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The Political Regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

H. E. Chehabi
H. E. Chehabi*
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Government and Opposition , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 2001 , pp. 48 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2001

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References

* I should like to thank Bahman Baktiari, Juan J. Linz, Reza Mehdizadeh, Mohsen Milani, Said Saffari, Asghar Schirazi, A. Reza Sheikholeslami, Mark Thompson, Haleh Vaziri and an anonymous reviewer for their help and their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington DC, for affording me a setting conducive to ref lection and writing. This article is respectfully dedicated to R. K. Ramazani.

1 See Bakhash, , The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution, New York, Basic Books, 1986 Google Scholar; Arjomand, Said Amir Shaul, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988 Google Scholar; and Chehabi, Mohsen M Milani, , The Making of Iran’s Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic, Boulder, Colo., Westview, 1994 Google Scholar. For a study of the transition period using the same analytic framework as the present article see H. E., ‘The Provisional Government and the Transition from Monarchy to Islamic Republic in Iran’, in Shain, Yossi and Linz, Juan J, Between States: Interim Governments and Democratic Transitions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 I use ‘post-traditional’ to draw attention to the existence of a written constitution that rationalized theocratic government in Iran. This distinguishes it from other theocracies, the last of which was pre-1959 Tibet.

3 The ideal types ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are used here as defined by Polsby, Juan J Linz, in ‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes’, in Nelson and Greenstein, Fred (eds), Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 3, Reading, Mass., Addison Wesley Press, 1975 Google Scholar. This piece was recently reprinted as Linz, Juan J., Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Boulder, Colo., Lynne Rienner, 2000 Google Scholar. For a more recent formulation that adds ‘post-totalitarianism’ as a distinct ideal type to the typology of political regimes see Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 Google Scholar, ch. 3, ‘Modern Nondemocratic Regimes’.

4 On the concept of ‘political society’ (as distinct from ‘civil society’) see Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, pp. 8–15.

5 Huntington, Samuel P, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Twentieth Century, Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 148 Google Scholar.

6 See his ‘Islamic Government’, in Algar, Hamid (ed.), Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, Berkeley, Cal., Mizan Press, 1981, pp. 137–8Google Scholar.

7 Surat-e mashruh-e mozakerat-e majles-e barresi-ye qanun-e asasi-ye jomhuri-ye eslami-ye Iran, Volume 1, Teheran, Omur-e farhangi va ravabet-e omumi-ye majles-e showra-ye eslami, 1985, pp. 380–1.

8 That, of course, is the very definition of the term ‘theocracy’, which was coined in AD 94 by the Romanized Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote ‘some legislators have permitted their governments to be monarchies, others oligarchies, and others democracies. But our legislator . . . ordained our government to be what . . . may be termed a theocracy, ascribing the sovereignty and authority to God’. See The Works of Flavius Josephus, Whiston’s translation, London, George Bell & Sons, 1890, pp. 241 and 244–5.

9 Sometimes one hears the argument that the Islamic Republic even improves on the Prophet’s state, since that one was weak enough to fall prey to usurpers after the founder’s death, whereas the Islamic Republic survived the passing of Ayatollah Khomeini intact. See Haggay, Ram, ‘The Myth of the Early Islamic Government: The Legitimization of the Islamic Regime’, in Iranian Studies, 24 (1991), p. 47 Google Scholar.

10 Brumberg, Daniel, Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2001 Google Scholar, ch. 5.

11 For a successful attempt to make sense of these see Buchta, Wilfried, Who Rules Iran? The Structure of Power in the Islamic Republic, Washington, DC, The Washington Institute, 1999 Google Scholar.

12 For an exhaustive study of the institutions of the Islamic Republic see Schirazi, Asghar, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic, London, I. B. Tauris, 1996 Google Scholar.

13 Mexico until the mid-1990s comes to mind as a polity that for decades straddled the border between authoritarianism and democracy.

14 This approach leaves open the question of the validity of their claim and is inspired by the ‘methodological atheism’ of Peter Berger who wrote that ‘to say that religion is a human projection does not logically preclude the possibility that the projected meaning may have an ultimate status independent of man’. See his The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York, Anchor Books, 1967, p. 181.

15 Even this is a simplification, as Khomeini was no ‘pope’: he was only one out a number of top religious leaders.

16 For post-Khomeini developments see Mozaffari, Mehdi, ‘Changes in the Iranian Political System after Khomeini’s Death’, Political Studies, 41 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ehteshami, Anoushiravan, After Khomeini: The Iranian Second Republic, London, Routledge, 1995 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brumberg, Reinventing Khomeini.

