Iran's rapidly expanding missile program is a growing threat to regional stability in the Middle East and is a cause of grave concern to Tehran's immediate and more distant neighbors
— The Israel Project

Divided Iran

By Malise Ruthven
The New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 11, July 2, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism
By Abbas Amanat
I.B. Tauris, 286 pages

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran
By Janet Afary
Cambridge University Press, 423 pages

Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs
By Ray Takeyh
Oxford University Press, 310 pages

In 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam would return within two years. The Islamic Republic's conflicting ideological currents also find expression in the age-old rhetoric of the apocalypse.

Abbas Amanat, a professor of history at Yale, regards Islam as one variant in a cluster of religions rather than a subject to be treated on its own. Messianic expectations are fundamental to all the West Asian religions.

Shiism has for more than thirteen centuries oscillated between revolutionary activism and quietist disengagement. In the early Muslim era, Ali's loyalists (his shia, or partisans) instigated numerous revolts. Many of these revolts were conducted in the name of the Mahdi (messiah), a figure resembling the avenging Christ of the book of Revelation.

In the 1979 revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini argued that in the absence of the Hidden Imam the clerics should effectively exercise power on his behalf. This was a radical break with the tradition of de facto separation between religion and state that had grown up over previous centuries.

A cliché of Iran's revolutionary rhetoric is that the United States is the Great Satan bent on destroying the Islamic Republic. Such frenzied antagonism, as Amanat suggests, owes more to Zoroastrian dualism than mainstream Quranic theology. In Muslim scriptures, Satan is just one demon among others and acts as tempter or ethical tester. Amanat argues that during the early Islamic centuries, Iranian Shiism absorbed the Zoroastrian view of a world divided between pure believers and polluting infidels.

In a patriarchal social order, it is women who bear the brunt. The battle over gender is brilliantly described by Janet Afary in her groundbreaking survey. As in other patrilineal societies, the woman is the "door of entry to the group." Improper behavior on her part can expose her community and family to all sorts of hidden dangers.

The sexual double standard was effectively institutionalized in all the mainstream Islamic traditions: men were permitted up to four legal wives and the right of divorce by repudiation. In pre-modern Iran, male prerogatives were enhanced by the practice of temporary marriage, which was exclusive to Shiism, and by the availability of concubines.

Gender segregation contributed to the prevalence of boy concubinage and pedophilia. Although sodomy is condemned in the Quran, homosexual relationships between older men and boys were tolerated. Beardless boys, says Afary, could be "penetrated without losing their essential manliness, so long as they did not register pleasure in the act."

Under the Qajar dynasty, which took power in the 1790s, Iran had a rigidly hierarchical social order. Marriage was nearly universal, with parents choosing spouses for children of both sexes. Afary finds references in the literature to love-brokers and to the secret affairs of women. In an order where sexual transgressions of respectable women were severely punished, it was the veil that provided opportunities for resistance.

The social reforms instituted by Reza Shah Pahlevi were modeled on the perceived advantages enjoyed by people in the industrialized West. Religious leaders adamantly resisted. They recognized that in enacting reforms in the realms of hygiene and dress, the state was appropriating their powers as the guardians of purity.

Khomeini's revolution upended the Pahlavi reforms, leading to a drastic reversal in women's rights. The compulsory veil was imposed for women in public. Women and men no longer enjoy equality under the law, with evidence from a man worth twice that of a woman. Lashing, amputation, and stoning have been applied by the courts.

Under Khomeini child marriage was allowed once more, with the age of marriage reduced from 18 to nine for girls (revised to 13) and 15 for boys. New laws encouraged polygamy and prevented women from leaving abusive husbands. The husband's right of unilateral divorce was reinstated. New policies encouraged temporary marriage.

Despite the formal reintroduction of child marriage, the mean age of first marriages for young women has continued to rise from around 19 before the revolution to 24 today. The revolution has maintained the momentum of the Shah's literacy campaigns, with literacy rates exceeding 95 percent for both sexes. A majority of college students are now women. Companionate marriage, with couples freely choosing their partners, is becoming the norm.

As Ray Takeyh explains, Khomeini intended a "revolution without borders" that would impose his Islamist template on Iran's neighbors. The decadent princes of the Gulf with their sham "American Islam" would be replaced by an "authentically Islamic" popular movement that would repoliticize Islam. Universal justice under the "government of God" would finally be realized.

The revolution's outward momentum was blocked by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which launched an unprovoked attack in 1980, leading to a war that cost as many as one million lives. Takeyh presents Khomeini as a "relentless ideologue willing to sacrifice his nation for the sake of his religious speculations." Having sacrificed a generation of young martyrs to repel the Iraqis, Khomeini insisted on carrying the war onto Iraqi soil, as the prelude to the Muslim Armageddon, with the "path to Jerusalem passing through Karbala."

