THE WORLD : Silencing Ideas: The Crisis Within Iran’s Theocracy

Iran now faces its most serious crisis since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. It’s not from neighboring Iraq, which still has the largest and best-equipped army in the Persian Gulf. It’s not from the United States, where the “Great Satan’s” legislature imposed a double whammy this month: $20 million for a new CIA program to destabilize Tehran and new sanctions punishing foreign companies for doing business with Iran.

This crisis, instead, comes from within.

After years of tentative openings--allowing everything from fiery public political debates to performances of Chekhov plays and a feisty media--Iran is now moving to stifle the exchange of ideas in universities, cultural circles, media and even at mosques. As a result, the Islamic revolution that so recently appeared to be maturing, may instead begin to implode.

Tension has erupted in part because of an issue pivotal to the revolution’s survival: The clergy’s domination of every aspect of life. The challenge is most startling, however, because it comes from the Islamic faithful themselves.

The crisis is symbolized by the regime’s crackdown on Abdol Karim Soroush, Iran’s leading philosopher and one of the world’s foremost proponents of reconciling Islam and democracy. His reformist ideas have led both supporters and critics to compare his role to Martin Luther’s lead in reforming Christianity.

In the world’s only modern theocracy, Soroush has come under harsh political and physical attack in the past six months for writing about the clergy. Muslim clerics, he argues, are equals rather than superiors of the people. They should not gain politically or socially from religion, nor should they be supported economically by the state or the people,

“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 too often based on the logic of power, not the logic of liberty,” Soroush explained in a recent interview.

Because his views hit hard at cornerstones of the Islamic republic, Soroush has now been silenced, according to Iranian sources. Last month he was virtually banned from lecturing, publishing or otherwise disseminating his views.

The fury over Soroush within the highest levels of Iran’s government was reflected at the 16th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover last month. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, successor to revolutionary leader Khomeini, spent as much time condemning Soroush’s ideas as he did discussing the United States or 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.” He warned, “The Islamic system will slap these people hard in the face.”

Soroush has often been threatened with violence. He has twice been physically attacked and injured, forcing him to flee lectures in Isfahan, in July, and at the University of Tehran, in October. The attackers, who also injured students, appeared to be officially sanctioned.

International human-rights groups are concerned for his life. Soroush is now traveling in Europe and Canada, but is still in danger. Western government have linked Iranian agents to murders of more than a dozen critics of the regime abroad.

And Soroush is not alone. “The government closed newspapers, imprisoned critics, forcibly suppressed protests and condoned vigilante attacks against domestic opposition,” concluded “Human Rights Watch World Report 1995,” issued this month.

Even Iran’s thriving movie 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. The response was a ban on the export of any film showing a “negative image of Iran.”

These tensions reflect changing dynamics within the clergy itself. Khamenei has become far more powerful and more outspoken in defining Iran’s agenda, while the position of President Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered the most moderate Iranian politician, weakens. The president 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 likely to increase in parliamentary elections in March and presidential elections in 1997. They fiercely reject the kind of reforms put forward by Soroush and other Muslim intellectuals.

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

Until the crackdown began in mid-1995, open debate within Iran had reached unprecedented levels, even when compared to the shah’s era. 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 1979 revolution. The Muslim Students Assn. petitioned the Revolutionary Guards commander not to dispatch his troops on campus and named many of the more than 100 men who attacked Soroush.

Soroush has long been a problem for the regime. Though a strong supporter of the revolution, he has challenged the premise of clerical rule.

“Using religion as an ideology makes it intolerant and authoritarian,” he said in an interview. 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 they are not beholden to propagate official views or “captive” to people’s whims. Instead of privilege, the clergy should experience life’s hardships, earning a living through scholarship, teaching or other jobs.

“Religion is for the lovers of the faith, not the dealers of the faith,” Soroush explained.

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 him.

At home, the attacks appear to be backfiring on the regime--as Soroush’s following continues to grow. Thousands of cassettes of his lectures now circulate among students, young technocrats and clerics angered by the way the regime has tainted Islam.

Neither Iraq’s army nor U.S. power has seriously undermined the regime for a simple reason: Proud of one of the world’s oldest civilizations, Iranians are nationalists first and foremost. And they want to control their destiny--what the 1979 revolution was originally about. They will rally around even this regime when outsiders overtly or covertly challenge it.

But the theocracy can be challenged by its own misrule, whether economic mismanagement or political repression--or both. And that’s exactly the context in which the ideas of Soroush and others have special appeal and legitimacy. Stifling that debate may cost more than the already tenuous regime can afford.