17 For a discussion of the succession crisis as it affected Iran see Gieling, Saskia, ‘The Marja’iya in Iran and the Nomination of Khamenei in December 1994’, Middle Eastern Studies, 33:4 (10 1997 CrossRefGoogle Scholar) and Mottahedeh, Roy, ‘The Islamic Movement: The Case for Democratic Inclusion’, Contention, 4 (Spring 1995), pp. 110–15Google Scholar.

18 By analogy with military regimes one could say that Iran is ruled by a non-hierarchical as opposed to a hierarchical clerical regime. The original formulation of the distinction is in Stepan, Alfred, ‘Paths toward Redemocratization’, in O’Donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe and Whitehead, Laurence (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986 Google Scholar.

19 See Chehabi, H. E., ‘Religion and Politics in Iran: How Theocratic is the Islamic Republic?’, Daedalus, 120 (Summer 1991 Google Scholar). The term ‘clerisy’ is borrowed from Coleridge, who, of course, used it in a somewhat different sense. See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, On the Constitution of the Church and the State (ed.) John Colmer, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 42–54 Google Scholar.

20 Islamic Republican Party, Mavaze‘-e ma [Our positions], Teheran, IRP, 1983, p. 26.

21 See Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 25–7 and 392–3Google Scholarn.

22 See Vichniac, Judith, ‘French Socialists and Droit à la Différence: A Changing Dynamic’, French Politics and Society, 9 (Winter 1991); and Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrowkhavar, Le voile et la république, Paris, Editions de la Découverte, 1995.Google Scholar

23 Yarshater, Ehsan, ‘The Theme of Wine-drinking and the Concept of the Beloved in Early Persian Poetry’, in Studia Islamica, 13 (1960). In 1996 scientists found evidence that wine was known in what is now Iran in 5400 BC, see Los Angeles Times, 6 June 1996, pp. A1 and A26.Google Scholar

24 Which does not mean all women. The veil has a large measure of support among less westernized women. See Adelkhah, Fariba, La révolution sous le voile: Femmes islamiques en Iran, Paris, Karthala, 1991 Google Scholar.

25 Friedrich, C. J. and Brzezinski, Z. K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1956, pp. 9–10 Google Scholar.

26 For a perceptive analysis of the origins and various strands of this ideology see Dabashi’s magisterial, Hamid Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, New York, New York University Press, 1993 Google Scholar.

27 For the importance of upholding public morality see Ayubi, Nazih N., ‘Rethinking the Public/Private Dichotomy: Radical Islamism and Civil Society in the Middle East’, Contention, 4 (Spring 1995 Google Scholar).

28 This is strikingly demonstrated in Loeffler, Reinhold, Islam in Practice: Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1988 Google Scholar.

29 This adaptability probably explains why religions have survived far longer than most ideologies.

30 See Coulson, N. J., A History of Islamic Law, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1964, especially pp. 120–34Google Scholar.

31 Ettela‘at (New York edition), 5 August 1994, p. 7. This passage is omitted from the English translation of the interview on p. 8. Rafsanjani’s hesitation is probably due to the fact that strictly speaking, he is not entitled to ijtihad on the basis of his scholarly credentials.

32 See Schirazi, Asghar, Islamic Development Policy: The Agrarian Question in Iran, Boulder, Colo., Lynne Rienner, 1993 Google Scholar, and his The Constitution of Iran, chs 8, 13, and 14 for detailed examples showing the difficulty and in some cases impossibility of arriving at a consensus about burning policy issues.

33 This discussion leaves out foreign policy. Here, the regime’s original revolutionary ideology still guides policy-makers to some extent, especially as regards policy toward the United States and Israel. But even here there are voices that advocate policies that would pragmatically serve Iran’s national interests. See Ramazani, R. K., Revolutionary Iran: Challenge and Response in the Middle East, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986 Google Scholar.

34 On this point see also Roy, Olivier, The Failure of Political Islam, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1994 Google Scholar.

35 As late as 1994, for instance, the faqih issued a fatwa discouraging wearing of the tie for men. And women are still harassed for being ‘mal-veiled’.

