Arjomand The Rise and Fall of President Khatami and The Reform Movement in Iran

Constellations Volume 12, No 4, 2005. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
The Rise and Fall of President Kh1tami and the
Reform Movement in Iran
Sad Amir Arjomand
We the protesting Representatives have had a share and role in the Revolution
and have struggled for its victory and consolidation in various arenas, have
learned the lessons of honor, truth-telling, piety, and freedom in the school of
Imam Khomeini (Gods mercy be upon him), and consider his way and Tradition
(sonnat) the path to the salvation and high standing of the Islamic Republic of
Iran. So begins, after a perfunctory quotation from Ali b. Abi-Talib in Arabic,
the last letter of protest of February 17, 2004, from the 131 Representatives of the
Sixth Majles, who had gone on strike in January after the Council of Guardians
had disqualified 80 of them for running again in the impending elections for the
Seventh Majles. The reformists presented themselves as spokespersons for the
forces loyal to the Revolution and democracy (mardom-s1l1ri), and complained
that the forces faithful (momen) to the Revolution and the regime had no
option but to retreat from political involvement. There was a reference to the
rumor of the Supreme Leaders complicity in their disqualification, and oblique
questioning of his authority to issue this particular governmental order (hokm
hokumati),
1
but the clarity (shaffafiyyat) advocated with such electrifying
effect by President Kh1tami and his reformist followers seven years earlier was
totally absent. The reformists ended their letter with an admonition in the manner
of the councilors to old kings: We are very worried about the future when our
regime, with the nostalgia of its immense lost popular support, would be forced to
submit to the open and hidden onslaught of foreigners. I shall treat this letter as
the epitaph of the reform movement that began in 1997 and caused a tremendous
burst of enthusiasm in Iran and throughout the world.
Trapped in Their Own Rhetoric and Abandoned
The revolutionary rhetoric of the reformists and their profession of faith to the
line of the late Imam fell absolutely flat, except on the ears of the hard-liners
who resented this futile attempt to appropriate the revolutionary heritage they
considered theirs, and hastily closed two reformist newspapers for publishing it.
In truth, this was on overreaction on their part. Anyone who still cared for the
revolutionary rhetoric would infinitely prefer to hear it from the mouth of Kho-
meinis true heir and successor. And the word was to come without delay.
The Rise and Fall of Reform in Iran: Sad Amir Arjomand 503
2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
When casting his vote on February 20, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Kh1manei said
that he considered these elections particularly important since you can see how
those who fight the Islamic Revolution and Iran, are trying to prevent the
people from going to the polling booths.
2
After the withdrawal in protest of a
further 1179 candidates and the foregone victory of his hard-line followers in
the elections that left at least eight persons dead in two reported clashes, he
obliquely retorted to the reformists admonition by saying that the losers were
the United States, Zionism, and the enemies of the Iranian nation.
3
The
reformists were thus hoist with their own petard. After four years of insults and
humiliation, witnessing assassinations, near-assassinations, and imprisonment
of their colleagues, they were still pathetically trapped in the net of their
bombastic revolutionary discourse.
The reformist strike had begun in January 2004 by the members of the Majles,
who had been surprised by the rejection of their candidacy by the Council of
Guardians despite their impeccable revolutionary credentials. In the last week of
January the Majles passed a bill to solve the election crisis,
4
which was
promptly rejected by the Council of Guardians. Interior Minister Musavi-L1ri
announced that he was not willing to hold the elections on schedule under the
circumstances. The high point of the protest came in the first days of February,
after the Council of Guardians, while restoring just under a third of some 3600
(out of a total of 8200) candidates it had originally rejected, not only refused to
reinstate the 80 striking reformists but instead barred seven more of them. 123 of
125 reformist Representatives handed in their resignations. Meanwhile, 12 minis-
ters and some 28 governors and deputy-ministers, representing the lay, techno-
cratic second stratum of the Islamic Republic, were also said to have submitted
their resignations in sympathy. The main students organization, the Office for
Consolidation of Unity (daftar-e tahkim-e vahdat), by contrast, kept its distance
because the students had been badly let down by the President and the reformists
during their prolonged sporadic protests through the summer of 2003, and only
one group of students, in typical disarray and lack of coordination, decided to
support the striking Majles reformists at the last minute on February 3. But that
was too little and too late. On February 11, in the speech marking the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, President Kh1tami let down his Interior
Ministry and Cabinet and capitulated to the Leader, confirming that the elections
would take place on schedule. This was yet another instance of the Presidents
caving in rather than standing firm and provoking a constitutional crisis which
might have been resolved by some concession to the reformers, or by the dis-
missal and jailing of the President and the Interior Minister. Musavi L1ri went
along with the elections, and nothing further was heard of the resignation of the
cabinet ministers and provincial governors. Only one representatives resignation
was accepted, that of Ms. Fatema Haqiqatju; the rest were said to require case by
case hearing and vote by the Majles. The rest of the reformists thus continue to
receive their paychecks from the Majles.
504 Constellations Volume 12, Number 4, 2005
If Marx and Weber could come out of their graves they would surely have
hurled their contemptuous term petty bourgeois (Spieburger) at our uncouth
reformist friends in their tieless white shirts and inelegant suits, with their shoes
piled up in the corner of the carpet for an extra cozy sit-in.
5
President Kh1tami, in
contrast, away from the medley in his elegant clerical attire, cut a truly tragic fig-
ure. Mohsen Kadivar, the reformist cleric who had been jailed for over a year for
writing an erudite refutation of Khomeinis theory of the Mandate of the Jurist
(vel1yat-e faqih), called upon him to resign rather than accept an unfair election.
More poignantly, in a letter urging the striking parliamentarians to push for a new
constitution, the jailed reformist, H1shem Agh1-Jari, had aptly referred to the
Tragedy of Kh1tami.
6
The stuff of the tragedy is of course the destruction of the smiling Sayyed
(sayyed-e khand1n), who had been elected President in 1997 and 2001, by the
ruthless Ayatollah who has been selected by his clerical colleagues as Khomeinis
successor as the Supreme Leader (rahbar). This destruction was already complete
in 2000, before Kh1tamis second landslide victory in June 2001.
