Iranians on the streets of Tehran marking the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein in 680
Iran’s electoral controversy of last June is starting to seem like a quaint irrelevance next to the conflict that the two sides are now waging for possession of the country—not simply its institutions and resources, but also its identity and culture. The end of the struggle will almost certainly mean defeat for one party, and not, as once seemed possible, co-existence. There will not only be political winners and losers, but moral ones too. Iranian tradition holds that fortune favours the righteous, and all the characters in this latest epic lay claim to that mantle.
The crisis is part of a struggle between Iranians who want their country to join the community of nations that is roughly in agreement on both the challenges facing the human race and the mechanisms for tackling them, and those who don’t. The supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main challenger in the June election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, present themselves as modern, plugged-in internationalists. Since the crisis began, they have adeptly used the internet to circumvent the state and publicise their cause to foreign media outlets. The state, on the other hand, has sought solace in principled isolation. Like Kipling’s cat, Iran walks on its own.
Iran withdrew into itself after the revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic’s semi-democratic, semi-theocratic system of government, topped by an institution known as the Guardianship of the Jurist, is unique. Its participation in the world economy is largely restricted to trade: Iran sells oil and buys capital and consumer goods. Its role in world diplomacy is mostly confined to pursuing its own, anti-western agenda. Ideas and information must get around walls of censorship and official indifference, and sometimes never do. Few Iranians, for instance, seem to know about global warming.
Living in Tehran, as I do, one of a very small number of westerners to remain, it is possible to feel incubated from many of the issues that concern other countries. Iran’s solitude has fostered a sense of exceptionalism, at once hubristic and defensive. Yes, Iran’s opposition movement shares characteristics with Europe’s 1989 revolutions—its reliance on “people power,” for instance, to press a broad (and, as yet, ill-defined) agenda of peaceful change. At the same time, watching events from behind a curtain of culture and history, it’s hard to ignore the intimate, coded, nature of the struggle.
Since the crisis began, and the authorities banned anti-government rallies, the opposition has developed a highly idiosyncratic modus operandi. Prevented by the security forces from staging protests, activists exploit the opportunities furnished by official days of commemoration or mourning, when the authorities encourage people to take to the streets in support for the Islamic Republic. Protestors duly comply, but instead shout subversive slogans.
Some call not only for democratic reforms but also for ending the Islamic Republic. An increasing number show their willingness to fight the security forces, hurling rocks and bricks at the better-armed riot police and Basij militiamen.
There were plenty of such battles on 27th December, the great Shia day of mourning, Ashura. Ashura is the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, and a pretender to the caliphate of Islam. In 680, Hossein and his men were wiped out by the army of Shemr, under the command of the rival Omayyids in Damascus. In time the rift gave rise to two rival sects within Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias, with Shias recognising the descendents of the Prophet as leaders. These days, Ashura is commemorated by Shias everywhere, notably in Iraq and Pakistan. But only in Iran, the largest Shia state, does it have an encompassing, national character.
Hossein’s martyrdom has long been a shorthand for sacrifice, Islamic militancy and the pursuit of justice. Ashura in Iran is marked each year with solemn fanfare. The streets fill with processions of flagellants, prayer halls teem with sobbing mourners beating their chests, and street corners grow misty from cauldrons filled with pullulating stews of meat and pulses that have been donated by local philanthropists.
This time was different. From early in the morning of 27th December, the streets of central Tehran were full not of mourners but of members of the security forces: police, volunteer militia, and riot police in body armour. This did not prevent many thousands of opposition demonstrators from taking to the streets, as they have done intermittently since June, chanting anti-government slogans and, when attacked, entering into battles with the forces of law and order. At least eight people were killed that day, including a nephew of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and hundreds more were injured and arrested as Tehran descended into chaos and violence.
Three days after Ashura, the authorities staged their own rally. I watched as the streets of central Tehran thronged with hundreds of thousands of chador-clad women and grim-faced men. They held aloft flags adorned with devotional verses and shouted slogans denouncing acts of desecration that the opposition had committed, they said, on 27th December.
