It’s hard to write about Iran at the moment, because the sense of hopelessness is too insidious. The photos of a former reformist vice-president, Mohammad Ali-Abtahi, next to Mohsen Mirdamadi, the reformist political leader, in prison pyjamas at the trial of the Tehran demonstrators, are demoralising, as they’re meant to be. Reform as an electoral movement seems to be over in Iran.
That doesn’t mean it’s ended, but it is going to yield to a new militancy. The security services are trying to intimidate anybody who wants a change in the system, though even they recognise this is a hopeless task when that descriptor includes tens of millions of people.
The reformists’ failure stems in part from an inability to form a united front as much as it does from outright harassment or persecution. Charismatic leaders have often been jailed, and there have been too many interpersonal jealousies. Factionalism has doomed the idea of change in Iran for the past two decades, even as the impetus for it has multiplied.
In the past dozen years, there were so many signs of hope that blossomed, but never bore real fruit. There was the movement to bring back the son of the last Shah of Iran – not a very dynamic leader, in my view. There was President Khatami’s eight years in power, which saw some minor liberalisation, often sternly countermanded by Ayatollah Khamenei. There was the reformist lawyer Shirin Ebadi winning her Nobel Prize, which might have kept her immune until now, but has not prevented her associates from being jailed. There were the blogs a few years ago, thousands of them, quoted in their variety in Nasrin Alavi’s 2005 book We Are Iran. And let’s not (please, let’s not) forget the arch-blogger himself, Hosein Derakhshan, who foolishly returned to Iran and has been in jail for almost a year for having visited Israel during his years of exile.
Now the forces of repression are in full throated cry, with their kangaroo courts and forced confessions. Tomorrow morning, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be proclaimed President by Khamenei, and the opposition, while widespread, will have little to offer but cries of scorn or maybe a mass walk-out from the increasingly marginalised Majlis.
Which is not to say it’s all over, but it is all over for the moment.
Bloom (to revert to my opening quote) admits to waking in the night after nightmares about Yahweh, who appears to him as the Ancient of Days, or sometimes as a cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud. After one of these bad dreams, he gets up and reads the scriptures in which he does not believe, trying to lay the ghost. Which, I assume, is why he wrote the book.
I don’t fear Yahweh or anything like him, and while in my Process days I believed very much in a Christ with whom I talked often, that time is long gone, and there are no further answers or prompts coming from that segment. Either my Thelemic tendencies mean I’m now abandoned as a lost cause, or that particular part of my own deep psyche doesn’t respond the way it used to. For today, I only trust in Silence, which I capitalise when I spell it, because it is the most eloquent thing I know, and I reverence that. Transcendence, for me, comes in the rare moments when I am in that Silence.
Perhaps the bitterest irony in Iran is that inspiring such reverence for Allah and his justice was the reason Ayatollah Khomeini launched his revolution in 1979. As his clerical opponents at the time warned it might, it ended up bringing religion into disrepute. Not transcendence but anger and misery have come from the great enforced experiment.
Nobody can say exactly what will happen in Iran now. I have frequently opined that a military dictatorship is emerging, with the clerical establishment sidelined, and everything I see happening confirms that suspicion. Ahmadinejad serves the Revolutionary Guard’s purposes for now, but he will be discarded when he no longer fulfils that requirement.
What, though, if the omnipresent spirituality that persists in the society takes on a different form later?
My thought here is that while the clerical establishment is scorned right now, it could reinvent itself if it sided against whatever junta or Great & Inspired Leader does emerge. Such ruler(s) would maintain the pretence of an Islamic state, and would thus be wary of arresting too many mullahs. If a liberal reformist movement emerged from within their ranks, and was able to challenge numbers of people who served the leadership by appealing not their opinions but to their faith in justice, a viably hopeful scenario emerges.
Yes, it’s a long shot, but it worked for Khomeini. I find it a more plausible idea than that a secular, liberal or leftist movement will come along and overthrow the state as it now exists. Westerners might prefer such an outcome, but that would be ignoring the basic need for transcendence that is so much part of Shi’ite religious practice. And one could, quite easily, quote Ayatollah Khomeini’s own statements about Irfan mysticism and other topics to support such a development.
The alternative, as I see it, is for the Iranian people to become ‘engines of entropy.’ I don’t think that appeals to them, either philosophically or in terms of the national temperament. For more than a century, they have been struggling to formulate an authentically Iranian system that allows them to fulfill their quest for justice. I don’t believe they would give up now.