Iran at the Crossroads

Abstract

As the confrontation between the West and Iran over uranium enrichment comes to a head, the internal confrontation in Iran between the partisans of divine sovereignty, allied with the Revolutionary Guard, and popular sovereignty continues to simmer. In this section, the first president of the IslamicRepublic, a leading cleric of the opposition, the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and a former British intelligence agent ponder what lies ahead. The Iran Conundrum WINTER 2010 45 Iran at the Crossroads ABOLHASSAN BANI-SADR was the first president of Iran after the 1979 revolution. He now lives in exile outside Paris.This article was written exclusively for NPQ's weekly Global Viewpoint column.paris -Since the recent election over the summer in Iran, the government of the Islamic Republic has been publicly divided, delegitimized, challenged and weak. As a result, we can now draw some analytical parallels between the current regime and the pre-1979 monarchy and between the two occasions of political unrest.Historically speaking, the Iranian government has enjoyed four sources of legitimacy: its ability to manage state affairs (and thus the people's consent), its official religious authority, its commitment to Iran's independence, and a stable base of social support. All of these have now been irretrievably undone.The massive vote rigging on June 12 brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ability to run the state's affairs under intense public scrutiny, and the spontaneous uprising of the people in its wake openly removed the government's political legitimacy.Shortly after, in a speech at Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, declared war on the people, threatening a violent crackdown unless the results of the election were duly accepted.This removed the last vestiges of the regime's religious legitimacy as well.It had been waning for some time already, not only because it stands in opposition to Islam understood as a discourse of freedom, but even within the regime and among traditionalists. Ayatollah Ali Sistani (the greatest Shia clergyman in Iraq) was opposed to the principle of Velayat-e Faqih (the rule of the imamate), and Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri (Khomeini's would-be successor who later became his critic) had argued that the doctrine was simply a proof of shirk, or false God-making.Even the traditional sharia, which the government had used to justify many of its actions, had been emptied of its original content and reduced to a theory of general violence. Ayatollah Mohammad Mesbah Yazdi, who can be seen as Ahmadinejad's guru, wrote a book entitled War and Jihad in Islam in which he argued that violence is intrinsic to and necessary for human beings. He extended this to claim that as the supreme leader is appointed by God, his use of violence is legitimate.Far from strengthening the regime's religious authority, however,Yazdi's theory of legitimate violence undermined it. It also violated another of the regime's major sources of legitimacy, the constitutio...

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