According to participants in the pro-government rally, the opposition had turned the most solemn day in the Shia calendar into a grotesque exhibition. They had attacked mourners and the security forces, setting fire to vehicles and buildings, whistling and clapping. “What they did,” one man said, “was more Shemr than Shemr himself.” He and the other members of the crowd shouted, “Death to Mousavi!” and “Death to opponents of the Guardianship of the Jurist!” Then, prompted through loudspeakers, they started chanting encomia to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
Further state-organised responses to the events of Ashura followed. Marches and demonstrations were staged across the country, and were covered exhaustively by state television. Ashen-faced news presenters introduced footage of rioters celebrating in front of burning buildings, and pro-government clerics duly lambasted the godless demonstrators.
***
Standing among government supporters at the epicentre of the rally I attended on 30th December—and not without discomfort, particularly when the crowd shouted, “Death to Britain!”—I cast my mind back to several days earlier to the eve of Ashura, which I had spent in Zavareh, a small provincial town at the edge of Iran’s inhospitable Kavir desert. I had gone there not as a reporter but in search of a famous Ta’zieh, or Shia passion play, which is performed on that day in the town’s elegant Hosseinieh, an arcaded congregational space of some antiquity that was recently restored with the help of pious locals.
Together with my six-year-old son Jahan, I watched a seemingly endless procession of flagellants wearing black, each group from a different part of the town, move through the Hosseinieh, striking their backs gently with chains on short handles, taking inching, crablike steps in time to the rhythmic lamentation of a man singing into a microphone, accompanied by pounding drums and crashing cymbals.
Eventually, at 1am, the Ta’zieh started. Jahan had been blinking hard with the effort of staying awake. Now he came to life, as the scarlet, plumed figure of Shemr prowled the stage proclaiming his evil intent, and Hossein’s brother, the heroic, handsome Abol Fazl, prepared to make a suicidal sally to the river Euphrates to bring water for the Imam’s followers. Hossein’s sister, Zeyneb, was played by a man who concealed his moustache with a black veil, a picture of demure, if rather broad-shouldered, feminine virtue. Peering over a cloth partition which divided the male from the female spectators, watching the chador-clad women shower Abol Fazl with donations in return for cups of sanctified water, and the young men kiss the Imam’s green flag, I could imagine myself being back in the provincial Iran of half a century or more ago.
During a break in the play, as a master of ceremonies praised those who financed the building of the corridor that allowed women to enter the Hosseinieh without encountering men, I started talking to a young man sitting next to us. He turned out to have been Ahmadinejad’s election campaign manager. In June, he said, Zavareh had been overwhelmingly pro-Ahmadinejad. Now, he went on, alluding to the growth of a dangerous opposition movement in faraway Tehran, it was even more so. Looking around me, I believed him.
We left at 3am, after Abol Fazl lost his arms, and ultimately his life, trying to draw water from the Euphrates. (Hossein himself would only be martyred the following day.)
Many people had predicted violence on Ashura, and I wanted to get Jahan back to Tehran, a five-hour drive away. I heard on the radio that hardliners had broken up a speech about Ashura and the Imam Hossein by Muhammad Khatami, a former reformist president and a Mousavi supporter.
The Imam Hossein’s martyrdom was a symbol for the 1979 revolutionaries and inspired millions to volunteer during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Iranians have other heroes, some from pre-Islamic history and mythology, but none rivals the lord of martyrs as an embodiment of chivalry, piety and self-sacrifice. Iranians write poems and pop songs for him; children are taught that the revolutionaries of 1979 vindicated his memory.
The question is, which revolutionaries? Many members of today’s opposition invoke the same symbols and memories as the hardliners. The text of Khatami’s interrupted speech about Ashura contained an allusion to the “highest and strongest right in the social sphere,” namely “the right of the individual to determine his destiny.” This is not an extrapolation that any hardliner would make from the tragedy of Ashura. In their eyes, it is a dangerous, western-inspired innovation.