7
I would place
it in the spring and summer of 2000 and at the time of the astonishing defeat of
the pro-clerical candidates in the national elections of the Sixth Majles. It came in
the Supreme Leaders several deadly embraces after the almost successful assas-
sination of the Presidents most important reformist aide, the clampdown on the
pro-President reformist press, and the slap on the face of the newly elected
reformist Majles. With each embrace came Kh1maneis affirmation that
Kh1tami is one of us; the latter did not have the courage to push him away and
say he was not one of them. From then on, Kh1manei knew he could do anything
he wanted with the smiling Sayyed. Kh1tami was a defeated man. His maudlin
speech for Nawruz (New Year) 1380/March 2001, read by many as expressing
his intention to quit, surely reflected his sense that he did not have the strength to
stand up to the Supreme Leader and the price of clinging to presidential power
would be capitulation and further humiliation.
Constitutional Politics of the Islamic Republic: The Revolutionary Power
Struggle
In what follows, I will attempt to put the rise and fall of Kh1tami and the reform
movement in a twin conceptual frame that links what I have been calling consti-
tutional politics to the sociology of revolution and post-revolutionary institution-
building. Let me first say a few words about each of these terms. Constitutional
politics is different from and superimposed upon the routine politics of give and
take, of horse-trading, stealing, and being robbed. It is a struggle for the definition
of order. Constitutional politics should not be confused with constitutionalism or
democracy. The political struggle for the constitution of order takes place among
groups and organizations aligned behind different principles of order by their
material and ideal interests.
8
These principles of order are heterogeneous and
potentially contradictory. In the process of constitutional politics, the contending
groups and organizations are forced to reconcile the respective logics of these
principles through compromise, concession, and reinterpretation. Some principles
of order are clustered into ideologies, and may be incorporated into written
constitutions. The principles of order amalgamated in fundamental laws set the
parameters of constitutional politics. Constitutions can become the subject of
intense public debate at the time of their promulgation or subsequent crises, and
thus create a frame of reference for a variety of political groups and thereby struc-
ture politics in ways that transcend their texts or legal effect.
To anticipate the argument that follows, the contradictions among the hetero-
geneous principles of the Constitution of 1979 namely, theocratic government,
the rule of law, and participatory representative government can exhaustively
account for the confrontation between the Supreme Leader, or clerical monarch,
and the President. The Leader stood for the first principle; aligned behind him
were the conservative clerics who came to power as a result of the Islamic revolu-
tion and are in control of the revolution-generated system of collective rule by
clerical councils, foundations (bony1ds), and foundation-supported unofficial
groups, including the thuggish Helpers of the Party of God (ans1r hizb all1h), the
judiciary, and the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and its Mobilization
Corps. The President stood for the last two principles, which were fused together
in his new political discourse of the rule of law, democratic participation, and
civil society; behind him were the technocrats for reconstruction, the reformist
and excluded clerics, and the disenfranchised middle classes, whom I will not be
able to cover directly.
As for the sociology of revolution, the greatest change introduced by the
Islamic revolution in Iran was the institution of theocratic government on the
basis of the velay1t-e faqih, or the mandate of the religious jurist to rule. This
novel idea clashed with the traditional system of clerical authority based on the
marjaiyyat-e taqlid, or the authority of the so-called sources of imitation. The
institutionalization of clerical rule was a difficult process and created a three-way
contradiction among three principles of legitimate authority namely, the consti-
tutional authority of the legislature, the new Sharia-based constitutional author-
ity of the supreme jurist vali-ye faqih, and the old Sharia-based authority of the
highest rank of mojtaheds the mar1je-e taqlid or sources of emulation. The
mechanism devised by the constitution-makers of 1979 for overcoming the first
set of contradictions was the inclusion of six clerical jurists in the Council of
Guardians to veto any item of legislation passed by the Majles which was incon-
sistent with the Sharia. The Council thus incorporated the 1907 idea of a com-
mittee of mojtaheds into the model of a Conseil Constitutionnel adopted in
Bazargans draft constitution from the 1958 Constitution of the French Fifth
Republic. Khomeini himself intervened in the constitutional crisis that resulted
from the clashes between the Majles and the Council of Guardians, and his solu-
tion, which was duly incorporated into the constitutional amendments of 1989,
consisted in incorporating the long-rejected Sunni principle of maslahat or public
interest into Shiism, and establishing the Maslahat Council. The Council was
originally to arbitrate between the Council of Guardians and the Majles, but has
since taken on the task of expanding legislation beyond matters specifically
vetoed by the jurists of the Council of Guardians, and of setting up the general
policies of the state as the advisory arm of the Leader (Supreme Jurist). The solu-
tion proposed by the former head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad
Yazdi, in the early 1990s for the second set of contradictions was to force the
recognition of the Supreme Jurist as the sole marja. It failed, as did the attempt
to restrict the number of mar1ji to seven through semi-official designation by the
Association of the Modarresin (professors) of Qom. Nevertheless, the clerical
elite has ruled Iran for over two decades through a number of key councils, by
controlling the judiciary and the Ministry of Intelligence, and by using a subservient
bureaucratic-technocratic second stratum without sharing any significant power
with it.
Now, my account highlights two features of the Iranian political situation
which may not be immediately evident. First, what I called clerical conciliar rule
would appear as the typical form of collective government that emerges during
the period of succession to the charismatic leader of a revolution and is gradually
consolidated. But the clash of clerical conciliarism with the democratization
espoused by the reform movement has also set in motion a non-institutional pro-
cess of accumulation of power by the Supreme Leader. The result has been the
recent consolidation of a system of personal rule that is increasingly, and perhaps
misleadingly, referred to as clerical monarchy. The Islamic Revolution thus
established a hybrid political regime, with an elected parliament and president
subordinated to clerical authority a theocratic republic. As time went by,
contrary to what one might expect, clerical authority enhanced its control over the
state. After the death of Khomeini, the charismatic leader, the government of the
Islamic Republic can be characterized as a system of collective rule by clerical
assemblies or councils.
9
The country is divided into a small clerical elite of reli-
gious jurists (mojtaheds), which maintains its power through the system of
conciliar rule and is supported by a second stratum of lay civil servants in
control of the administration, and a huge lay population which has no share of
political power but votes once a year for the president, the Majles, or the local and
municipal councils that confront and are often effectively neutralized by the
structures of clerical domination. It should also be pointed out that a sizeable pro-
portion of the second stratum come from clerical families.
