Change in Iran can only come from within

The Islamic Republic of Iran on Monday celebrates the 40th anniversary of the revolution that brought it into being. It is unlikely that the rest of the world will celebrate in quite the same way. But, like it or not, the events of 1979 represent what the French scholar of Iran, Bernard Hourcade, in a recent commentary for the online magazine Orient XXI, correctly called a “profound rupture” for Iran, the Islamic world and the international community as a whole.

No revolution succeeds without an ideology. Equally, no revolution succeeds without luck. Would the October Revolution in Russia have happened the way it did if Vladimir Lenin, newly returned from Switzerland, had been detained at a checkpoint earlier that year instead of being waved through in disguise by careless police? Would Ruhollah Khomeini have been able to establish his theocracy if the shah had not had cancer, or had the powerful leftist and secular forces in the country not been forced into alignment with the Islamists by the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and the US hostage crisis? Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one of the key sources of support for the Islamic Republic and its continuing revolution and now perhaps the most powerful single force inside the country. The logic of Wilayat Al-Faqih always removed ultimate accountability from the debating floor of a parliament to the hidden realm of metaphysics. And now those who have most enthusiastically supported this doctrine and sought, with some success, to export it to Iran’s neighbors claim the right to influence its exercise.

This does not seem to have made Iranians as a whole committed theocrats. Hard data for this is not easy to collect, though some scholars have done impressive work.

But the evidence of recurrent popular unrest across the country, the continuing savage repression by the authorities of dissent, evidence of patchy religious observance and reports of widespread anticlerical sentiment all suggest that Iran has preserved a varied and dynamic political culture and that many — if not most — Iranians would prefer not to be ruled by obscurantist and self-serving mullahs and their praetorian security forces, if only they had a choice in the matter.

This doesn’t mean the Islamic Republic is going to disappear any time soon. It has significant support from those who have benefited from its patronage. And it is unlikely that Iranians want another violent revolution: Hardly anyone ever does.

But it does mean that the regime has almost certainly failed to persuade a majority of Iranians that rule by Shiite clerics produces anything remotely resembling the rule of the just. That is a failure not just for them but for all Islamists everywhere. The Iranian Revolution was the first and, in many ways, still the most startling success for political Islamism, which makes claims to singular legitimacy and authenticity.

The experience of the last 40 years in Iran has shown that, while Islamists — with a large helping of luck — can capture a state, they are incompetent, corrupt, harsh and oppressive when they try to manage one. That is a lesson the brutal failure of Daesh also illustrates. But Iran, precisely because it is a complex and sophisticated state rather than a ramshackle and besieged imaginary caliphate, is the more potent case.

The rule of Daesh can certainly be destroyed by military force, but its ideology cannot. In the case of Iran, the only military option is containment. And we need our own hard-headed clarity, patience and resolve to deal with the ideological challenge.

A recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine on INSTEX, the new EU Special Purpose Vehicle to protect trade from US sanctions, quotes (with apparent approval)