The opposition have also described the violence of 27th December in religious terms, using terms of reference set by their adversaries. According to them, it is the security forces who behaved like Shemr. In a statement on 2nd January, Mousavi declared that he was ready for martyrdom, placing himself in a tradition that extends from the Imam Hossein to the Iranians who lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war.
***
When Khatami’s reform movement emerged in the 1990s it claimed to be the heir of the founder of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Today’s opposition, being a mutation of the same reform movement, does the same, and the conservatives reply with the same accusations: that the reformists’ pledges to improve the Islamic Republic are a smokescreen hiding their real intention, which is to abolish it.
Undoubtedly, many opposition supporters still adhere to the idea of reform as the solution to the current crisis. But others have disengaged themselves from the old terms of reference. They are stirred by ideas about western-style democracy, and do not rationalise their pursuit of freedom of the individual with recourse to the Imam Hossein’s martyrdom. For the moment, the opposition is united, but in the future, a fracture along these lines may take place. Mousavi’s calls for reform within the framework of the Islamic Republic have the support not only of Mehdi Karrubi, another defeated presidential candidate, but also of several influential intellectuals. Outside the country, however, where Iranian exiles—many of them hopelessly out of touch—observe events with fascination, there is support for a more radical transformation.
Iran’s conservatives have seized on these tensions to depict their adversaries as opportunists who aim to destroy Islam. The religion’s history includes examples of enemies who coat their evil intentions in pieties. Mousavi and his friends have been added to the list.
If the current dispute were solely a political one, the conservatives would have declared it won long ago. Since 2005, when Khatami stepped down from the presidency, the conservatives have held all the levers of the state, including the supreme leadership, government, parliament and armed forces. Rather, what we are seeing now is the denouement of a more opaque conflict, centring around issues of culture and identity.
The Persian word for culture is farhang. A westernised, middle-class Iranian may use it to refer to the nation’s creative output—films, books and art—or perhaps mores. But the word is most often heard from official mouths. It is elastic, taking in almost every facet of an Iranian’s life.
Before 1979, the Shah’s government steered citizens towards a farhang that was, on the surface at least, western; since then, the authorities have tried, through farhangsazi, or “culture-making,” to create a nation of pious Shias in a state of perpetual ferment, enamoured of the Islamic Republic and the Guardianship of the Jurist, and inspired by their “Islamic-Iranian” identity. At its most extreme, farhang has a solely negative connotation, meaning rejecting all that is western.
Farhangsazi is an elite activity, in which senior politicians and academics tell people how to think and behave. Recently I heard an official on the radio say that Iran needed “cultural engineering.” More than a century after western fashions first appeared in Tehran, scandalising traditionalists, government support is being offered for the development of a “national dress.” The supreme leader has inveighed against the teaching of humanities—“whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in divine and Islamic teachings.” A proposal to ban co-ed universities comes under farhang’s rubric, for it would counter the farhang of fraternising between the sexes, which harmed the farhang of arranged marriages between virgins.
Hostility to the west is as old as Iran’s modern engagement with Europe, which began in earnest in the second half of the 19th century. Then European ideas, goods, travellers and investors entered the country under the watchful eye of a suspicious, but impecunious, shah, and a generally hostile clerical establishment. Educated Iranians experienced a rise in national consciousness, although they were divided over how to reconcile their pre-Islamic heritage and the Persian language—which distinguished them from their Arab neighbours—with their supranational, Islamic identity. Finally, while there was consensus over the greed and unscrupulousness of the Europeans, attitudes towards the European commodities of knowledge and modernity were less uniform.
In the middle part of the last century, Muhammad Mossadegh was Iran’s most inspirational nationalist. Mossadegh was a European-educated secularist who regarded Britain’s constitutional monarchy as a model, but he coloured his message as much with Islam and traditional notions of justice as he did with national sovereignty. In 1951, Mossadegh oversaw the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which most Iranians regarded as an agent of British imperialism, and became prime minister immediately after. Two years later, after failing to agree a compromise with the British, the Americans and his internal enemies, Mossadegh refused to use violence to save his premiership from a CIA coup. For his readiness to face martyrdom rather than compromise his beliefs, some of his supporters compared him to the Imam Hossein.
