An Offer They Can Refuse: Winning Friends and Fighting Enemies in Iran

See Maghen (2008). Shi’ite exponents in particular have gone to great lengths to suppress any and all manifestations of actual messianism, among other reasons because such manifestations play into the hands of the Sunni Muslim majority that exploits them to tar Shi’ism with the brush of radical antinomianism and thereby justify fierce persecution.

Washington and the BBC’s go-to Iranologist Mehdi Khalaji, for instance, portrayed Iran as a military dictatorship with a thin clerical sheen already a decade ago (Khalaji, 2012). One of several glaring internal contradictions in this document involves Khalaji’s (in and of itself problematic) claim that the IRGC is a potential force for détente with the West that would seek compromise on the nuclear issue were it not for Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s intransigence (which shouldn’t matter, because Khalaji argues in the same essay that the armed forces actually run the show). This claim is followed by another one, scil., that Khameneʾi cannot back pedal on his hardline nuclear stance, because if he did so he would “face a major, perhaps unbearable, political crisis” (p. 3, column 2). If the IRGC is essentially for nuclear compromise, while the democratic element of the regime has no real power, and the clerical aristocracy has been neutralized in favor of the IRGC “deep state”—whence this major political crisis? In the event, of course, Khameneʾi was not intransigent, did in fact back pedal—allowing for the negotiations that led to the JCPOA—and there was no major, or minor, political crisis. No less problematic for Khalaji’s thesis, which pits the Supreme Leader against the Revolutionary Guards, is that most of those who proffer the militarization or “creeping coup d’etat” thesis saddle Khameneʾi himself with the primary responsibility for it, accusing him of lifting both clerics and laymen out of the officers corps—or dipping into the pool of retirees from the same—and planting them in important government posts. The present writer lives in a country (Israel) where in most governments no less than one hundred percent of the ministers have served in the military, many of them in high-ranking positions. Yet no one but the crudest or most ill-informed propagandist would claim that this statistic proves that the State of Israel is governed by its army.

See, for one instance among hundreds of this argument in the literature, Jahanbegloo (2004), esp. the Introduction.

https://​www.​aa.​com.​tr/​en/​middle-east/​roads-border-jammed-as-millions-of-iranian-pilgrims-head-to-iraq/​2680364. Last accessed 06/10/2022. The number climbs with each passing year. Westerners often hear from Iranian acquaintances about how their countrymen are fed up with Shi’ism. Of course, these acquaintances—a tiny percentage of Iran’s eighty million plus population—have themselves emigrated specifically because they, and their upper-class North Tehran friends, have been estranged from Islam or hail from secular (or Jewish) families.

The Eid al-Ghadir holiday commemorates the purported naming of Ali as Muhammad’s successor. See https://​en.​mehrnews.​com/​news/​189209/​3-million-Tehraners-attend-10-km-long-Ghadir-festival (last accessed 8/22/23).

Richard (1995, p. 212). Ervand Abrahamian noticed that as the years wore on, more and more speakers at official Islamic Republican events would sprinkle their rhetoric with the terms enshallah (in shāʾa llāh) meaning “if God wills” (Abrahamian, 1993, p. 86).

http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Iranian_​presidential_​election,_​2009. Last accessed 4/7/2023. See also: Eric A. Brill, “Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Steal the 2009 Election?” at http://​brill-law.​com/​iran2009election​-100710.​pdf. Last accessed 12/10/2021. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund poll, also known for its reliability, conducted one month prior to the elections, gave Ahmadinejad 34% of the vote to Musavi’s 14% (Straw, 2019, p. 288). Tellingly, Ahmadinejad is reported to have claimed several weeks after the election that Khameneʾi’s support had cost him no less than ten million votes (Majd, 2014, pp. 63–64).

Some of the most convincing correctives on these scores are offered in Takeyh (2021).

Takeyh (2021, p. 52).

“The Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief” (Amnesty International Annual Report—1974–5, https://​www.​amnesty.​org/​download/​Documents/​POL100011975ENGL​ISH.​PDF, p. 8. Last accessed 12/21/2019). Amnesty’s report, together with other well-known indictments of the shah’s human rights record (that famously included the wild claim that at any given time no less than 100,000 political prisoners were incarcerated in SAVAK jails), have since been convincingly discredited. For the best corrective to such exaggerations see Cooper (2016).

Cited in Cooper (2016, p. 318).

E.g., Kurzman (2004), Ansari (2006), Abrahamian (1993), Taheri (2010); and scores of other works.

British Ambassador Anthony Parsons would recall “a well-informed professor at Aryamehr University (Iran’s MIT) telling me in 1976 that about 65% of his students were motivated by Islam and about 20% by communism, while the neutral remainder would always side with the Islamist groups if it came to trouble” (Cited in Takeyh, 2021, p. 200).

Alam (1992, vol. 1, p. 243).

This issue is vast, profound, and complex (and extremely significant), and cannot be entertained here in any depth. States in modern times may be instructively located on different sides of a sliding spectrum in terms of the extent to which they harbor national raisons d’etre and the extent to which these same double back on themselves. Spreading communism, for instance, may have been the declared objective of the Soviet state—mui stroim communism! was the chant that went up at every meeting of every youth movement behind the Iron Curtain—but then communism itself was essentially conceived as a framework for improved individual life, some we come full circle. In this essay, “national purpose” refers more to the facilitation of the achievement of collective objectives that, as it were, represent goals in and of themselves, such as the preservation and prosperity of a given human grouping (e.g., nineteenth-century romantic nationalism) or the promotion of a given religious outlook (e.g., political Islam). Even these last can be viewed as means as opposed to goals—forging an international Muslim caliphate is seen by many as a way in which to guarantee a more just human society—but as we said, we have to do with a spectrum.

Mill (1963, p. 27).

A government that pursues an efficacious domestic policy will, in line with our disquisition above on the crucial role of a powerful national raison d’etre, endeavor to maintain and/or cultivate collective, country-wide objectives toward which the whole of society can strive—but this is a topic for another essay.

Unlike many other Muslim countries or Islamist organizations, the Islamic Republic has never required more than the covering of female hair—and even that, in most periods, only partially or “symbolically”—even though the letter of Muslim law requires far more.