Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran

Iran has a hundred-year history of dabbling with democracy and pluralism, as well as a long parliamentary tradition. Early in the twentieth century, Iranian leaders and politicians experimented with the ideas of a law-based state, and wrote a progressive Constitution. Even the Islamic Constitution ratified in 1979 reflects concerns over public accountability and transparency.

In their own way, these men are just as disaffected from the Islamic government as the student demonstrators in Tehran. They share the same desires for personal freedoms. It is just that in Islamshahr, the freedom that matters is a job. They will not rebel over the closure of a newspaper. But they might over the price of a bus ticket.

In the end, all of this economic irrationality has hurt the middle class the most. The rich and the politically connected have done just fine, accumulating wealth through trading and real estate and currency speculation; the poor have benefited from the revolution’s massive subsidies, better access to education and housing and building projects. But for the middle class, living standards have deteriorated.

“We have an expression in the bazaar. You have five fingers but you have to hide one of them. Show only four fingers. We always say that business is bad. There’s always a recession. If people don’t think your business is bad, they may give you the evil eye and make your business bad. There’s always the fear that if one businessman is too successful the others will unite against him.”

The task of defining an Islamic Republic was left to the drafters of the new Constitution, who included people of different political persuasions. They argued fiercely over the relationship between Western-based secular law and Islamic law, the role of Iranian culture alongside Islamic culture, and the distribution of power between the President and the Parliament. But the framers couldn’t agree, and instead of resolving the conflicts, the Constitution embraced contradictory elements—at once democratic and authoritarian, secular and religious.

The victory of the reformers was another dramatic event that highlighted a conundrum that had confronted the revolution since its inception: whether sovereignty in an Islamic Republic is vested in clerics who claim to be God’s deputies on earth or in the people.

Iran has also emphasized diplomacy over force in its relationship with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. To the Iranians, the Taliban—a Sunni Muslim movement that follows an extreme, repressive version of Islamic law—are backward peasants who have given Muslims a bad name.

Following Khatami’s election, the most powerful woman in Iran’s government—on paper at least—was Massoumeh Ebtekar, a steely symbol of his promise to promote women into high-profile positions. Khatami had been elected with the help of the left, and the left needed to be rewarded, or at least neutralized. So he named one from its ranks to his cabinet. A mother of two with a doctorate in immunology, she was appointed at the age of thirty-six as Vice President for the Environment, the first woman to hold cabinet rank in the Islamic Republic.

But Rafsanjani had shed his turban for this photo, making it exceptional. He recognized, in other words, that the uniform of the mullahs was no longer an automatic draw. On the contrary, it had become a liability.

The power play in Azerbaijan became an early and important chapter in American efforts to contain Moscow and block its path to the oil and trade routes of the Persian Gulf. Ever after, the Iranian-Soviet border at Azerbaijan was a red line in American eyes, beyond which Soviet influence could not be allowed to extend.