Over the past decade, benefitting from record oil prices, urban Iranians have become noticeably more materialistic, and more liberal in their approach to mores and culture. This has prompted charges of vacuous hedonism, but it is noticeable that many of the women who have pushed the dress codes to the limit are now engaged in a more deadly struggle—on the streets of the capital, in combat with the Basijis.
***
If the reform movement is to be captured by any ideology, it is likely to be nationalism. There is little evidence that the opposition would be less uncompromising than the government in defending the country’s nuclear programme. And many opposition members argue that the country’s rulers have shunned Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage in favour of Arab-imported Islam; they shout, “Neither east, nor west, but an Iranian Republic!” In place of the US, Britain and Israel, the traditional bogeymen, demonstrators shout slogans against Russia and China, whose diplomatic and economic support have partly mitigated the effects of western pressure. Many Iranians believe in allegations that Russia has been giving lessons to Iran’s security forces, and they regret the decline of local manufacturing at the hands of Chinese imports.
A newspaper recently reported that China produces the chains that flagellants use during Ashura, the helmets worn by actors in the Ta’zieh, and the belts to which mourners attach heavy metal standards for the Ashura processions. Even the pro-government newspaper Iran expressed dismay that China has captured the lion’s share of the country’s stationery sector. For a nation so concerned about cultural imperialism, it is ironic that exercise books and pencils emblazoned with a British bear repackaged in Hollywood should enter the country thanks to Chinese mass production.
The nationalism of the opposition is anathema to supporters of Iran’s rulers, who fear the country may be separated from its Islamic core. “What does an ‘Iranian Republic’ mean?” Ayatollah Abdullah Javadi-Amoli demanded in December. “If the country could achieve independence through an Iranian Republic, it would have done so in the time of Mossadegh. The only thing that made Iran proud and victorious was Islam and Hossein.” The dichotomy is simplistic, but the words point up a truth about a seemingly modern struggle. Iran’s present agony stems from old debates: about virtue, gallantry and justice.
Iran’s electoral controversy of last June is starting to seem like a quaint irrelevance next to the conflict that the two sides are now waging for possession of the country—not simply its institutions and resources, but also its identity and culture. The end of the struggle will almost certainly mean defeat for one party, and not, as once seemed possible, co-existence. There will not only be political winners and losers, but moral ones too. Iranian tradition holds that fortune favours the righteous, and all the characters in this latest epic lay claim to that mantle.
The crisis is part of a struggle between Iranians who want their country to join the community of nations that is roughly in agreement on both the challenges facing the human race and the mechanisms for tackling them, and those who don’t. The supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main challenger in the June election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, present themselves as modern, plugged-in internationalists. Since the crisis began, they have adeptly used the internet to circumvent the state and publicise their cause to foreign media outlets. The state, on the other hand, has sought solace in principled isolation. Like Kipling’s cat, Iran walks on its own.
Iran withdrew into itself after the revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic’s semi-democratic, semi-theocratic system of government, topped by an institution known as the Guardianship of the Jurist, is unique. Its participation in the world economy is largely restricted to trade: Iran sells oil and buys capital and consumer goods. Its role in world diplomacy is mostly confined to pursuing its own, anti-western agenda. Ideas and information must get around walls of censorship and official indifference, and sometimes never do. Few Iranians, for instance, seem to know about global warming.
Living in Tehran, as I do, one of a very small number of westerners to remain, it is possible to feel incubated from many of the issues that concern other countries. Iran’s solitude has fostered a sense of exceptionalism, at once hubristic and defensive. Yes, Iran’s opposition movement shares characteristics with Europe’s 1989 revolutions—its reliance on “people power,” for instance, to press a broad (and, as yet, ill-defined) agenda of peaceful change. At the same time, watching events from behind a curtain of culture and history, it’s hard to ignore the intimate, coded, nature of the struggle.