Takeyh argues that Saddam's use of chemical weaponry turned the tide of the war, and it was the trauma of this event that underpins Iran's policy of developing a nuclear capability. The war altered perceptions: "The fact that Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran with impunity demonstrated that the Western powers' hostility toward the clerical regime would always overcome their moral compunctions."

The 1997 election brought the moderate President Mohammad Khatami to power against the wishes of the clerical elite led by Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader. This should have demonstrated to Washington that the regime was far from monolithic. But George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech in January 2002 undermined Khatami and convinced the hard-liners that the Islamic Republic would become the next target in Bush's "war on terror."

This month's presidential elections will reveal if the current incumbents retains its grip on power. Ahmedinajad is thought to enjoy the support of the Supreme Leader. Since 2005, the New Right has consolidated its hold over Iran's institutions and the international situation is hardly encouraging for reformers.

Apocalyptic talk by both sides is serving to ratchet up the temperature. After Iran successfully tested a new missile with a range of 1900 km, Ahmedinajad attributed the latest breakthrough to divine intervention and the assistance of the Lord of the Age. Counterblasts from Israel are alarming: "You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recent interview.

Takeyh takes a much more sanguine view: "Iran's rulers should not be caricatured as messianic politicians seeking to implement obscure scriptural dictates for ushering in the end of the world through conflict and disorder. As with most leaders, they are interested in staying in power and will recoil from conduct that jeopardizes their domain."
 

AR  Another excellent overview from the New York Review of Books — surely one of the prime information resources for any serious blogger in the field of current affairs.
 

Clerical Errors

By James Buchan
The Guardian, June 27, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

For Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, history ended on 1 February 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris to inaugurate the new revolutionary government. The story of humanity, which up to that moment had been the persistent thwarting of God's will by Jews, Arabs, heretics, kings, drunkards, liberals and the British, had now entered its end phase. A learned cleric would administer first Iran, then the whole world, until the Lord of Time revealed himself and ushered in an age of justice. The Lord of Time, or Mahdi, went into hiding in 874 CE.

Another view of history rejects Khomeini's fantastic theories of clerical government, the religiosity of Ahmadinejad, the grinding air of eschatological menace, and the regime's metaphysical liberties with the truth. This view has it that Iran, in cutting itself off from the mainstream of world affairs, has squandered its wealth and condemned itself to insignificance or ridicule.

This liberal Iranian view has its best expression in Ahmad Kasravi's Tarikh-e Mashrute-ye Iran, or History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, which first saw the light in Arabic in 1921 and is now partly available in English translation.

Ahmad Kasravi was born in modest circumstances in 1890 in the Turkish-speaking city of Tabriz in north-west Iran. Bred up for the Shia clergy, his life was changed in 1905 when the Shia clergy became aware of some of the wider consequences of Enlightenment ideas. They were shocked to learn that liberty included liberty not to pray or wash, and equality might even be extended to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. The new parliament, instead of merely interpreting and enforcing sharia, would give law to the Muslims.

This break in the alliance between clergy and liberals is the dominant theme of modern Iranian history. It has permitted a succession of government coups d'etat from 1908 to 1979. The two groups together mobilized millions of demonstrators over the winter of 1978/79 and send Muhammad Reza into exile. The Iraqi invasion of 1980 and the eight years of war forged a solidarity that persisted into the 1990s.

These two wings split apart again soon after polls closed on 12 June this year. From a purely historical point of view, the most likely outcome of recent events is despotism. Kasravi saw the parade of Shia ceremonies that punctuate the Iranian calendar, the cursing of the early caliphs, and the self-flagellation and mourning for the prophet's family, as mere mechanisms for despotic control. The prophet Muhammad performed no miracles, but the Iranians know better. Khomeini loathed popular superstition. Not so his successors.

Kasravi became more and more anti-clerical. In the course of the 1930s, he came to argue that the Shia itself was a perversion of the prophet's Islam. That brought him to the attention not only of Khomeini but of Muhammad Navvab Safavi, who had founded a terrorist group called the Fedayan-e Islam ("Devotees of Islam"). Brought to trial for his anti-clerical stance in Tehran, Kasravi was butchered in open court on 11 March 1946.

One of the assassins appeared at the central police station waving a blood-stained knife and crying: "I have killed Kasravi! The man who is burning the Qur'an!" He was turned away as a madman and later pardoned. The Fedayan went on to assassinate the prime minister. Navvab Safavi was executed by the Pahlavis in 1955, and his followers dispersed into Khomeini's movement. Khomeini said on television in 1979 that Kasravi was a vile man who sought prophethood.

The fine new translation from Mazda Publishers is by Evan Siegel, a professor of mathematics at New Jersey City University.
 

AR  Another excellent article from Jamie Buchan, whose expertise on this topic is considerable. See his 1999 novel A Good Place to Die, set in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. I knew Jamie when we were students at Oxford. He caused me to discover that Vogue is the cultivated man's porn.