Page 2 of 3 Ahmadinejad held hostage to
bazaar politics By M K Bhadrakumar
to those of [Prophet] Mohammed and
Ali" (to borrow the words of Bernard Lewis).
No doubt, what annoys the US is that
instead of sticking to mainstream Islam and
reposing trust in faith, hope and pious devotion
(as the pro-Western Arab regimes do), Ahmadinejad
has imparted to it a messianic strain, making it a
vehicle for a sort of Heideggerian commitment,
resolve and willpower on behalf of
oppressed people.
To
be sure, he would have been anathema to British
statesman Winston Churchill - as the Jacobins or
the Bolsheviks were. Ahmadinejad's Third World
socialist credo is incendiary. It is agitating an
entire region. It has caught the imagination of
(Sunni) Hamas in Palestine and (Shi'ite) Hezbollah
in Lebanon. Ahmadinejad has crossed the sectarian
divide in the Muslim Middle East with an abandon
that Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt or Mossadeq
couldn't.
Quite naturally, Ahmadinejad
doesn't represent all political forces in Iran -
nor did Shariati. This brings us to ayatollah
Mohammad Beheshti, one of the founding fathers of
the Council of Revolution of Iran, and destined
for Iran's leadership but for his assassination at
the age of 52, together with more than 70 members
of the Islamic Republic Party, in 1981 in a
terrorist attack sponsored by the United States.
(Rafsanjani narrowly escaped when he left the
meeting Beheshti attended a few minutes before the
bomb exploded.)
Beheshti was the very
antithesis of Shariati. He was a wily political
pragmatist who used religion and ideology as means
to power. From obscure origins as a writer of
religious texts in public schools in the shah's
Iran, he catapulted to the forefront of the
revolution by his great quality never to commit
himself to any viewpoint. Like Rafsanjani, he was
an equivocator par excellence, capable of
endlessly parrying, forever arguing on the need
for calm, invariably positioning at the center of
political space. It was impossible to nail him
down. He was a consummate politician.
Khomeini, a great observer of men, was
once approached by Rafsanjani in the heyday of the
revolution with the plea that his friend Beheshti
was eligible for Iran's presidency. The imam
apparently replied that he would prefer
non-clerics to hold the post of Iran's president!
Clearly, two distinct streams of the Iranian
revolution - represented by Shariati and Beheshti
- existed all along. But after Khomeini passed
away, the Islamic left lost ground in the battle
for supremacy. Ahmadinejad represents its second
coming.
He poses a challenge to powerful
sections of the ruling elite. His brand of
revolutionary Shi'ism unnerves the conservative
clergy. He spreads unease in the bazaar with his
program of social justice. ("The Hajji Bazaari,
even while exploiting everyone, claims he is
everyone's religious brother, and goes to the
mosque to mourn Hossein," Shariati once wrote with
sarcasm.) Again, Ahmadinejad puts off Iran's
middle class and intelligentsia by his sheer
earthiness.
Lacking a distinct faction of
his own, Ahmadinejad was compelled into endorsing
a ticket of Islamic scholars known as the "Haqqani
circle" in the recent elections to the Assembly of
Experts. But in the event, simply in terms of
electoral arithmetic, the alliance between the
conservative clergy (including Rafsanjani), the
bazaar and the "reformist" camp, which was
patently an unholy coalition scrambled together
for the sake of stalling any "Ahmedinjad wave",
prevailed. The "international community" saw it as
constituting a political setback for Ahmadinejad,
though.
Some naively wondered whether
Ahmadinejad was on his "way out". But that's not
the way politics works in Tehran. The conservative
clergy knows that the system based on the doctrine
of velayat-i-faqih (the sovereign power of
the Supreme Leader as the chief jurist) does not
any more appeal to large sections of the Iranian
people, including sizable sections of clerics. The
corruption that began entrapping the religious
establishment during Rafsanjani's presidency
(1988-96) became legion. The electoral victory of
Ahmadinejad in August 2005 was a wake-up call that
the impoverished Iranian people were yearning for
change.
Iran's ruling elite would know
that Ahmadinejad 's presidency might well be the
last chance for re-establishing the regime's
connectivity with the Iranian people. The
religious leadership, especially a shrewd observer
like Rafsanjani, would realize that any
constitutional crisis emanating out of a power
struggle at this critical juncture could as well
mean the unraveling of the Iranian regime.
It is highly significant that Rafsanjani
was picked as the Friday Prayer leader last week
in Tehran. It conveyed a message to the outside
world that the religious establishment is savvy
enough to counter the conspiracies aimed at
creating dissension within the regime. The veteran
leader devoted virtually his entire sermon to a
tirade against foreign powers conspiring against
Iran's national unity. Rafsanjani singled out the
US and Israel for vehement criticism. The day
after Rafsanjani spoke, the secretary of the
Expediency Council, Mohsen Rezaei, nailed the
canard in the
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