Since the crisis began, and the authorities banned anti-government rallies, the opposition has developed a highly idiosyncratic modus operandi. Prevented by the security forces from staging protests, activists exploit the opportunities furnished by official days of commemoration or mourning, when the authorities encourage people to take to the streets in support for the Islamic Republic. Protestors duly comply, but instead shout subversive slogans.
Some call not only for democratic reforms but also for ending the Islamic Republic. An increasing number show their willingness to fight the security forces, hurling rocks and bricks at the better-armed riot police and Basij militiamen.
There were plenty of such battles on 27th December, the great Shia day of mourning, Ashura. Ashura is the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, and a pretender to the caliphate of Islam. In 680, Hossein and his men were wiped out by the army of Shemr, under the command of the rival Omayyids in Damascus. In time the rift gave rise to two rival sects within Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias, with Shias recognising the descendents of the Prophet as leaders. These days, Ashura is commemorated by Shias everywhere, notably in Iraq and Pakistan. But only in Iran, the largest Shia state, does it have an encompassing, national character.
Hossein’s martyrdom has long been a shorthand for sacrifice, Islamic militancy and the pursuit of justice. Ashura in Iran is marked each year with solemn fanfare. The streets fill with processions of flagellants, prayer halls teem with sobbing mourners beating their chests, and street corners grow misty from cauldrons filled with pullulating stews of meat and pulses that have been donated by local philanthropists.
This time was different. From early in the morning of 27th December, the streets of central Tehran were full not of mourners but of members of the security forces: police, volunteer militia, and riot police in body armour. This did not prevent many thousands of opposition demonstrators from taking to the streets, as they have done intermittently since June, chanting anti-government slogans and, when attacked, entering into battles with the forces of law and order. At least eight people were killed that day, including a nephew of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and hundreds more were injured and arrested as Tehran descended into chaos and violence.
Three days after Ashura, the authorities staged their own rally. I watched as the streets of central Tehran thronged with hundreds of thousands of chador-clad women and grim-faced men. They held aloft flags adorned with devotional verses and shouted slogans denouncing acts of desecration that the opposition had committed, they said, on 27th December.
According to participants in the pro-government rally, the opposition had turned the most solemn day in the Shia calendar into a grotesque exhibition. They had attacked mourners and the security forces, setting fire to vehicles and buildings, whistling and clapping. “What they did,” one man said, “was more Shemr than Shemr himself.” He and the other members of the crowd shouted, “Death to Mousavi!” and “Death to opponents of the Guardianship of the Jurist!” Then, prompted through loudspeakers, they started chanting encomia to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
Further state-organised responses to the events of Ashura followed. Marches and demonstrations were staged across the country, and were covered exhaustively by state television. Ashen-faced news presenters introduced footage of rioters celebrating in front of burning buildings, and pro-government clerics duly lambasted the godless demonstrators.
***
Standing among government supporters at the epicentre of the rally I attended on 30th December—and not without discomfort, particularly when the crowd shouted, “Death to Britain!”—I cast my mind back to several days earlier to the eve of Ashura, which I had spent in Zavareh, a small provincial town at the edge of Iran’s inhospitable Kavir desert. I had gone there not as a reporter but in search of a famous Ta’zieh, or Shia passion play, which is performed on that day in the town’s elegant Hosseinieh, an arcaded congregational space of some antiquity that was recently restored with the help of pious locals.
Together with my six-year-old son Jahan, I watched a seemingly endless procession of flagellants wearing black, each group from a different part of the town, move through the Hosseinieh, striking their backs gently with chains on short handles, taking inching, crablike steps in time to the rhythmic lamentation of a man singing into a microphone, accompanied by pounding drums and crashing cymbals.
Eventually, at 1am, the Ta’zieh started. Jahan had been blinking hard with the effort of staying awake. Now he came to life, as the scarlet, plumed figure of Shemr prowled the stage proclaiming his evil intent, and Hossein’s brother, the heroic, handsome Abol Fazl, prepared to make a suicidal sally to the river Euphrates to bring water for the Imam’s followers. Hossein’s sister, Zeyneb, was played by a man who concealed his moustache with a black veil, a picture of demure, if rather broad-shouldered, feminine virtue. Peering over a cloth partition which divided the male from the female spectators, watching the chador-clad women shower Abol Fazl with donations in return for cups of sanctified water, and the young men kiss the Imam’s green flag, I could imagine myself being back in the provincial Iran of half a century or more ago.