36 See for instance his Farbehtar az ide’olozhi {More Substantial than Ideology}, Teheran, Sarat, 1993. For a critical study of Sorush’s thought see Matin-asgari, Afshin, ‘ ‘Abdolkarim Sorush and the Secularization of Islamic Thought in Iran’, Iranian Studies, 30 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Weber, Max, Economy and Society, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, p. 1195 Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in Ahmadi, Sa‘id, ‘Darbareh-ye enhelal-e hezb-e jomhuri-ye eslami-ye Iran’, Aghazi Now, 5–6 (Summer–Autumn 1987), p. 27 Google ScholarPubMed.

39 For the exchange of letters between the founders Rafsanjani and Khameneh‘i, and Khomeini, see Keyhan, 2 June 1987, p. 3.

40 It is interesting that Khomeini protested against this ‘disorder’ throughout his political career, ending in his testament, after the Islamic Republic had had ten years to bring ‘order’ to the hierarchy. See Imam Khomeini’s Last Will and Testament, Washington, DC, Interest Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran, nd, p. 39.

41 See Fischer, Michael M. J., Iran: From Religious Revolt to Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1980 Google Scholar and Mottahedeh, Roy, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, Oxford, OneWorld Publications, 2000 Google Scholar.

42 Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin: Recollections of an Historian of Ideas, London, Orion Books, 1993, p. 141 Google Scholar.

43 MacFarquhar, Neil, ‘Backlash of Intolerance Stirring Fear in Iran’, New York Times, 20 09 1996, pp. 1 and 6 Google Scholar.

44 Hyman, Anthony, ‘Iran’s Press — Freedom within Limits’, Index on Censorship, 19:2 (02 1990), p. 26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Adelkhah, Fariba, ‘L’offensive des intellectuels en Iran’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 42 (01 1995), p. 20 Google Scholar.

45 Linz, Juan, ‘Types of Political Regimes and Respect for Human Rights: Historical and Cross-National Perspectives’, in Eide, Asbjørn and Hagtvet, Bernt (eds), Human Rights in Perspective: A Global Assessment, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992 Google Scholar.

46 For instance, members of the Baha’i Faith, who are considered heretics by the regime, have been the target of systematic discrimination and oppression. See Roger Cooper, The Baha’is of Iran, Minority Rights Report No. 51, 1982.

47 Linz, ‘Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes’, p. 218.

48 For an elaboration of this point see my Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini, London, I. B. Tauris, 1990, pp. 19–26.

49 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 932.

50 The new ascendancy of the non-cosmopolitan segment is noticeable by many indices, such as the names, (verbal and body) language, manners and cultural references of the new power-holders. In the 1960s and 1970s, when official policy promoted westernization, a key concept in the anti-Shah opposition’s ideological discourses was gharbzadegi, ‘west-struckness’. Now one sometimes hears educated Iranians complain about a new phenomenon, the term of which was coined by analogy with gharbzadegi: this is avamzadegi, ‘common-struckness’.

51 In the early 1990s close to 4 million Afghans and Iraqis, about a quarter of all international refugees, lived in Iran.

52 See Adnan, Mazarei Jr., ‘The Iranian Economy under the Islamic Republic: Institutional Change and Macroeconomic Performance’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 20 (1996)Google Scholar.

53 Havel, Vaclav, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Open Letters: Selected Prose, New York, Knopf, 1991, p. 131 Google Scholar.

54 Linz, Juan J., ‘Opposition in and under an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain,’ in Dahl, Robert A. (ed.), Regimes and Oppositions, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 173–4Google Scholar.

55 Economy and Society, p. 1112.

56 Other examples are the coexistence of army and Revolutionary Guards, of a ministry of agriculture and the ‘Reconstruction Jihad’.

57 Ettela‘at, 8 February 1996.

58 As a corrective to the social scientist’s inevitable (but none the less distorting) tendency to bury the palpable reality of a nation’s public life under a coat of abstraction (if not jargon), see ‘Power Versus Choice: Human Rights and Parliamentary Elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, Human Rights Watch/Middle East Report, 8:1 (March 1996).

59 Linz, Juan J., ‘An Authoritarian Regime: Spain,’ in Allardt, Erik and Rokkan, Stein (eds), Mass Politics: Studies in Political Sociology, New York, Free Press, 1970, p. 255 Google Scholar. The phrasing is slightly modified. For a further elaboration on this definition see Morlino, Leonardo, ‘Authoritarianism,’ in Bebler, Anton and Seroka, Jim (eds), Contemporary Political Systems: Classifications and Typologies, Boulder, Colo., Lynne Rienner, 1990 Google Scholar.