10
Having an uncle who
is or was a cleric helps enormously with becoming Deputy Minister of Foreign
Affairs or Industry.
Second, the rift between the establishment clerics and the reformists can
be seen as a delayed but typical pattern of revolutionary power struggle. This
struggle is greatly complicated by the fact that the two-decade delay has caused a
great (180-degree) ideological shift in the position of the radicals. Some observers
wondered why Saturn did not devour his children in the case of the Iranian
revolution, apart from the Mojahedin-e Khalq. The power struggle whose last round
we have just witnessed may well be the result of Saturns unsatisfied appetite. What
stands out in this analysis is that the reformists are very much the children of the
revolution, as are the so-called religious-nationalist (melli-madhhabi) followers
of Bazargan, Khomeinis revolutionary partner and the first prime minister of the
Islamic Republic.
11
It is also instructive to compare the relation between the reform movement and
the revolution in the Soviet Union less than a decade earlier. The reform move-
ment under Gorbachev began with an opening (glasnost) and restructuring
(perestroika) that led to the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union.
12
The opening
of the Iranian reform movement was as impressive, if not more so, but the impe-
tus to restructuring was extremely weak. The reform movement consequently
failed to restructure the regime, as it intended, or unintentionally to produce
regime change, and the price of failure was its demise as a political force.
Political Reform and the Non-ideological Reading of Islam
Iranian glasnost came as a radical break with the totalitarian ideology of the
Islamic Revolution. From a sociological point of view, Kh1tamis 1997 electoral
campaign was the political edge of a deep cultural movement for the Shiite refor-
mation that was well under way in the 1990s. This movement for the reform of
Islam, too, was a product of the children of the revolution. Its leading figure since
the early 1990s, Abdolkarim Sorush, is a philosopher of science who had been a
member of the Commission for Cultural Revolution set up by Khomeini after the
closure of the universities in 1980, and its most forceful theorist, Mohammad
Mojtahed-Shabestari, a cleric who was elected to the first Majles after the revolu-
tion. Mohsen Kadivar was a student of electrical engineering who went to the
seminaries of Qom as an enthusiastic Islamic revolutionary, and Kh1tami himself
had served as the revolutionary Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. What
these clerical reformists shared with the lay intellectual, Sorush, was a keen inter-
est in philosophy and rational theology, which they have used as a tool for the
reconstruction of religious thought.
13
Nevertheless, Kh1tamis landslide victory was an unexpected and historically
unprecedented event, and was instantly referred to as the epic of 2 Khord1d (23
May), the historic national event of 2 Khord1d, a date later chosen by the
coalition of his supporters as their designation. It reopened the question of the
fundamental principles of order in the Islamic Republic for the first time since
1979. His platform of civil society and the rule of law (hokumat-e q1nun)
evoked an implicit contrast with hokumat-e esl1mi (Islamic government), the
slogan of the revolution.
14
Ataoll1h Moh1jer1ni, his first reformist Minister of
Culture and Islamic Guidance, removed many of the restrictions on the press, and
a popular pro-Kh1tami press immediately flourished. Before long, a number of
these newspapers were closed down by the clerical judges seriatim, while their
editorial staffs were given licenses by the Ministry of Culture to start new ones.
This press spread Kh1tamis new political discourse and neologisms such as
civil society (j1mea-ye madani), legality (q1nun-mandi), and citizens
(shahrvand1n) used in his inaugural speech.
15
To these were soon added others:
pluralism (plur1lizm, takkathur-gar1i) as opposed to monopolism, law-ori-
entedness (q1nun-ger1i), and finally reading (qer1at) [of Islam].
Kh1tami showed firm determination in promoting the most basic aspect of the
rule of law. Political murders committed by the secret services of the Islamic
Republic constitute a blatant breach of the rule of law. In January 1999, Kh1tami
insisted on the arrest of a number of officials in the Ministry of Information (read
Intelligence), including a Deputy Minister, Said Em1mi (alias Esl1mi), for a
chain of murders of writers and liberal politicians. Some of the conservative
Ayatollahs were reliably said to have issued fatv1s (injunctions) justifying the
killings. The reformist Ayatollah Musavi Arbadili declared any such fatv1s
invalid. Hojjat al-Esl1m Mohsen Kadivar, a younger but prominent reformist
cleric who had written a direct and detailed refutation of Khomeinis theory of
theocratic government, delivered a speech in Isfahan in which he declared terror-
ism forbidden by the Sacred Law. Kadivar was arrested at the end of February
1999, and his trial by the Special Court for Clerics became a cause clbre. The
national press and student associations protested that the Court was unconstitu-
tional, and that it was in contravention of the international human rights instru-
ments signed by the government that disallow special courts for special classes of
persons. The head of the judiciary defended the legitimacy of the Special Court
for Clerics on grounds of its approval by the late Imam Khomeini as Supreme
Jurist, and its jurisdiction with reference to Articles 110 and 112 of the Constitution,
pertaining to Leadership. Disregarding the widespread public protest and Kadivars
elaborate defense, the Special Court for Clerics sentenced him to 18 months in
prison in April 1999.
The spring of 1999 marked the height of Kh1tamis success in implementing
his program of rule of law and democratization. In April 1999, he announced that
the first step in political development is participation, and the most evident chan-
nel for participation is the election of the Councils. The Councils were the local
and municipal councils provided for in the Constitution of 1979, but never
elected. Over half a million candidates competed for seats in 35,000 village and
over 900 municipal councils. Some four-fifths of the popular vote (65 percent
turnout) was reported cast for supporters of Kh1tamis reform movement, who
won the great majority of the seats. On the second anniversary of his Presidential
victory, Kh1tami addressed a gathering of some 107,000 elected members of the
village and town councils in Tehran, again emphasizing the importance of polit-
ical development and the need to struggle for the consolidation of Islamic demo-
cracy and popular government (mardom-s1l1ri). He noted that sacred terms such
as revolution, freedom, Islam, and Leadership are not the monopoly of
any group. The Leader was pointedly absent, and his message was read by the
director of this bureau.
