After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors (review)

Sociologist Saïd Amir Arjomand has written two major books on the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the first one, The Turban for the Crown (1988), we meet the radical prime minister, Mir Hossein Moussavi, a key figure in the "lay second stratum" that the Revolution of 1979 had brought to power. This social group was highly educated, often in technical fields, and fiercely loyal to the clerical leadership of the Revolution, which Arjomand calls the first stratum. "The servant government and the officials in charge of the administration of the country will execute the Imam's [Ruhollah Khomeini's] decree as a religiously incumbent duty," Moussavi declared in the 1980s.¹¹ In Arjomand's second book on the Islamic Republic, After Khomeini (2009), we meet Moussavi again. This time, he is running for president as a reformist, campaigning alongside his wife on behalf of republicanism and civil society. Loyalty to the clerical leadership is no longer his main priority.

After Khomeini tells the story of this shift. It is not a biography — Moussavi plays only a bit part in both books — but rather a sociological account that focuses on the trajectory of the "second stratum." Following Alexis de Tocqueville's famous analysis of the French Revolution, Arjomand argues that revolutions paradoxically reinforce the power of the states that they intend to destroy. They do so by creating new government institutions, staffed by functionaries whose upward mobility is dependent on the revolutionary political system. That was one of Arjomand's central themes in The Turban for the Crown.

Two decades later, Iran's second stratum had splintered in two. One faction, associated primarily with the country's booming university system, became disillusioned with the ruling ideology and developed a theologically sophisticated pluralist interpretation of Islam. The reformists were further motivated by their ham-fisted exclusion from government. Arjomand proposes that "the critical event that marks the onset of rethinking among the Islamic radicals was their massive disqualification by the Guardian Council and its supervisory committees for running in the 1992 Majlis [parliament] elections" (p. 68). More than 100 reformists, including the Speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karrubi — who later ran for president against Mahmud Ahmadinejad — were barred from seeking re-election. Also in 1992, Muhammad Khatami, who came to symbolize the reformist movement when he won the presidential election of 1997, was forced out of his cabinet position. Rebuffed by the clerical elite, the reformists turned to popular mobilization, winning landslide victories in parliamentary and presidential elections at the turn of the 21^st century.

Arjomand is highly critical of the Iranian reformists, whom he characterizes as "pathetically trapped in the net of their bombastic revolutionary discourse" (p. 107). Even as they sought to promote democracy, civil society, and the rule of law, the reformists continued to express their devotion to the memory of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini and the ideals of the Islamic Republic. Arjomand comments: "Anyone who still cared for the revolutionary rhetoric would infinitely prefer to hear it from the mouth of Khomeini's true heir and successor," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (p. 107). But the reformists clung to this rhetoric instead of "building a coalition with outsiders — students, women, the urban poor, and citizens without impeccable revolutionary credentials" (p. 105). As a result, nobody stood up for the reformists when they were swept out of government in the early 2000s.

Again the cycle repeated itself — in an echo of the 1992 disqualifications, more than 2,000 reformist candidates were barred from running for election in 2004, including 80 sitting members of Parliament. Again, the reformists responded by mounting a mass electoral campaign. The disputed presidential election of June 2009, which sparked gigantic protests, showed the depth of the discontent that the reformists had tapped into. Still, the reformists clung to "the old political rhetoric of the revolutionary discourse," which, in Arjomand's view, "unmistakably worked against them" (p. 171).

This criticism...