In the 14 Centuries since the appearance of Islam, the religion was almost constantly used to buttress and excuse political power (faith, justice and governance being firmly linked together). Yet, while any number of rulers presented themselves as Caliphs to shore up their political power, Islamic clerics never became rulers anywhere in the Muslim world until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
It is in the nature of ideologues in power to corrupt the cause that was used to justify their ascension, and it is in the nature of people who survived an ideological government to despise the great lie afterwards. Aside from some addled Skinheads who seek to shock other people, the Germans have not been attracted to Nazism since picking themselves up out of the rubble of the Reich in 1945. Nor has there been any flirtation with militarism among the Japanese since then either.
The Russians, by contrast, may be the exception that proves the rule. Having failed to come to grips with the murderous legacy of the Soviet Union, they are drifting back to autocracy and corruption. However, these might also be the usual ground conditions of Russian political life: It is hard to think of a time when they weren’t firmly entrenched.
In Iran, the Mullahcracy has tried to generate a state based on Islam with every aspect of life governed by Islamic principles and teachings. What they have managed to do is foul up the economy (despite vast oil wealth) and brew up the usual rancid totalitarian stew of quasi-legalism, mass murder, state-terror, minority repression and threats to the neighbours.
It may also be possible that they are inadvertently setting the stage for something the rest of the world has waited 14 centuries to see – the first Post-Islamic society.
The Iranians are like most of the peoples who converted to Islam; it was forced upon them by coercion. While the Arabs tend to discount any history predating Islam, Iranians remember that they are descended from one of the great civilizations. In the last 14 Centuries, there has been a long tradition of Iranian sneering at boasts of Arab accomplishments in poetry, architecture and other arts and sciences… Iranians know full well who those gifted poets and architects were and where they came from.
Among Iranians, there has often been a tendency towards such secularism as is possible in an Islamic society. Their Islamic past is occasionally speckled with poets singing of great wines and – most unusually for an Islamic society – even some women who are known to history. More recently, some of the most clinical analysis of Islam has come from Iranians. The writer Ibn Warriq is among the foremost with his devastating critique Why I am Not a Muslim.
The growing unhappiness of Iranians with the Mullahs is obvious. The Iranian government is sustained by the mechanisms that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia used including:
- Attempts to have total control over all information sources – Iran is desperately eager to get controls on the internet and the technologies of social media so that it can plug these gaps in the wall of the regime’s defences.
- The creation of a politicized military elite separate from the Armed Forces; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is very much like Himmler’s Waffen SS (although much scruffier) or the Soviet NKVD/KGB security units. The Revolutionary Guard Corps siphons off the best equipment, has created an alternative navy and air force of its own and creates its own special forces.
- The Mullahs created a ‘popular’ militia (the Basij) among the regime’s adherents which is very much like the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany.
The Basij, like so many other groups of this kind, attracts all manner of little people desperate for status and a uniform. This creates a cadre of loyalists who enforce conformity on others and who – human nature being what it is – look for opportunities to line their own pockets while defending the noble characteristics of whatever revolution it was this time.
The Basij may comprise as much as 20% of Iran’s population and is armed. This suggests that many Iranians join for their own advancement, for protective colouration or so that when the regime finally falls, its own guardians may be among the rebels.
Lenin, like many other rulers, was never quite sure he could trust the defence of his capital and his person to his own people. The Latvian Riflemen saved the Soviet regime in its infancy and the Soviet Union made a practice of ensuring that the NKVD/KGB security units in any part of the Soviet Union were made up of nationalities from elsewhere: Thus, Siberian Mongols were ready to thrash Ukrainians who got out of line, while their own people might be watched by Georgians, who had Finno-Urgic security forces at their homes, etc. Some of the ‘public order’ Revolutionary Guard Corps troops outside of Iran’s major cities consist of Yemenis, Lebanese Hizbollah and mercenaries from the Arab World. In the recent turmoil in Syria, the Assad Government also made some use of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to shoot demonstrators.
In Nazi Germany, the SS took over police functions and created a State Security Apparatus, the Order Police with all of the traditional police under its control. The Soviets did the same thing with the NKVD in Stalin’s time, but split the duties up between the KGB and the MVD afterwards – with the MVD handling border security, the prisons and the police, but leaving intelligence and other paramilitary functions to the KGB. In Iran, the Gendarmerie and the National Police Force (plus the notorious SAVAK of the Shah’s time) have all come under the control of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, following the Nazi model exactly.
The net effect of all this is that the Mullahs are firmly in control of Iran and will not be toppled easily… and this may very well result in the undoing of all they believe in.