16
The summer of 1999 was less glorious. On July 5, shortly after Em1mi/Esl1mi
was said to have committed suicide in prison, the reformist newspaper, Sal1m,
published a secret letter written by him with an outline of the restrictive press law
with provisions for clerical censorship which was under discussion in the Majles.
The Special Court for Clerics immediately banned Sal1m, presumably giving
itself jurisdiction to do so because the newspapers editor was a cleric. Student
riots in the University of Tehran broke out in protest against the closure of Sal1m
on July 8 and spread to other Iranian universities. The Revolutionary Guards
intervened, alongside the regular police and the hooligans of the Helpers of the
Party of God, causing a few deaths, many casualties, and hundreds of arrests.
The student riots of July 1999 marked a high point in questioning the principle
of Leadership or theocratic government. The protesters slogans, for the first
time, included Kh1menei must go! But they were also the first sign of discon-
nect between the reformist President and the younger generation who had voted
for him. A similar disconnection had become evident by Kh1tamis failure to
appoint a female minister. Emboldened by the suppression of the student riots,
the hardliners proceeded with the closure of the reformist newspaper, Khord 1d,
and trial of its editor, former Interior Minister Abdoll1h Nuri. The trial of Nuri in
November 1999 by the notorious Special Court for Clerics was remarkable in
many ways. There was hardly any legal argument in the charges, whose nature
was crudely political. The trial also provided the occasion for the widespread
questioning of the legality of the Special Court for Clerics as well as the legiti-
macy of theocratic rule and Leadership. The all-clerical jury turned in its verdict
before receiving Nuris final written defense, and he was sentenced to five years
in prison.
Kh1tamis supporters in the reform movement were organized by Said
Hajj1ri1n, Vice President of Tehrans newly elected municipal council, and by the
Presidents younger brother by 16 years, Mohammad-Reza Kh1tami, into the
Participation (Mosh1rekat) Front for the parliamentary elections of February
2000, and won by a landslide, with 69 percent of the electorate turning out, and
dealt the clericalist groups a crushing defeat. They won a solid majority in the
first round against the 17 other political groups that had competed for Majles
seats. But the reaction of the Supreme Leader and the clerical establishment was
swift and determined. Hajj1ri1n, the chief architect of the stunning reformist
victory, was almost fatally shot in the head in front of the municipal council
building in March 2000 just before the Nawruz, and the new Majles was in for its
rudest awakening as soon as its doors were opened.
In fact, signs of trouble multiplied before the new Majles was convened. In
April 2000, the Council of Guardians postponed the second round of Majles elec-
tions, annulled a number of elections won by reformists, and asserted its superior-
ity over the Majles by virtue of its appointment by the Leader. The Maslahat
Council successfully preempted any Majles investigations into the breaches of the
law by depriving it of the right to investigate not only the Special Court for Clerics,
but also any other organization under the control of the Leadership, including the
armed forces and national radio and television. The reformist Majles, when it
eventually convened, was too docile to challenge this arrogation by the Maslahat
Council. By May 2000, all but one or two of the reformist newspapers were
closed down, and a number of leading journalists arrested and imprisoned. On
August 6, 2000, the Leader told the Majles to stop its deliberations on the new
press law, and clerical judges were emboldened to close down the last important
reformist paper, Bah1r, and arrest more journalists.
The reformist Majles lost the first and best (and probably the only) chance it
had for confronting the Leader, who had clearly stepped beyond his ample consti-
tutional jurisdiction by telling parliament to shut up, to stand up as the legislative
power against the judiciary. It was too timid to challenge the authority of the
Leader and took the slap in the face without any vigorous reaction. Furthermore,
the grave mistake of electing a cleric, Mehdi Karrubi, as Majles Speaker became
evident when he confirmed the authority of the Leader, as the vali-ye faqih, to
issue a governmental order (hokm-e hokumati) to the Majles, and defended it as
the constitutional exercise of the Absolute Mandate of the Jurist. Two days later,
Karrubi reaffirmed the value of this prerogative by pointing out that another
governmental order had solved the problem of recounting the votes in the
second round of elections in Tehran.
17
In retrospect, this was the Majles second
and last chance to challenge the surreptitiously expanding system of conciliar
clerical ruler under Leadership by provoking a major constitutional crisis. It did
not rise up to the admittedly daunting challenge, and was doomed to further
humiliation.
The Supreme Leader led the continuous assault with the use of the clerically
controlled judiciary, using a group of former Ministry of Intelligence investiga-
tors who had been appointed judges toward the end of Yazdis long tenure as the
head of the judiciary. These judges now began harassing the Majles deputies, as
they had done with journalists, by summoning them to courts for expressing their
critical opinions in parliament. The closure of the press continued beyond the dai-
lies, and on the eve of Nawruz 1380/2001, the most important of the remaining
reformist magazines and monthlies were closed down. The political abuse of
courts to harass and sentence a number of reformist Majles deputies continued
unabated.
18
It was only in October 2001 (and not in August 2000) that President Kh1tami
joined the fray of constitutional politics as the protector of the constitution
according to its Article 113, and warned the head of the judiciary in a letter
against the constitutional violation of the parliamentary immunity of several
Majles deputies convicted by the politicized courts. But this warning was ignored
and the political abuse of clerically-controlled judicial power against legislators
continued. Some 60 reformist legislators were summoned to court in the ensuing
months, and four were sentenced. Representative Loqm1nni1 began serving his
sentence in January 2002, but was pardoned by the Supreme Leader after a few
days when his reformist colleagues walked out of the Majles in protest.
Kh1tami took the next few months to prepare for one final confrontation, and
made his last important speech on the first anniversary of his reelection and
the fifth year of his administration on August 28, 2002. He renewed his vow to
the nation and affirmed that he was not only the head of the executive, but also
the authority responsible for upholding the Constitution. He reaffirmed that
religious democracy (mardom-s1l1ri-ye dini) and rights of the people were not
empty slogans and that he was determined to realize the model of religious demo-
cracy proposed to the world by the Islamic revolution.
19
This speech, followed by
the introduction of two pieces of legislation to be discussed in the next section,
finally provoked the constitutional crisis prefigured in the combination of the
heterogeneous principles of theocracy and democracy in the Constitution of the
Islamic Republic.
