A riveting political story told with a light touch

CURRENT AFFAIRS: The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge, By Hooman Majd, Allen Lane, 282pp. £20

ON FEBRUARY 1st, 1979, a solemn old man, wearing the ancient turban and cloak of holiness, returned to his country, after 14 years of exile, and changed the political landscape of the region and the world. In its 32-year history – February 11th is the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution – Iran has never been out of the international spotlight.

From hostage taking to nuclear weapons, from the stoning of women to what has been called a “tsunami of execution”– 71 in the first three weeks of 2011 – from support for Middle Eastern terrorists to Holocaust denial, Iran has become emblematic of all that is seen as negative and threatening about Islam.

And yet, in the summer of 2009, the headlines changed and, to the delight of Iranian opposition, the world saw this ancient and complex country in a new light, one that had been obscured not only by the viciousness of the officially sponsored anti-western slogans but also by the unwavering focus of the West on the nuclear issue and the threat Iran may pose to Israel.

Hooman Majd’s second book focuses on this period and illuminates the heady, uplifting and ultimately terrifying days of Iran’s attempt to regain the freedom and democracy that were the starting call of the revolution of 1979.

Majd's first book, Ayatollah Begs to Differ, from 2008, was a witty, insightful and sympathetic account of life and politics in Iran. His new book focuses primarily on the disputed presidential election of 2009 and the rise of the reformist movement, the Greens (so called for religious rather than environmental reasons), headed by Mir Hossein Mousavi, prime minister in the 1980s.

The book uses as its epithet William Morgan Shuster’s 1912 judgment that “Iran’s politics is conducted as a well-staged drama – even an opera bouffe”. Majd, with a long career in the music and film industry and alert to the creative possibilities of the stage, structures the book around dramatic personae, prologues and acts rather than conventional chapters and headings. The effect is a riveting political story told with a light touch for a western audience.

The narrative begins with the dramatic moment when it became obvious that, after a short-lived period of freedom and open debate, the supreme leader and the revolutionary guards are not going to allow the “election” of anyone but their favourite candidate, Mahmood Ahmadinejad.

Millions of people, young and old, poured into the streets asking, “Where is my vote?” Their initially peaceful and good-natured demonstrations soon became one more occasion for bloodshed by a regime bent on retaining power at all costs. Majd captures well the heady atmosphere of those days of hope and optimism, followed by the sheer disbelief that even the founders of the Islamic republic were not immune from the wrath of the ultraconservatives.

In style and content the book has the immediacy of history experienced at the coalface. Majd’s perspective on matters Iranian is unique. He is the son of a diplomat of the former shah’s period, was educated first at an English boarding school and then in the US, where he now lives. But he is also a descendent of a prominent ayatollah, is related to the reformist former president Mohammad Khatami and acted as his translator during his visits to the UN.

Majd’s connections with power players and a permit to work as a journalist in Iran give him the freedom to travel around the country and to interview a variety of officials. Through them we gain access to the latest high-level political gossip, if not facts, for facts are hard to find in this opera bouffe.

Majd intermingles his personal stories, past and present, with the political but ultimately, and somewhat surprisingly, comes to view contemporary Iran from the perspective of the reformist clerics. For him Iran, despite its long pre-Islamic history, is first and foremost a Shia country, where Islam provides a framework of core values.

The western media got it wrong in talking about a Green revolution, he tells us repeatedly: there was no revolution, only a fundamentally peaceful attempt to realise the promise of the ayatollahs’ democracy. The Green movement is primarily a civil-rights movement, the first of its kind in Iran, similar in its aspirations to Martin Luther King’s. Crucially, Islamic democracy, where religion is centrally located in the public domain, rather than western secular governance, is the form of democracy best suited to Iran.

Not surprisingly, Hooman Majd’s is not a popular voice among the secular opposition inside and outside Iran. Yet his intimate and numerous connections in the country give him an important voice in debates happening outside. But despite his proximity to the centres of power, or maybe because of it, his books seem to be blind to some of the deepest fault lines in the Islamic republic.

Most significantly, what is left out of Majd’s account of democracy ayatollah style is the plight of women, the victims of untold discrimination and suffering, and their reaction to it. The Islamic regime has deprived women of some of their most fundamental rights – in marriage, inheritance, family law, dress code, legal entitlements and more – freedoms that they had come to take for granted under the previous regime. And yet the very same women have managed to mount one of the most innovative and creative campaigns of civil resistance anywhere in the world. By seeing reformist clerics and their allies as the first civil-rights movement in Iran, Majd, like the ayatollahs, manages to write women out of Iran’s history and hence does a great injustice to the realities of Iranian society. In his earlier book Majd had described the Islamic revolution as a revolution of shabby men in plastic slippers. What I missed most from this book is a discussion of the role of brave women activists pushing against the stifling forces of religious oppression.

Maria Baghramian is associate professor of philosophy at University College Dublin, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. She was born and grew up in Iran