The Making of Modern Authoritarianism in Contemporary Iran

Abstract

Shock and exhilaration characterized the first responses of many to the uprising that started in Tehran after the Islamic regime declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of the 12 June 2009 presidential election. Demonstrations sprang up across the Iranian capital in the days following the election and spread to other major cities, including Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashhad. The regime scrambled to contain the street protests and attempted to silence the opposition through mass arrests, detentions, and, in many cases, torture and murder. The world watched Iran with fascination and amazement. Analysts who had characterized the regime in Tehran as strong, formidable,and confident, and the majority of Iranians as orderly and law abiding, were shocked by the unpopularity of the regime and the relative ease with which young and educated pro-democracy Iranians organized rallies and demonstrations across the country. The widespread assumption that for all its repression and corruption the country was fundamentally orderly and harmonious proved to be a myth. The government’s contention that the Green Movement was a conspiracyhatched in the United States and Israel, and that any attempt to seek an alternative explanation excused the traitorous activities of the Movement’s leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, was merely a desperate attempt by the regime to divert the responsibility for the country’s ills and blame them on convenient scapegoats. Conversely, the opposition’s knee-jerk declarations that the demonstrations marked the beginning of a popular revolt capable of overthrowing the ruling Islamic regime and replacing it with a new political system based on law and democratic principles was also a lazy fantasy; these bombastic pronouncements reflected a complete lack of appreciation for the durability of authoritarianism as a persistent and unrelenting phenomenon in Iran’s long and rich history. Indeed, authoritarianism has enjoyed an illustrious history in Iranianpolitical culture, having undergone several distinct stages of development, adjustment, and maturation. The foremost feature of Iranian authoritarianism has been its exceptional ability to adjust itself to socioeconomic transformations as well as its infinite capability to articulate new principles ofideological legitimization for its replication and preservation. Thus, the three transformational periods in recent Iranian history, 1906-25, 1941-53, and 1979-80, were each followed by resurgent authoritarian sequels that advocated political, socioeconomic, and cultural changes favoring stronger authoritarian rule rather than democratic outcomes. This essay will argue that far from being the ideology of a particular formof government, Iranian authoritarianism has laid the foundation for, and lent legitimacy to, a variety of political systems and movements, including the traditional monarchical absolutism of the Qajar dynasty, the modernizing autocratic regimes of the two Pahlavi shahs, and the revolutionary Islamic government that emerged after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979. Thus, ruling elites as well as oppositional individuals and movements espousing a variety of ideological, political, social, and economic objectives have utilized authoritarian concepts and models as a means of legitimizing the validity and righteousness of their cause. In this context we can identify several distinct brands of authoritarianismin Iranian history since the second half of the nineteenth century. The first is the traditional authoritarianism practiced by Iran’s absolutist monarchs before the establishment of a constitutional form of government in 1906. The second brand was articulated and implemented by the two modernizing monarchs of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79), Reza Shah (1925-41) and Mohammad Reza Shah (1941-79), who emphasized the exceptionalism of the Iranian monarchy, glorified Iran’s pre-Islamic history, advocated the modernization (i.e., Westernization) and secularization of society from above, and promoted the abandoning of democratic institutions in favor of an efficient and highly interventionist state. The third brand was articulated by revolutionary organizations that used either Marxian socialism or a new fusion of Islam and socialism to challenge the Iranian monarchy and propose the creation of what they believed to be a more just and egalitarian social order. The fourth brand was developed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his supporters, who pieced together a religiously based form of Iranian authoritarianism by manipulating Shi‘i theology and creating a highly regimented and hierarchical Islamic state.