Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
The relentless monthlong assault by the U.S. and Israel does not appear to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear assets or its military capacity to fight back and wreak havoc in the global economy by targeting its Gulf neighbors and threatening passage through the Strait of Hormuz. What has been assuredly obliterated is the political space for a reformist opposition from within to ever come to power by replacing the present regime.
The raining down by the U.S. and Israel of “death and destruction from the sky all day long” upon the Iranian people has rendered regime change impossible by further entrenching the most hardline elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the chief defenders of national dignity and sovereignty. Even before this war, the IRGC had already established itself as the real power behind the face of the theocracy.
This is the assessment of Reza Aslan, the Iranian American scholar of religion, with whom I recently sat down for the Berggruen Institute’s Futurology podcast. Aslan, who hosted the celebrated CNN series “Believers,” is the author of numerous books, notably the seminal “No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.”
Back in January, when the regime massacred thousands of protestors, reformist voices were emboldened by public anger to claim “game over” for the Islamic Republic. Thanks to foreign intervention by Iran’s longtime enemies, in April, the game is over for the reformists.
Najaf & Qom
When the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the suppression of the Iraqi Shia community, estimated at about 60% of the population, was lifted, and it once again became a key influence in the region.
At that time, I spoke with Abdolkarim Soroush, dubbed “the Martin Luther of Islam,” to discuss the impact of events in Iraq on neighboring Iran.
Soroush pointed out that Shia Islam has two competing religious centers — Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran. “Najaf,” he told me, “has been the revered center of Shiite Islam for 1,000 years; it is the most respected shrine. The Qom seminary is barely 100 years old. Its most famous product, so to speak, was Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the revolution that established the religious guardianship in Iran today.” Unlike Qom, the Najaf school regards the idea of guardianship as heretical and stipulates the separation of mosque and state. Soroush hoped that, over time, this shift of balance within Shiite Islam would influence and promote a more democratic, non-theocratic model in Iran.
Indeed, Aslan saw this happening over the two decades since. The Najaf “version of Shiism began to re-exert itself, not just in Iraq but also in Iran,” he observes. “Students began to go back and forth between the two centers. The teachers from the Najaf school began teaching in Qom. The Qom seminarians, many of whom were born after the revolution, many of whom weren’t familiar with a version of Shiism stripped of Khomeiniism, were now being taught a new version of Shiism.
“One of the most fascinating things that was occurring before the bombing campaign is that the seminary of Qom was beginning to graduate a new generation of clerics who were being taught this other version of Shiism and who were coming out of the seminary with a real distaste for the entire concept of the Velayat-e Faqih, or guardianship of the state by a supreme religious authority.
“It is not a coincidence that the last two major uprisings that we saw in Iran were supported by young clerics. There were young seminarians on the streets during the women’s uprising. There were not just revolts and rebellions in Qom itself — that’s like the people in Vatican City rising up against the Pope — but the chants that were coming out of Qom were ‘death to the supreme leader.’”
The combination of this internal erosion of belief in Velayat-e Faqih among rising clerics and the general loss of political legitimacy among the population from years of corruption, hardship and repression, had weakened the theocratic regime to the point of fragility. It would not have been able to withstand the challenging winds from integration with the diverse world outside.
Instead of that withering condition opening a path to democratic reformation, isolation by the West and then military intervention from outside has strengthened the Revolutionary Guards and consolidated their role as the institutional center of gravity in Iran, eclipsing even the waning authority of the ayatollahs.
The Best That Can Be Hoped For
Lamentably, Aslan believes the best we can hope for in the foreseeable future is not some democratic transition, but the emergence of nationalist military rule that looks something like Myanmar, Egypt or Pakistan, with nominal democratic institutions controlled by the military behind the scenes.
“The best-case scenario is that at a certain point, the IRGC — the Revolutionary Guard, the military intelligence mafia — steps out of the shadows and takes overt, explicit control over the government,” Aslan predicted. The IRGC will “very likely set themselves up to the Iranian people as the savior of the nation” which beat back its two greatest enemies in war. It will then “send the mullahs back to the mosques. They’re the ones who have done everything wrong,” the IRGC will argue. “They’re the ones who have brought us to this place of collapse.”
The IRGC will claim, of course, that “we’ll have to have a period of martial law and a period of military rule. But don’t worry. We’re going to have elections soon.”
“Who knows? Maybe those elections happen. Maybe they don’t. And then Iran becomes Myanmar. Iran becomes Egypt. Best-case scenario, Iran becomes Pakistan. At least in Pakistan, there is a democratically elected government and a legislature, though the power is still with the military, as opposed to Egypt or Myanmar, which are military dictatorships.”
“It’s not a democracy. It’s not what Iranians have been fighting for over the last 120 years,” Aslan sighed resignedly. “But if you asked most Iranians, in Iran and outside of Iran, ‘Would you take Egypt to this?’ I think most would say yes. If you asked, ‘Would you take Myanmar to this?’ I think a lot would say yes. They would say yes because what could be worse than what they’ve already got?”
Aslan added: “History has shown that the path from military rule to true representative government is easier than the path from an ideological regime, be it religious or otherwise. Whatever you want to say about the military, ideology is not part of their calculus. The military is a very pragmatic force. What they’re concerned about is who has the biggest guns.”
It seems an eternal affliction of the Middle East that the antagonists never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s leaders have chosen continuous confrontation with the U.S. and Israel to legitimize their power. In turn, the U.S. and Israel adopted a perennially hostile posture toward Iran that culminated in the ill-conceived attempt at regime change by force from outside.
Instead of breaking down barriers and opening up to the moderating currents of integration and balanced interdependence, this mutually destructive interplay has further saddled the unfortunate Iranian people more tightly with the very loathed forces most responsible for their misery.