60 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, pp. 41–6.

61 See Kazemi, Farhad, ‘Civil Society and Iranian Politics,’ in Norton (ed, Augustus Richard.), Civil Society in the Middle East, Volume 2, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1996 Google Scholar.

62 Linz, ‘Opposition’, p. 191.

63 Ibid., p. 193.

64 It is almost as though Bukharinists, Trotzkyites and Stalin’s ‘Leninist Centre’ had taken their disagreements to the Soviet electorate in the 1920s.

65 For a detailed study of the Iranian parliament see Baktiari, Bahman Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran, Gainesville, Fla., Florida University Press, 1996 Google Scholar.

66 This is somewhat similar to the Mexican experience, where the PRI candidate always won until Vicente Fox’s election in 2000.

67 The latter through the Mostazafan Foundation, in fact a holding company for nationalized enterprises accounting for about a quarter of Iran’s GNP. The Foundation is directly under the Leader’s control and its finances are independent of the government.

68 In the diplomatic service, where their skills are needed most, they are not even tolerated in subordinate positions. In no state administration was the purge of employees more thorough than in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

69 The classic formulation of this is of course Havel’s famous essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’. It is telling that in a collection devoted to civil society in the Middle East, the author of the article on Iran chose to concentrate on counter-culture. See Schirazi, Asghar, ‘Gegenkultur als Ausdruck der Zivilgesellschaft in der Islamischen Republik Iran’, in Ibrahim, Ferhad and Wedel, Heidi (eds), Probleme der Zivilgesellschaft im Vorderen Orient, Opladen, Leske & Budrich, 1995 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 (Pseudonym), ‘Sadeq’, ‘Dinsalari, nah mardomsalari’, Rahavard, 41 (1996), pp. 336–7Google Scholar.

71 This is done by awarding extra points to high school graduates for participation in religious social life, by reserving a quota for relatives of those killed in the Iran-Iraq War, and by awarding fellowships for studying abroad only to ‘ideologically reliable’ students. The latter hits non-hezbollahi Iranians particularly hard, as the devaluation of the Iranian currency since the revolution (and, to a lesser extent, the introduction of fees by many European universities) now allows only the very rich to pay for their offspring’s foreign education themselves. See Habibi, Nader, ‘Allocation of Educational and Occupational Opportunities in the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Case Study in the Political Screening of Human Capital in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, Iranian Studies, 22 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Guardians of Thought: Limits on Freedom of Expression in Iran, New York, Human Rights Watch, 1993, pp. 118–21 and 136–40.

72 The fallacy in this reasoning is that the masses themselves do not live in a cultural vacuum. They are also subjected to the forces of cultural globalization, which means westernization, and given the advances in communications technology these pressures are probably stronger and more insidious than those that superficially westernized the old elite.

73 Th. Geiger, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes, Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, 1932, pp. 77–8. Geiger’s formulations of ‘mentality’ and ‘ideology’ were used by Juan Linz in his analyses of non-democratic regimes. Here, however, they are quoted from the original.

74 The quotations are from Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, pp. 48 and 49.

75 Sir Arnold T. Wilson, Persia, London, Ernest Been Limited, 1932, pp. 34 and 45–46.

76 On this dimension of the regime see Abrahamian, Ervand, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993 Google Scholar, ch. 1.

77 For an interesting analysis of how language has changed see Keshavarz, Mohammad Hossein, ‘Forms of Address in Post-revolutionary Iranian Persian: A Sociolinguistic Analysis’, Language in Society, 17 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 For an analysis of their origins see Ashraf, Ahmad, ‘Charisma, Theocracy, and Men of Power in Postrevolutionary Iran’, in Weiner, Myron and Banuazizi, Ali (eds), The Politics of Social Transformation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1994 Google Scholar.

79 Iran is not alone in facing this anti-cosmopolitan backlash in the name of ‘authenticity’. See Meijer, Roel (ed.), Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Authenticity in the Middle East, Richmond, Virginia, Curzon Press, 1999 Google Scholar.

80 Salam, 12 May 1995, pp. 1–2.

81 See Buchta, Who Rules Iran?, p. 8.

82 For an analysis of the social strata carrying this movement see Farhad Khosrokhavar, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Democratization in Iran’, Critique, 16 (Spring 2000).