Children of Paradise (49 page)

Like Hajjarian, Ganji turned to Weber to classify Iran’s current form of government. He settled on sultanism, which was a kind of patrimonialism, but one that sustained itself less on tradition than on the autocrat’s personal discretion. Such a regime was not reformable. The reformists, in Ganji’s view, should stop collaborating with it by participating in its fig-leaf elections. They should boycott elections, withdraw from government, and use people power, through civil disobedience, to push back against unjust laws and to demand a referendum on Iran’s form of government. He pledged to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the people in this struggle. “
If civil disobedience needs leadership and planning, we must go after creating organizing bodies and leadership,” Ganji reasoned in 2005, “not shut down the struggle for freedom with the excuse of lack of leadership.” To build civil society was itself an act of civil disobedience in a state without legal freedoms of speech and association, Ganji noted. There was no half measure for this.

Ganji wrote as a man who, already in prison, had little left to lose. Even if the people defend tyranny or are indifferent to it, he wrote, “[a] freedom-loving democrat still has the right (nay, the duty) to stand against such a system, alone and by himself.” Some would say he was grandstanding, that his writings were a dangerous incitement. He did not have the instinct for nuance—or for political survival—that acted as a weight in other men’s shoes. What he did have, often in breathtaking profusion, was courage.

“I do not believe at all in the theory of
velayat-e faqih
and I think it is anti-democratic and violates human rights,” he wrote. “I will not stand the master-slave relationship, in which the Leader ascends to the ranks of a god and the people descend to the level of slaves. I apologize in place of Mr. Khamenei to students, journalists, bloggers . . . families of the victims of serial murders, the family of Zahra Kazemi . . . for all they have gone through these years.” He added, “I strongly apologize in place of Mr. Khamenei to the families of the executed prisoners of the summer of 1988 all over the country.” After meeting with the bloggers during a furlough, Ganji wrote, “
Forcing repentance letters on prisoners is the method of Stalin’s interrogators inherited by Iranian Stalinists.”

Ganji’s writings were thick with references: to Hafez, Motahhari, and Socrates; to Freud, Foucault, and Adorno; to Tocqueville, Rawls, and Locke; to Richard Rorty, Milan Kundera, Claude Lefort, and even contemporary European academics, like the Italian literary critic Franco Moretti and the British social theorist David Beetham. He had come a great distance from his revolutionary roots, which he would later describe as having lodged in the soil of his class resentment as a boy in the southern Tehran slums. By 2005, Ganji argued that the conservatives’ rhetoric of social justice was a cloak for oppression. How could one claim to stand for social justice while holding that there were unequal classes of humans, whether men and women, clerics and laypeople, or Muslims and non-Muslims? Even if Iran’s rulers meant to condone justice only in the distribution of wealth, surely they should allow a free press to expose the corruption that impeded economic fairness in Iran. But they did not.

As for President Khatami, he had always been the wrong man for the job of reform. “He didn’t have the mettle,” Ganji would later reflect. Khatami hadn’t really known what he meant by civil society, or even by democracy. And so it was little wonder he did not persevere. “We need someone like Gandhi, like Havel, like Nelson Mandela,” Ganji insisted. “If you ask me, we need mostly Gandhi.”

• • •

G
ANJI WAS NOT ALONE
in his categorical rejection of the constitutional order. The radical wing of the student movement called for a referendum on the Islamic Republic, to mirror the one that had founded the revolutionary state in 1979. The activists issued an online petition named for its outsized ambition of garnering six million signatures.

Saeed Hajjarian described the referendum campaign as delusional. With what leverage did the radicals imagine they could force their referendum on the conservatives? Moreover, the radicals’ strategy rested on the presumption that “the people” both wanted a secular republic and were ready to expose themselves to violence in order to obtain one. But Iranian society was diverse, divided, and traumatized. As Omid Memarian later
observed, to be one step ahead of the people was to be a leader; to be five steps ahead was to walk alone.

