20 Years After Revolution, Iran Has Hope

Twenty years ago, Mohammed Ebrahim Asgharzadeh was a radical student on the front lines in the battle to bring down the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In November 1979, he helped organize the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, and he acted as a spokesman for the group that held American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

Now 43, hair flecked with gray, he wears a suit and carries a cellular phone as an executive for the National Steel Co. Politically, he is a major supporter of the reforms of President Mohammad Khatami.

How does this onetime anti-Western hard-liner see Iran’s Islamic Revolution on the eve of its 20th anniversary?

“If religious leaders do not have a positive concept of democracy,” he warns, “they are going to have a problem.”

Iranians look back with mixed feelings on that morning 20 years ago today when the shah’s troops finally stood down and the government of Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar fell, ushering in a modern Islamic theocracy. The past two decades have been filled with violent convulsions. And while its future still is in doubt, Iran has been tempered by the bitter experience. Today it is a country filled with hope and energy, thanks largely to a society that is driving political events to create the kind of Iran that many people imagined would follow the euphoria of 1979.

After the revolution, waves of violence claimed the lives of 10,000 Iranians. Half a million of the educated and rich elite went into exile. Religious edicts began to carry the force of law, ending night life, banning alcohol and compelling all women to cover themselves in black chadors on pain of lashing.

By the end of 1980, Iran had been invaded by Iraq, beginning a devastating eight-year war that would claim 1 million lives and envelop the country in a cult of martyrdom. To this day, murals throughout Tehran show the haunting faces of young men who did not return, and maimed veterans beg at intersections.

Since the war’s end and the subsequent death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, a sometimes-violent political struggle between conservatives and reformers has taken hold.

“The fundamental reality today is that public opinion is demanding more democracy and transparency,” said one longtime Western ambassador in Tehran. “Even conservative revolutionary institutions are forced to respond.”

More Democratic Than Neighbors

Contrary to its rogue image in the United States as a land of medieval brutality bent on humiliating the West and suppressing individuality, many people see Iran today as having more democracy, more freedom of speech and more intellectual ferment than almost any of its neighbors in the Middle East.

“Ninety percent of the things that can be talked about in a Western democracy can be talked about here,” said Nasser Hadian, a political scientist.

Hadian counts today’s relative freedom of expression, as well as Iran’s independence in foreign policy, as accomplishments of the revolution.

“Freedom is not perfect. There are red lines. But still it is incomparably better than in the shah’s time,” he said.

Ibrahim Yazdi, the U.S.-educated pharmacologist who was deputy prime minister and foreign minister during the early days of the revolution, says things are getting better, but suppression still exists. He now heads the Freedom Movement of Iran, an unsanctioned opposition party that has survived despite many arrests of Yazdi and his followers.

“If people are speaking aloud more than they did under the time of the shah, [it] doesn’t mean government is not brutal or that it does not suppress political activities. Political repression is very widespread,” he said, pointing to the activities of young hard-line toughs who routinely break up political gatherings.

Yazdi also noted the revolutionary tribunals and the special tribunals of the clergy that try to enforce a version of Islamic orthodoxy.

He recounted how in Esfahan, people who sympathize with his party had been held for days and grilled on their private religious and political beliefs. “It is a Middle Ages inquisitional court,” Yazdi said.

Nevertheless, he said, authorities are finding it hard to resist a rising demand “for liberty, for freedom, for sovereignty of the people and human rights. This demand is as great now as on the day of the revolution.”

Reaching Out to Young People

To mark the 20th anniversary, the government organized a 10-day festival called the “Days of Dawn.”

Brightly colored lights have festooned buildings, fireworks have filled the air, and state television has repeated over and over the 20-year-old film footage in which a glowering Khomeini returned from exile in France and walked slowly down the stairs of his plane.

For an Islamic system that fears losing the allegiance of young people, one of the main aims is to remind them of the joyous atmosphere of those days, and to convince them that establishment of an Islamic authority deemed to be God’s earthly representative has been worth the sacrifices.

More than half of Iran’s 65 million people are under 25, and thus have no direct memory of the revolution.

While some young people praised the revolution for stamping out immorality, many of those interviewed seemed to take a ho-hum attitude.

Commentators say that young people are more concerned with practical issues, such as finding jobs or being able to afford to get married.

Jalil, a 28-year-old waiting in line for the First Islamic Pop Festival, one of the cultural events surrounding the anniversary, reflected some of the younger generation’s estrangement.

Although he credited it with reviving traditional Iranian music and “deepening” the country’s cinema by putting artistic considerations above commercial ones, on the whole the revolution accomplished little for Iran, said the young man who works for a trade company.

“They closed the whorehouses, but the whorehouses went underground. They closed the bars, so the bars went inside the houses, and people make their own alcohol,” he said. “What was the point?”

Among his friends, many are single, in part because they have been brought up in such a repressed sexual atmosphere that “they are afraid of the other sex,” he said.

Many young people were inspired by the 1997 election of Khatami, a moderate cleric who radiates tolerance and speaks of the importance of dialogue among civilizations. He has done much to relax the social and cultural atmosphere. The pop festival that Jalil was attending, for instance, would have been impossible before Khatami’s election, because singing and rock music were deemed haram, or sinful.

Khatami has pledged to introduce a civil society and ensure the rule of law. One of his first acts was to speak out in favor of privacy. That has put a dent in the petty harassment of young couples on the street or of those who illicitly watch satellite television at home.

To the surprise of many who thought Khatami would be putty in the hands of the hard-liners surrounding Khomeini’s successor, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he appears to be prevailing in the power struggle.

In the latest blow, it appears that Khatami has succeeded in wresting absolute control of the secretive intelligence ministry away from hard-liners after rogue intelligence agents were discovered to have killed four dissidents last year.

The prevailing diplomatic view is that Iran is on its way to becoming a much different country from the brutal and fierce Islamic regime that emerged in the first days after the revolution.

“We think the trend is toward reform, not necessarily at a rapid pace, but we think it is probably unstoppable,” one European envoy said. “It is hard to know how long before you can say that an absolute transition has taken place. It may actually occur by stealth. But every six months you will be able to look back and say that Iran has changed a little more.”

One man who would seem to have reason to be pessimistic about Iran’s direction is newspaper publisher Hamid Reza Jalaiepour, who was sent to prison for one month last fall by a Revolutionary Court and has seen his last two reform-oriented daily newspapers--Jameah and Tous--closed down by conservative mullahs.

But in a meeting, he was bouncing with enthusiasm for what the coming years will bring. Jalaiepour said that in the very near future he and his staff will be coming out with a third newspaper, even more progressive than the two that preceded it. Its name? “Happiness.”

According to the publisher, the revolution’s achievements are “not bad.”

“Why? Because the participation of people in politics is vast and because the revolution generally had been developing toward a pluralistic idea,” he said. “The shah could be a despot. [But] the political system today cannot be despotic, because the social strata and social groups resist. This is the positive outcome of the revolution.”

Asgharzadeh, the onetime hostage-taker, said he does not see any contradiction between people’s aspirations today and those of the original revolutionaries. Their aim is democracy within an Islamic context, he said.

If today there was an election that pitted a monarchist, a Marxist, a secularist, a fundamentalist and an Islamic reformer like Khatami against each other, the Khatami figure would win hands down, he reckoned.

“People want to have reform within the revolution,” Asgharzadeh said. “They don’t want any other revolution.”