In Iran, daring to Dream of Democracy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35478-2004Mar6.html

In Iran, Daring to Dream of Democracy

By Afshin Molavi
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page B04


This past summer at a major intersection in Tehran, I stood under a massive mural of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, watching a gray-bearded cleric trying to hail a cab. None would stop for him. By my count, eight empty taxis passed by without picking him up.

Residents of the Iranian capital have become familiar with this scene. Several clerics have told me that they literally de-frock and put on civilian clothes when they want to catch a cab. One young seminary student told me: "I don't even bother with taxis, but buses aren't much better. When I get on, people whisper behind my back. When I'm in a store, people smile and wish me well, but I see in their eyes that they don't like me." My Tehran barber, Hossein, a 38-year-old man who grew up in a religious home, puts it this way: "When I was growing up and we saw a cleric walking down the street, my father would insist that I go out of my way to say hello to him. Today, I steer my own children away from them."

Given these anti-clerical attitudes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it's small wonder that the 25th anniversary of Khomeini's return from exile passed with little note there. But it is still remarkable nonetheless. On Feb. 1, 1979, the unbending cleric who dared to defy the shah was met in Tehran by a jubilant, expectant crowd of nearly 2 million. He proclaimed "the spring of freedom" for the Iranian people, promised economic deliverance for the poor, and lambasted America and the West with a sound and fury that stunned many in Western capitals.

It is often noted that Iranians are frustrated with their isolation and deteriorating economy. But something deeper is going on in Iran -- a wide-ranging repudiation of the mingling of religion and politics, and a growing movement for secular democracy. As a Farsi speaker (I left Iran as a child), I've been able to speak to Iranians directly. In villages and cities I visited last summer, I often heard people say, "Let the necktie-wearers come back," a direct reference to secular technocrats whose record of economic management in the Shah's era far exceeded the past 25 years.

Even in seminaries, a rising number of clerics publicly advocate the separation of mosque and state, arguing (accurately) that Khomeini's vision of Islamic rule upended more than a thousand years of classical Shiite tradition, which prohibited clergy from ruling the state. It's time to get back to the fundamentals of private religious guidance and instruction, they argue -- a critical point since Khomeini is often referred to in the West as a fundamentalist. In reality, he was a Shiite aberration.

Iranian college campuses, however, offer glimmers of hope. The leftist, anti-imperialist ideas of the 1970s have given way to a more pragmatic discourse about economic and political dignity based on Western models of secular democracy. Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents' generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third World anti-imperialism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism. "We just want to be normal," is typical of what hundreds of students have told me. "We're tired of radicalism." Another student told me, "We're not rich enough to be radical leftists. We have to worry about getting a job."

For inspiration, Iranian youth would do well to turn back to the era of their great-grandparents and the 1906-11 Constitutional Revolution, Iran's first attempt at democratic reform. That era produced a constitution that embraced democracy, secularism, women's rights and a strong parliament. Ultimately, the movement was snuffed out by royalist reactionaries and foreign powers (namely the British and Russians). But the dream of that movement -- of a fair society based on just laws and of an independent, democratic, secular and prosperous Iran -- has not died. It lives even stronger among today's "children of the Islamic revolution." That, in the end, might be the Islamic Republic's most lasting -- and ironic -- legacy.