The things Ganji said, everyone knew, Omid reflected; but not everyone thought that directly articulating them would be helpful. Khatami’s equivocation could be taken for fecklessness, but it could also be taken for political acuity. He governed a divided country that seethed with mutual distrust, whose lasting stability depended on assuaging tension, and in which his opponents held all the coercive instruments. People like Omid, who had spent the reform years building fragile new institutions that encouraged Iranian citizens to cooperate and work together, felt they had much to lose by polarizing the political atmosphere and raising conservative hackles. Thousands of nongovernmental organizations operated by the middle of Khatami’s second term. Their founders’ goal was not to win a war of ideas but to convince all parties to lay down their arms in pursuit of common, constructive aims.

The NGO network, like the reformist media before it, would be decimated by the political warfare within the regime. After the parliamentary election in 2004, the hardline press began a drumbeat against these civic groups as nodes in the foreign-sponsored conspiracy bent on regime change. This was when
Kayhan
published its “Spider’s House” editorial and when other media close to the security establishment began suggesting that the NGOs were linked to Western governments and foundations that had pushed for regime change in places like Serbia. Activists protested that they had studiously rejected outside funding, and they entreated American journalists to beg the administration of George W. Bush to stop expressing support for Iranian civil society. But within the Iranian political system, there was no one left to fight for the NGO network. The reformists had vanished from the parliament and the Tehran City Council; the students had set their sights beyond reform; the media was increasingly censored; international pressure was counterproductive; and Khatami was on his way out.

On the eve of the 2005 election, the reformist elite still spoke of reform as “irreversible.” After all, the reformist project was not only a political campaign or a policy proposal. It was an intellectual shift, a popular
groundswell, a cultural watershed. All that was, arguably, true. But it was also true, as Omid noted ruefully, that many of reform’s concrete achievements had indeed been reversed: institutions built and unbuilt, elected offices obtained and lost, newspapers published and censored. Maybe it was a visionary optimism that kept reformist theorists focused on the far horizon. Or maybe it was hubris, or denial—the refusal to take stock of all they’d lost.

• • •

K
IYAN CONTINUED PUBLISHING
almost to the end of Khatami’s first term. It remained, as Mostafa Rokhsefat had conceived it, an intellectual wellspring and not a political organ. Two of its founders decamped to found a popular reformist daily, bringing the sensibilities they’d nurtured at
Kiyan
to the popular mediascape that Khatami had briefly transformed. One of Soroush’s acolytes, a young man named Ebrahim Soltani, who had come to the
Kiyan
Circle in the Rafsanjani era as a medical student with a passion for philosophy, became the journal’s editor in chief.

Soltani’s
Kiyan
continued to lead with Soroush’s essays and interviews. In subsequent pages, Iranian scholars translated and debated the work of foreign philosophers, wrestled with the vexed interplay of liberalism and Islam, translated and discussed Latin American literature and poetry. As Soroush had once said of science, perhaps
Kiyan
’s editors and contributors believed of their journal’s domain: philosophy was wild and had no homeland. The work before them was not to assert a national identity through the provenance of their ideas, but to forge a liberal theory of the state that was true to the parts of that identity they considered most vital.

In the fall of 2000, Soltani and his colleagues received a letter from the judiciary ordering them to cease publishing
Kiyan
. The order took Soltani by surprise. No one had interfered with the journal in the preceding months; Soltani had just published its fifty-fourth issue, dated October–November, with Soroush on scientific and political development, a translation of a John Keane essay on media and democracy, and other essays on Socrates and Hegel. But that was to be the last issue of the reform
movement’s flagship journal. Now it went the way of the rest of the reformist press, despite its best effort to sail above the political fray.