While the Presidents resignation and a national referendum were being
discussed by the reformists as ways to overcome the predictable recalcitrance of
the Council of Guardians and the Maslahat Council, Rahim Safavi, Commander
of the Revolutionary Guards, announced his readiness to unleash revolutionary
violence against the reform movement.
20
Meanwhile, the political abuse of
clerically controlled judiciary power had become more blatant. A number of
reformists outside the Majles were arrested in the fall of 2002, and on November
6, one university lecturer, H1shem Agh1jari, was sentenced to death for his anti-
clerical remarks which the judge considered as insults to the Prophet. The
students joined the constitutional struggle with protests against judicial abuse.
21
Unrest continued into December, resulted in numerous arrests, and even a hard-
line judicial spokesman resigned in protest against the gross miscarriage of justice
in the Agh1jari case.
22
At this point, Agh1jari introduced a radically novel oppositional tactic into the
constitutional politics of the Islamic Republic. Sensing the futility of the Presi-
dent as the leader of the uncoordinated opposition within and outside parliament,
Agh1jari refused to ask for the pardon hinted by the Supreme Leader and
demanded instead that the unjust death sentence be carried out. His example was
followed by the religious-nationalist dissident leader, Ezzatoll1h Sah1bi, who
wrote an open letter to the heads of the three powers asking that he be executed
rather than subjected to continued harassment after his release from jail.
23
The loss of the only serious constitutional struggle Kh1tami and the reformists
had mounted against the Supreme Leader evidently led to widespread disaffection
that manifested itself in the elections of the local and municipal councils in
February 2003. The turnout outside of the major cities was not low (about 50 per-
cent for all of Iran), partly because the Ministry of the Interior had stood its
ground and the candidates were not vetted by the Council of Guardians, and quite
a few reformists seem to have been elected in smaller places. But the drop in
participation in the big cities was sharp, and with less than a third of voters turn-
ing out (the official breakdown of Tehran vote has apparently never been made
public) the municipal council of Tehran went entirely to the pro-Kh1manei hard-
liners, with Mahmud Ahmadinezh1d being elected Mayor. As several people told
a researcher, what can we expect from local councilors, when even the President
of the country is stymied from pursuing his agenda?
24
It cannot be said that the
reformists have looked after the Councils. In fact, in their typical inattention and
disarray, the reformist Majles passed the 2003 Tax Amalgamation Law, which
removed what little financial autonomy the Councils had. The same general
disaffection with Kh1tami was evident in the widespread and continuous student
protests and youth unrest in a large number of cities through the summer of 2003.
The Majles reformists, to their great discredit, disowned the students.
This brief survey should suffice to show that the major problem of the political
wing of the reform movement as the true children of the Islamic Revolution of
1979 and its undoing was a double disconnect: a disconnect between the President
and the reformist members of the Majles at the organizational level, and a discon-
nect of both Kh1tami and the reform movement from the people in general, and
from the new generation, and the university students in particular. Nor was the
reform movement able to build any bridges connecting to the urban poor. This
double disconnect was the other side of the entrapment of the reformist children
of the revolution as insiders (khodi) in the revolutionary discourse reflected in
their final letter I began with. The empty slogans they clung to for salvation in
their last moment of desperation were in fact the millstones that drowned them.
The Council of Guardians versus the Majles
More institutionalized struggles were taking place between the Majles and the
Council of Guardians, on the one hand, and between the judiciary and the press
and the Majles, on the other. The paradox of Kh1tamis rule of law became evi-
dent when he and his supporters were seen powerless to either make laws or
enfore them. Their law-making power was blocked by the Council of Guardians,
and law enforcement by the clerically-controlled judiciary was unabashedly polit-
icized by Kh1maneis hardliners and turned viciously against them. The Consti-
tution gave the Majles very little to use against the Council of Guardians and
absolutely nothing against the Maslahat Council. In 2001, the Majles had tried to
use its power of confirmation of the lay members of the Council of Guardians
proposed by the head of the judiciary. On August 8, 2001, however, with the
backing of the Supreme Leader, the Maslahat Council ruled that if the judiciarys
nominees failed to obtain confirmation in the Majles in the first round, those with
the highest plurality of votes in the second round would be appointed to the
Council of Guardians. The rejected candidates were confirmed retroactively on a
plurality of votes, with many of the reformist deputies turning blank votes in pro-
test; one candidate was considered confirmed with only two votes out of 290.
Two years later, in November 2003, the head of the judiciary proposed two other
candidates, including a notorious mobster of the Helpers of the Party of God, who
were rejected by the Majles for failing to obtain a majority. (Majles Speaker
Karrubi explained that the Supreme Leader had changed his mind on the subject.)
The Council of Guardians did not insist on its newly acquired constitutional
prerogative. As we shall see presently, it had chosen a different battlefield.
Whatever the intention of its architects, it can be stated categorically that the
Council of Guardians has made no contribution to institution-building in the
Islamic Republic of Iran. I would argue that the main reason for this failure is the
absence of a written jurisprudence remotely comparable to that of other constitu-
tional courts (or the Supreme Court in the US), and the increasing politicization
of judicial review, which preceded the politicization of the judiciary and the use
of courts as an instrument of political repression. An incidental feature of its
French model, supervision of elections, suggested the Council of Guardians as an
instrument of political control to Irans ruling elite after the death of Khomeini
and the end of his charismatic leadership. It interpreted its function of supervising
elections as the power to reject the qualification of candidates for all elected
offices, including the presidency, without giving reasons as is also the case
when it vetoes legislation. This resulted in a serious overload of the functions of
the Council of Guardians and overwhelmed its functions of judicial review and
determination of the conformity of legislation with Islamic standards. In fact, it is
quite clear that since 2000 the effect of the Council of Guardians on institution-
building has been negative consisting in the paralysis of legislation and near-
destruction of the Majles as an institution. This has been done by its blanket
extension of inconsistency with the Sharia, which by the first year of the new
century extended to the annual government budget!
25
In January 2002, the Coun-
cil of Guardians vetoed as contrary to the Sharia bills that were at variance with
the governmental orders of the Leader, the orders of the late Imam, and even the
regulations of the Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution;
26
and in January
2003, it rejected a Majles bill against torture on the grounds that it contravened
the internal regulations (1in-n1ma) of state prisons!
