Iran Moves to Stifle Exchange of Reformist Views : Mideast: Ruling clergy challenged by Islamic faithful. Crackdown on prominent philosopher symbolizes tension.

In a major reversal after years of tentative openings, Iran is now moving to stifle the exchange of ideas in universities, the media, cultural circles and even mosques.

The clampdown is a response to challenges to the clerical government’s domination of all major aspects of everyday life. More startling still, the challenges are coming from the Islamic faithful themselves.

Symbolizing the tension is the regime’s crackdown on Abdol Karim Soroush, Iran’s leading Islamic reformer and philosopher. He has come under increasingly harsh attack--physical as well as political--after saying that members of the clergy are not endowed with special rights in Iran or any Islamic society, because they are equals, rather than superiors, of the people.

The clergy should not enjoy political or social gain as a result of their religion, nor should they be supported economically by either the state or the people, Soroush wrote in recent articles. And in an interview, he said: “The clergy is always talking about the duties of the people, but they never speak about people’s rights. The rule of the clergy is based on the logic of power, not the logic of liberty.”

Soroush is among the world’s most outspoken proponents of reconciling Islam and democracy, and his reformist ideas have led both supporters and critics to compare his role in reforming Islam to that of Martin Luther in reforming Christianity. Because his views hit hard at cornerstones of the world’s only modern theocracy, Soroush has been silenced, Iranian sources say. Last month, he was virtually banned from lecturing, publishing and otherwise disseminating his views.

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The fury over Soroush in the highest levels of Iran’s government were reflected at the 16th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover last month. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor to the late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spent as much time condemning Soroush’s ideas as he did blasting the United States and Israel.

“If someone confronts the clergy, he gladdens the Zionists and the Americans more than anything else,” Khamenei said. “They want the clergy to cease to exist. . . . This kind of talk--understanding truths in such a distorted way and publishing them in this way--this is sedition.

“The Islamic system,” he warned, “will slap these people hard in the face.”

Soroush has often been threatened with violence this year and has been attacked and injured twice; his attackers forced him to flee lectures in Esfahan in July and at the University of Tehran in October. Iranian sources said the attackers, who also injured students, appeared to be officially sanctioned or members of paramilitary groups.

International human rights groups are now concerned for his life. Although he is traveling in Europe and Canada, he still faces dangers. Iranian agents have been linked to the murders of more than a dozen critics of the regime abroad, diplomats in Tehran say.

Soroush may be the most prominent target of the government crackdown, but he is not alone. “The government closed newspapers, imprisoned critics, forcibly suppressed protests and condoned vigilante attacks against domestic opposition,” concluded the recent Human Rights Watch World Report 1995.

“Religious zealots from competing authorities interfered in people’s everyday lives, enforcing ever-changing rules of conduct,” added the New York-based monitoring group.

Even Iran’s thriving cinema industry, which has won several international awards, including one at the Cannes film festival this year, is under fire. More than 200 filmmakers petitioned for an end to government interference in scripts, production, funding and distribution of films; in response, the government banned the export of any film conveying a “negative image of Iran.”

On a broader level, the tensions reflect changing dynamics within the clergy itself, analysts in Tehran say. Khamenei has become both more powerful and more outspoken in defining Iran’s agenda as the position of President Hashemi Rafsanjani, widely considered the most moderate Iranian politician, weakens. Rafsanjani is approaching the end of his second and last term in office.

Iran’s political environment is increasingly dominated by political conservatives and xenophobes--a trend that Iranian and U.S. analysts expect to accelerate in parliamentary elections in March and presidential elections in 1997. They fiercely reject the kind of reforms put forward by Soroush and other reformist thinkers and writers.

The divide was visible after the August firebombing of a Tehran bookstore that had published a book condemned by some as un-Islamic. Ranking government clergy members said the arsonists did what the government should have. When a newspaper published by other clergy members said those comments encouraged anarchy, its offices were mobbed by demonstrators chanting, “Death to the enemies of Islam.”

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Until the crackdown began several months ago, open debate in Iran had reached unprecedented levels, even in contrast to the shah’s era before the 1979 Islamic revolution. And some quarters are still trying.

After the October attack on Soroush, University of Tehran students organized a pro-Soroush demonstration, the first implicitly anti-government protest on campus since the revolution. The Muslim Students Assn. petitioned the Revolutionary Guards commander not to dispatch his troops on campus and named many of the 100-plus men who attacked Soroush.

The attacks appear to be backfiring on the regime, because Soroush’s following has only grown. Thousands of cassettes of his lectures now circulate among students, young technocrats and clerics angered by the way the regime has tainted Islam.

Soroush has long been a problem for the regime. Although a strong supporter of the revolution that ended 2,500 years of monarchy, he has challenged the premise of clerical rule. “Using religion as an ideology makes it intolerant and authoritarian,” he said. And government and economics are the province of intellect and reason, not religion.

But it was his writing on how the clergy’s role has been corrupted that led the regime to act. “Many clergy are feeding on religion,” he said.

Clerics should be “freed” from state or public financial support so that they are not forced to propagate official views, he has written. Instead of privilege, the clergy should have to tolerate the hardships of life and earn their own income through scholarship, teaching or other jobs. “Religion is for the lovers of the faith, not the dealers of the faith,” Soroush said.

As a sign of Soroush’s growing international standing, leading U.S. and European scholars have launched a letter-writing campaign to Iranian authorities appealing for an end to attacks on scholars. But Iranian analysts worry that the situation has already gone too far. “Iran is becoming a very fragile society,” said one. “It needs only an excuse to explode.”