven. This is the type
of democratization in the Middle East that the US should
do everything in its power to support.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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