27
In February 1998, President Kh1tami appointed a Commission for the Imple-
mentation of the Constitution and Constitutional Supervision, citing Article 113
of the Constitution, one of the few unchanged from the original draft modeled on
1958 constitution of the French Fifth Republic, which makes the protection of the
Constitution one of his main duties. The Commission has so far displayed little
energy. Despite losing repeated rounds to the Leader and the resourceful Ayatol-
lahs, Kh1tami has made his presidential duty of safeguarding the Constitution a
means for driving a wedge into the hitherto seamless edifice of monolithic
Islamic-ideological interpretation of the law by clerical jurists. The power
of the clerical jurists of the Council of Guardians to determine the qualification of
candidates for all elected office, which was first effectively challenged by the
disqualified clerical or clerically endorsed candidates, has now become widely
contested. Conformity with the standards of Islam has therefore become a
contested axiom. This is particularly the case as regards human rights and freedom
of the press. Kh1tami and the chairman of his Constitutional Commission,
Hossein Mehrpur, avoided confronting the Council of Guardians and the judici-
ary, which under a more assertive head, Ayatollah H1shemi-Sh1hrudi, was
putting forward its own claim to constitutional interpretation. In January 2002,
the judiciary even denied Mehrpurs request to visit dissident political prison-
ers.
28
Finally, Kh1tami did not dare augment the power of the Commission in his
last assertive endeavor.
In September 2002, Kh1tami finally introduced the bill to increase the powers of
the President as the guardian of the Constitution, announced in his second inaugural
speech a year earlier. The bill was passed by the Majles but, needless to say,
promptly rejected by the Council of Guardians. It was in any case ill-conceived
and too timid to make a significant difference. It missed the opportunity to make
the first step toward introducing a form of judicial review under the aegis of the
President, which was technically possible,
29
by couching the bill in administrative
rather than judicial terms. The proposed presidential commission was given the
power of inspection to determine violations of the Constitution, and it was not
explicitly given jurisdiction to hear cases of human rights violations. Obliquely
and at the end, the President was given the power to provide a budget for compen-
sating victims of human rights violations!
The Council of Guardians, by contrast, did not show the slightest interest in
avoiding confrontation. The Constitution of 1979 had given the Council of
Guardians the power to supervise presidential and Majles elections. Ever since
the trouble with the Republics first president, Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, the Coun-
cil has assumed the function of political control as the gatekeeper to presidency;
in 1997, it rejected 234 of the 238 candidates. The Council of Guardians also took
its supervisory power to mean vetting the candidates for the Majles, about whose
qualifications the Constitution was silent. It rejected between 12 and 17 percent
of the candidates of the first three Majles, over a quarter of those for the fourth,
and over a third of those for the fifth.
30
With such arbitrary and blatant use of its
power, as one newspaper put it, running for elections was no longer a right but a
privilege.
31
Be that as it may, the function of the Council of Guardian as the pro-
tector of the ideological foundations of the regime by now required not only the
filtering of legislation but also political control of elections. In 1991, the Council
exercised its authority to interpret the constitution to assert that the supervision
mentioned in Article 99 of the Constitution meant approbatory (estesv1bi) super-
vision and applied to all stages of the electoral process, including the approval or
rejection of the qualification of the candidates. The formula was adopted by an
amendment to the electoral law in July 1995.
32
The reformist movement had so far not been the primary victim of the new
power of political control, as it was of the negative legislative power of the Council,
but turned against it because of its obvious anti-democratic nature and as its
frustration with the Council of Guardians blockage of legislation mounted. On
September 1 2002, the President introduced a bill to curb the Councils power of
approbatory supervision, which was vetoed. In the beginning of March 2003, the
Majles passed amendments to the electoral law with the same effect in March
2003.
33
Kh1tami threatened to resign or put the bills to referendum. But the
Maslahat Council let its position be known by quadrupling the Councils budget
at a meeting on March 15, which Kh1tami and Majles Speaker Karrubi walked
out of.
34
That the Council of Guardians would reject these attempts to restrict its
power was a foregone conclusion. What the reformists had not expected,
however, was that the Council would also punish them by depriving them of their
parliamentary seats. The multiplied budget was used, among other things, to
increase the number of Council of Guardian inspectors in anticipation of the com-
ing elections of February 2004. The Council let it be known that approbatory
supervision would henceforth mean practicing continuous supervision or
vetting a candidates competency at any time. President Kh1tami prepared to
capitulate, telling the members of election supervisory boards on December 1,
Even if some renowned candidates are not nominated or qualified, the people
should not withdraw. In this case we should look for a candidate whose thoughts
are closest to our ideas and vote for him.
35
A month later 3600 out of 8200
candidates were disqualified, including 80 members of the current Majles.
Clerical Reaction and the Growth of the Personal Power of the Leader
I have presented the rise and fall of Kh1tamis reform movement as a struggle
against the Supreme Leader and clerical elite. Let me conclude with a few
remarks on the growing domination of the regime by the Supreme Leader and the
extension of clerical control over the political, judicial, and economic institutions
as the counterpart of the decline and fall of reformism. Khomeini, as you may
recall, dismissed his successor-designate, Ayatollah Hasan-Ali Montazeri, the
year before his death, and his closest remaining associates, Kh1manei and
Rafsanj1ni, were more junior. The former took over his position as Leader while
the latter served as a powerful President for two terms. Toward the end of his
second term, Moh1jerani, one of his several Vice Presidents, aired the idea that
the constitution be amended to allow him to run for another term. The idea was
vetoed by the Supreme Leader, who was slowly being called Imam and was less
and less inclined to share power. He was under some pressure from the clerical
Assembly of Leadership Experts, with a commission to monitor the conditions of
the Leader as specified by the Constitution to consolidate the system of collective
clerical rule,
36
and decided to revitalize the Maslahat Council in the spring of 1997,
which would also provide a suitable job to ease Rafsanj1ni out of the presidency.
This and other instances of institution-building toward the end of Rafsanj1nis pres-
idency and throughout Kh1tamis was accompanied by a non-institutional,
personal bid for power by the Leader, Ayatollah Kh1manei. While firmly retaining
his control over the Revolutionary Guards and its Mobilizational Corps (Basij),
Kh1manei eliminated Rafsanj1nis men one by one, replacing some of them with
his own men, such as the L1rijani brothers, but also putting his men, notably the
cleric Ezhehi, in key positions in the judiciary. From this perspective, Rafsanj1nis
inability to protect his protg, Tehran Mayor Karb1schi, was damaging to his
reputation within the ruling elite, and was seen as capitulation to Kh1manei.