During a break in the play, as a master of ceremonies praised those who financed the building of the corridor that allowed women to enter the Hosseinieh without encountering men, I started talking to a young man sitting next to us. He turned out to have been Ahmadinejad’s election campaign manager. In June, he said, Zavareh had been overwhelmingly pro-Ahmadinejad. Now, he went on, alluding to the growth of a dangerous opposition movement in faraway Tehran, it was even more so. Looking around me, I believed him.
We left at 3am, after Abol Fazl lost his arms, and ultimately his life, trying to draw water from the Euphrates. (Hossein himself would only be martyred the following day.)
Many people had predicted violence on Ashura, and I wanted to get Jahan back to Tehran, a five-hour drive away. I heard on the radio that hardliners had broken up a speech about Ashura and the Imam Hossein by Muhammad Khatami, a former reformist president and a Mousavi supporter.
The Imam Hossein’s martyrdom was a symbol for the 1979 revolutionaries and inspired millions to volunteer during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Iranians have other heroes, some from pre-Islamic history and mythology, but none rivals the lord of martyrs as an embodiment of chivalry, piety and self-sacrifice. Iranians write poems and pop songs for him; children are taught that the revolutionaries of 1979 vindicated his memory.
The question is, which revolutionaries? Many members of today’s opposition invoke the same symbols and memories as the hardliners. The text of Khatami’s interrupted speech about Ashura contained an allusion to the “highest and strongest right in the social sphere,” namely “the right of the individual to determine his destiny.” This is not an extrapolation that any hardliner would make from the tragedy of Ashura. In their eyes, it is a dangerous, western-inspired innovation.
The opposition have also described the violence of 27th December in religious terms, using terms of reference set by their adversaries. According to them, it is the security forces who behaved like Shemr. In a statement on 2nd January, Mousavi declared that he was ready for martyrdom, placing himself in a tradition that extends from the Imam Hossein to the Iranians who lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war.
***
When Khatami’s reform movement emerged in the 1990s it claimed to be the heir of the founder of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Today’s opposition, being a mutation of the same reform movement, does the same, and the conservatives reply with the same accusations: that the reformists’ pledges to improve the Islamic Republic are a smokescreen hiding their real intention, which is to abolish it.
Undoubtedly, many opposition supporters still adhere to the idea of reform as the solution to the current crisis. But others have disengaged themselves from the old terms of reference. They are stirred by ideas about western-style democracy, and do not rationalise their pursuit of freedom of the individual with recourse to the Imam Hossein’s martyrdom. For the moment, the opposition is united, but in the future, a fracture along these lines may take place. Mousavi’s calls for reform within the framework of the Islamic Republic have the support not only of Mehdi Karrubi, another defeated presidential candidate, but also of several influential intellectuals. Outside the country, however, where Iranian exiles—many of them hopelessly out of touch—observe events with fascination, there is support for a more radical transformation.
Iran’s conservatives have seized on these tensions to depict their adversaries as opportunists who aim to destroy Islam. The religion’s history includes examples of enemies who coat their evil intentions in pieties. Mousavi and his friends have been added to the list.
If the current dispute were solely a political one, the conservatives would have declared it won long ago. Since 2005, when Khatami stepped down from the presidency, the conservatives have held all the levers of the state, including the supreme leadership, government, parliament and armed forces. Rather, what we are seeing now is the denouement of a more opaque conflict, centring around issues of culture and identity.
The Persian word for culture is farhang. A westernised, middle-class Iranian may use it to refer to the nation’s creative output—films, books and art—or perhaps mores. But the word is most often heard from official mouths. It is elastic, taking in almost every facet of an Iranian’s life.
