BUT WHAT CAN SOLIDARITY DO?:

Iran loses faith in clerics: Change elusive in rigid society (Kim Barker, May 2, 2004, Chicago Tribune)

The mob shouted for his blood. They called him a traitor; they yelled, "Death to Montazeri."

The target of their wrath? The Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri.

Once, he was heir apparent to the ruler of the country, an Iranian equivalent to Thomas Jefferson, an Islamic revolutionary who helped topple the dreaded Shah of Iran. Now, though, his fall from grace seemed complete. Outside his home, an unruly crowd of hundreds had branded him a heretic.

As Montazeri, partially deaf, prayed in a room behind his office, he barely heard bricks shattering the windows. But his family members were scared. They ran from the cleric to the chaos outside and back, trying to shield Montazeri from harm.

Eventually, the police took action on that day in 1997, spraying the mob with tear gas. The aging cleric and his family escaped harm. But they would endure years of punishment, house arrest, prison and harassment.

Montazeri's crime was simple: He had publicly criticized his one-time allies, the clerics who run the country, for abandoning human rights and freedom as the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

"The shah is gone," Montazeri said in a recent interview. "But a clergy has replaced him."

On one level, the story of Hussein Ali Montazeri is a powerful drama of life, death and resurrection in one of the world's most rigid societies. Critics say he is naive, manipulated by the people around him and bitter after falling out of favor with the government. But at 82, Montazeri has survived years of intellectual apartheid to rise again in the eyes of the Islamic world. Today he is considered one of the top two Shiite clerics worldwide and is a powerful voice for moderation in Iran.

His story also shows the ups and downs of the struggle over Islam in a nation where large numbers of people yearn for the economic and political freedoms practiced in the secular West, often viewed as an icon of immorality by the conservative clerics of Iran.

In thick, black-rimmed glasses, a white skullcap, cardigan sweater and long robe, Montazeri hardly fits the image of a rebel. His hands shake. He often sits on a heating pad. He suffers from diabetes, but he hides chocolates in a desk drawer. He speaks in singsong sentences that trail off in a wheeze.

But Montazeri is at the heart of a battle over Iran's fate--one that could hint at the future in the Middle East, where radicals from Iraq to the Gaza Strip want an Islamic revolution like the one that happened in Iran 25 years ago.

On one side are the powerful clerics who rule Iran and thwart the most modest reforms.

On the other side, grass-roots reformers complain that the fight for an Islamic democracy actually led to an Islamic dictatorship, one that jails or even kills its critics, violates basic rights and distorts the tenets of Islam.

Led by senior clerics such as Montazeri and one-time foot soldiers of the revolution, they seek democratic reforms that would restore a respect for human rights and freedom. Some, such as Montazeri, believe that the country can be run through an Islamic system. But others believe that religion has no place in government. They want the clergy to return to the mosques. They want a true democracy.

"I don't have any doubt it will come," said Ibrahim Yazdi, the Islamic Republic's first foreign minister, who now leads the country's only secular-leaning political party. [...]

Montazeri is now considered to be one of the top two Shiite legal experts in the world. He has continued to modify earlier opinions. Women are allowed to watch him teach--a rarity in Qom. Montazeri recently said women and men can shake hands in certain situations--a liberal ruling for any Muslim cleric.

He still demands change. He wants Iran to be run according to the principles of the Islamic Revolution, which he says are freedom, democracy and Islam. He wants an elected top leader who derives his power from people, not from God.

Before the election, Montazeri was courted by both reformists and the government, aware that the dissident cleric's opinion could sway certain voters. Reformists asked him to say publicly whether he would cast a ballot. But he said he did not want to interfere with voting.

On election day, officials offered to send a ballot box to Montazeri's home so he could easily vote. He told them not to bother. At least eight of the top 12 grand ayatollahs did not vote, protesting the elections, said Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, who lives next to Montazeri.