The disenchantment of young, urban Iranians with the Mullahs is obviously growing and their eventual overthrow of the Mullahs is inevitable. The Mullahs are aging, corrupt and inefficient. The great majority of Iranians are younger than the Revolution and know that they cannot find meaningful work or good careers because of the acute mismanagement of the economy. Despite the frantic interference of their government, they have a good sense of what the rest of the world is really like.
Already more inclined to be cynical about Islam and more inclined to be contemptuous of Arabs, many Iranians find their adherence to the religion is weakening. What does this mean?
In late April 2011, there was a posting on You-Tube of young Iranians burning Qurans during a protest in Tehran. Needless to say, the footage showed no faces. In the Islamic world, people can burn any number of US and Israeli flags, Bibles and Torahs with no repercussions: Burn a Quran and your life is forfeit. This was a strong – and brave – symbol of defiance.
Within a few weeks, there were two more postings on You-Tube. Watching Islamic clerics on television talk shows can be enlightening, although not in the manner they may have intended. Learn about the sexual pleasures awaiting the believers in Paradise, the particulars of how one should beat one’s wives, why Jews and Christians are subhuman apes in need of extermination… this is not a religion to be carelessly ignored. In this one instance, the interview concerned the Iranian cleric’s alarm than many young Iranians are turning to Zoroastrianism.
Zoroastrianism was Persia’s main religion when the Arabs brought the Muslim message of brotherhood and peace at sword point and offered the Persians the choice of death, enslavement or conversion some 1,350 years ago. It is a dualistic religion where light, order, and goodness all stem from one source and must oppose darkness, chaos and evil. All men are held to have a part in this battle and their deeds and conduct have influence on its outcome, so they should conduct themselves accordingly. There was a strong positive message to this religion and it once attracted many adherents, even among the Legions of the Roman Empire.
There is also some You-Tube clips of a gathering of Iranians out in the desert, secretly practicing what they hope are Zoroastrian rituals. In an Islamic society, apostasy is punishable by death, and this is another brave act of resistance.
A chance encounter with an Iranian cab-driver and a conversation with an Iranian concierge about these You-Tube clops revealed more. The concierge had been a bright young student in Iran, and the Mullahs pulled him and others out of the regular schools and put them in a special class which worked very well until it was time for religious instruction. Having been taught to reason and think in the Western manner for physical sciences, when the students applied the same approach to religion, they got slapped down. The concierge drew the appropriate conclusions and now – living in Canada – describes himself as an ex-Muslim.
The taxi-driver was something else again. He smuggles Bibles back to Iran when he visits and mentioned that Christianity is spreading very rapidly, underground, in the educated urban classes of Iran.
This seemed hard to accept until another chance encounter with a young Pentecostal at a gathering of Iranian dissidents. He was the boyfriend of one of the organizers of the gathering, which itself is a telling argument about the spread of a new secularism, since Muslim women can be putting their lives at hazard if they date non-Muslims. Mentioning these facts to this Pentecostal, he informed me that he had been in Iran himself, doing very discrete missionary work and that Christianity was spreading quietly but rapidly there.
It might surprise many of the less religious elements of Western Society to realize that Christianity is the religion of contemporary dissent… but then look at the work the Catholic Church did under John Paul II in kicking the skids out from under the Soviet system. The Chinese government, whose Party connected elites are corrupt and inefficient too, are finding that Christianity is spreading very quickly inside China. The Chinese harassment of the various Christian sects is matched by their persecution of Tibetan Buddhists, the Falun Gong Sect and Uigher Muslims (whose cause seems quite neglected by all the eager Jihadists of the Islamic World) but it is Christianity that is growing the fastest.
The postulation that Iran will become a post-Muslim society is based on impressions, not analysis. Some things in Iran are unlikely to change. Rural populations adopt new ideas very slowly and the Mullahs already derive far more support in rural areas than they do in urban areas. Revolutions are always unpredictable and a complete refutation of Islam is very unlikely.
However, an officially secular Iran that is tolerant of all its minorities is entirely possible once they finish hanging Mullahs from lampposts and standing Revolutionary Guards Corps officers against pockmarked brick walls. People do look to their religious leaders for moral instruction, and the lessons that the Mullahs of Iran have been providing in the last 30 years have no doubt been taught well. When Justice comes, it should be … interesting.
Given the capacity of Christianity for redemption and forgiveness, a wise Mullah might be well advised to turn a blind-eye to their underground activities – it’s always best to ask for clemency from somebody with a tradition of granting it`.