Kiyan
’s leading light, Abdolkarim Soroush, was not in exile, or so he said; but he could neither publish nor teach in Iran, nor could he lecture there unmolested. Starting around 2000, he alighted in a succession of bare academic offices without nameplates, where bookends stood marooned on the shelves and the contents of his briefcase of an evening could as easily have packed him off to a new locale. He was, at different times, a visiting scholar at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Georgetown universities; sometimes he was in Germany, and for a stretch he could be found at the heart of a maze of hallways at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The peripatetic life seemed to suit him. He was tranquil, solitary, and less combative as he aged.

Now he returned to Marx, reading the German giant without the animosity that had fired his intellect as a young man. And he stood for the first time truly in awe of the insight, influence, and explanatory power of a Marxism he once used Popper to deride. “I think I have been a little unfair to it,” Soroush confessed. To recognize the importance of social and economic forces, he understood now, was not to take anything away from reason. Rather, such forces behaved as Freud’s unconscious behaved. “You are induced, so to speak, to reason in a particular way because of some of the social and economic factors around you, because of some of the interests that drag you along, and put some words on your tongue or some thoughts in your mind,” Soroush reflected. Perhaps he had something of his own strange life’s journey in mind.

Still, as a formula for political emancipation, Soroush contended, Marxism had failed. Democratic socialism, much longed for, had materialized neither in Iran nor anywhere else. Deep down, Soroush surmised, many of Iran’s reformists were disappointed with that. They found socialism attractive, and compatible with Islamic teachings. “But they do not know how to make it compatible with social liberty, democracy and so on.”

Soroush was critical of Khatami’s performance as president. In July 2003, he’d issued an open letter observing that the president stood at a
crossroads. “He either sides with the people or joins hands with the conservatives, and in either situation he would be the loser,” Soroush wrote. “He can no longer join the people because they demand not the reform of the present theocracy, as the reformists want, but a fundamental change towards full fledged democracy and secularism. He can’t join the conservatives because they consider him as a used handkerchief.”

He believed that Khatami should have acknowledged that he couldn’t run the country in the presence of hardline vigilante groups. The reformists should have exposed the sources of funding and chains of command that allowed those groups to function, and they should have demanded that the vigilantes be restrained. As for the students, Soroush surmised that they were demoralized because they were never granted their rights and their assailants had never faced justice. These were legitimate complaints.

Soroush believed passionately in the moral and practical force of ideas, and he attributed Khatami’s irresoluteness in action to his irresoluteness in thought. He said of the outgoing president, “
Lack of vision theoretically leads to lack of courage in action.” As a result, Soroush said of Khatami, “he’d sometimes go one way and sometimes the other way. He’d raise an idea and others would follow him and then he’d suddenly slam on the brakes. He’d pull back and come to a grinding halt and startle everyone.”

Soroush worried that Khatami’s performance would reflect poorly on an intellectual project that he believed was far from dead. “We need theoretical debates just as much as we need institution building and political action,” he observed. And the consensus that had emerged from such debates was a striking one. The reformists’ ambitions were democratic and politically secular, a secularism Soroush defined as the belief that the state should be neutral toward religion and that the legitimacy of the political system was not divinely given but depended on the system’s justice.

Soroush, more than any of his protégés in the reform movement, emphasized that democracy was a matter not only of self-determination or freedoms but of rights. “
All the important, modern, political institutions are founded on rights,” he argued. “If we want to enter political modernity, this is the route that we have to take. As long as the concept of right has
not taken on as much importance as we attach to family and honor, our modern institutions will lack meaning; they’ll only be hollow names.” And rights began with a powerful, protective, independent judiciary. This was something Soroush had observed as a student in Britain. He argued now that an independent judiciary was more crucial than civil society; it should have been the first and least negotiable of Khatami’s aims.

For all that Soroush’s vision was bold and uncompromising, he was not a political radical like his close friend and acolyte Ganji. He remained the lower-middle-class boy who demurred when invited to be a guerrilla fighter, arguing that society needed philosophers, too. The Iran he knew, and felt integrally connected to, was a pious and conservative place. The rulers he might have chosen, had he been free to choose, were religious ones, although they would not rule a theocratic state.