It's not clear what the new parliament will do when it takes over in a few weeks. Some believe that conservatives will again try to crack down on social freedoms, and others believe this is impossible.

"Nobody can stop these freedoms," said Ataollah Mohajerani, the former culture minister under Khatami. "Freedom is like a genie in a bottle. Once you open it, it's hard to put back in."

If the country does not continue with reform, some clerics worry about the future of Islam in Iran. They say Iran is still religious, but they fear that the Islamic Republic and its vision of religion might be hurting Islam.

"If our prophet said something like what these people say--the supreme leader and his men--why would people continue to be Muslims?" asked Kadivar, an ally of Montazeri's. "No one would follow him."

Shortly after the election, Kadivar attracted 1,000 people for a speech at a Tehran community center. For three hours, he lectured in his quiet voice, laying out 10 ways to identify an unjust government, starting with lack of tolerance for peaceful opposition and ending with unfair distribution of wealth. He never mentioned Iran. But the implication was clear.

Throughout the speech, people listened quietly and took notes. One of Montazeri's grandsons, Meisam Hashemi, sat near the front, next to Kadivar's son.

When he was born, Hashemi was given the name "Down with the shah," which was changed after the shah was deposed. He is now 25, the same age as the Islamic Republic. He is a religious man, but he believes religion has no place in his government. Hashemi is no revolutionary. He understands the value of moving slowly.

Montazeri wants Hashemi and his other grandsons to become clerics, like all three of his sons. "After all, it is not bad to be a clergyman," Montazeri said, talking about all he has done for Islam and for people in Iran, all that the clergy can contribute to the world.

But Hashemi gives the same answer as Montazeri's 12 other grandsons: No.

Hashemi wants to do something with his life that could really make a difference for his family. He wants to be a criminal lawyer.

One thing about getting old--you're stuck watching history repeat itself during your lifetime and seeing folks make the same mistakes over and over again, sometimes the same people making the same mistake. So, those of us of a certain age can easily recall the end of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan and a very few others understood that the days of the USSR were numbered while the rest of the world thought it had become America's equal. But then an even stranger spectacle occurred, Mikhail Gorbachev took over and many in the West managed to convince themselves that he would salvage Communism by introducing some minimal reforms. It's understandable that those on the Left harbored this hope, but more than a few on the Right fell prey to the delusion too. It was as if having hated Communism and the Soviets for so long they lost sight of just how fundamentally flawed it was and, even worse, had lost faith in the power of American ideals to transform societies. Those who most despised Bolshevism ended up being among the last defenders of its efficacy and durability as a political system.

Much the same thing appears to be happening now as regards the Islamic world. Folk who protest their abiding confidence in liberal democracy and who abhor the totalitarian nature of Islamicism seem unable to grasp either the fact or the inevitability of democratic reform in the Middle East. We hear the same nonsense we once heard about Eastern Europeans and Asians, that Muslims are somehow so different than us that they prefer to be dominated than to thrive economically, that they are unfit for democracy. We hear the same nonsense about how steps toward reform can be controlled by the governments that are undertaking them--as if the man riding the tiger were in a favorable position. We hear people who can't tell a Shi'a from a Sunni any more than they could understand how the Poles and Czechs differed from Muscovites. We hear about how they all hate us--"Just look at the parades and the chants!"--as if the public expressions of people in unfree states meant a thing.

It won't do to be overly optimistic, but we can at least be more realistic than the Realists. This much we know, as Americans: there is no totalitarianism that can ever provide for the universal desires of a people to live in peace, freedom and plenty. Every iteration of totalitarianism--Nazism, Communism, Islamicism--is therefore destined to be short-lived. All we really need do is keep up the external pressure, support internal reform movements, stop the worst depravities of totalitarian regimes, and let the inexorable tide of History do the rest. There are undoubtedly some tough times ahead, but if we think of the Islamic world today as being at a point similar to the Iron Curtain in the mid '80s we can get some sense of just how quickly change may come.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2004 4:52 PM