Rafsanj1nis second stratum did quickly organize themselves into a party, the
Technocrats for Construction (k1rgoz1r1n-e s1zamdehgi), mounted a vigorous
campaign in the 1996 Majles elections, and appeared as partners in Kh1tamis
reform administration, with Moh1jer1ni taking the key position of Minister of
Culture and Islamic Guidance. Other lackluster Rafsanj1ni technocrats, too, con-
tinued to serve under Kh1tami. Before long, however, Kh1manei forced
Moh1jer1ni out, while Kh1tami gave him a non-political position as Director of
the Dialogue for Civilization to pave his exit from politics into increasing obscu-
rity. Rumors and complaints about his second and third wives resulted in his dis-
missal, while the first, Jamileh Kadivar (sister of the dissident reformist cleric),
was active as a Majles feminist reformer. Another key K1rgoz1r, Mehdi Nurba-
khsh, who had managed the central bank for Rafsanj1ni, was eased out of power
and died a private citizen in 2003. Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader had been
replacing Rafsanj1nis men by his own. The constitutional theocracy has thus
been imperceptibly turning into a system of personal rule by Kh1menei, with
increasing politicization of the judiciary and ad hoc infiltration of a variety of govern-
mental organs. In preparation for the ouster of Kh1tami and the reformists,
Kh1namei now recruited his own team of technocrats to take over the economy, or
more precisely the sectors of the economy that are not already under his loose control.
All the banks and large industrial companies were expropriated. Khomeini did
not allow the state to take them over, however, but treated them as booty in
Islamic law and set them up as independent foundations, appointing mullahs
Islamic clerics as their heads.
37
These economic foundations, known as
Bony1ds, control an estimated 40 percent of the Iranian economy; their heads are
not responsible to the state but only to Ayatollah Khamenei, whose official title
is the Leader of the Islamic Revolution.
38
It was one of these mullahs who, a
few years ago, put a price on Salman Rushdies head when the Iranian Foreign
Ministry had agreed to drop Khomeinis fatwa in order to attract German invest-
ment. The Bony1ds sustain their own network of contractors and suppliers. Once
again, clerical families and their relatives are prominent among the beneficiaries
and contractors of these foundations and among government contractors.
39
Nepotism is rife in the economy as it is in the appointment to governmental
positions. Indeed, the term 1q1z1dehg1n (sons of masters) was coined to refer to
the new politico-economic elite consisting of the families of the clerical upper
stratum.
Closely connected to the 1q1z1dehg1n in government and foundation business
are a more numerous group of bazaaris (bazaar merchants and businessmen)
and former revolutionaries turned businessmen through the foundations and as
the mediators in the 1979 bazaar-Khomeini alliance that overthrew the Shah.
The best representative of this group is the ruffian monopolist, Habiboll1h
Asgar-awl1di. But it includes a large number of bazaar merchants and business-
men who have made fortunes in Irans closed domestic markets through
government concessions and licenses. There is little data on this group as they
pay hardly any income tax and are much better at hiding their wealth than the
Shahs ostentatious industrialists. In short, the nationalized economic founda-
tions, mostly run by clerics who are not responsible to government but only to
the Leader, who appoints them on a personal basis, and the bazaar, serve as a
secondary basis for rising post-revolutionary inequality and social stratification.
Neither basis, however, can be considered independent of political power; they
need political ties to maintain their appropriation of economic opportunities. Irans
foreign policy makers wish to join the World Trade Organization to improve
the countrys international standing a move that is short-sightedly opposed by
the United States.
40
If they succeed in doing so and are forced to open the
domestic market to competition, a new independent economic basis for social
stratification may emerge.
With the expansion of the reach of the clerical conciliar system and the
growth of the personal, extra-legal power of the Supreme Leader, both of which
are typical modes of post-revolutionary concentration of power, the trend
toward democratization initiated by Kh1tami has been reversed. The pro-clerical
Developers, who include the newly-elected President and had the Seventh
Majles elections won for them by the clericalist Council of Guardians last year,
do have a plan of their own for perestroika. The plan, as unveiled by their
leader Hadd1d-1del, proposes to make Iran into a new China or Japan by
performing the economic miracle of combining political and religio-cultural
conservatism with economic liberalization. I consider this policy impossible
because it requires the destruction of the economic base of the Islamic Republic
as I have just described it. But in the extremely unlikely event that they do
succeed, they would dig their own graves, as did the Soviet Union after 1989.
Meanwhile, the victory of the hardliners in the 2004 Majles elections, many of
whom were the Supreme Leaders men in the security apparatus and mobiliza-
tion, extended Ayatollah Kh1maneis agglomeration of personal power to the
Majles. The election of Mahmud Ahmadinezh1d with the backing of the
Leader-controlled security and mobilization apparatus in June 2005 can be seen
as the culmination of this trend in accumulation of extra-constitutional power.
But this could mark the end of the trend as well. The control of a personal
system of power is difficult, and the hardliners, formerly Kh1maneis men,
may well prove unruly, with the Majles and presidency as additional power
bases, forcing the Leader to return to the clerical elite he has been dividing. In
any event, the fragility of the regime increases with the greater preponderance
of personal power.
The Ultimate Defeat of Reformism
The final and most resounding popular defeat of the reformist movement came in
the presidential elections of June 2005. The reformist candidate, Kh1tamis lack-
luster Education Minister, Mostaf1 Moin, rejected by an unduly apprehensive
Council of Guardians but shrewdly reinstated by the Leader, who is much better
at taking of popular pulse, came fifth in the first round and was eliminated.
41
The
hardliner Mahmud Ahmadinezh1d, who had become mayor of Tehran in the
municipal elections of 2003, the first massive expression of disillusionment
against the reformists with the lowest ever turnout, but whose career as a child of
the Islamic revolution was otherwise the same as Moins, won the final round
against H1shemi-Rafsanj1ni by a wide margin. It is interesting to note that quite a
few students, presumably disillusioned with the reformists, joined his campaign.
