The mullahs who hold power in Iran claim to know the will of God, and demand that all citizens must follow the “law of God,” which in Iran’s case refers to Islamic law based on the Koran. If the Islamic clergy are unsure of what position God would take on a certain matter, the question is resolved by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. If you take the ayatollah’s word for it when he says that he knows best what God wants, then this way of deciding law is a perfectly reasonable way of organizing society. If not, then the Ayatollah is a liar, and Iran is, in fact, a dictatorship.
In Iran, all candidates running for Parliament or President have to be approved by a 12-member “Guardian Council.” Six members of the Council are priests selected by the ayatollah. The other six members are lawyers proposed by Iran's Head of Judicial Branch, who again is himself appointed by the ayatollah. This makes Iranian elections a complete mockery. In the May 2005 presidential elections, 1014 candidates had registered to run. The Council only approved six of them.
The Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi published an excerpt from her book Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope in the New York Times recently. The regime orders assassinations of foreign novelists and publishers, it supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and the suicide missions of Islamic Jihad in Israel. Iran was behind the suicide bomb attack against a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 100 people. But the majority of victims of the Iranian regime’s hunt for free thinkers, “infidels” and dangerous enemies like homosexuals and promiscuous girls, are, of course, Iranian citizens. While preparing a case where the Government had been complicit in assassinating Iranian intellectuals in the 1990’s, Shirin Ebati discovered she had been on the Government’s hit list herself. In a Government dossier, she found a transcript of a minister discussing with a death squad leader how to get rid of her. Ebati wrote:
My would-be assassin went to the minister of intelligence, requesting permission to carry out my killing. Not during the fasting month of Ramadan, the minister replied. But they don't fast anyway, the mercenary argued; these people have divorced God. It was through this belief — that the intellectuals, that I, had abandoned God — that they justified the killings as religious duty.
In March, the Norwegian writer Henrik Hovland held a brilliant lecture at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. He described the practical challenges of working as a war correspondent in Iraq. He has also been a UN war crimes tribunal investigator in Rwanda and an election observer in Guatemala. He expressed optimism on behalf of investigative journalism in armed conflicts. Recently he travelled to Iran and wrote a story for the Norwegian Dagbladet. In it, he depicts how the mullahs encourage the persecution of Iranian minorities like Zoroasters, Christians and Bahais. Hovland’s piece is beautifully written and is interactive to the point of being “interventionistic.” In the city of Esfahan he observes the Islamic Moharram celebrations. In an exhibition tent in memory of the soldiers killed in the Iraq-Iran war, Hovland gets into a discussion with a group of Iranians. Consider this excerpt:
The atmosphere in the tent is intense. A couple of youngsters ask me where I’m from and what I think about Islam. [Referring to the publication of the caricatures of Mohammad] they ask me why we Norwegians have tainted the Prophet. This is the start of a long and difficult conversation. On the hotel television, on BBC World, I hear Western leaders call for dialogue [between the West and Muslim countries], but practically it is tough to discuss with people that are convinced that they are in possession of the One and Only truth. While believers dressed in black cram around us, I try to explain freedom of speech. They do not grasp the concept. The people surrounding me have no idea about the political organization of Europe. I explain about the separation of powers in Western societies. They shake their heads and provide their own explanations. For them, the American intervention in Iraq, the French hijab-ban in schools, the nuclear controversy and the Scandinavian publications of the Muhammad cartoons are all part of the same attack on Islam. They tell me that Europeans are flocking to Islam. That’s why the US and Europe hates Islam. I try to clarify that European Muslims are mostly immigrants from other parts of the world, but they won’t accept that. I ask them what they think about the fact that Iran sentences people to death for converting from Islam to Christianity. They smile. These regime-faithful young men remind me of the young Stalinists I met in guerrilla camps in Latin-America during the Cold War. They have the same arrogance, the same ignorance, and they too are certain that they will triumph over the US and the West.
Three other outstanding writers have travelled to Iran recently, writing challenging reports for American magazines: Christopher Hitchens, Timothy Garton Ash and Michael Ignatieff [links follow]. Each of these provide different styles of writing, analysis and offer individual strategies of engagement with the Iranians they meet. Comparing the texts you can get a feel of how their core values influence their craft. They draw historical parallels, evaluate Iranian society ideologically and they all appear to have enjoyed their explorations of it.
Timothy Garton Ash starts off with a political science approach, describing the hierarchical system of institutions and government within the Iranian theocracy. He expresses his hopes for “Young Persia,” the discontented youth of the mullahs’ Revolution. From within the Iranian society he envisions a distinctly Iranian version of democracy emerging. He hopes that this will happen in the long run, as the “Young Persians” leave university and enter more powerful positions in society.
Christopher Hitchens invests much energy into portraying the undercurrent of Iranian society – the Iranians secret love of freedom and pleasure. But Hitchens also makes an effort to depict the theological superstructure of how it came about that the Iranians got it all wrong in the question of separating religion and politics. It makes an interesting read. Hitchens writes as if the mullahs actually mean what they are saying. (This realization that “they are not like me” is often a crucial igniter of healthy aversion towards religion.) Many of the young people Hitchens talks to express a naïve belief in that America could intervene militarily and put things straight. This annoys Hitchens somewhat. Hitchens writes: “It's a confession of powerlessness, an avoidance of responsibility, a demand that change come from somewhere else.”