Before 1979, the Shah’s government steered citizens towards a farhang that was, on the surface at least, western; since then, the authorities have tried, through farhangsazi, or “culture-making,” to create a nation of pious Shias in a state of perpetual ferment, enamoured of the Islamic Republic and the Guardianship of the Jurist, and inspired by their “Islamic-Iranian” identity. At its most extreme, farhang has a solely negative connotation, meaning rejecting all that is western.
Farhangsazi is an elite activity, in which senior politicians and academics tell people how to think and behave. Recently I heard an official on the radio say that Iran needed “cultural engineering.” More than a century after western fashions first appeared in Tehran, scandalising traditionalists, government support is being offered for the development of a “national dress.” The supreme leader has inveighed against the teaching of humanities—“whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in divine and Islamic teachings.” A proposal to ban co-ed universities comes under farhang’s rubric, for it would counter the farhang of fraternising between the sexes, which harmed the farhang of arranged marriages between virgins.
Hostility to the west is as old as Iran’s modern engagement with Europe, which began in earnest in the second half of the 19th century. Then European ideas, goods, travellers and investors entered the country under the watchful eye of a suspicious, but impecunious, shah, and a generally hostile clerical establishment. Educated Iranians experienced a rise in national consciousness, although they were divided over how to reconcile their pre-Islamic heritage and the Persian language—which distinguished them from their Arab neighbours—with their supranational, Islamic identity. Finally, while there was consensus over the greed and unscrupulousness of the Europeans, attitudes towards the European commodities of knowledge and modernity were less uniform.
In the middle part of the last century, Muhammad Mossadegh was Iran’s most inspirational nationalist. Mossadegh was a European-educated secularist who regarded Britain’s constitutional monarchy as a model, but he coloured his message as much with Islam and traditional notions of justice as he did with national sovereignty. In 1951, Mossadegh oversaw the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which most Iranians regarded as an agent of British imperialism, and became prime minister immediately after. Two years later, after failing to agree a compromise with the British, the Americans and his internal enemies, Mossadegh refused to use violence to save his premiership from a CIA coup. For his readiness to face martyrdom rather than compromise his beliefs, some of his supporters compared him to the Imam Hossein.
Over the past decade, benefitting from record oil prices, urban Iranians have become noticeably more materialistic, and more liberal in their approach to mores and culture. This has prompted charges of vacuous hedonism, but it is noticeable that many of the women who have pushed the dress codes to the limit are now engaged in a more deadly struggle—on the streets of the capital, in combat with the Basijis.
***
If the reform movement is to be captured by any ideology, it is likely to be nationalism. There is little evidence that the opposition would be less uncompromising than the government in defending the country’s nuclear programme. And many opposition members argue that the country’s rulers have shunned Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage in favour of Arab-imported Islam; they shout, “Neither east, nor west, but an Iranian Republic!” In place of the US, Britain and Israel, the traditional bogeymen, demonstrators shout slogans against Russia and China, whose diplomatic and economic support have partly mitigated the effects of western pressure. Many Iranians believe in allegations that Russia has been giving lessons to Iran’s security forces, and they regret the decline of local manufacturing at the hands of Chinese imports.
A newspaper recently reported that China produces the chains that flagellants use during Ashura, the helmets worn by actors in the Ta’zieh, and the belts to which mourners attach heavy metal standards for the Ashura processions. Even the pro-government newspaper Iran expressed dismay that China has captured the lion’s share of the country’s stationery sector. For a nation so concerned about cultural imperialism, it is ironic that exercise books and pencils emblazoned with a British bear repackaged in Hollywood should enter the country thanks to Chinese mass production.
The nationalism of the opposition is anathema to supporters of Iran’s rulers, who fear the country may be separated from its Islamic core. “What does an ‘Iranian Republic’ mean?” Ayatollah Abdullah Javadi-Amoli demanded in December. “If the country could achieve independence through an Iranian Republic, it would have done so in the time of Mossadegh. The only thing that made Iran proud and victorious was Islam and Hossein.” The dichotomy is simplistic, but the words point up a truth about a seemingly modern struggle. Iran’s present agony stems from old debates: about virtue, gallantry and justice.
