Iran’s mullahs versus the forces for change
The cities of Iran were quiet this week and the passionate demonstrations seemed over for now, to the government’s relief. On social media the hashtag # WhereIsShe? remained popular and still unanswered. It refers to a woman who staged her own protest, and inspired others, when she mounted a pillar in Tehran, took off her white hijab and waved it on a stick like a banner.
This gesture, defying Iranian law that female hair must be covered in public, was recorded on tape and went viral in several countries. It happened on Dec. 27 but so far the heroine’s name remains unknown. Instead, her admirers have affectionately called her the Girl of Enghelab Street. She was taken away by police and has been not seen since. Amnesty has demanded her immediate release.
She was apparently protesting the powerful mullahs and their officious habit of determining all the rules of life in Iran. Her bravery made her the face of a spontaneous movement but the movement was not necessarily anti- religion. It was, so far as journalists could tell, secular. The demonstrators were deeply angry about the inept management of their country.
Many Iranians, one journalist reported, believe that when the shah’s regime was overturned in 1979, the mullahs took over a fairly prosperous country and turned it into a poorhouse. Hunger is widespread, many lives are lived in slums and the government’s reckless policies are to blame. The vast fortunes that were unfrozen by the lifting of sanctions in the 2015 nuclear agreement did nothing to improve living conditions.
Much of the revolutionary generation has died off and it seems likely few people can remember why the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was widely hated. One protester summarized the views of his young contemporaries in a public statement: “We want reform, not revolution, so the people don’t suffer anymore. We don’t want to bring in leaders from outside of Iran and give them power as happened in 1979. We just want reform to stop all this misery.”
In Iran, the demonstrations produced no notable internal changes, but Iran’s international position was affected. When the protests broke out, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sent his best wishes to Iranians in “their noble quest for freedom.” In Saudi Arabia, state- run media expressed similar feelings. Israel and Saudi Arabia have no peace treaty but to Iranian leaders they are now obvious partners. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani (he has become a moderate without doing anything in moderation) said Iran won’t resume ties with Saudi Arabia until it ends its friendship with Israel. On the other hand, the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement may lead to improved Israeli relations with other Arab states that see Iran as their shared problem.
Iran has developed into a regional power, having already helped the Assad regime to survive in Syria while boosting the status of Hezbollah in Lebanon — and that was when many government actions were constrained by sanctions. Lieutenant- General Gadi Eizenkot, Israel’s army chief of staff, has talked about co- operating with Saudi Arabia against Iran, in his view the “biggest threat” in the Middle East. Israel, he said, is willing as well to exchange experiences with other moderate Arab countries.
Guy Millière, a University of Paris expert on the Middle East, recently wrote that “Leaders of Western Europe know exactly what the mullahs’ regime is, and what its goals and activities are. They know it is the world’s main sponsor of Islamic terrorism.” EU countries deal with Iran and hope their deals continue to be profitable. Which, as Millière sees it, made the European Union’s chief diplomat a hypocrite when he greeted the news of unrest in Iran with his pious hope that all parties should “abstain from violence,” as if there were a moral equivalence between unarmed protesters and armed police.
The mullahs have been satisfied, all these years, because they have brought a theological purity into Iran. It has become more Shiite every year, even though it must exist in a region where Sunni Muslims hold a sizable majority. On these points the mullahs built a legitimacy. But the Iranian young are showing signs of a greater interest in secular matters while neighbouring countries slowly gather themselves into an anti- Iran coalition. Perhaps the mullahs will have to rethink their opposition to change.