Restless in radical Iran

Undeterred by the icy wind on a snowy day in January, a cheery crowd gathered at the busy square in Qom, the Shiite holy city south of Tehran. A crane moved in, followed by hangmen in black masks.

Three convicted drug traffickers who were brought along were made to stand on stools and nooses were thrown around their necks. Then the hangmen quickly pulled the stools from under them. The bodies were left dangling for hours.

The number of public executions has been on the rise in Iran in recent years. According to Amnesty International, Iran hanged 298 people in 2007, compared with 177 in 2006. There have been close to 57 executions this year, according to an AFP count.

A cleric from Mofid University, a traditionally liberal seminary in Qom, who witnessed the execution, says he is troubled by the message it sends not only to the outside world but also to Iranians.

“Through public executions, they create an atmosphere of intimidation and silence,'' says the cleric, who asked not to be named for his safety. “They want to frighten people, to make them afraid of voicing criticism. This is not the Islam I know.''

Such dissent in Qom is a reflection of how opposition to the Iranian leadership is growing not just among the secular-minded intellectuals in affluent areas of northern Tehran but also in the echelons of Iran's clerical class.

The cleric from Qom, himself once a staunch supporter of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is disillusioned by the “frightening direction'' the revolution has taken, making way for a “turbaned dictatorship''.

The Islamic Revolution ended the dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought to power Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It transformed Iran into a theocracy and turned the dream of political Islam into a reality. Since then, clerics wear the hats of government as well as the turbans of religion.

The principle of valiyat-e- faqih, which places the clergy above all other institutions, holds that society should be governed by a supreme leader — a cleric best qualified to enforce Islamic law — until the appearance of the Shiites' hidden imam. It is this doctrine that makes Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the supreme leader.

Home to a revolution

While Iranian liberals have yearned for a constitutional separation of religion and state, Qom, too, was never at ease with Khomeini's idea of valiyat-e-faqih or the success of Ayatollah Khamenei's leadership.

With its many decrepit buildings bearing scribbled slogans and stencilled portraits of an unsmiling Khomeini, Qom has hundreds of seminaries. Women there are seen clad only in the ubiquitous full black chador. And its seminaries are home to perhaps 60,000 clerical students.

It was from Qom that Ayatollah Khomeini began his denouncement of the Shah and it was there that he formed his revolutionary government after returning from exile in France. Yet views in this holy city are not homogeneous. Some revered clerics repudiate the idea of involving religion in politics and governance.

They blame politicisation of Islam for Iran's pressing woes — widespread human rights abuses, international isolation and a crippled economy despite being blessed with the world's fourth-largest oil reserves. Religion, they say, is perhaps not competent to rule over modern society.

Those views may be in the minority, overshadowed by more hardline clerics such as Dr Mohsen Rezwani from the political department of the radical Imam Khomeini Research Institute. “Islam prescribes a way to deal with every situation in the world. It has rid the world of the responsibility to create modern laws,'' he says. The Quran and the Hadith, the traditions of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), are “our guiding force''.

Rezwani justifies the public executions. “In Islam, punishment is harsh,'' he says, “because the philosophy of punishment in the Quran is to prevent people from committing a crime.''

An unkindly cut

In the recent elections to the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, conservative clerics strengthened their grip on power. An unprecedented number of reformists — liberals who want closer ties with the West and greater social freedoms at home — were prevented from running in elections by the Guardian Council, a clerical group that vets candidates for loyalty to the country's Islamic system. They were rejected for “lack of commitment to Islam''.

Some dissident clerics have challenged the legitimacy of a parliament chosen under such restrictions and argue that politics may jeopardise religious principles.

“The clergy must keep themselves as far as possible from executive roles and from the centres of power so as not to compromise its role as the spiritual guide of the population,'' Grand Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a revered cleric who was Khomeini's designated successor, recently told the Italian news agency Adnkronos International (AKI).

Montazeri was under house arrest until four years ago for his harsh criticism of the repressive actions of the Iranian regime in the mid-1980s. His scathing attack also distanced Montazeri from his brother-in-law, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Likewise, in the 1990s, another renowned cleric, Hojatoleslam Mohsen Kadivar, began arguing that Iran could not have clerical rule and claim to be a democracy at the same time. He said the freedom Iranians sought through the revolution was being replaced by a new clerical despotism.

Kadivar was charged with having spread false information about Iran's “sacred system of the Islamic Republic'', convicted by the Special Court for Clergy in 1999 and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

He was released from Evin prison in mid-2000 and, sidelined by the clergy, is now engaged in reform movements in Iran.

The cleric from Mofid University is well aware of the perils of echoing these sentiments in public. As religious conservatives tighten their grip on power in Iran, he fears, “the regime might become more aggressive in its attempts to make ‘true Islamists' out of Iranians''. Iran is in the throes of a crackdown on civil society and America is partly to be blamed for it, he says.

“If America wasn't on ‘Iran regime change' status at all times, the Iranian people might not have had to deal with such a strict government. All because America is constantly confronting Iran, the regime is always paranoid about Iranians turning anti-establishment. That has made them obsessed with ensuring Iranians remain loyal to Islamic norms and don't drift towards America or a decadent West,'' he adds.

Last year, the Iranian government launched a nationwide crackdown to enforce dress codes and public morality. The mandate of the hejab wraps every woman in Iran — Muslim or non-Muslim — in layers of dark clothing and strict sexual segregation.

Sisters of Zeynab — the female Islamic police of Iran — as enforcers of public morality, stalk men and women walking together and watch for stray strands of hair that may escape from the cover of scarves.

This crackdown is occurring at a time when Iran's economy is stagnant. Inflation is disturbingly high at about 19 per cent. The unemployment rate has spiked to a record 20 per cent, falling hard on youths who make up nearly three-quarters of the population.

There are 7,000 mosques in Iran today — almost 5,000 of them built since the 1979 revolution. These mosques, which used to rely on khoms (an Islamic levy) in the pre-Revolution years, are now flush with funds from the government. As a result, these Islamic institutions have become more powerful and influential, proving a hurdle to political liberalisation.

In spite of the bad state of the economy, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had promised to bring the benefits of oil revenues to people's lives in his 2005 presidential campaign, has authorised a 700 per cent increase in government spending on “religious activities'' in next year's budget package, according to Rooz, a Persian language news website.

Last year, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance had a budget equivalent to 20.11 billion rials ($2.21 million) for religious activities. Ahmadinejad has proposed increasing this amount to 150.62 billion rials ($16.61 million) next year.

Some Iranians — even among those who are religiously devout — look at this extravagance on religion as a waste of money. “The government spends more on enforcing religious morality than improving the economic conditions of its poor,'' says a senior official at a state-owned oil company.

“If you need to construct a building, you hire a civil engineer. And to run a country efficiently, you need efficient, qualified people, not clerics.''

A bitter critic of the government's economic policies centred around religion, the official says the revolution stopped modernisation in its tracks and jerked Iran back to the Middle Ages. With all its oil wealth, Iran, he says, could be a very prosperous nation, but isn't.

“Iran needs a government answerable not just to God but also to its own people,'' he says. That, perhaps, would require something of a miracle.

Anuj Chopra is an independent writer based in Bonn, Germany.

This story was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center ''ON'' Crisis Reporting