Michael Ignatieff was invited to Iran in the fall of 2005 to lecture on human rights. He starts his essay by reflecting on Iranian hardships under the Iran-Iraq war. He portrays the revolutionary and nationalistic spirit that defines Iran – a culture that can be traced back some 2500 years. Ignatieff considers the impact of Ahmadinejad’s 2005 election victory over former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. In his lectures to Iranian students he argues that secularism doesn't mean crushing religion, but creating a neutral space where arguments are “settled by evidence, not dogma.” Noting that conversations with Iranians do become furtive when homosexual love is the topic, he interprets this hostility as a result of a war on pleasure waged by the mullahs. Ignatieff also mentions the plight of Armenian Christians and Bahais. He also pays respect to the memory of Iranian-Canadian Zahra Kazemi, who in 2003 was imprisoned for taking pictures outside the Evin prison in Tehran. She was subsequently raped, tortured and killed by the Iranian police.
At a seminar at Shahid Beheshti University, a group of female students appeal to Ignatieff for more outside pressure from Western intellectuals to help stop the mullahs’ application of Islamic law, including punishments such as stoning, whipping and amputations. Ignatieff oddly suggests that the students should try to reform the Islamic law system from within instead of appealing for the introduction of secular law, as in the West. An Iranian professor observing the exchange between Ignatieff and the students asks him if he can explain why he considers human rights to be universal. Ignatieff answers that there’s a certain inherited understanding of right and wrong in all people, and that “human rights law codifies our agreement about stopping these intuitively obvious injustices.” The professor replies that Ignatieff must be an intuitionist: “You need something stronger than this,” he says, hinting that religion would provide a better tool.
When I read this exchange I was embarrassed by Ignatieff’s frail defence of liberal democracy. There are two crucial distinctions that one should immediately introduce when confronted with a comparison between liberal democracies and Shariah rule. Religious law claims to be the word of God himself - dictated through the so called Prophets, and codified by those who declare that they are God’s representatives on earth, the clergy. Human rights and laws in liberal democracies, however, make no claim of divinity. They are explicitly invented, formulated and applied by men and women appointed through free elections. The second distinction is that while theocratic rule seeks moral uniformity through what it claims is “God’s legislation,” liberal democracies accept – and legally protect – individual, ethical orientations among its citizens.
These are the political distinctions. Now let me add some personal reflections. At the launch of a new issue of a lesbian gay fanzine in Oslo, I had a heated discussion with the editor. In one of her articles she wrote that the Jamaican authorities ought to prosecute and punish homophobic dancehall artists. While I share her disdain for the murder music of these miserable Jah-men, I object to any legal prosecution of them. In liberal democracies and secular societies, one of our strongest assets is the ability to be indifferent about other individuals’ attitudes, as well as the right to be allowed to preserve our own moral preferences intact.
Personally, I protest homophobia, and I enjoy expressing my contempt for superstitious moralists, but I would never bother to confront a nationalist, a homophobic or a religious devotee in order to convince him or that he is wrong. As long as they leave me alone and don’t hurt or abuse other people, I simply don’t care. If they prefer to live life as uptight fools, it’s their choice. They express their opinions. I express mine. I enjoy the fact that the laws of liberal democracies do not forbid idiocy. If you try to change other people’s weird belief systems by converting them, you are entering the realm of spastic, missionary zeal: You are becoming a moral imperialist. This is an activity that traditionally has been religion’s area of expertise. Let’s keep it that way.
The Iranian professor who challenged Michael Ignatieff doesn’t want to permit a legal framework which allows individual moral orientations. The professor craves a universal love. That is, he has a standardized, copyrighted vision of Love that he has been told is God’s own. Imagine the professor’s Utopia: What if everyone thought the same... if everyone had the same vision of the right and wrong way of living life... Wouldn't society be full of bliss? One would have no need of laws upheld by human authority. Everyone would agree. There would be peace.
Such a vision of ethical uniformity is the essence of religion. No ideology can streamline moral values more efficiently. The so called Prophets understood this. But if you have proclaimed universal love as the goal of your organization you must prepare for slaughter. Society will always host some infidels that will disagree with your interpretation of love, and in order to attain “universal love,” you will have to remove them, physically. This remains the curse that religious ideology has cast upon the world. The longing for universal love is often manifested through massacres.
Is it possible to foresee a turning point - a moment of true, democratic transformation of Iran - through a reading of Christopher Hitchens’ essay? Some of the Iranians who talked to Hitchens longed for an American intervention. This view of American salvation is perhaps the flip-side of all the conspiracy theories that claim that the USA, the CIA and the Jews are behind every horrible event in human history. (The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hinted in his public letter to George W. Bush that he believed that the 911 attacks themselves must have been organized by American secret services.) In this respect, the belief in USA as a Superpower is perhaps not unlike the belief in an Almighty God?
When enough Iranians, on their own, find out that they can’t bear another year of hypocrisy, another year of schizophrenia, they will speak their mind. As it is today, one suspects that the lack of individual autonomy symbolized by the belief in the Almighty/Superpower/Great Satan prevents the surfacing of real freedom in Iranian society as a whole.