The ineffectiveness of the student and anti-regime boycott of the presidential
elections was demonstrated by the larger than expected turnout, even though the
official 60 percent figure should be discounted. Finally, the Ahmadinezh1d vote
also demonstrated that the reformists had not only alienated the students by
letting them down, but also failed to attract masses of the urban poor. Trapped in
their insider rhetoric and narrow vision and refusing to use the huge reservoir of
secular professionals in his administration, Kh1tami and his reform movement
also came to naught because of its failure to build bridges to the significant and
growing social forces that were their easy potential constituencies.
NOTES
1. I discuss this term in Authority in Shiism and Constitutional Developments in the
Islamic Republic of Iran, in W. Ende and R. Brunner, eds., The Twelver Shia in Modern Times:
Religious Culture & Political History (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 31213.
2. Bill Samii, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Iran Report 7, no. 8 (February 23,
2004).
3. The Economist, February 28, 2004, 10.
4. This was to be done by making being a Muslim in good standing to run attestable by
neighbors and acquaintances according to custom (orf) rather that requiring the determination of
the Council of Guardians.
5. See pictures in The New York Times, January 13, 2004, A8 and February 1, 2004, A6
6. BBC Persian website, February 15, 2004.
7. Kh1tami won 77 percent of the popular vote, running against nine other candidates. The
turnout, however, was not as heavy as in 1997. It was 67 percent of eligible voters (aged over 16), as
compared to 88 percent in May 23, 1997, when Kh1tami received 69 percent of the popular vote.
8. Arjomand, Constitutions and the Struggle for Political Order: A Study in the Moderniza-
tion of Political Traditions, Archives europennes de sociologie/European Journal of Sociology
33, no. 4 (1992): 3982.
9. Arjomand, Democratization and the Constitutional Politics of Iran since 1997, Polish
Sociological Review 136, no. 4 (2001): 34963.
10. Wilfried Buchta, Who Rules Iran?: The Structure of Power in the Islamic Republic
(Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000).
11. It is not an accident that, apart from the reformist children of the revolution, one of the
most important dissident leaders, Ezzatoll1h Sah1bi, and most of the 42 persons arrested in April
2001, were members of Bazargans Islamic liberal nationalist movement and junior partners in the
initial Islamic revolutionary coalition in 1979.
12. M. Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1991).
13. Arjomand, Modernity, Tradition and the Shiite Reformation in Contemporary Iran, in
G. Skapska, ed., The Moral Fabric in Contemporary Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
14. Although he never disputed the principle of clerical supremacy as inscribed in the Consti-
tution, the invidious contrast between the popular mandate of the President and the Mandate of the
Jurist became evident. Once a legal matter becomes a contested issue in constitutional politics, the
gates are wide open for debate over the fundamental principles of order. This is precisely what hap-
pened, shortly after the presidential elections, in November 1997, when Ayatollah Hasan-Ali Mon-
tazeri and some other disgruntled senior clerics, who had been pushed aside by the Supreme Leader
after a very long association with the regime, openly challenged the Mandate of the Jurist. At this
point, it was clerical dissent and the rift within the ruling clerical elite that gave secular political
forces the chance to express their opposition to clericalism openly.
15. Arjomand, Civil Society and the Rule of Law in the Constitutional Politics of Iran under
Kh1tami, Social Research 76, no. 2 (2000): 286.
16. Cited in ibid., 297, emphasis added.
17. The actual effect of the order was to save H1shemi-Rafsanj1ni some further embarrass-
ment and to knock two reformists off the list to make room for two candidates favored by the con-
servatives.
18. Arjomand, Democratization and the Constitutional Politics of Iran since 1997.
19. ISNA website, isnagency.com, August 30, 2002.
20. Financial Times, November 2, 2002.
21. Economist, November 16, 2002, 42
22. New York Times, December 11, 2002.
23. Emrooz website, February 12, 2003.
24. K. Tajbakhsh, Fate of Local Democracy under Kh1tami, Woodrow Wilson Center Web-
site, Events, December 16, 2003, 2.
25. Arjomand, Democratization and the Constitutional Politics of Iran since 1997.
26. Ettel11t, January 11, 2002.
27. Emrooz website: emrooz.org/81-10-22.
28. New York Times, January 9, 2002.
29. I had urged the Office of the President, through Vice President Abtahi and a number of
reformist members of the Majles, to do so.
30. Furthermore, the constitutional amendments of 1989 explicitly added the supervision of
the elections for the Assembly of Leadership Experts to the functions of the Council of Guardians,
while a law of 1990/1369 transferred the determination of the candidates requisite level of jurispru-
dential competence (ejteh1d) to it. The Council used these powers to disqualify over one third and
one half of the candidates for the Assembly in 1990 and 1998 elections, respectively. See Farshad
Malekahmadi, The Sociological Intersection of Religion, Law and Politics in Iran: Judicial Review
and Political Control in the Islamic Republic of Iran, PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999.
31. Cited in A. Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Repub-
lic, tr. J. OKane (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 89.
32. Arjomand, Authority in Shiism and Constitutional Developments in the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran, 31718.
33. Samii, RPE/RL Iran Report, 6.15 (April 7, 2003).
34. Financial Times, March 17, 2003.
35. Samii, RFE/RL, Iran Report, 6.49 (December 27, 2003).
36. Personal interview.
37. S.A. Arjomand. The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 136.
38. J. Amuzegar, Irans Economy under the Islamic Republic (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997).
39. Buchta, Who Rules Iran?
40. J. Amuzegar, Irans Crumbling Revolution, Foreign Affairs 84, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2003):
5355.
41. Former Majles Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, who belonged to the clerical wing of the reformist
movement, came third in the first round partly by magnifying a leaf out of President Bushs book
and promising every Iranian a substantial, monthly negative tax paycheck, and justifiably com-
plained of electoral fraud. But the fact remains that the total hard-line vote in the first round was
larger than the total reformist vote.
Sad Amir Arjomand is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the
State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the Co-Editor of Rethinking
Civilizational Analysis (2004), and the author of The Turban for the Crown: The
Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988) and The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam:
Religion, Political Organization, and Societal Change in Shiite Iran from the
Beginning to l890 (l984). He is currently working on a constitutional history of
the Islamic Middle East.

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